[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
Warning, what you’re about to hear may trigger you.
I know that there is this standard in the digital marketing space and that you’ve got to show up everywhere online, that you’ve got to post every single day, that you have to document every bit of your success.
But that’s just not true.
I know countless seven, eight, even nine figure business owners who don’t show up on social media at ALL, and it’s never detracted from their success one bit.
You don’t have to do the most to be successful, but you DO have to be very intentional about how you choose to spend your time and energy.
In today’s episode, I’m reflecting on the question “what would a billionaire do?” and what that means for how I will be choosing to show up and spend my time in 2021, and how you should too.
If anything I mentioned resonates with you, slide in my DM’s on Instagram (@emilyhirsh) and tell me all about it!
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Emily Hirsh:
Hello my friends. How are you guys? I have a fun podcast in store today. A little bit of a follow up from Tuesday’s podcast, but I had to add on and talk through this because I did a post on my Instagram and my Facebook over the weekend, and it kind of blew up. And whenever that happens, it just means that more people need to hear what I’m thinking and what I have come to the realization of and discovered. So I spent the week after Christmas doing, just reflecting and thinking and planning, and one thing that kept coming up for me and I shared it on Tuesday was the pull to do a lot of things, to show up on Clubhouse, to figure out how I can do Instagram stories better. And I felt for the last, probably three months, this real, I guess, confliction in myself with how do I show up on social media to show the behind the scenes of my life. Like, especially things like Instagram stories. How do I show up and let you guys in and show that behind the scenes, and also enjoy my life and not feel like I have to document everything?
And I felt this, you can’t really have both. At the end of 2019 for about four months straight I completely took social media off my phone. I didn’t even re-download it once. I didn’t even open Instagram, I basically forgot about it. My team obviously still runs things. So I don’t write our posts, they come from my podcast and they’re created by our content and social media manager, but showing up on Instagram stories and being present in that way on social media and keeping up to date with people is something that I have not been able to crack. How do I have social media off my phone, be unplugged from it, and still be visible on social media in real time?
So I was feeling this pull, and then throw Clubhouse in there. I have friends who are like, you know, it’s working really well for me and I’m going in here and I’m getting all these new leads and it’s so fun. And I just like, I didn’t dive into Clubhouse. I made a profile and I let it sit there with no bio for over a month. I was going to start, and even in the last podcast I told you guys I’m going to do four Clubhouse trainings this month. Well, I have decided I’m not. And I decided hard stop. I told my team I am not going to be on Instagram stories throughout my day. I will pre-record a video for my podcast, we can share content on there that’s good, but I’m not documenting my day in real time and I’m not doing clubhouse. Because here’s what I’ve come to the conclusion of is I started asking myself this question, and that is what would a billionaire do?
I know that obviously a billionaire is in a different place because they have gotten to that place and they can then make decisions based on that. But I kept thinking like, what would these very successful entrepreneurs, like these real players, what would they do? And I don’t think that they would show up on Clubhouse, or most of them, I’m not going to say all of them. I know that they don’t. I know that they don’t document behind the scenes of their day and feel like they have to be visible everywhere and if you don’t show it, then it’s not really happening, and this pressure. And what that piece right there, if you don’t show the success that guilt of like, it’s not real. At least for me, I feel that sometimes if I don’t show you behind the scenes of my day and my kids and my team, like then how are you going to know about my success?
You feel that pull, but that’s BS. We can choose to believe that or we can choose not to. And I started thinking about some entrepreneurs that I really look up to and who do I want to look up to? Because there’s some that I really look up to and then there’s some that I I think are very successful, and then I look at how they are living their life or showing up online and I don’t actually want to be like that. The entrepreneurs that I really look up to, I’ll say one of them is Brooke Castillo, she is not on social media at all. She is not on her Instagram. She doesn’t have Facebook, her team posts on Instagram. I don’t know if they do Facebook. They run ads, but she’s zero on social media. And she has a thirty-five million dollar business. I know because she shares this on her podcast that she works three days a week. To me, that is the entrepreneur I am becoming. And I do, I already work three days a week, but I have felt that pull to come on social media.
And so I am claiming right here, the start of this year, and I want to challenge you guys if this resonates with you, because it resonated with a lot of people when I put this out there, that you don’t have to give in to that pull to be visible everywhere, to show your success everywhere. You can just silently behind the scenes and be building your empire, and you can very intentionally choose how you show up online. That doesn’t mean you’re choosing between not doing any social media and doing social media. It means you’re being intentional and strategic with how you do it.
So for me, I told my team one time a month I will batch record all the content that you need. And in a couple hours time, it doesn’t take me long, I can do like 10 videos in an hour on my phone. So easy for me, but I will batch record all of it and you get me the list. I’ll give it to you guys. And that is how I’m showing up on social media, because I am reclaiming my mental energy and where my thoughts go and where I put my time into, because it’s so easy for you to think, well, it’s just an hour, just an hour of my time on Clubhouse, that’s not very much time. Okay, well, how much is your time worth?
So I kept asking myself, how much is my time worth? If I was to go spend an hour doing the Clubhouse room when I could also spend an hour doing a webinar that I run ads to and I get registrants for, what would net me the better results? Hands down the webinar. So in this time, I started looking at clubhouse and deciding, do I want to explore this? I went on Clubhouse and I went in this entrepreneur room and it had some very big names who you would think are very successful and are very successful. Not, you would think they are very successful, but they have, they’re worth multimillion, $60, $70 million, a hundred million dollars. And they’re in these Clubhouse rooms with 2000, one I think had 2,500 people in it. They’re in there talking in this Clubhouse room, and I’m just thinking to myself, you are worth $70 million and you’re sitting in this room with anyone. You don’t even know who these people are. It’s not even your room. There’s 2,500 people, like there’s going to be all different ranges of people and they’re not paying, it’s free. It’s not for your product. It’s not like a webinar where it’s strategic and you have this presentation and then you get to do your offer. You’re just sitting in the room giving your time to these people, and you’re worth $70 million. Why are you making yourself so accessible?
And then, I just sat there and I’m like, I do not want to do that. That is not my goal. And if you’re listening to this and you’re like, well, my goal is to hang out on Clubhouse and I love Clubhouse, good for you. That’s fine, just be intentional about it. For me, my time, I value my time so much, and just hanging out for hours at a time in a Clubhouse room, I decided is not worth my time. And that very well might get me a client or webinar registrants or new leads or Instagram followers. I don’t care because I have a better way that I can put my time to net the same results.
So here’s what I really want you guys to think about in marketing. It’s not about how many things can you do? How many ways can you grow your organic social media, and show up, and do content ,and how many ways can you do that? It’s about what are the very few ways that you can do things very, very well? I did talk about this deeper in the previous podcast, because what will kill your marketing success is trying to do everything and then not doing anything quality, but right now, if you just gave yourself a week and you turned off all the social media and all the noise out there, you would be amazed at the clarity of your mental thinking compared to when you have it constantly on.
The reason I know this is because I’ve had the contrast of both, and every time I’ve taken social media off my phone for an extended period of time and kind of like re-got rid of the addiction from it really and then gone back, I noticed like massively the increase in just uneasiness. You’re just constantly like, oh, I’ve got to check that, and do this, and refresh the feed, and do this. It’s like this constantly, and that kills your creativity, the ability to think deeply, to make decisions. It’s really not good. So I decided like no Instagram stories, no Clubhouse. My extent of my social media will be my team manager manages my accounts, and one time a month I will batch record all of our content, and then I’ll show up here on this podcast.
Now that is obviously what I decided is going to work for me. So what I am encouraging you guys to do is make a decision that’s intentional and strategic for two things. One, how it serves your business growth, of course, but then two, how you want to show as an entrepreneur. So when I look at, you know, there’s a couple of digital marketer entrepreneurs, like I said, out there who are very successful. And when I look at their success and then I also look at, oh, they’re spending three hours on social media, or they’re at their kids sports game, and they’re on Instagram stories. Or they’re updating their day all day on Instagram stories, and they’re feeling like they have to be visible like that. I do not want that. To me, that is not success. To you, that might be success, but to me success is the freedom of having a business that can completely run itself and I can take time off, and I don’t have to document my day to the point where it takes away from my real life experiences with my kids.
I’ve felt like for the last three months conflicted because I want to document my day, and I wanted to show up in that way and show you guys behind the scenes. And my kids are so cute and it’s fun to post it, but every single time I did it, it took away from the real moment. Even if you like take out a camera, it’s taking away from the moment. Have you ever had those times where you go on a trip or you do a day thing, and you spent the whole time taking pictures and then you’re like, wait, I didn’t actually like enjoy it with my own eyes?
So you have to make this choice. And so I make this choice to not have a lot of pictures and to not have a lot of documentation because I don’t have my phone on me because I’m present with my kids, and my family, and myself, and my own thoughts. That’s a choice I want to make, but the question I tacked on with this is what would a billionaire do? If you don’t want to be a billionaire, that’s fine. Just change the question. Really at the end of the day it’s like, what would my future self do? So for me, I want to grow I think a billion dollar business, at least a hundred million dollar business, I will grow a hundred million dollar business. A billionaire, that seems very far out there, but I’m all for that and creating that level of impact and wealth, absolutely. So the people I want to look up to are not only the billionaires, but the billionaires who are also present with their family, who are growing themselves personally, who are not visible all day long online and accessible to everybody, who value their time and their energy.
So for me, I asked that question, what would a billionaire do? For you, it could be what would my future self do, or what brings me joy? Whatever that question is, but having a question that you come back to with all the decisions. This has helped me a lot with my planning for the year, my personal planning, and then also when I make decisions from the team. Because what will happen is you’ll get ideas, so either your team will bring an idea to you or somebody else, like a friend or a mentor, will tell you like, hey you got to try this, I’m trying this thing, it’s so awesome, or whatever you’ll hear about the next thing you have to do, or somewhere that you need to put your energy.
You can just ask yourself this question and then make a decision based off of that. And I did this, like the changes that I made, one, I blocked off eight weeks in the year of 2021 that I’m taking off. Not as a vacation, vacations will be separate, but as time to either create content, or think and read and study. Eight weeks. Then I blocked off an hour a day that’s CEO time, and I’m not working during that time. I’m literally thinking, doing thought downloads, CEO only. Like what is my time worth? And what I want is me to be spending a hundred percent of my time when I’m working is only things I can do, which is actually very few things, recording this podcast, creating new ideas and visions for the company, helping plan out a brand new project and set goals for that because I have the vision. I want a hundred percent of my time to be things that only I can do, and that is not a lot of things. I should be able to delegate most things, because that’s where my time is valued.
If you can do that for this next year, I promise you, your business will grow so much. This also is relevant where sometimes, and I know we’ve all been there. Like when you are, as Brene Brown says, in the arena and getting, you know, you’re visible, so you get beat up a little bit more. So maybe there’s a hater who’s putting something on your Facebook ads, or you’ve got like an angry person in your messenger, or whatever happens, like a response to your content, a response to your success. I have obviously, because I’ve chosen to put myself in the arena, dealt with my fair share of that. Various people either backstabbing me or going against their word, or just like random haters on the internet.
So I started thinking, when I put my time into analyzing that, or thinking about that, or just my mental energy, what would a billionaire do? Would they care about that? Or would they protect themselves from that? Would they build protection around themselves so that they are not even seeing those things so that they don’t even have to go there in their mind because their mental energy and their thoughts are so important to their success, that they are going to be insanely protective, fiercely protective of their time and their mental energy. So that’s what I decided. I’m fiercely protective. I’ve told my team that, and it’s really not like massive changes to our social media. It’s more like how I spend my leisure time, you know?
And also the decision not to go on Clubhouse. I had a room scheduled with a couple of business friends this week, and it was only going to be an hour and I was like telling myself, it’s only an hour, like I should still go. And I said, no, I’m not. I deleted Clubhouse from my phone. I’m choosing consciously to not engage. Now for some people, depending on where you’re at in your business right now, Clubhouse might be a really great tool for you. I want to talk about this for a second, because you have two choices when you’re growing your business. You either can put in a bunch of time to get a following, to get visibility, to get people to pay attention to you, or you can invest money in ads in the beginning.
And I didn’t have money to invest in ads, if this was five years ago, I probably should be on Clubhouse. I probably should be on Instagram stories because I didn’t have the ad spend to put into ads. But as you grow, once you’re at six figures, you need to intentionally make the decision to invest in paid ads, because what those paid ads do is they get you constant visibility every single day without you having to even open your social media. That’s one of the powers of paid ads. So if you are in a phase where you need to do that level of hustling, and in order for people to see your business, and see who you are, and your offers, and your funnels, and your product, you have to show up online.
Do that temporarily until you get to a certain point, and then invest in paid ads and remove yourself from it. But have a plan, because what I see happen is people, that’s the only thing they know how to do because that’s how they built their business. So they built their business, let’s say organically from showing up on Instagram and doing Instagram stories. And they were able to build a following of people, and so that’s all they know. That’s how they’ve built their business, and they don’t challenge themselves to get to a place where they can remove themselves from that hustle. Because if you aren’t meeting a million for sure, but if you’re even six to seven figures, you want to be building a business that’s not dependent on you every day. And part of that means you don’t want to have to show up on social media in order to drive your sales. You can still have a social media presence, it can be intentional with a team, with paid ads, but you don’t want to have okay if I don’t do Instagram stories for a week, am I going to lose all my sales? That would be terrible.
So your goal should be to get out of that hamster wheel and you might be in a place listening to this where you’re brand new. Get on Clubhouse, get on Instagram stories, go do those things. Figure out what works, build your visibility, prove your product, prove your messaging, and then invest in paid ads because that’s not a forever sustainable strategy. If I was five years ago in my business, we’d be having a different conversation right now, but what I’m seeing on Clubhouse is people I love who are like all of a sudden accessible four hours a day. And then like, what are you valuing your time at? So I’m just pushing you to question, and if you feel triggered by that, I put that in my post, if you feel triggered by that, you probably need to hear this. Because I think it’s very common that people, like I said, they do this in the beginning and then this is the only way they know how to go drive business and so they never stopped doing it.
That’s one of the reasons I love paid ads is because you can be very strategic and intentional. In your business, you’re either paying for, you’re either spending time or you’re spending money for your growth. So you want to get to a place where it can be money and your time can be put into higher level things. So I feel like, and actually my friend, Alex Chargen and I saw this last night and I loved it. He’s like, isn’t Clubhouse the definition of trading time for money? Yes. You’re sitting on there in real time. You can not pre-record content. You can not schedule it. You can’t get people to sign up. You’re sitting there in real time engaging, and you’re all of a sudden accessible to thousands of people just in real time, and people that you can’t even fully control the audience cause there’s no targeting. Yes, you can have a title and you’re just accessible right there. You’re spending your time doing that.
For some people that might be one, what you enjoy doing, that’s fine. Or two, what you need to do to grow your business. And I will say there is opportunity on Clubhouse right now in terms of organic reach, and so, like I said, if you are at that place in your business, maybe that is where you should be putting your time, but you have to evaluate. Everything you say yes to is a no to something else. So if you’re saying yes to spending two hours a day on Clubhouse, what are you saying, what are you not doing with that time that you would have normally been doing? And is that other thing, are those other things better and more effective than the two hours on Clubhouse? That’s what I had to analyze. If I was to spend two hours on Clubhouse, I could do so much more impactful things inside my business that you don’t even know about and are behind the scenes, but will in the long run improve my team and my business so much more.
So to summarize a few things, go back and listen to Tuesday’s podcast. If you haven’t, because I talked specifically about all the social media ideas and how that’s going to kill your business if you just jump around from thing to thing and like hustle like that. But adding to that, I want you to just really look at everything you’re choosing to put your energy towards. You’re choosing, whether it’s your actual effort and energy going into it, or it’s your mental energy, it’s decisions you have to make, it’s the way you’re spending your time, what you’re thinking about and how you’re protecting that mental energy. Because as you grow, you have to do that or you will just kill yourself.
So think about all of that. Think about how you’re spending your time, how you’re spending your energy, where your thoughts are, how you’re protecting your time and your energy, and how you could potentially do that better. Are you being at the least intentional with all those things and strategic? Because if you come to me and you’re like, I have a whole Clubhouse plan and here’s how I’m going to do it, and I’m going to spend this much time on it, and this is my goal, and I I’m measuring this many leads from my efforts. I’m like, great. Like, that’s awesome because if I was going to do Clubhouse, I would at least have a goal for what I would want to get out of that. I wouldn’t just be giving hours of my time a week with no kind of ROI to measure that. But if you come, you have that in place, that’s great.
What I want you to have is intention with everything you do, there’s a metric attached to the success, there is strict strategy behind it. You’re not just impulsively on social media, or feeling like you have to run this hamster wheel of being visible. Let’s start thinking about the real big players out there, the real big business owners that have built hundreds of million dollar businesses, billion dollar businesses, and what they’re doing, because we’re in this little internet marketing bubble and I think it’s so easy to think like, this is the way you build a business.
But when I go talk to people in corporate, for example, I have a friend who’s a vice president of a billion dollar company, and I’m fascinated by it. I’m fascinated by their processes, their systems, how they run things the way they spend their time. They don’t have it perfect. There’s like a lot of downsides to corporate, but there’s also a lot of foundational components to it that we need to bring into our internet marketing world. So I’m looking at the real players, the people who don’t have to run that hamster wheel of showing you everything behind the scenes of not being present with their family, and that’s who I’m aspiring to be.
So whenever it comes down to a decision and how I’m spending my time, I’m going to ask myself that question. What would a billionaire do? And that might not be the question that resonates with you, but it could be, you know what I think that it should be what you want in the future. So somebody you look up to, or a type of person or a goal or your future self, because I think we have to start acting like the person that we want to become now. So I’m going to start acting like a billionaire. I’m going to start acting like protecting my time and my energy like a billionaire would, because then that’s the way my direction would go. If you keep acting like you’re making $5,000 a month or less, and you are a brand new entrepreneur in your actions and the way you spend your time and energy, you will stay in that place. So it’s time for you to up-level and ask yourself, what would that person do? The person I want to be in a year from now, how are they going to show up for their team? How are they going to show up on social media? How are they going to show up in their business and start doing those things? And you’ll become that person. You have to do the things to become that person before you can have what that person has.
All right, guys, that’s my rant for the day. Hopefully you enjoyed it. I will follow up on this. I really do plan to spend this year pretty behind the scenes like I said, being very intentional with my social media. So you guys look, watch what we’re doing. Everything we’re doing is not going to be required that I’m real time on social media. It will not be on my phone. I have very strict rules around for myself around screen time because I’m protecting my mental energy. I have a lot of thinking space planned and scheduled already in my calendar. And I plan on doing that this whole year and seeing what happens. I think we’re going to grow a lot. I’m very excited and I have an awesome team to support me in the backend, but I can’t wait to share that with you guys. We’ll let you all know what works and what doesn’t, but thanks so much for tuning in. I’ll see you guys next week.