Launching a New Product? Your 4 Most Important Questions

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Women Conquer Business Show. I'm Jen McFarland, joined by Shelley Carney. We're your go-to small business marketing show covering breaking marketing news that affects you cool apps we found, and a deep dive into a marketing topic with a side of motivation and inspir. We'll also talk a little about our own entrepreneurial journeys as well.

[00:00:28] Are you ready? Let's get started.

[00:00:37] I know it was so fun. . Hello and welcome. Today we are talking about launching a new product or service, and the most important questions you need to ask. I have a top. It's how I started every major project for multimillion dollar corporations and then also win my work with marketing clients. So as business owners, we love to chase our ideas.

[00:01:02] What's better than attracting our customers with a new offering? But have you asked all of the important questions you need to consider before going all in? Most of the time the answer is, During this episode, we'll uncover the four key questions you must ask before you start something new. Why? Because it takes too much time to launch and market your ideas.

[00:01:27] So you wanna get it right the first time?

[00:01:29] Absolutely. I don't like to mess around. Let's do it right the first time, . Cause we have enough mistakes that we make without doing 'em on purpose. .

[00:01:40] That's right. Hey, Happy birthday.

[00:01:42] Happy birthday to us. Yay. Where's my

[00:01:48] Yes. Woohoo. Shelley, your birthday was the same day as my anniversary.

[00:01:55] Yes. And you had a special birthday weekend. Oh my God. We have so many balloons [00:02:00] For those of you who are watching . ,

[00:02:03] all the balloons. So your, my birthday's the 10th. Your birthday is tomorrow. Had an anniversary. We just party,party, party. That's all we're

[00:02:12] doing here. We're just partying. Just partying.

[00:02:14] Yeah.

[00:02:15] Baby's family came up and we had a big party on Sunday. It was awesome. Yeah. So the kids were there. His daughter Brian, her husband Tom, his son Jason Ryan and Tom's four kids. And Sean's two teenage sons were all there. Tom and Jason were playing guitars and singing for an hour and a half.

[00:02:35] They, and then at the end of their set, they played Happy Birthday and everybody sang and brought out the cake. And it was a big, Woohoo. We had a lot of fun. And this is my last year to be in my fifties.

[00:02:47] Commemorative. Exactly right, gotta do it. Yeah, . So for my anniversary, we went to this great restaurant I've been wanting to go to for a long time, called Bergerac.

[00:02:58] It's Berg Bergerac. it's French. The French. Oh, it is a French restaurant. It was so delightful. It was lovely and wonderful. And then tomorrow for my birth, My husband asked me what I wanted to do, and this might surprise some people, but I was like, I wanna see how Halloween ends. I wanna see Jamie Lee Curtis in the last go in

[00:03:21] Halloween.

[00:03:23] Didn't know that was the name of the movie. And I was like, Ends, that's a weird thing

[00:03:30] to wanna know, . So I don't know what we're doing before that, but I know that we are doing that. At late at night, we're gonna. Like 10, 11 o'clock at night. Oh. To have my pants scared off. Hopefully, not literally, cuz it's in a theater.

[00:03:43] So that's how I'm spending my birthday. I'm excited. It'll be fun. And yeah, that's pretty much what's going on with me. I am in the process of revamping my workflows for my business. And I suppose if you wanna know how [00:04:00] I'm doing that, maybe I should make a video or write a blog post about that. But it's very exciting.

[00:04:04] It's. Changing some things. Yeah I'm pretty, it's pretty cool. So that's my news. And then it sounds like you have a podcast, new podcast? I have

[00:04:15] a podcast I've rebooted. So I had about 95. Episodes on there and had been sitting fallow for a while, and I decided to go ahead and start putting out more content on my YouTube channel and then putting the audio on my podcast.

[00:04:30] And my podcast is now on Amazon. It was cool because Amazon actually sent me an email and said, Hey we hear you have a podcast. Would you like to put it on Amazon? I was like, Yeah, I've been thinking about that. How'd you know? They read Minds Over at Amazon. So I'm always, You know what? I don't know why I'm ever surprised.

[00:04:47] My podcast is called Shelley Carney Livestream Coach. It goes live on Wednesdays on my YouTube channel at four o'clock in the afternoon, and the podcast is uploaded. Around, I don't know, 5, 5 30 on Wednesday. So you can listen to it Wednesday evening or Thursday morning. Whenever works best for you, but take a look for it.

[00:05:07] It's on the major platforms. Hey Toby. Thank you. Platform.

[00:05:16] Yeah, that's so cool. We'll put a, we'll put a link in the show notes to it. I don't have it here to offer it up Now for people who are watching. But yes. How exciting this is cool. Rebooting a show. Yeah. So what do you have for us in breaking news?

[00:05:36] Okay. For breaking news, we have sounds,

[00:05:43] and we're talking about shopping because holiday shopping has already started with. The Amazon days and all that all that goings on. Let's see. Add this to the street. Oops, that's the wrong thing. You guys don't need to see that. So there's Ad Week has [00:06:00] an article called This Beginning to Look a lot like the holiday shopping season will be defined by five trends.

[00:06:06] And this one is by marketing dive. And it's about a survey that they put out about people who are basically downgrading a little bit in order to be able to afford holiday shopping. And they may be either switching stores or brands going to lower priced brands adjusting their quantity or pack sizes, postponing purchases, or leveraging buy now pay later programs, layaway or credit.

[00:06:35] And the other one was the five trends, which includes big discounts earlier spend, which is what we're seeing with the Amazon Prime Early Bird

[00:06:44] special. Yeah. I started seeing that promotion. I'm a prime member, and I, they were like, Do you wanna do it now, ? I was like, What is this magic? I want you to spend money now.

[00:06:54] And I do. Do you think, I do think that this has something to do with all the. The inflation and then by now pay later, like it's it, we didn't have layaway as it was called back in the day. We didn't have layaway for the last few years and now it's made a comeback. I noticed it made a comeback actually during Covid, and then it's just continued and now it's becoming more and more prevalent, although it's a little bit different by now.

[00:07:21] Pay later, you can buy things and they'll send it to you and. They just keep charging you.

[00:07:27] Yeah. Now some of 'em. Furniture stores. And I think Amazon has a program where you can buy things and you have a 0% interest as long as you pay it off by a certain date and you make the, at least the minimum payments.

[00:07:42] Yeah. Look at things like that, but don't overspend my, but do think about, hey, people are, Gear already for holiday shopping. So if you have something to present I was telling Jen about this info Stack has contacted me about a Black Friday special that they're putting together, and they've asked me if I [00:08:00] wanted to be involved and share one of my courses on Info Stack, and they'll be, selling this.

[00:08:07] The whole Black Friday week. So be thinking about what are you gonna be doing for presenting your business as a for holiday shopping.

[00:08:16] Absolutely. And one of the things we're going to be talking about today is how to discern what projects you're going to go after. And it also helps you with marketing because one of the biggest things that I see is people don't realize it's October 13th.

[00:08:32] As we're talking right now live, Yeah. People don't think people, small business people like you and me and the people we serve don't think about planning out their marketing for November, December. Now that's true, but really all of those conversations, Needed to begin in September so that you could hit the ground running now.

[00:08:57] And, but it's not too late. And that's the thing, a lot of people have that intention that they're going to do something for holiday season, whether it is, in the Thanksgiving time. If you're like I'm not going to do anything on Black Friday. Understand that the next day. Small business Saturday and then the next Monday is Cyber Monday.

[00:09:19] That's right. So there's a whole line of things going on in there that in terms of your marketing, you need to really be looking at. Yeah, you're thinking about,

[00:09:28] Yeah, and Amazon hasn't waited for Black Friday. They have said we don't wanna compete with everybody else. We're gonna start now. So they started this week by showcasing some of the things that they're saying, Oh, this is like an early bird chance to spend money.

[00:09:46] As if we haven't been spending money on Amazon all year

[00:09:48] already. I know one of and all the, I've been following a lot of YouTubers and live streamers, and they're starting to come out now with their email lists saying, for Prime Day, [00:10:00] here are the things you want to stream. And I've been so far Not paying attention to that, but it's an interesting, We had our birthdays and anniversaries.

[00:10:08] We're not ready for Christmas and Thanksgiving yet. No, I

[00:10:11] know. We need to buy ourselves gifts. Yay,

[00:10:18] Let's do it. Okay, so let's power up. Let's add this to the stream. So as I said, I gave you a little foreshadowing . One of the biggest problems that many small business owners have is they are not planning for their success, or they take on projects that are maybe not the best fit for what it is that you want to do, what your biggest purpose is, what your mission is, your biggest business goals.

[00:10:49] So remember, one of the things we've talked about over and over again is your marketing. Needs to be tied to your biggest business goals. So one of the ways you can drift is if your marketing on social media and stuff isn't talking about what you do every day, right? The other way you can really drift and sometimes you don't see how far you've drifted from your purpose or your biggest business mission is you take on a project that just sounds really cool.

[00:11:14] And it takes you away and then you start marketing it and you're like, Wait, now how come nobody knows what I do? living, so one of the things that I thought would be useful to talk about are the four strategic questions to ask. Yourself and your business before starting something new. And what this means is you can really plan your success.

[00:11:35] I love this because I studied it in graduate school, a and I used it a lot on large projects at the city of Portland and some other places. Be and see the most powerful reason to do it, to go through these questions as a small business owner, as a solo printer, as a content creator, is, it is a great way to say yes or no before you spend [00:12:00] any money or any time if you go through these questions.

[00:12:03] So let's just start with the first question and the top first question. That's I think, the most important because this is really the place. Where you can say yes or no. So the first question is what are we trying to accomplish and why? So this would be like if I said to Shelley, Hey, let's start a pool company.

[00:12:28] Then Shelley could be like, Why?

[00:12:33] She said, Where

[00:12:34] are you going with this? The pool company. You're a marketer. I'm a livestream coach. Why would we start a pool company? Shell. Because it would be really cool. Oh. Cause I would feel like swimming, , , and so that's like really extreme, right? And you're kinda like, that is not at all what I do.

[00:12:50] There's no reason that I would do that. But there are opportunities that come in all the time that are not clearly aligned with what you do. that people. The risk we run, and you see this happen with people who do interview shows on podcasts that don't constantly remind people about what they do.

[00:13:18] And I say this to someone with experience. I would interview people on my show. And people are like, Jen, you're such a great interviewer. And I'm like, , you dunno what I do for a living. yeah. And so that's the thing, like when you come up with something and you're passionate about it, but you're also running a business like you're higher, why?

[00:13:40] And I was okay with interviewing people and like that whole process for a while because my biggest goal in starting the show. Two, three years ago was to become a better public speaker. So it was okay and to make connection, like those were like my two goals, right? . So if that's what you're trying to [00:14:00] accomplish and why you're starting something, just be very clear that those are the things that you're trying to accomplish, and that's fine.

[00:14:07] And that's the thing. When I was thinking about the summit and bringing everybody together, it was I am not an event planner. . , I would be spending a lot of time and resources promoting something when those resources are better spent. Attracting new clients and bringing people in, organizing workflows, getting, doing all of these different things for me right now in my business.

[00:14:29] But sometimes we have to pitch the idea to somebody else and they remind you, like, Why are we doing this? I'm telling you, because we communicate about things and I'm telling the audience because they're, they have ideas all the time. It's, remember that not every idea is a good. And that you need to talk to other people because here I am, somebody saying, Here's how you plan your success.

[00:14:50] And oh, by the way, I get drawn away too. Yeah, Because oftentimes as small business owners or solopreneurs or freelancers, we get pulled away or pulled in many different directions. So that's why this question is so important and why it's important to also talk and communicate with others. So what are we trying to accomplish and why?

[00:15:12] A few years ago, I was a guest on a podcast, and it was so funny, like in the middle of the interview, I came up with this concept, and the reason why you always wanna be mission aligned and really super clear about what you're trying to accomplish is you don't want to climb the wrong mountain. It's really easy for you to drift away from your ultimate mission and your biggest goals.

[00:15:36] One day look back and go, Wait, that was what I really wanted to do. That was my higher purpose. That is who I am than what I do. Why am I standing over here on this other mountain? That doesn't make any sense to me. . Yeah, you wanna climb the right mountain because entrepreneurship is hard. So you wanna be always like doing the thing that makes the most sense [00:16:00] for.

[00:16:01] That should hopefully ring true on like, why, what are we trying to accomplish and why? Why are you motivated? Yeah. And

[00:16:09] sometimes it's at different levels of the funnel, right? So you might be saying, I want brand awareness, or I want I want to generate leads, or I want conversions, or I want, to satisfy my customers.

[00:16:20] Whatever it is, it's gotta fit in your funnel somewhere.

[00:16:24] Yeah. Especially when you're taking on a new project. You always wanna be very clear about what the bigger goal is. So this is bigger stuff, like for me, starting the podcast, my bigger goal was I want to be teaching, I want to be on stages.

[00:16:40] I want to be speaking to groups. And guess what? I am now doing that . And a lot of it is because I practiced by being on other people's shows, by having my own shows. So in a way I can be like, Check, which takes us into question number two. How will we measure success? How do we know when we're there?

[00:17:04] What is there?

[00:17:08] and it's for each individual project has its own measure of success. So yeah, for my YouTube channel, I might be trying to get to 500. That would be success. But what campaign am I installing in order to make that happen? That's where we're at right here. I started restarted my Shelley Carney livestream coach podcast and YouTube videos in order to try to get over 500 on my YouTube channel.

[00:17:35] And I'll know when I get there when I hit that number. So that's success for that particular campaign, but it's not. Overall, my one, defining goal is to get to 500 on my YouTube channel. That's just one small thing,

[00:17:51] right? So for example, we're talking about Shelley Carney live coach, and you're doing like live streams and you have a podcast.

[00:17:59] I would hope [00:18:00] that the broader, bigger goal measure of success is not just subscribers, but some sort of payment. Whether it's clients or people taking your courses or both, or some sort of timeline that you have I'm gonna reach 500 subscribers and my goal is to have a milestone at each point. It might be I wanna generate revenue.

[00:18:26] I want this project to be successful. I'm going to define success by attracting, three new con, three new clients. X number of days, whatever is reasonable, and that's the thing. The point is you need to have deadlines and finances tied to what success is. If you don't, how do you know when you get there?

[00:18:52] It can be demoralizing if the goals are too big. It can also be demoralizing when you're like I don't know if I've done it . I don't even know what it is.

[00:19:02] And somebody might have to point out to look, you were at 470 and now you're at 500. So you've done something, you've grown a little bit.

[00:19:09] Yeah. Unless you have that 500 goal, you're like, Oh, I guess I got there. . And that's,

[00:19:14] and that's the thing, like you need to measure success. You need, it needs to be incremental. And it, like you're, because you have experience, you're not gonna get 500 subscribers in a. It's going to take time, but if you don't have experience, you need to set something reasonable.

[00:19:31] It's like people who are like I'm gonna make a million dollars in a year. How much are you making now? 10,000.

[00:19:34] That's

[00:19:35] a big jump We need something in the interim so that we feel successful along the way, otherwise we give up. Yeah. But we also need to define success so that we know when we get there so we can move on to the next.

[00:19:48] We also need to have, know what success looks like, so we know how to market it , because then we know how to, what buttons to push that will [00:20:00] help us reach that ultimate goal. So this is the beginning of making our dreams actionable. If you think about it like that, we have this big fuzzy goal or this big goal of what we wanna accomplish.

[00:20:14] We need actions that help us understand when we've achieved that big goal. So part of that is to start clearly defining it, and we do that in part so that we know when we need to set another goal or what the next success looks like. Yeah. I don't feel, Are you buying it?

[00:20:33] yeah, and it is like there, it's like I said, there.

[00:20:37] We're talking about when you're starting something new. So if it's a campaign of course when you have a whole new bus, a whole business, you've gotta have a whole set of goals for that business that cover each aspect of it. But we're specifically trying to focus here on new things, like a new program, a new product, a new service, and a campaign that would fit into that.

[00:20:57] And then how do you know when you've gotten success out of that campaign? In. Whether it works or not, you're gonna be learning something. This can a campaign works or it doesn't. So I abandon it and I try something different. But each campaign, you've gotta have a reason to do it.

[00:21:13] You can't just say, Oh, I wanna do a podcast because podcasting looks fun and you try it and it's not as much fun as you thought it would be. then you're like, Why did I even do this? You have got to have reasons and goals with. Campaign that you're doing?

[00:21:28] Part of it, I'm gonna point so that I know , part of it is, we've talked about this before, is you have to have patience.

[00:21:35] You can't have Marketing Omo, fear of missing out. You can't think everything's gonna happen really quick. You can't just jump on the next thing. Part of this is so that you. Get grounded in what you're trying to accomplish, what success looks and something reasonable around how long it's gonna take.

[00:21:51] If you're starting a podcast, if you're doing YouTube, these things don't happen overnight. , you need to talk to some [00:22:00] people. You need to set up reasonable timelines. Otherwise, you're right. You're gonna just be like, this isn't fun. I'm speaking into the void, And so in order to avoid. Feeling that way.

[00:22:12] That's why the goals need to be reasonable and you might need to talk to somebody else about it. The point is to really take your dream and start to think about the infrastructure that goes under that when you start something new and to really understand if what it's gonna take to accomplish. What you would like to accomplish if that is aligned with you, with your company, with everything that you are trying to build with your deepest desires for your company, is if we decided to start a pool company, then we would just have to scrap what everything else that we're doing and we would have to go all in on that.

[00:22:52] Yeah. So sometimes when you look at Can I really go all in? That's when you start to see Oh, I'm really like drifting away from my like higher purpose. and that's why like for you to do Shelley Carney livestream coach, it's so aligned because it's who you are and what you do. Third

[00:23:14] personal brand, which is one of my goals with it.

[00:23:16] Yeah, exactly. Great. Yeah. But oftentimes we get asked to do things. It would be like What was the name of the organization that you're creating? The, It's called Info Stack. Yeah, Info Stack. If they were like, Shelley why don't you share about. I don't know. I'm trying to think of something else really off the wall.

[00:23:36] Why don't you create a course about recycling? You'd probably be like, What , This doesn't make any sense. Why would I do that? I have no interest in that. I'm no interest in that. And so it's easy to do what? It's really off the wall. It's harder to do when it's maybe about, how do I create, can you do something about TikTok and short form video?

[00:23:57] That's not really what you do, right? [00:24:00] That's a whole different animal. So like you might be inclined to be like, Yeah, but I could really get a lot of email subscribers if I do that, right? If I join this, if I do info stack and I did something about TikTok, but then you would get subscribers and people who are expecting you to talk about TikTok all the time, because that's the course that you prepared for.

[00:24:20] Yeah. Does that make maybe more sense? So the off the wall stuff, you can just go, Eh, that doesn't make any sense. When it starts to get close. Like TikTok is still video, you do YouTube. The alert of all the potential clients and subscribers Yeah. Can really draw you in. Oh sure. It

[00:24:39] would be like if somebody came to me and Toby and said, Oh, we want you to do a commercial for us.

[00:24:44] And it's Oh, we used to that, but we're not really doing that anymore. And yeah, it would be hard to turn it down if it was good money. But it isn't in alignment with what we're doing right now.

[00:24:54] Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. So say that you're like, Okay, this is totally on purpose. It's aligned with my mission.

[00:25:02] I know what success looks like. Then we move on to the third question, which is what other conditions must exist? Another way of looking at that is what assumptions am I making to reach my goals? Another way to look at this is what could possibly go wrong, , before I get there. And so the way to look at.

[00:25:26] Because Shelley looked at this question and was like, I don't know what that means, . Is that fair? That was,

[00:25:31] Yes. I asked. I asked, What did that mean?

[00:25:34] Yeah. What other conditions must exist? when we go live, or when you as a business owner giving a presentation in Zoom, meeting with clients, You are making a lot of assumptions, so walking into this today, I, this morning was a little late getting my stuff together, but I'm assuming that when I go to stream yard.com.

[00:25:59] It's [00:26:00] there. I can log into it. I'm assuming that the lights and the electricity here is gonna work. And we have had a show where that did not work. , That's right. Five seconds before the show went live. I had a, There was. Actually

[00:26:15] was in the middle of the show, or right after about a minute we'd gone into it about a minute.

[00:26:18] And then suddenly you had a

[00:26:19] power outage. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Cause I loose in place where the transformers below, sometimes we get these blips, and I think Shelley was in here tap dancing, figure how, come

[00:26:29] back. Is this a situation where I keep going or do we just stop and start over sometime?

[00:26:34] Yeah. So yeah, so that happens. So we made an assumption that the power was gonna work, the computers were gonna work. Cause we also had an episode, I think where the computer went down, didn't we? Where Toby's computer went. Yeah. And because that happens. Sorry, Toby. Feel better. Your computer's.

[00:26:51] Okay. Don't worry about it. But all of which is to say you're making all of these assumptions all the time that everything is gonna be okay. A lot of people get freaked out when you start to think about risk. What's the risk? What's the risk of me doing this project? What could possibly go wrong?

[00:27:09] and I don't know about you, but I know that when I plan for what if things go wrong? Typically things don't go wrong. . How many times have you planned a party and you're like, what about this, and what about this and what about this? ,

[00:27:21] having a strong support system or support method in place in case things go wrong or so that things don't go wrong.

[00:27:29] If you're putting on an event and you, it's just you, a lot more things can go wrong. But if you have a team, a strong team, and everybody fills in those gaps for each other, Things are less likely to go wrong, that can't be supported by somebody else. So yeah. Thinking of those things that you need in advance to support what you're trying to accomplish.

[00:27:51] Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, because then when things go sideways, which happens, [00:28:00] You have thought about it. , you're not caught flatfooted or not as flatfooted. So a lot of people who resist the idea to really consider everything, and what if I don't reach my goal or my dream?

[00:28:14] if you think about it, then you have actually started taking steps to what we call mitigating risk or taking steps to go, Oh no, I already thought about this. Here's what we're gonna do. . That's a much more powerful position to be in than, Holy crap, what just happened, . Yeah. Yeah. Which is scary. It's super scary.

[00:28:38] Yeah. So what is it about this new thing that you wanna do? If it's not gonna go exactly like you would like it to, or like you had planned? What could possibly go wrong and what am I gonna do before it happens to make sure. Now, this can also be things like if you were talking about a marketing campaign or something like that, where you can be like, Okay, I am assuming that it's gonna cost this much to run an ad.

[00:29:05] What happens if it costs more? Am I willing to pay more for it? Am I willing to not? Are there other ways that I can market? That are more cost effective. If I learned that my assumption about how much this is gonna cost me goes wrong. Another assumption that people make is about time. Time is money.

[00:29:27] If you need people to support you, that's something that you can plan for ahead of time. I am assuming that rebuilding my website is super easy and gonna take two hours.

[00:29:39] Wrong. Better than that, Jen. Wrong. That's

[00:29:42] wrong. as someone who knows how to do it and has helped people with that. No. You also know that when you are involving other people in whatever it is that you are doing, you can't assume that they're sitting around waiting to help you.

[00:29:58] You have to realize [00:30:00] that they have other things. They need to schedule you in. That's why we plan things like small business Saturday in October, instead of November. So yeah, our campaigns start running. We have everything set up. It's it becomes as easy as it's time to launch. I've thought about everything.

[00:30:21] Somebody's helped me, somebody supported me. It's easy to launch. What other conditions must exist? What could possibly go wrong? And what are you going to do about. Maybe that's what I should call this question, what could possibly go wrong and what are you going to do about it?

[00:30:36] Yeah, I like that. I like that.

[00:30:40] And yeah and cultivating your support in advance. Yeah.

[00:30:44] Oh, absolutely. Yeah. The other thing that you're doing here, when you think about what other conditions must exist, is you have to consider. External disruptors. So we talked about it to an extent with the power could go out, equipment could fail.

[00:30:59] It also means like what's your competition doing and how can they upset the apple cart? So there are things that could happen that you start to notice, like trends that could be happening, changes shifts. Other companies, competitors that could. Disrupt what's happening, what assumptions that you're making.

[00:31:23] And that's why I don't like to focus or have my clients focus too much on competitors cuz when we compare, we start to get, it gets on our head sometimes a little bit. But we do need to have that kind of awareness. We need to understand our own industries, we need to understand the landscape of what's going on out there.

[00:31:42] And that also helps us think about our goals and think about what it is we're trying to do. In a more holistic way.

[00:31:53] So it's an opportunities and threats a thing. Yeah. .

[00:31:58] Yeah. This is like part [00:32:00] risk analysis, part SWAT analysis. Yeah. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. What could possibly go wrong and what am I gonna do about it? , oftentimes people don't think about these things.

[00:32:11] Yeah. Oh yeah. Because we got our rose colored glasses on because we're excited to go swimming, so we wanna start a pool company.

[00:32:20] Let's dive in.

[00:32:24] So then the last question is the one that most people just go to immediately, like it's I wanna start a pool company. How are we gonna do it? Yep. They skip over those middle two, right? They aren't even really thinking about what are we trying to accomplish and why? It's we're gonna do this thing.

[00:32:43] How are we gonna do it? So how are we gonna get there? That's the last question. Those are the nitty gritty, step by step details. This is where tech lives, this is where our checklists live, all of that. How am I gonna do it? What am I gonna do every day, every week, every month, every year to make sure that I am planning my.

[00:33:02] Yes. And what happens is it's easy to go from, I'm gonna do this thing, how am I gonna get there? And then you skip everything else and you're like, What the heck did I just do?

[00:33:20] So that, are you still there, Kelly? ?

[00:33:25] How do we get there? Is my favorite. People always wanna know how, okay, how, why, and how they forget about the what and why. Why would we wanna do this? , gotta figure that out first.

[00:33:39] How is

[00:33:39] good? How is how tos, education information, All the details, all the numbers, all the, step by step action plan.

[00:33:48] We wanna. We wanna get started. Let's get started. But yeah, there's some thinking to do first.

[00:33:54] Yeah. It just needs to be tied to something. You have to tether those tasks to [00:34:00] something bigger because otherwise it's easy to get, keep your head down and do things and then you can't tell if it's really gonna get you what you ultimately,

[00:34:13] That's right. And once you've made up your mind to do something, it's hard to change it again because conservation of energy, our brain is make the decision once and then keep working at it. You wanna make those decisions consciously and you wanna make good ones so that you're doing the work that's going to get you where you wanna go.

[00:34:32] The end, that's the end of our training right there, . That's it. Absolutely. All right, so if you want to, if you know that you wanna create content and you know this is, that was fine, , you know that you wanna create content and it is really a big part of your broader goal, I highly encourage you to download the content consistency framework and schedule that Shelley has put together.

[00:34:56] That is an excellent tool that will help you reach some of your bigger content goals. If you like trainings like this and you want to know a little bit more about how to look at your own marketing and maybe figure out exactly how your goals are being. Done , how? How much , I don't have any words left.

[00:35:23] I've lost them all. , I have a free marketing as self-assessment that you can take. That is at send fox.com/wcb. That's for Women Conquer Business. And you can go through your marketing, see how you're tracking, maybe think a little about how this ties into your bigger business goals. And that is the end of our.

[00:35:48] Yay.

[00:35:48] I had to, I had a little story I wanted to tell you. It fit in with another show I was doing maybe it'll fit here as well. When I was in film technology class one of the things that we did was [00:36:00] we worked on. Projects for everybody. If everybody had a project, we work on it just to learn, right?

[00:36:05] And as we were doing this, sometimes things would go wrong, The audio would be wrong have problems, or there would be plane overhead and cause a problem with the audio or maybe the video, something wasn't quite right with the video. And the joke, the joke was, fix it in post which means now it's the editor's problem.

[00:36:26] And if you are doing Your own production. You are the editor. So do yourself a favor, fix it in pre-production through planning and having those, that support system and having that knowledge and skills in place, or getting somebody to help you who has that knowledge and those skills to make those things happen so that you're.

[00:36:49] Stuck in post. I can't tell you how many projects got stuck in post where the editor couldn't fix it. There was no fix , so it never finished, It never got published and distributed. So don't do that to yourself. Make sure that you are spending as much time in that planning and pre-production phase as you are in production and post that is.

[00:37:12] Process. And the more planning and thinking ahead you can do, the more you're gonna save yourself at English of not being able to finish the project.

[00:37:21] And like the other part of that, I know planning snore, people hate talking about planning. It saves you so much time and money. Yeah. I can't even tell you, especially if you're like, That's not a good idea.

[00:37:34] I'm not going to do it. Yeah. Think about how much anguish and time you've just saved yourself. That's. , That's the whole point. That's right.

[00:37:42] Like when you're writing the script, Toby and I have done this. We were writing a script for a 48 hour film and he was like, what if we get like a police car, somebody with that, and then they pull you over and they do this scene and it's we are not gonna be able to make that happen.

[00:37:54] Don't even put it in the script. Make it simpler. So as you're writing your script, [00:38:00] as you're planning your pre-production stuff, That's when you have to say, Is this gonna work? How will this work? How will I know when it's worked? And put that into your plan so that by the time you get to that production and post, everything is going smoothly at that and it's, and you're doing the way that it should be done.

[00:38:19] If you have 48 hours to make a film, you don't have time to find somebody with a police car in a uniform to come show up and do a scene with you. Don't put that in your script, . Absolutely.

[00:38:31] Yeah. Absolutely. So are we ready? Speaking of script. Yay. You ready? For the tweak of the week? Tweak it up where you're gonna talk about the script,

[00:38:43] the script.

[00:38:45] I am going to show you what I've been working on in descript. Share the screen. I forgot that I was gonna show you this, so I,

[00:38:56] So for those of you who don't know, descript is at.com and it is a program that both Shelley and I use for video editing, captioning. I use it for editing the podcast because you can take audio and bring it in.

[00:39:12] You can take video and bring it in. And it looks like Shelley wants to share some new video editing and captioning. Is that what's going on? Yeah, this is a

[00:39:21] pretty new product. Descript is still in beta testing with it, and it can have a few glitches here and there, so you may have to restart a few times, but it is an automatic save and you can always do an undo if, if you have.

[00:39:34] Something you need to undo. They have undo and then they have automatic save. So that's helpful. And what you can do is you can bring in a clip of what I did was, or I brought in a short clip of my livestream video and I captioned it. I added in video clips. So they have video clips that you can use.

[00:39:56] For instance, this is a video clip that. Have [00:40:00] in their library that you can pull in and use and it's pretty, pretty quick and easy. And then of course it captions it for you. So if you wanna put up, say I do a live stream that's 30 minutes long and I want to put up a video that's five minutes or less, pull out a clip and.

[00:40:19] Cut out things that I don't want in there, Put in some video clips from their library. And now I've got a whole new video that I can upload to my channel, which is just focused on that one thing that I talked about during my big long live stream. A really. Nice way to to create video clips, d script again, it does your transcription and so much more

[00:40:41] So much more. So much so

[00:40:42] this is cool. So if you hit play, what does this look like? It looks like it'll if you hit it

[00:40:49] why consistency. Important. I'm gonna outline a few of the ideas about consistency that makes it so important. Igniting the power of the compound effect. Every little habit, every little detail.

[00:41:03] Okay, So that's pretty cool. So for those of you who are listening, Shelley was playing a part of one of her presentations. So she moved from her presentation piece to then talking about the power of doing it, and showed like four panels of somebody. Getting into the details of getting everything done.

[00:41:25] Yeah, it's pretty powerful. That's really neat.

[00:41:27] It's pretty cool. And if you are not a person who knows how to edit, this is a perfect product to start with because it is, As you're editing the text, you are also editing the audio and video automatically, so it keeps it simple for

[00:41:43] you. I love it. I tell people, if you're starting a podcast, go with the script because.

[00:41:48] If you can edit, your Google Docs or Microsoft Word, then you can edit your show and it's so easy. And it does the same thing with video. I love it. It works for [00:42:00] me. so that's awesome. I didn't, the captioning, I've struggled with getting in captioning to work, so it looks like they've done some things to make it, They

[00:42:07] are making a lot of changes.

[00:42:08] So right now, again, it's in, in the story. Format for editing video is in beta. And they continue to get better every week. So yeah. Yeah, there still

[00:42:19] changes going on. That's what I've loved about script. I was an early adopter and it has consistently gotten better and better. Yeah. So that's lovely.

[00:42:27] Thank you. I'll have to look that up. Ready for inspirational nugget.

[00:42:35] Let's do that. So I gotta pull down my D script. so much to do. All right, this is Epictetus Epi once said if anyone would take two words to heart and take pains to govern and watch over themselves by them, they will live an impeccable and immensely tranquil.

[00:42:55] The two words are persist and resist. That's great advice, but what principles should determine what we persist in and what we ought to resist? Marcus supplies that answer, reverence and justice. In other words, virtue. What do my principles tell me about persisting and resisting? I believe we persist in love and resist hate persist in doing the things that bring me joy and resist the procrastinating, buffering activities that keep me hiding from the world in my responsibilities.

[00:43:28] And we persist in planning and we resist jumping into starting a pool company when we don't know what we're doing. , That's

[00:43:37] right.

[00:43:41] Anything you wanna add to that, Jen?

[00:43:43] No, I totally agree. That's really great.

[00:43:46] Anything you wanna persist in or resist this week?

[00:43:51] I'm just going to persist in getting my workflows updated and modernized and I'm hiring help with that and I'm [00:44:00] excited about that. So gonna resist the draw of not. Getting the workflows done since I got so behind on it at one point that it's easier to just do nothing

[00:44:15] So I'm gonna resist

[00:44:16] that. Yeah. All right. And we hope that you will persist in joining us every week here on Women Conquer Business, and subscribe. Share this with your friends, and we'll see you again next week. Woo.

[00:44:32] Thank you for joining the Women Conquer Business Podcast, posted by Shelley Carney and Jen McFarland. Please subscribe and leave a comment or question regarding your most challenging content creation or business problem. Then share this podcast with family and friends. So they can find the support they need to expand their brand and share their message with the world.

[00:44:56] Check the show notes for links to valuable resources and come back again next week.