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Emily Hirsh:

If something comes up and it’s so obvious that it’s going to greatly improve what you’re doing, do it, and do it quickly. Forget, let’s do it by the end of the week. Let’s do it today. Do we need to move your priorities around? Let’s double-check our priorities and make sure they’re actually going to be moving the needle and this one isn’t more important. 

That flexibility is huge.I think it is one of the biggest contributing factors to my personal and professional success. You were listening to the Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast, Episode #360.

Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. It has been an amazing start to our year. If you’ve been tuning into the series, I did a walk through my experience last year, the big changes we made, and then officially rolling out our Market Like A Pro program. My team really hustled to get that done by the date. We actually pushed it one week from the original time, but it was incredible to see it all come together and everybody work and just get it launched. It’s a massive beast. If you haven’t checked that new offer out, Market Like A Pro is incredible. It’s the first-ever, that I’ve ever seen, marketing consultancy where you get a team in your back pocket and you have the support from strategists, ads, managers, copywriters, a messaging coach, a sales coach all for a fraction of the cost of done for you.

I was out to create that solution and I believe we have cracked the code. I first initially launched my program two and a half years ago. So it’s taken that long of like refinement and getting feedback and, and seeing what people need and doing interviews with their audiences. You can go to JoinMarketLikeAPro.com if you’re interested in seeing more about that program and seeing if it can support your business. 

We’re back to regular tuning on the podcast. So regular Tuesday, Thursday episodes, and I’m pumped about todays. Today I’m talking about how speed equals results. We just refreshed our company values not that long ago and we made one of them speed as queen because it’s one of my personal strengths, and I think secret weapons is how fast I move. 

Now, it can be a weakness. That’s generally how it goes with your strengths is they are also your greatest weaknesses, but I’ve been doing a lot of reflection as I was creating the content, looking at what worked and what doesn’t, looking at what makes us different, looking at what makes me different as an entrepreneur and going back to what originally created success for me. I think sometimes at different phases and stages in your life, you forget, and you lose track of the things that are huge assets to yourself because there’s so much other noise out there of people telling you shouldn’t do that, or that’s not a good idea, that’s bad, or you got to slow down or whatever it is. Then that noise gets in your head. I think that’s happened to me a little bit around this one.

So one of the things that I do really well is I can move insanely fast. Like if you look at what we get done in a month as a company, it’s insane. We accomplish so much across our entire company. We have incredible goals. We have ambitious goals. We’re always busy. We are always moving and we are hustling. I balance that with time off, and not working on the weekends. I give my team four weeks of paid time off a year. So I do balance that because I think that time is really important, but also I’ve reflected on how recently we’ve had some new team members come on. I think it’s almost like a shock at first to be like, wow, you’re not kidding with how fast you move. I got into… not recently, but I would say in the last, like three to six months, I started to feel like that was a bad thing and would have people around me… and this has been my whole life… telling me slow down, just enjoy things better, or you’re trying to do too much, or, you know, that’s not good. I think that got in my head a little bit. I had this realization a couple of weeks ago and I was like, no, our speed and the ability to move this fast is one of our greatest assets because we solve problems. If there’s a problem that we find it’s solved within five days. If we find a process that we should change, we change it that day. We just make the change. Obviously, there has to be refinement with it, but if it’s easy and it’s like, oh, we’re just going to change the way we do that. Or the way we look at that. It’s done.

If someone comes to me with an idea and they’re like, I think we should be doing this. I’m like, yeah, love it. Let’s do it right now. That is actually a huge strength. I think being an entrepreneur, you experience that, you thrive off that, you love that fast pace. You love the chaos a little bit. I think we need to normalize that. That’s okay. While of course also balancing the fact that yes, you go take a break. Step away from screens, you reach hard, your brain… I get eight, nine hours of sleep every night. All of those things are important and I move freaking fast and I get done, and I’m not going to hide that anymore.

That’s why I made it one of our company values. I was like, we’re doing this anyways and so we’re going to own this. I think when you look at it, it is one of the biggest contributing factors to my success because I have built, in six years, a multimillion-dollar company, I’ve had three kids also at the same time throughout those years and have a team of over 20 people. I mean, that takes some people 10 years to do. And the reason is because I move fast. If there’s a problem, we solve it because we come up with a new idea to test, we test it, we fail, we move on. That’s how I operate. Every month we have a ton of stuff we’re getting done. 

When you look at it and you think about it, I think that the is one of the biggest things that could drive your success this year is the pace at which you move and specifically how fast you’re willing to try something new, you’re willing to pivot something that’s not working.You’re willing to solve a problem that you’ve found. You have this solution, and you just implement it. How fast you’re willing to make that quick change your funnel, re-record that webinar, how fast you’re willing to go get support. I think that some people’s biggest thing holding them back is they just don’t take the action maybe because they’re afraid to fail or maybe because they don’t know exactly the next steps. But I think what you guys need to do is realize, do just do it. Like I didn’t mean to go Nike there, but seriously go and, and test something new. You might fail. Then just quickly move on to the next thing it’s done. Keep going or you find a problem. 

Forget telling people we’ll solve that in the next three weeks. Do it now, do it today. Is it a priority? Then put it at the top of the priority and push the other things off. You know, there are times that we find something and we’re like, wow, that is such a great idea. And I’ll have a team meeting and I get this like, see, this is the part where it’s me. I get this. This just happened to me. I’m in a team meeting and these amazing ideas are coming out of it. I realize, oh man, we’ve got a hole right there. These are great ideas. We should start doing this. I am literally anxious until I know it’s implemented. And I wanted to implement that day tomorrow right now. And obviously, that’s not always realistic, but if there are small things you can change. Like why wait? 

Forget being like, oh, well let’s do that in the next couple weeks. And can you fit it on your plate? Like, no. If this is the most important thing, if this is going to make the biggest impact on either our retention or our delivery or our marketing or our results, we’re doing it today. We’re doing it tomorrow. And I do think this is difficult because there is a balance to it. You don’t want to throw people off of their projects if they’re working on things. But I also think that with teams… This is the problem with corporations. This is why we entrepreneurs who are online and solopreneurs in building your business… We have all this flexibility and freedom because this is what you get in corporations where they find a problem and it’s a year until it’s addressed. You hear that– I’ve never personally worked in corporate– but you hear that a lot in people who have where they’re like, it was just terrible.

Like nobody did anything. Nobody took action. Nobody had the freedom to make changes. And that’s why they struggle. That’s why it’s such a terrible, oftentimes not every time, but oftentimes working environment and the businesses struggle. It’s very bureaucratic and not a great environment. I think it also impacts the result. 

You have the freedom as the CEO to adjust priorities. If you find something that… if something comes to you and you’re like, that is a great idea, we should do it. Or you’re like, we need to change this thing about our offer or the way we deliver. Or  you just came up with a marketing idea that  is going to make a huge impact or you want to test something or test a new video, just do it.

You have to keep the balance of not trying to lose focus, but if it is still achieving your main goal, that is okay, I’m not saying go start a new business. I’m talking about your existing business, your existing delivery, your existing product, your existing service, your existing marketing. If something comes up that is so obvious that it’s going to greatly improve what you’re doing, do it and do it quickly and forget, let’s do it at, by the end of the week. Let’s do it today. Do we need to move your priorities around? Let’s double-check your priorities and make sure that they’re actually going to be moving the needle and this one isn’t more important. And so that flexibility is huge. I think it is one of the biggest contributing factors to my personal and professional success in my business. And it’s because I cannot sit still until I know we’ve done that thing.

When there are ideas coming up that I know are really good. I’m like, Ooh, we’ve hit something here. I get anxious. I have to organize it. I have to organize the things and the tasks that are required to get it done and who needs to help and we need to do, and then I want it tomorrow. It’s not obviously always realistic to have it tomorrow, but you can have it a lot faster than most people do. I do witness things happening where sometimes an entrepreneur has a webinar that it’s like, why didn’t you just redo it? Just redo it multiple times until it’s better. just go. don’t overthink these things. I think also in marketing, this is coming up a lot with how much you’re willing to test something new and how fast you’re willing to do that.

Also how fast you’re willing to pivot if it’s not working. So if you test a strategy and it doesn’t take off, you put the effort into it and you’re paying attention to the data you can pivot and, and shift the angle or shift the strategy a little bit. You’re still moving towards your main goal. You’re not jumping businesses or launching new products every week, but you are focusing on that main goal and adjusting the wrapping paper or the things surrounding that goal. Then if a problem comes up in your business, especially around delivery, how long does it take you to go fix that problem? Or do you ignore it? 

How quickly you can move is a massive asset and also an advantage over so many other companies. And I think that is my advantage. When I look and compare other agencies or agency owners, people who started around the same time as me and didn’t grow, that’s one of the things they did wrong is they just didn’t move. They didn’t take action. They didn’t move fast enough. Didn’t make changes and didn’t fix things. They didn’t try new things. I think one of my team and my business’s greatest assets is that we test so much. If you really watch, we test a lot. I would say 60% of the things don’t work and that’s fine because 40% do really, really well. And then we have incredible months, like last month and this month where we have just exploded and found kind of a groove on something. So how fast you’re willing to move is going to be an asset for you. And I think this is something naturally built into me.

I was reflecting on how I was suppressing it a little bit. I was getting noise from people around no you need to slow down or you’re trying to do too much or that, you know, you’re going to burn out and all those things. And I do think there’s validity in that. I’m not saying hustle, culture work, you know? You need to have your priorities and your work-life balance. I have time for two workouts a day. I work out for an hour and a half a day, that’s a priority and that’s a non-negotiable for me. So I’m absolutely not saying that…

But what I am saying is a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of businesses spend a lot of time on things they don’t need to be spending time on because they are in this loop of just doing the same thing, or it’s like we said, we’re going to do this so we’re just doing it. We don’t really know why we’re doing it, but we’re doing it. 

And they’re not willing to move and question and pivot and say, Hey, is this actually a priority? Or do we figure out something else? That’s a higher priority. Let’s pivot right now tomorrow. Why would we wait a week? Let’s do it right now and organize the overall projects and what they’re working on in the business. I started realizing, I was feeling like, oh, I have to tone that down. I don’t want to scare people away, but now I just own it. I just did an interview for our team and I was like, I want you to imagine a really fast-paced company and then I want you to 10X it — that’s our company. So can you handle that? Because that’s the reality and I’m owning that and if you’re not a right fit for that, that’s fine. You’re not a right fit for it. You know that then we don’t want you and you shouldn’t be here because you won’t be happy here.

I now very openly own that. It’s helped a lot because then we get people who thrive off of that. Who loves the fast pace, who loves the changes, who loves the autonomy of being like, Hey, I just came up with a better idea. Okay, let’s implement it tomorrow. A while back, we had our team where we used to because of an old…. Here’s a great example. Because of an old process we used to have a long time ago, I think two and a half, three years ago. So a long time ago, we used to have a tech person on our team, a tech-numbers, virtual system person. They would pull account numbers for our client accounts. Then we put it into a spreadsheet. Then we’d say in the weekly reports a long time ago, we realized that’s not going to work because they’re not involved in the accounts enough, the ads manager needs to be doing it. So we’ve been doing that for years, but we still had this process where our clients’ weekly reports were delayed because it was originally created because that tech person couldn’t do 40 reports in a day. And so then we used to send out a report. Clients got them on Monday and some on Tuesday. And it was sporadic. Then we were in this team meeting, and this was probably like seven or eight months ago where our team was like, why can’t we just all send our reports on Friday? And I was like, oh, I don’t know.

We have this old process because it existed when we had this previous role. And it’s been like two years since we had this role, we just left it. Let’s start sending them on Friday. Let’s do it this week. Tomorrow. Let’s do it. And we did. And we changed it that week. It was like, okay, it’s done. It was an instant value, but that’s an example of something that we kept doing the same exact way, but it was based off of a previous role we had in the company. We didn’t question why. As soon as we questioned why we didn’t say, okay, well, we’re going to have to make sure it’s okay with everybody and we’ll change it in a couple weeks. No, if that’s an instant value… 

Because the reason it came up was for clients. It’s really nice to get your report at the end of the week, going into the weekend to know what happened that week and to know what we’re working on next week. That kind of eases clients’ minds about what’s happening in their account. If that was an instant value, we really had that meeting. I think it was on a Monday or Tuesday. We implemented it that Friday. It was like, great idea. Why haven’t we been doing this? Let’s do it right now. That is a great example because there’s a lot in your business as you grow, no matter where you’re at right now, as you grow, there are things you should look at and be like, why am I still doing it this way? Originally, I started doing it because of not having this team member or having this team member or because of something that used to come up in a process we used to have…  

But question that, and then if there’s a better way to do it, change it. Now, change it tomorrow, move fast, speed equals success, speed equals growth. So that is my permission for you guys because I needed that permission. I was listening to another entrepreneur, Alex Hormozi, who I keep on talking about on here because his podcast is so good. His book is so good. What did he say? He said something about forgetting the end of the week. Let’s do it today. And that’s what he tells employees. I was like, finally, someone who’s actually saying that that’s okay to do because that leads to so much growth. And if you can do that and you can move faster, you will grow. And I think that I just needed to hear that because there are a lot of people who reprimand you for your speed as an entrepreneur. I have got that my entire life growing up and I’m like, no, we’re going to own this. We made it our company value. We tell people in interviews, we own it. If they’re not a right fit, they’re not a right fit. That it’s fine. But at least we’re not pretending we’re something that we’re not. I truly believe reflecting that my speed and my ability to be insanely fast and efficient is my greatest strength and contribution to our success. All right, everybody I hope you got some value out of this. I’ll talk to you guys on Thursday. Thanks so much.

Thanks for listening to the Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast. If you love this episode and want deeper support with your marketing head over to helpmystrategy.com to see how Hirsh Marketing can help take your marketing to the next level, no matter where you’re at today. We help our clients scale faster than ever, find hidden leaks in their funnel experiment with new creative marketing strategies and help their business explode and be more profitable than they ever dreamed possible. Head over to helpmystrategy.com and see if you qualify for a free strategy audit with team Hirsh.

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