Ep. 82 - Short Form Content Success with David Bennett

Ep. 86 - Mindfulness and Self Awareness as a Business Owner with Gigi Thomas

In today’s episode, Brooke speaks with Gabrielle Thomas, founder of Gabrielle Thomas Consulting and co-founder of Under the Oaks. Gigi’s connection and love with health and wellness started on the front lines as a nurse in a hospital, then she moved into mental health and slowly made her way into alternative medicine. She worked as a practitioner for a couple of years with holistic nutrition, homeopathy and functional medicine. She transitioned even further into the marketing space for health and wellness providers. 

A couple of months ago, Gigi had an aha moment. She saw the breadcrumbs of her career lead to this moment. When she was 19, she experienced paralyzing anxiety. Fast forwarding to later in life, she lost her mom and she didn’t realize at the time what she was doing but in helping her mom, she was very much involved in her healing process. Going through that as well as the grief process, she was in a very dark time with crushing grief. She realized she needed to do something for herself and for her daughter. 

She started her first business as a whole food mobile service. That helped her compost that grief and it was a catalyst for getting out of the darkness she was in. From there she found healing. 5 years later, she transitioned out of that and into consulting work. She started virtual work at this time. She was pulled into the direction of marketing for health and wellness providers. She knew she needed to do this because it helps people live longer, healthier lives. 

One of the most important lessons she’s learned in her career is you can’t change the outside if you don’t change the inside. So much about business is about courage and being straight with people. Courage always feels like the call to action. A lot of people believe that those who are accomplishing great things and are successful don’t have any fear. There’s a lot to be said about people who are willing to talk about their journey and the difficulty in building your business. 

Gigi’s recommendation to others is being clear about where you are in the process matters. For those that are looking for their first 1000 users, content and press is very important but the tools for longer term growth is around virality and getting something out there that people want to share and get out there. SEO is an important tool as well as paid growth ads. 

A common pitfall is selecting too many growth engines. The key is to master one and go really deep into it. As far as executing within your selected growth engine, Gigi likes to use a simple framework she calls now, next later. What will you do now, what will you do next and what will you do later? 

We need to be mindful of the words we choose and how those words have changed meaning over time. For example, the word diva has changed. It used to be something we wanted to be but it’s become something that nobody wants to be. 

Gigi says we need to become more familiar with how our own minds work and the states of mind that cause us suffering and the states that provide us freedom. Once we understand that, we will know what to do and not to do and how to handle stress and our thoughts. We also need to give ourselves time to stop thinking and it can help ideas come more freely. It helps you move forward joyfully. 

Bio:

Gabrielle “Gigi” Thomas is the founder of Gabrielle Thomas Consulting, a practice management consultancy where she works with health and wellness businesses, brands and private practices as a strategic partner to develop sustainable and scalable systems. She’s also the co-founder of Under The Oaks, a Self Care Centre that is modernizing mental health care by focusing on holistic psychotherapy and diversity. Gigi can be found at gigi-thomas.co

Links:

Gigi-thomas.co

Ep. 85 - Tips to Become Successful on TikTok and Reach Your Ideal Audience with Noemi Aguilar-Horta

In today’s episode, Brooke speaks with Noemi who was a teen mom, college drop out but now she’s thriving with two 6 figure businesses from the comfort of her home. Her spouse recently retired and now they partnered in the businesses. She earns full time income working part time hours. When Noemi was little, she was in Girl Scouts and she hated selling and she didn’t want to be begging anyone for money. When TikTok came around, she knew she needed an online presence and it started out just for fun at the beginning of the pandemic and then she saw someone post about a day in the life of their business. She got the idea to do that about her own life in little clips. It forced her to get created on what she wanted to share. When her first business video exploded, it created an audience for her because people wanted to follow what she was saying. 

Compared to the TikTok world, she’s small but she’s not worried for it to scale viral like some people are but she’s reaching her ideal clients and audience. First, you want to be teaching something that you’re an expert in or good at. People want to find out how-to because it is becoming a search engine. Those that are teaching something in under a minute or anything under 15 seconds with something that is super valuable are the videos going viral. The hashtags and trending video sounds are also going viral and help you get into the right audience. A lot of TikTok users are becoming affiliates and that’s why they have millions of followers. She has been able to niche down and the algorithm has been placing her with her exact audience of moms, and bilingual moms. 

Noemi shows up as she is, she’s real and TikTok prefers authenticity and the people that do that are the ones that are more attracted to watch because they are relatable. People think they need to be dancing or goofy but she has had success with a boomerang she did. She has gone back on her camera roll and video clips and used those because people want to see what you are doing and it creates a trust factor. Her TikTok followers get funneled into her Facebook group which is where she does many of the offers she has and those people are ready to buy. That for entrepreneurs is very important. You must have the know, like and trust factor or you will never succeed. 

Being consistent, persevering and being patient has kept Noemi’s business going over the years. Most ventures don’t go to the level you want when we are not consistent in business. That idea can be applied to anything. We have to have a reality check of what we have to do first to get to the big goals. Keep the consistency going and be patient because we want to be where other influencers are at but they all started at the same place and persevered to get to the place they are now. Sometimes there are skill sets that must be developed and if you can commit to the time it takes to learn it, you’ll be good to go. 

Her favorite productivity hack is her calendar time blocking. It helps her keep track with what is going on with her family because they are her top priority. When she sticks to her time blocking, she is much more productive and intentional. She has a great team that helps her run her business so she doesn’t have to spend time doing it. She is able to focus on her clients and let the team focus on running the business. At the beginning of the month, she will block out what is happening with her family first and then she will fill in other work-related events. 

Bio:

Noemi Aguilar-Horta, was a teen mom, college dropout, a mother of 2 super fun teenage boys, one beautiful-sassy daughter, and married to her high school sweetheart. Born in Mexico, migrated to California at the age of 1 going against all odds to not just survive but thrive in life.

She is the founder of MamáCounts, a community, and course that teaches the skill set of bookkeeping to other moms, and she also runs a six-figure bookkeeping & tax firm all from the comfort of her home.

She’s owned a successful virtual bookkeeping & tax firm for the past 8 years and has found a way to make a full-time income, working from home, with only part-time hours. She wants to teach other mamas that they can do it, too!

Her passion is to help mamas stay home with their kids, while not giving up their career aspirations. She wants women to have the time flexibility and freedom to be the amazing mamas they are and the confidence to go after their dreams as well.

Links:

https://www.instagram.com/mamacountsbookkeeping/

https://mamacounts.com/mamacountscourse

Ep. 84 - Digital Courses for Successful Parenting with Cara Tyrrell

In today’s episode, Brooke speaks with Cara Tyrrell, the founder of Core4Parenting. She started out in early childhood education and pivoted to create courses to help set up parents for success in raising school, world-ready kids. She has a Master’s degree in Education and knew it could take her different directions, but she started out in the classroom. She saw year after year that kids came to the classroom less and less ready to learn in every area of the classroom. They lacked social skills, emotional skills and how to control that to respond appropriately. She left the classroom prior to the pandemic and had a nudge that knew this problem started at home and happens between birth and 5 years old. She started creating the courses and curriculum. At the time she had this idea, she went to work as a nanny. She was using strategies that became her courses and saw them work. When the pandemic hit, she saw this as her sign to take her courses to the world. 

Cara says it’s vital to see the world through our kids’ perspective. The value of her courses is meant to give you tools to help your child meet the four readiness skill areas. It helps the parent connect with their child and observe who they are and what their struggles and triggers are. It is also learning how to recognize what type of words help your child stop, listen, process and problem solve with you. It helps parents collaborate with their child and develop a relationship with their child while the children still think their parents hung the moon. If we win the toddler years, we’ve already won the teenage years. 

If your kids are out of the 0-5 years, you can still impact your kids by including them in the option to be part of the problem solving. When you as the adult recognize the environment is calm and collected, that is a good opportunity to open a conversation with them and invite them to be an idea maker, they will feel trusted and respected. Maybe their idea isn’t something you can approve but laying out what will happen and expecting them to respond is not the way to build the four connectors. 

As a teacher, Cara knew how to organize her day and she had the framework figured out for the classroom. It was a different ballgame for an online business owner. She wishes she had known to broaden her thinking because she couldn’t walk into the online space and just teach. She had to learn the things she needed to reach the people so she could make an impact. 

Cara makes a point to read The Alchemist once a year. She knows it’s fiction but it’s based on the premise that what we need or treasure is already here. She finds she can get bogged down in the weeds of doing and she goes back to the book and it grounds her. 

Her favorite digital course is her American Sign Language course. It blends a lot of her loves and empowers kids with a voice before they have one. It encompasses 24 signs that we say the most to our kids in their first 2 years of life. It’s one new sign per day over the course of three weeks. 

2023 is very exciting for Cara. On Jan 3, she will be launching her podcast called Raising Gen C and is about parenting post-pandemic. The trailer is up and ready to listen to. Also in early January, her live program for toddler moms will open again to help set up kids to be kindergarten ready. 

Cara has a shirt that says, World Ready Kids will Change the World. That is the legacy she wants to leave. Our world is suffering and we need adults that will add value to the world. Covid devastated our world in a lot of ways but there were people who saw an opportunity to serve the babies that grew up during Covid. 

Bio:

Cara Tyrrell is the mother of two grown girls, an early childhood educator and the founder of Core4Parenting. While teaching preschool and Kindergarten, she identified a pattern of underdeveloped skills sets in her students leading to a professional pivot as an online Early Childhood Parent Educator. Cara has Bachelor degrees in American Sign Language (ASL) and Linguistics and a Master’s degree in Education. Her science-based courses and conscious coaching programs empower new moms to embrace their parenting personal development journey while teaching them how to maximize their baby’s early learning.

Links:

@core4parenting

Ep. 83 - Pivoting, Iterating and Avoiding Burnout with Content Creation Specialist Jen Liddy

In today’s episode, Brooke speaks with Jen Liddy, a former high school teacher who left the profession and became an entrepreneur. Today she is a Content Creation Specialist who helps people shift their exact right audience into their ideal clients. In the middle of her teaching career, she realized she was working really hard, was well educated, loved her job, and wasn’t making any money. She wondered what she was doing wrong. She left teaching in 2007 when her son was born and went on to become a college professor. During that time, phones were coming into the classroom and she felt less like an educator and more like someone policing a classroom. It wore her down and she realized she was always looking for an out. She experienced some resistance from her peers as she told them she was leaving education. She was told things like, “you’re just a teacher”, “what about your retirement.” She wants other teachers to know they are smart and creative and can do other things. You don’t have to have a business degree to start a business. She still teaches but the difference is the people she’s teaching want to be in the room and they care about learning. 

Jen says it’s easy to burnout when you’re a business owner, especially when you’re a solopreneur and don’t have a team yet or feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re in a period of gathering information and learning from others and imposter syndrome can lead to burnout. It’s important to be on the lookout for burnout and notice what you’re feeling. Jen’s business went from general accountability coaching to general business coaching and then she found out she liked content and pulling words out of people’s heads. She kept leaning into words being her thing and organized and sequential and she narrowed her niche. The more specific you can be with who you help, the easier it will be to be well known for something. She likes people to understand you can create a business that works for you based on your strengths and the way your brain works for you.

She created a membership called the content creator’s studio. It was an online creation classroom and she marketed it and she always had just over 30 people in it. She knew it was working and realized that people always tell you to go big and scale, and she realized she can’t help a huge number of people at once but can do more with a smaller group. Her challenge has been to trust her intuition. Trusting yourself that you’ll pivot and iterate is hard and scary and you have to take that leap. Surround yourself with people online or following people online that align with you. 

Jen is a big podcast listener and she recommends getting as much information as you can from podcasts versus courses. Find the people who get you and if you do invest in a course, she wishes she would have invested in someone who would have put eyes on her business. Her favorite place for understanding money and business is Denise Duffield-Thomas podcast and books on her money boot camp. Personal development is a big part of entrepreneurship. 

The legacy Jen wants to have is to help people get their messaging and content out there. She wants to show people how to do it in a way that feels good and gets them the clients they want to work with. 

Bio:

Jen left her high school teaching career to avoid a life doomed by grading crappy 9th grade Romeo & Juliet essays. 

In 2013, she made a terrifying leap into entrepreneurship & learned everything the hard way! 

Today, as a Content Creation Specialist, Jen helps personal brands step off the content creation DREADmill, become better writers, & get out of content chaos with strategies that ease-ify, simplify, and actually make content feel GOOD for you

Links:

@jenliddycoach

jenliddy.com

Ep. 82 - Short Form Content Success with David Bennett

In today’s episode, Brooke speaks with David Bennett, the founder of The Metabolic Body Reset. He has mastered the short form video and has over 200k followers. David has not only grown his following but also a community to teach others how to grow their own short form business.

David’s recommendation is telling people what they want. He can give you the science and biology on the topics he teaches about but he knows people want to hear about their problem and how they can solve it on their own. Sometimes 30 seconds of redirection is what people need to hear to help motivate them. His top video that went viral was his first video and it was simply David holding 5 pounds of fat and it was 15-20 seconds long and he posted it under his business name. He had a half a million views when his son pointed out to him that his video had gone viral. He did another video at the beginning of this year for the 3 reasons you can’t lose weight that your doctor isn’t telling you about and it went viral as well. There’s two things, knowledge and consistency that you have to merge to get to where you want to go. To have those, you have to see results. 

David thought he was going to have to do dancing, lip synching and other things to become popular but he found all he had to be was himself and giving short, little nuggets of information and that is easier than sitting down and writing a 30-40 minute presentation. David took a long form blog post and kept whittling down the original content to make a 1 minute short term video. No matter the field, we all have the content. 

David started with a chiropractic business and he started moving to an online platform with his metabolic platforms and the success with his short term content has helped him move forward with his business faster without spending money on advertising. It helps him with the know, like and trust by getting in front of people. It has helped move people onto his email list and build his client list. If you have a lead magnet already such as a PDF, open it up and use it for 20 seconds and encourage people to enter their email to grab the free content. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You can be successful without the latest technology. 

David wishes he would have had the knowledge to use the technology when he got started to help him get ahead of the game with where he is now. When he first started doing live videos, he used to be so concerned when the kids would walk in on the video but people loved those because you are relatable in those moments. You’re getting to know the personality of the person and not just know the person by their profession. 

The biggest mistake he feels he made was not jumping into social media earlier. He was very hesitant to get on video and he didn’t want to post on all the platforms but realized that’s where all the people are. He tried direct mailings and other traditional forms of advertising but he learned to modify, adapt and overcome by incorporating social media. If you conceive it, then you believe it, and then you become it. 

David’s favorite quote is, Perfection is never done, done is never perfect. You don’t have to have the best lighting, or the best whatever. You never know what is going to be a success but you have to be consistent and you can be successful. He says stop chasing the algorithm but start talking. 

David wants his legacy to be helping whomever he can whether it’s metabolic coaching or short form content. Understanding your why in any field is very important and he wants to leave that legacy to his children and other people so they can reach their goals. 

David recommends when working with content on social media is what he calls the 24 hour rule. There are going to be mean people. He lets those comments sit for 24 hours before he deals with it and most of the time, someone else will take care of that for you. 

Bio:

David is the founder of The Metabolic Body Reset, LLC, the Empowered Living Institute, LLC, and TeachinVideo.com.  David has been working with clients since 2004 to help enable them to take back control of their health and their life.  David has a Law Degree, Chiropractic Degree and is certified in Functional Medicine.

David specializes in helping people overcome and reverse Metabolic Syndrome (weight gain, elevated blood pressure, elevated blood sugar & excess body fat), using the same methods and formula that he used to overcome his own weight and health issues and achieve Metabolic Freedom.  

David has recently expanded into helping practitioners step out of their comfort zone and get amazing results using short-form videos on social media, without ad spend (teachinvideo.com).  He is a member of the Leadership Council of the Perfect Practice Mentorship and enjoys helping guide & coach mentees on their journey to freedom in their business.  

David is inspired by his wife and two children, and in his spare time coaches both his daughter’s softball team and his son’s baseball team.
 

Links:

http://empoweredlivinginst.com   

metabolicbodyreset.com  

teachinvideo.com

@metabolic.body.reset 

@empoweredlivinginst 

@teachinvideo