PP 308: Don’t Wait, Live Your Dreams with Carolyn Cole

Carolyn Cole is the founder of Boomtank, “where business success and happiness meet.” Carolyn helps companies with their organizational learning, training, and development needs. Carolyn also serves as a Fortune 100 and Fortune 200 Senior Company Attorney. 

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Kim Sutton: Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity. I am so happy that you’re here to join us today. And I am thrilled to introduce you to our guest, Carolyn Cole. Carolyn is the founder of boomtank.com. I got to tell you, we just had the most amazing pre chat. I said to Carolyn already, I wish we were recording because there was just so much value. But Carolyn, welcome so much. That didn’t make any sense. 

Welcome to Positive Productivity. I’m so happy that you are here, and I can’t wait until you fill the listeners minds with all the great information that you’ve just provided me with.

Carolyn Cole: Thank you. It’s so good to be here. And thank you for the opportunity. I loved our pre-chat too, Kim.

Kim Sutton: Oh, yeah. Listeners. Again, my mind is already blown. I’m going to be taking massive action when we are done with our chat today. But holy cow, Carolyn, I would love it if you would share your background with the listeners and just give them a little bit of insight on your journey, and how you’ve gotten to where you are today.

Carolyn Cole: Okay. What I would love to do is just give you my tagline because that keeps it nice and short, and keeps the listeners motivated and interested. My name is Carolyn Cole, I was a Fortune 100 and Fortune 200 Senior trial attorney for those Fortune 100 and Fortune 200 companies. Now, and make the case on behalf of others business dreams and happiness too. So that’s my basic introduction. My background is I spent nearly two decades in trial courtrooms for Fortune 100 and Fortune 200 companies, defending cases, lots of jewelry travel experience, learned a lot about people, learned a lot about messaging, learned a lot about influence and persuasion. And above all, being straight, being ethical, and putting out there, the facts are always friendly in business, and in the courtroom.

Kim Sutton: The facts are always friendly, I’ve never really thought about that before.

Carolyn Cole: Because to some extent, a lot of facts are human made. But to the extent that we assume facts are real, there’s so much power in truth. And that is the truth that you need for your business, for your messaging, for your marketing, for how you want to live your life, great power in that. And now, I have three signature programs that I offer. And I live stream, I’m a professional coach. I’m also an old consultant. My client base, its executives teams, business owners and entrepreneurs. That’s who I work with. And I’m a podcast show host.

Kim Sutton: I love how you said that there’s so much beauty and truth.

Carolyn Cole: And it as long as that comes through and people get sidetracked and tactics for their business, and for productivity, and those things, just be truthful about where you are, be bone truthful about where you want to go. And that includes claiming your greatness, claiming your celebrity, claiming the great things about you that you can use to help other people actually do that. Claim it, don’t be shy about it. Don’t be humble about it, go out and do it. And that’s part of your truth is living every gift you are given to your fullest extent to help yourself and to help others. That’s why we’re here.

Kim Sutton: So part of our pre chat, something that we are talking about is sharing our struggles. So I’d love to know your thoughts when we’re sharing our truth about sharing our struggles. I share a lot about the struggles that I’ve experienced in the past, just because I don’t want listeners or my followers on social media to be experiencing those same struggles if I can possibly give them the tools and resources to prevent it. How do you feel about sharing those struggles?

Carolyn Cole: I love this question, Kim. This is a great one and I’m going to use Danielle LaPorte’s bright line rule that she announced two years ago. She said: “Listen people, when I’m going through something horrible in my life, maybe it’s personal, something really bad. I don’t share the messy, I don’t share all of that with you. Because the greatness is not in me sharing the messy. That does you no good. That’s just misery loves company type of things. Everybody gets sad. Everybody says, yeah, everything’s horrible. What I do is I wait until I get to the other side of it so there’s a lesson for me that I can share with you. And then that is a lesson for you.I don’t share my messy, I wait till it’s done, then I share the message and the learning with you.” And I think that if you’re going to do that, that is an incredibly healthy way to do it. Because you have that vulnerability and that sharing of, hey, people, you can relate to me. I’m human like you. I’ve been through the same places. I’ve triumphed over this which is why you should be talking to me or at least exploring some of the things because I can cut your suffering short by steps I took if they apply to you. But it’s more powerful that way instead of just this beacon in the dark just blinking and saying, I’m in trouble in trouble. I mean, if you’re in trouble, the last place to do it really is with your business people. You should be doing it with friends in a support group that you can do that in a safe place and get to the lesson. But then, when you’re done absolutely, I think that’s powerful business messaging to say, listen, I was struggling X, Y and Z. I was miserable, but here’s what I did. Here’s how I try, here’s why I think you can try them using some of my things. Obviously, it’s always unique to the person. But here’s some of the common denominators that can help you. How does that sound Kim?

Kim Sutton: Oh, that sounds absolutely amazing. And I love that which would actually lead me to another question. Through my education and training as a digital marketer, I’ve heard people say that we should get on social media and share a rant because rants get more responses. But to me, that would feel dirty. Just for me personally, I like to keep my feeds uplifting. And sometimes, those rants have to do with struggles that I’m going through. Like if I were to share them, I have to in the last five years, I think I’ve maybe ranted one, it wasn’t well accepted. And I think I was just doing what other people were telling me to, but it was so out of character with me and my personality. What are your thoughts about people posting public rants on social media?

Carolyn Cole: I actually have two pieces, and I want to loop back to what you said just before. When I’m going to deal specifically with Facebook, because this is a mistake, I see business women, not so much business women, but business women making a lot. They treat the profile page as a separate wall. This fantasy world of Facebook that somehow, whatever, and that goes to your point. Now, whatever you post on your profile, your personal page somehow doesn’t impact your business. Who you are is in the collective always. What you publish on your personal/profile page on Facebook, what you put on Instagram, what you put on your business page on Facebook, your website, all of that is in the collective. You may separate it out and say, what I say on my personal page really shouldn’t splash over into my business. It does. So be very careful of that. And this leads to this new point that you raise, which is very good. What do you think about negative energy, the negative rants as opposed to positive? And what do I think about that? 

And here’s my answer for you. It’s another great question. Think of two things in your mind at the same time. Think Jerry Springer, think Oprah Winfrey, and if you don’t know who Jerry Springer is, think Inquirer Magazine. Those magazine rags you see in the grocery store on racks, and think about them. Now, they have an audience, but who are they attracting? Do you want to attract those same kinds of people to your business? And the answer is, of course you don’t. So people who rant, people who deal in negative energy typically attract negative people. They attract other people just like those who were in the negative warp zone. And if you studied anything about prosperity and success throughout the ages, throughout the centuries, the leaders in business, the leaders in life, they are positive people. Negatives will repel wealth, it will repel energy. If it does bring wealth, it’ll be the kind that brings with it the negative stuff. 

Yes, there are tabloids that are awful, and they make a living, but they attract the negative part of society and the darker part of our nature. And that is not where you’ll find happiness. That is not where you’ll find real success. That’s not where you will elevate you and your work on the planet. So no, I don’t believe in rants, I do believe that you can express your opinion about different things. But rants forensics, and I know there’s one person, just one that I know online says, do it, you’ll get attention. That person gets lots of negative attention and negative people following him. It’s bad preaching, and it’s not good business. If you look at the top business people in the world who seem the happiest, and who seem to have it all, and are doing the most for the planet, they are very positive people and they don’t rant.

Kim Sutton: Oh, my gosh, I love the Jerry Springer, Oprah analogy, by the way.

Carolyn Cole: Jerry Springer stayed on TV for years. Yes, you can have success being negative, and being a ranter, and being in the negative ilk of humanity. Yes, there is money to be made there. Your question for your soul, and your work on the planet, and your business, and your life mission is, am I in the dark? Or am I in the light? And if you’re the kind of person who’s attracted to the dark and you make your money there, you certainly will. But if you are a person who is positive, yes. Stay in the positive, don’t buy into that because it is a business model. I’m not gonna lie to you, you look at Jerry Springer, the other tabloids. It is a business model, right? That kind of negative thing. But by and large, healthy people don’t go there. Healthy people don’t build massive empires there. And they certainly don’t build massive good social change there.

Kim Sutton: Oh, it’s so true. I just want a funny backstory about all, it’s not actually Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones. Do you remember Jenny Jones from the late 90’s?

Carolyn Cole: Yeah. I didn’t watch but I remember, yeah.

Kim Sutton: I went to school in Chicago. For four years that I was in school, my name was on the waiting list to get into an Oprah show. As a member of the audience, my friend and I had all joined the list together and we never got tickets. The Jenny Jones show was always contacting the school to see if they could send over audience members.

Carolyn Cole: I love this. Yes, you got it. You nailed it. That’s it.

Kim Sutton: Yeah, because the negative energy just wasn’t filling the seats. Oh, my gosh, your analogy just opened it wide open for me, continuing to blow my mind, holy moly,

Carolyn Cole:  Try and experiment. Go to a party. Just go to a party gathering, stay in the middle of the room and start saying a bunch of really negative things and see how many people flock to you. The ones that come to you, you’re going to draw to you the most negative, the most complaining, the downtrodden of society, and they’re not going to pay you money for your business. They may buy, because think about it, the people who were coming to her show, they were showing up for free. The people who were watching from their TV, they were watching for free. The advertisers that were showing up were saying, hey, we’ve got to make money, but they weren’t. Bet you, if we go back and we look at the ads for those shows, chances are they were not the upstanding brands in the world. That would be my guess. They would be the ones probably the fast food joints. Probably, the most unhealthy things you can consume in your body, because they know the kind of people that watch that by and large have unhealthy habits. They’re just unhealthy people.

Kim Sutton: Oh, yeah. And I just remember the quality of the audience too.

Carolyn Cole: Yeah, it was towards the primal. And we have to acknowledge that in humanity, because not everybody has grown at the rate of other people. There are people who are stuck in the primal because they haven’t taken time to grow, or they don’t know any better. A lot of people don’t know personal development, they don’t know. They’re all these different avenues, and it’s up to people like us to try and reach as many as we can to share, hey, you really can have a different life. To see people who are in that negative rent world, they are trapped in the world of, I was born this way. This is all there’s ever going to be for me. It’s all predestined, predetermined. I go do certain things. I come home, and that’s my life. It really is what happens to me. I just have to wait and see how it all unfolds. That is what you attract with the rants, those kinds of people.

Kim Sutton: Oh, yeah, so true. So true. And I have to say on that note, in the last couple years, I have been so inspired by seeing where my mentors have come from. Because my mentors, well, most of them do not come from any wealth or any significant wealth. So what I see people posting on social media, I can’t get anywhere because this is where I am, or this is where I came from. I just shake my head now and I want to send them over. But some people just don’t want to hear it. You can become whatever you want to be, but it’s gonna take more than going on from your job that you’re settling for and sitting on the couch and watching TV all night to get there.

Carolyn Cole: Well, people say, move out of your comfort zone. So for us, what the thing is that you have to be willing to change, and change is uncomfortable. It’s so much easier to jump on Facebook and blast out something, and feel empowered and go to bed say, wow, that was really, and not take any action. Just shout off. If somebody thinks that, I mean, however you feel about Gary Vaynerchuk, he came from nothing. Gary does rants every day, but guess what? They’re positive rants, their rants designed to get people moving the positive. Gary doesn’t do positive. In fact, he probably at least once a week somewhere in the world, he spends time talking about positivity. That’s all the guy talks about. He said there’s nothing to be gained in the negative, nothing. Absolutely zero, nada. Everything comes from positivity. If you start in that place, or you work toward it, even with small steps daily, you have a negative thought and you say, okay, I feel the thought, I understand it, I’m going to say it out loud. And now, I’m going to banish it. I’m going to replace it with a good one. Such as, I wish business was better. Your business sucks. You know what? I’m hopeful my business is going to turn around. Because you know what? I’m doing everything I need to do every day to have a successful business. That’s how you turn that thought around. And you practice that.

Kim Sutton: Yeah, a little bit every day is all it ever takes. And some days, you can give more. On some days, you can’t necessarily put in as much time. But as long as your effort and your thoughts are there–

Carolyn Cole: Look at Gary, does anybody really think on planet earth that every moment of Gary’s life is pleasant, perfect, it’s terrific every single moment? No, it can’t be because that’s not the law of nature. But the guy is so bound and determined to preach positivity to live it, to change his thoughts, to make wins, that he’s so good about even taking failures and making them wins. Do [inaudible] with the case with the sneaker he just released. He said, even if it doesn’t sell, it’s a win because my friends get the laugh of me like, you idiot. You had a sneaker named after you. And he said: “I got the experience, so how am I losing here?” You see, that’s the attitude.

Kim Sutton: That blew my mind, his sneaker. When I saw it on social media, like, wow. And I had to admit, I was thinking, I want a turquoise sneaker. I’m not about to go out and do it. That would just be another example of chronic idea disorder and not following my own thing.

Carolyn Cole: Like a Positivity t-shirt brand coming from you. I mean, life is good, it’s big, there’s room for other shirts like that.

Kim Sutton: Oh, yeah, definitely. Carolyn, how did you go from being an attorney into launching your business as it is known today? What did that journey look like?

Carolyn Cole: Another great question. I had always had an eye on business because I loved it, period. And I was, really, when you’re in litigation, you’re siloed. I knew about, I’m gonna say about 10 years ago, I was gonna make the leap. I actually started making the leap in my late 30’s, in my late 30’s. I also have a master’s in organization development from Hopkins, and I knew I wanted my own consultancy. Talking about change management missions, building organizations, aligning people, all of that stuff that comes with the field of organization developments, a big field in corporate America. And I had a degree in that. I started at the same time I was doing my heavy litigation, my own consultancy. Where on the weekends, I would fly around and I had clients that flew too. And eventually, my health broke because I was doing just too much. And that was a great lesson for me for the rest of my life, that we are a finite resource, you do have to pay attention to health, full recovery, everything’s fantastic, but I had to make a choice. 

And my choice back then, even though I wanted my consultancy so badly and I wanted to stay in business was, for now, what I need to do is stay the safer route, which I have mixed feelings about that now, but stay the safer route because I was doing very well with my salary and benefits, and the whole thing. I had a great job, and I just kept getting more great jobs as time went on. I’m like, I’ll take the safe route. I’m going to let that go. But I’ll always kind of keep it there, and I’ll figure it out. And then years passed, and then real estate was in its boom years so everybody was doing real estate. And I said, well, I know that things are cyclical, and I know I can’t put a lot of stock in this. But let me think about that maybe as an exit because I knew I wanted to do more with my life with writing, with speaking, with helping the planet because there are different things I’m called to do, and I couldn’t do that with my litigation position. At one point, I managed, I was working seven days a week 14, 16 hours a day and commuting four or 5, 6, 7 hours a day. It was just absolute craziness that people are out there doing and I’ve been there, I did it because I was a higher up and had to. 

And what I ended up doing is I waited long enough to watch the real estate market crash. But here’s what’s interesting. I watched during that real estate market crash the the luminaries in the real estate world who did rehabbing, flipping homes and all of that as a model. I watched some of them go out of business altogether, some of them really struggle. But then, I watched them transition to online businesses? That had nothing to do with real estate. Sometimes, they did. Sometimes, they didn’t. I said, so what’s this about people making money on the internet, because the internet is not that old. Before the internet, we still had businesses conducting business without the internet. So people were learning how to make money. So I watched how they were doing, I’m like, what can I do? I can create a business on the internet and watch what they were doing. So I knew I was going to be doing that. And then finally, I just pulled the plug three years ago saying, okay, I know what I’m going to do. I’d already captured boomtank.com, I knew the essence of what it would be, and I formed my LLC, and I exited. And I’ve been working on it ever since. So that’s how I am where I am today. I’ve climbed all the mountains I was going to climb in my career. And I knew there was so much more to me, I think probably you can. And most of the people listening to this podcast are creatives, highly creative people. You need to actually be in creation mode to really live and to tap into that big dream you have. And that’s where I am right now.

Kim Sutton: Yeah, definitely. I am creative and as are many of the listeners. In 2008, I lost my job as an interior architect. I remember joining local networking groups because I didn’t know how to add candidates. I didn’t know how to, but I didn’t know if I wanted to grow an interior design business online, especially here around the Dayton area. It’s not exactly Mecca, we had so many struggles financially in the Dayton area because DHL closed their doors, there were a lot of people who were getting severance packages if they were locked. But as I was going to these referrals, or I went to a couple of BNI meetings and some other networking meetings, I saw people who were getting buyout packages, for example, from GM, and they wanted to start businesses. And in our pre-chat, you were talking about how people often invest money thinking that they can launch the magical business or get the magic ticket in 30 days. Can you address the topic of the magic ticket that people are offering out there, and what you should do instead?

Carolyn Cole: Yeah, I love this. Here is the 100% truth. There is no speeding bullet or speeding train to success. There is no overnight success. The people online who are marketing products and even offline, when they say, I did this in my first launch? Well, that’s the first launch under their new brand after they’ve had about 40 brands before that, and they’ve learned all their lessons. You really need to seize on that. What is truly needed to start a business? Because that’s one of the things I do, like free design with the business in mind is that you look at the person and you say, number one, what can you sell? And then you figure out, how you’re going to sell it in a way that really makes a difference in someone’s lives? But when people, and it’s natural when you’re leaving a job, you’ve been laid off, or you’ve been fired, or you want to just exit your career too. It’s natural to want to go by these different packages and start your business, do X, Y and Z because you’re like, okay, because your training doesn’t know and there’s no experience you have that buying that does not really create your business. You think it does, you think it will work, but it can’t. Because what starts your business, it all starts with you. And someone really looking at you, or you really looking at yourself and getting your messaging right, what is your tagline? Who are you to the business world? Do you clearly say what you offer and what you do? 

The next stage of business is, do you have high VAT value correctly priced offers? We talked about this breach yet. You are not going to make a living on 27, $97 offers. There’s this whole other ecosystem that a lot of people don’t know about. And it’s the world of angel investors, venture capital investors and startups. So you have this wide swath to come into business with .Are you going to be, and I don’t like the term solopreneur because it puts in our brain that solo success is possible. Solo success is a complete myth, you will need other people in your corner, you will need help, you will need powerful connections to make your business blind. I’m not talking like top of the world connections, I’m talking about other people where you can joint venture and do things to scale faster so that you don’t lose your financial runway. But you have this swath of coming in as basically a solo business owner to begin with, and how you grow and scale that all the way up. Are you a large startup now trying to pitch to angel investors and venture capital people because you’ve got something global to roll out. In that whole mix, that whole varied range of possibilities for your business, it truly starts with you. It’s all about what you offer. And going and buying somebody a package is not necessarily always going to help you. 

And when we Frankenstein our business, which is what I call it, we go and we buy a package on how to build an email list, we buy a package on how to run Facebook ads, we run a package on how to market on YouTube, how to market on Instagram. When we Frankenstein our business, that’s really kind of how we’re operating instead of starting at the core, which is building a solid thing that you offer, solid messaging. I call it claiming your expert celebrity, not vanity, but you build your expert celebrity so that people know exactly who you are and what you do, then you fan out and do these things to bring people to your business once you have your stake in the ground. And you’re very clear at this point in time, this is what I’m offering. And I find that so many of these packages people buy in the coaching they go into, it addresses very well, exceptionally well. One facet of business, but it doesn’t address their whole life. And look at it this way, if you just take your life in general, if you say, okay, I’m going to focus just on nutrition. And you say, okay, my nutrition is knocking it out of the park now, but you’re only getting three hours sleep a night. How is that nutrition going to really solve all your problems? It’s not. Now we have to look at your sleep patterns. Now, we’ve got sleep nutrition, what else can you do to get healthier? It’s that kind of thing, the piecemealing. And what happens when we buy these course things with the tactics is that you put all your focus and energy into that one piece of the big wheel, and you’re not building the big wheel. Does that make sense?

Kim Sutton: Oh, that makes absolute sense. I will never forget sitting at one of these networking meetings, and I remember I was at a Panera Restaurant. I don’t know if international, listeners, is Panera was. But I was sitting next to a lady who had been working in a factory for years for GM, and she got a $40,000 payout. And around here, a $40,000 payout in some other areas or even around here is not that much different from winning a million dollars in the lottery. That’s huge. And she had an idea, she didn’t know how to build it, but she wasn’t doing anything about what you just said. She wasn’t starting with the core. And she found one person who heard that she had that money and they told her to invest it in them to help her grow her business, which she was so not educated about. I remember it was a handbag business. She liked purses so she thought she wanted to start her own handbag production company. And having gone through my own round one of entrepreneurship where I was an e-commerce, I didn’t even handle production. I can tell you, and this might be pessimistic, but I would have to say I have 99.9% confidence that it didn’t go anywhere. And I feel bad for it because that $40,000 could have gotten her through a year or two, especially around dating, whereas she invested in somebody who wasn’t really vested in her.

Carolyn Cole: Kim, I think that’s a great point. And the thing is when you get into this whole coaching consulting world, if someone wants thousands from you and they say we’re going to have a 20 minute call to set it up, that’s not good enough. I want to see this industry. Do what Alli Brown says, which is really to help people. And when I interviewed to see if I don’t work with everybody. If I’m going to work with you, I spend an hour to 90 minutes talking with you to begin with just to explore what you have, to make sure I have something to go forward with. And if not, like I told you, sometimes, I’ll refer people to someone else who does some other pre-work. But I’m not going to take your money for that because you don’t need to spend that on what I do for you. And it comes down to you being who you are, and especially for women. I want to talk about this handbag thing because this is really interesting. I recently put on my profile page, are there any women out there who have products they’ve developed that they want to sell on QVC home shopping network around the globe, I mean, around the globe. Because recently, my interview is coming out, I think tomorrow with a woman who does this. She’s made $300 million over, 300 million in the cosmetics industry selling her stuff on home shopping networks personally, and she’s got this whole organization that helps women with physical products, get them to market on the home shopping networks. Exactly what the woman with the handbags, I would have loved to have done. 

And there are different Trump pitch sessions. That’s a whole nother ecosystem for your listeners. If you know anybody who has physical products, there is now real help from a woman’s organization. Women pull their money, a high level women’s organization that has as its chief founder, the woman who is now head of the Small Business Administration for the United States of America, okay. She is a member of this organization that’s called Women’s Leadership live. And I’m going to have that interview. And one of the people associated with it has opened it up for me to introduce or to at least make them familiar refer people into the network to try out to get a spot, kind of like Shark Tank, but a lot friendlier about getting their physical product to market on these markets. And the markets are in the United States, Canada, Dubai, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Germany and all through the UK.

Kim Sutton:  Wow.

Carolyn Cole: Yeah. So these opportunities are out there. So don’t just think online. Here’s the thing, online, I’m not crazy about it because here’s what’s happening. The offline world is still going to be coming in droves online, they’re bringing with them their professionalism, their business acumen, traditional business principles that have worked since the beginning of time like relationships. Think about the first business deal ever on planet earth between whatever, however we all look way back when humans were on the planet first. There was a clubbing over the head, just take it maybe that was business back then, it was still business. But later, there came to be bartering, there came to be selling all of those things all before the internet, all before Facebook ads, all before all of this. It goes back to connections, building those robust networks, and getting your name out there, and getting high value out there. But even for somebody with a physical product, there’s now help for women globally by women to get it out there. And more and more women are forming angel investing networks. Billionaire women, half billionaire women pulling other billionaires, half billionaire women to fund women’s startups and women’s products. So look beyond this dixie cup, that is Facebook. Look beyond and go start connecting with these large scale women who have built, and even the cool guys that support them. I have very cool guys in my network that support female entrepreneurs on a big level, and some of them are hooked into angel networks too. So there’s so much life beyond there. Go for it. Think big and get out there.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. I love how you talked about going back, looking at the earliest examples of sales. The first thought that came to my mind, actually, even though it wasn’t a sale, I was thinking of Adam and Eve in the garden where the snake gets Eve to eat the apple. Often, we don’t think beyond the initial lure and attraction of what the promises are. It’s the curse of shiny object syndrome. But when we’re doing more homework, I love Carolyn how you talked about the 20 minute quick chat versus how you’re spending an hour to 90 minutes talking with your prospects, and that you’ll turn them away.

Carolyn Cole: If I want to take thousands of dollars from you, I’m going to make sure, number one, I can deliver and see you has to be there. It has to be high value where I’m going to give you the answers you can’t just get anywhere else. I’m going to really take time to build to your strengths, not your weaknesses, never build to your weaknesses and don’t even try to compensate for them. Always as Gary says, triple down on your strengths, you have to do that. I’m very kind when it comes to shiny object syndrome with people because I get it. All they’re trying to do is find the answer. They’re trying desperately, but because the answers are so fragmented, and it’s a Frankenstein approach, you don’t have real business people teaching real business principles. They’re just sending out tactics. 

But see, that’s what has dominated. But it’s changing, it’s going to change because people are going to want that one stop system, how do I scale my business if I’m in business. Really scale and bring in power scalars to scale it that know what the heck they’re doing. And if you are a life redesign person and you’re contemplating a business and getting into it, you want that one stop shop that doesn’t put you in the poorhouse. It doesn’t have to bankrupt $40,000. That’s insane. But how do I get started in a very realistic way, in a cost efficient way, that actually you start in the direction of success. And I had Matthew Pollard, he is a rapid growth guy. He’s fantastic. Check out Matthew, Matthew, and I have a quote that I put on Instagram from him. And he said, listen, when you start your business, or wherever you are in your business, point it in the direction of growth, because you don’t want to hustle for the rest of your life. You don’t want that lifestyle. That’s not why you went into business. You want to live. So at least point your ship in the direction of scaling where you can grow it, at least pointed in that broad direction, and start going in that broad direction just to begin, and that was incredible. That’s what I do naturally. But it’s an incredible way that he said that, and I love sharing his quote.

Kim Sutton: I love that you brought up that quote, because I’m thinking about the word hustle. I’ve never liked the word.

Carolyn Cole: I think on business, initially, I do. I don’t like it, but I think you do. Because here’s why. You’re going to make a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes, that’s actually your whole blueprint for growth and scaling. I saw this recently from Darren Hardy. I love Darren Hardy of Success Magazine. And this is what Darren said, the road to success, and it’s so clear, is paved with failures. And Darren hustled his butt off, but you don’t always have to do that. But I think initially you do have to work hard, you do have to figure things out, but that doesn’t have to last long with the right help. And I don’t like what you say, hustle is a lifestyle. You will burn out, you will get sick, you will quit, the worst can happen, you’ll lose relationships, your marriage, your children. Horrible things come from chronic hustle forever. And Gary Vaynerchuk [inaudible]. He’s an extreme. I love Gary, but he’s an extreme. That won’t work for most people. Most people don’t want that for a lifestyle he does for his own reasons on the planet. But I agree with you, you do not have to have the endless chronic hustle for years. It’s not a business model, and it’s not a good business model.

Kim Sutton: Maybe I should clarify. I love everything that you just said, by the way. I don’t like the word hustle, because I’m thinking about people who have said they got hustled.

Carolyn Cole: Gotcha.

Kim Sutton: The word hustle has just always felt dirty to me for that reason because I don’t want to hustle anybody, but I know that I worked my butt off. I just wish there was another word for it.

Carolyn Cole: Very good. I get you, I love that. Yeah, yeah.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. If we’re talking about hustle working our butts off. Oh, my gosh, I’ve hustled a lot longer. And way more hours than I would have ever thought of, or dreamed, or hoped, or even healthy for me. Absolutely.

Carolyn Cole: That’s off to you. You have built so much, and you’re in the process right now of scaling all of that. It’s incredible, and I give you so much credit for pulling all those pieces together, and creating a place where people can go where they don’t have to do all of that crazy hard stuff about, they don’t have to Frankenstein. And you have done amazing. Here’s how I describe it, I say hardworking and ambitious. I love the word ambition. I don’t think it’s a dirty word as long as you don’t–

Kim Sutton: Not at all, I love it. I love ambitious, I love ambition, all of those. Motivation, motivated, yeah.

Carolyn Cole: Those words, right? I go back to another Danielle LaPorte that I love, which is this. Danielle LaPorte was walking out on why she thought [inaudible] she could identify probably because of its size, because female eagles are bigger than male eagles. And she said that the she eagle was just beautiful when she landed on the branch, and she never said, branch, can I land here? Oh, branch I’m so sorry I’m so big, I’m so heavy. Is it okay that I’m here? She just did what she eagle does, which is she saw something, she landed where she was supposed to be totally in her own power. And I really want to stress that for the women listening to this, get into your own power, stop playing small, stop playing not great, stop living in a dixie cup and realize your greatness live into it. Go for it and be ambitious, and be hardworking, that’s the deal. You don’t always have to work or hustle yourself into the ground. I understand what you mean by the word hustle, but you don’t always have to work yourself into oblivion. Eventually, success comes, and that comes the help you can hire and go live your life.

Kim Sutton: Absolutely. Also jumping back a little bit earlier in the conversation. While I am the host of the Positive Productivity and the name behind all my brand’s, I am definitely not a solopreneur. I have an awesome team behind the scenes who is here every step of the way to support me. And it’s not just the people who I pay. But also, I’m in a mastermind with great people. I have coaches, there’s more than just me here. And when it was just me, it sucked. I’m just going to be totally honest, it sucked, because I was chasing my own tail. In our pre-chat, we were talking about, you had heard of somebody who had dropped the price of their product for a short period of time from 5000 to 49. And I’m bringing this up right now because back when I was chasing my tail, I would often, what? 

First I was struggling financially, constantly because I was chasing my tail, and I was trying to do too much at one time. But I was so often just creating products out of desperation mode and putting them out there really cheap. And in this course of discovery and learning in personal and professional development, I realized, okay, I really need to focus on one or two listeners, you know I have chronic idea disorder, it’s almost impossible for me to focus on one. So I’m going to give myself that freedom and get them done. And even after they launched, that’s not the end of them, they’re just going to keep on going. But when you were telling me the story, I couldn’t imagine dropping from 5000 to 49. Just because the first thing that came to my mind was, wow, somebody needed to make rent. And I know that might be harsh. But it also made me think about, what’s the value of the product if they can afford to drop it from 5000 to 49? I see a lot of women doing this. And you and I talked before in our pre chat about how men don’t do this. But where is the hesitation? Where does this break in value come from that somebody would feel like they needed to drop it like that?

Carolyn Cole: Okay, this is endemic in the online space among women in the online space. Because there have been different women who have led the charge saying, charge $27 for a product, charge $47 for product, charge 97 for product, do free launches, do free betas, do free, free, free, free, free discovery calls, free everything. I just say, book a session with me, when I want to talk with somebody. I don’t like the word free. Occasionally, I might use it. If I’m advertising a webinar, I might say free training, because people that are not in the online space don’t understand webinars can be free. I think that’s rare. But sometimes, I might slip that in there. Otherwise, I don’t use it because it just values everything. So you have these women who have done bad coaching out there because of their mindset limitations. They’re thinking in a dixie cup, they’re wanting the safe approach. Wow, I can sell $27, $97 products. Totally, you can’t make a living off that bad, bad, bad business model. And let’s look at that right now, and think about that. If you go out with low end business products, okay, that is in that app. 

Now, if you have 10,000, or 20,000, or 50,000 people on your email list, okay? Because what people have, they’ve got it wrong. You start with higher priced products that you are an expert doing that you really know can help people. When you get the money to build your list, then you can drop down into the automated sales for products that still help but at a much lower price point. You just sell on volume, perfectly good model, automated, you’re not working beating your brains out. When you’re on vacation, you’re making sales online. I get that you don’t start with that because you can’t make a living that way. And the problem with that is, let’s look at that when you’re offering chronic things for free, let’s say a free beta. Why wouldn’t you charge for that? It’s a valuable service. You can discount it, but why wouldn’t you? And people do it publicly. They’ll announce it like, hey, I’m offering a free beta. Why are you doing that? Just pm people privately and say, listen, I’m rolling out a new product, I want to see what people think. And you can offer it privately for free if you want to, but not publicly, to have them go through and get those great testimonials. So nobody knows it was free, nobody knows anything. They just know you’re launching this course, it has testimonials to order this program, and the people liked it. And they have to be honest testimonials, no fake job because you’ll end up blowing yourself out of the business with a bad reputation. 

But let’s look at what low discount does for products for anybody who’s in that round because people I deal with aren’t in that realm at all. They’re not in the low end round, but I’m addressing it because women need that help. Guys, don’t charge that unless they have a big email list. Women consistently do high value stuff. Number one, it sends a message that your product isn’t really worthwhile, it’s not. Because really, 97, 47, 27, how is that going to change your life? It’s just something you’re throwing out there. Number two, it sends a message that you don’t really have a big client base because you’re marketing this high value stuff for low things. When you put out a free beta, you’re advertising your brand new business, which may not be the case. You’re a newbie, which may not be the case. You may have tons of experience, you’re just new to online business stuff, and you’re also saying you’re desperate for people to try things. You’re begging people to try your stuff. How do you undo that messaging later when you step into your greatness, and you’re now willing to get your self esteem up where it should be your pricing upward should be in charge? There’s such a disparity there and people remember, how did you go from free in 27 and 97 to these higher end products? What are you doing with yourself? So that is the bad thing around that. Now, what about people just starting who don’t have any experience? That’s a whole different conversation. I don’t coach those people, I don’t deal with those people because I think you have to get really concrete experience in one thing. It can be something small, but one thing that you can really teach and do better than anyone else in your mind and go with that. 

But by and large, the people I work with, they have so many skills, and they have so much expertise. And they are so timid coming out that they dramatically discount themselves the value, price it like that. And then they get caught in the low price trap where they can’t make a living, they can’t market because they don’t have money to market. And they spiral out and they go out of business. And it’s just that thing. And to your point about the person who offered a 5,000 product discounting it into the 40’s for like a one day only, I’m sure wasn’t the whole $5,000 product, but the advertisement was, essentially, it’s what I offered to my $5,000 people, so jump on it. I don’t think that that program was worth 47 or whatnot. That was desperation maybe to pay the rent, but it also may be to generate calls, people in your funnel, etc, etc. That person was buying into, okay, the low cost thing just to attract bees to the nest. I mean, that was the whole thinking. I do know that person personally when they coach, they coach their clients to sell 27, 47, $97 products. So that is their mindset issue. And it’s upsetting, because that’s what’s being put out there without the understanding that the 27, 47 and $97 business models are when you have email lists of a lot of people, and you can generate volume of sales. And it doesn’t take that much work to do it. But you’re still delivering high quality, and they’re small packages. Not to start, without a big email list and without that, do the math. I mean, how are you going to make a living off $97 products, you can’t.

Kim Sutton: Thank you so much for bringing that up. And that when I was actually trying to build my first membership program. I hadn’t thought about it at all, because I didn’t, again, I was a solopreneur at that point. I was looking at people like Michael Hyatt and others digital marketer how they were building their platforms and they were charging 29, 27, 37, 47. And now, it was working so well for me or for them. But I had never thought about the fact that there had been so much work and so much growth of their platform before they even got to offering that system. Thank you so much for bringing that up. Yes, it’s great when you’re already bringing in regular recurring revenue and another avenue, but you can’t just expect to go from a zero platform. I mean, I’m gonna go like Michael Hyatt, there is a platform University. You can’t go from a zero platform unless you’re extremely lucky, maybe that’s not the right word, to building a tribe of 1,000, 2,000 paying members every month at $27 a piece. It just doesn’t work.

Carolyn Cole: Right, exactly. It works, but people find it in the right order. Especially women. They think, I start there. No, you don’t start there. You wind up there. I’m going to have that model. I will have a large email list. I will mark it that way. I will do those things. Let’s look at Lewis Howes right now too, because this is a good one as well. Lewis Howes, he does training, he puts people whether it’s instagram, whether this or that, typically around $49 a month to get into one of these programs, etc. And he has bought space on other people’s Instagram accounts. And he’s very transparent about this to get his followings in the hundreds of thousands on Instagram. He had the money to go build that thing, and then he brings people into his $49 programs. But even Lewis Howes now has high end masterminds where you have to apply. He talks with you, and then you pay anywhere from 10 to 25,000, or even more to be in one of his high masterminds. So he’s still doing direct sales. He’s still doing direct sales, talking to people, bringing them in and interviewing them, and putting them in his programs. He’s still doing that. And he’s doing the low end products. And you can even do the Facebook groups charge low and Facebook groups. I’m not opposed to that. I’m not opposed to people having some low end products when they have volume or for whatever reason, but you have to make a living, and you have to offer high value, high end products. 

And traditionally, those are sold word of mouth. All the best deals in the world, the biggest deals in the world are still done on golf courses across a cup of coffee in person with handshakes. That’s how they’re still done. And see, this whole internet myth and Facebook myth is all done online. If you’re moving into higher end sales, it’s direct sales, it’s still having the conversations, etc. Then when you scale your business and you can afford to buy like Lewis did, a 100,000 followers on Instagram, he didn’t buy them. He bought space on other people, people will let you advertise, or they’ll promote you on their page for feed. They’re called solo ads, or however you want to word them. But that’s what they’re called to build your presence. There’s all these different ways to scale and grow. And eventually, the big automation with the lower end products definitely comes into play. But not if you are transitioning and just starting your business. Unless you have a big financial runway and you absolutely know your audience, you absolutely know what you’re going to be selling, then it could on a new situation. But really, for the first year of business, yours and always truly. 

But for the first year, especially, you’re figuring out what you’re doing as far as, like what you’re going to be offering and you’re adding new offers, and you’re taking out offers, you’re doing different things, and a lot of that is it’s going to be smaller revenue. And in fact, no revenue. If you’re down in those, it’s double digits, That to me is just absolutely crazy. And people actually teach that. They teach your first course creation, go out and sell this course for $29. But, wow, how does that do any good when you have to put 3,000 or $4,000 into Facebook ads if you have no following? It doesn’t. And people say launch, launch, launch. What they don’t tell you behind these launches is you need thousands of dollars. And I’ll give you an example. Okay, I know someone who made like, gross like $80,000 on the launch? No, no, I take that back. They grossed $117,000 on the launch, but they put $40,000 into Facebook ads. I’m not saying that you have to do this there. There’s other ways to build communities for free. There’s other ways to build followings for free and go market on it. But if you don’t have that, and I know somebody else who spent $230,000 on Facebook ads to gross 800, $900,000.

Kim Sutton: Yeah, absolutely. And I know of somebody who grossed over a million on a launch. And after all the affiliate payouts, ads and all the technical setup was down at 100,000.

Carolyn Cole: He did. You said it perfectly. The other thing is, especially for women out there because men do it naturally, start joint venturing and don’t venture at that low price point. Don’t hold each other’s dixie cup. Get out of there.

Kim Sutton: Absolutely. I have to throw in here. And listeners, I’ve shared this in so many of the previous episodes that I have gone through. So many struggles in my business. If I could get paid for every single mistake that I made in my business, I would be a millionaire. I think we all would be. It would be fair. I mean, I shared this in the VA, in the virtual assistant job group recently that I started really low. And with really low listeners, when I started my business in 2012, I was charging $8 an hour for my time. $8 an hour, Carolyn. It took three years of learning to figure out what I was actually offering and who my ideal client was. And now that I figured that out, listeners, if you don’t know this, I do marketing automation for six to seven figure business coaches. They’re out there at their parties doing my marketing. They’ll hear when they’re with their colleagues, and Carolyn, you brought this up in our pre chat, San Diego has a huge entrepreneurial circle of just some huge earners. When they are networking and somebody hears, oh, I need somebody who can do Infusionsoft or marketing automation. I’ve got clients who are timing in now. And it’s great, but you really need to hone in on what you’re doing and who you are before you can get there. And oh, my gosh, I’m just even thinking about where I started as an Infusionsoft certified partner, not where I’m at now, let me just put it out there like that.

Carolyn Cole: Which is fantastic. And the thing is that you have to get started, you have to take action. You can’t analyze paralysis, think, think, think. But you also need to take conscious action. And I want to get back to that point about this dropping of the $5,000 fee to 47, 49. The biggest point of all that is that person was in front of the wrong audience. Because if that person is trying to entice people to spend $47, those are not the people you want to invest in your business. That they were in front of the wrong audience trying to preach to them, oh, at least give me 47. Really? No, you’re in front of the wrong audience, get on a platform with real professionals, seeking real professional help. And what you said about this starting small, I totally get it. It’s not your fault. And I totally get it, it took a while to figure things out. It does take things to figure out, which goes back to your big point which is, there is a speeding bullet in business. There is no fast magical pill, there is nothing. There are things that can really help you come out of the gate strong. But ultimately, you will have to go through the exercise of entrepreneurship, which is, try some things work, some things don’t work, keep trying, keep taking action, and get to profitability and scaling. That’s it.

Kim Sutton: Oh, my gosh, yeah, yeah. Okay, I don’t give myself much credit for this. And I don’t have a big head, I think I need to grow a bigger head like a lot of women. And I mean that in the best way possible. But I don’t think I give myself enough credit for this sometimes even in those first three years, I created three new lives. I mean, I had my daughter a year after I started my business, and then I had twins 16 months after that. So there was a little bit of a detour that I wasn’t quite expecting up then. But with that said, I do want to circle back. I know we’re not trying to offend the male listeners here. But I know you agree, Carolyn, that women don’t give themselves enough credit. Not just sometimes, but a lot of the time.

Carolyn Cole: Yeah. And that’s a choice. Because women, it’s been an, I call this ancestral training, it’s DNA trading, because women have only had the right to vote in the US for, it’s not even 100 years yet, believe it or not, and we’ve only had our own businesses a nanosecond. I mean, this is all recent. In fact, the associate with the American Express card has been tracking female entrepreneurs in the United States only for I think the past nine years, and they have the American Express open report every year, the documents, all of the businesses, women’s owned businesses in the USA, and the money they bring to the economy, etc, which is now over a trillion, etc. And just how many women businesses are started every day. So I kind of give us a break because this is all new to us. Whereas men have been in business since the beginning of time. Women may have support and done supporting roles, but to actually run, own, operate, do our own thing. So this is all very new. And this is stepping into a new role, a new identity. The same with social reform, the same with politics. For the first time in 2018, it’s setting a record, and this is across all party lines, it’s not just one. But there are over 400 women filing for congressional seats going to be running for election, which is a record in this country. So even though we’re like, wow, we should be further along. 

We’ve come so far since the 1920’s, believe it or not in the history of humanity. But there is all the reason now not to have this take much longer. We have the technology, we have the financing, especially in the Western world, the eastern world, it’s still tragic in some places. But in the Western world, we have so much privilege and so much abundance. We can step into our greatness, and we’re supposed to. And here’s what I want people to realize, I say this over and over again, when babies are born, little boy babies in the Western world in theory aren’t stamped, whereas the little girl baby stamped is unworthy. You are just as worthy. And it’s incumbent upon you to step into your greatness, period. And don’t tear down other women when they do. That’s a whole nother thing. Women have to learn to celebrate other women’s successes, really get behind them in promoting them, stop promoting just men, start promoting women because your training is to just promote men. You’re raised to be caretakers, you’re raised to help, and you’re not raised to look after other women, but you have to, and you have to promote them because that’s going to benefit you. And start joint venturing on high level scales. And when you do have connection calls in business, don’t spend half hour 40 minutes talking about chitchat in the weather, get right into business. If you’re ever on a business call with the business guy connecting with you for the first time, they’re like, okay, let’s cover it in 15 minutes, they’re in, they’re out, you have a relationship, you know what you’re doing, you’re gone. You don’t have to spend five hours on a virtual tea with two people. You don’t have to do that. So that’s my FULL address to your question.

Kim Sutton: Oh, I absolutely love it. And I want to come back in just a quick second to the crab story that you were sharing earlier in our pre chat. But before we went there, when you said American Express Open, it clicked in my head about how you were also talking about Facebook. Because what I’m seeing is that a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs, business owners, are spending so much time on Facebook. I went through a period where I was a member of no fewer than 200 groups. And I’m embarrassed to admit it, but by admitting it. I’m hoping to help other people. I thought that I could get all my business out of Facebook. What I wound up with getting was a bank account that was constantly in the red because that was not where my market was. American Express Open, I believe actually has a link in the group where this thought came from. We need to be spending more time on LinkedIn because that’s what professionals are. 

And I just heard a report earlier this week, and I don’t usually like to timestamp, but we’re recording on March 15, 2018. For the first time in its history, Facebook just saw a decline in usage. And I think, and especially with how they are changing the algorithms for business pages, and what we can say, and I like to ask questions and get responses. But now, I’m going to get dinged for doing that. No, I’m going to take it to a platform where I can actually engage with the people who are following me without getting dig. And I’m not saying that that’s the answer, LinkedIn. But I think we need to diversify and become more aware of where our ideal clients and customers really are. Because for a lot of us, it’s not Facebook. And if it is then, those aren’t our ideal clients. The ones that I found on Facebook were the ones who consistently had more trouble to work with, didn’t pay their invoices on time and just created a lot more headache for me.

Carolyn Cole: Well, they’re not business people. This is a reckoning because not only Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, they were all hauled to Congress. It was October, again in January, I think there’s one more hall and they have to come in, because they all have to address their absolute reluctance and refusal to address at the time outside government influence with the US elections, hate groups, extremist groups, and they still haven’t addressed cyberbullying. I wish that were on the table. But I haven’t seen that mentioned. But these extreme behaviors, all of the stuff that they didn’t care about. In fact, they’ve even been hold some of them, I believe, into the whole Brexit peace. I know Facebook has, personally. Where the British Parliament said you haven’t done anything with your investigation, go back to the table because you’re not fully investigating outside interference with our Brexit vote. So they’re facing all of this. 

And the other thing people have to realize is that Mark Zuckerberg, he’s getting older now. He’s 18, he’s still a young guy, but he’s still aging. His priorities have changed. It’s not hooking up on Facebook, which Facebook was designed to do as a hookup site, just basically everybody connecting, hooking up and having fun. And he wanted to chase girls and that kind of thing way back when. But all of these YouTube went, I think it was Google, and Facebook, Twitter I think also was involved somehow. But they all got reprimanded. And there’s a big cry in the country now for regulating them and other high tech companies because they need to be regulated. So to avoid that regulation, that’s where these algorithm changes are coming. They’re like, okay, we’re going to take down a lot of the media operations so that they can come in and do the fake news piece. So they’re all of this, everybody’s seen this. That’s the problem with Facebook, there’s so much bad information. 

All these people live stream, oh, Mark Zuckerberg wants to close the community. They had no clue that that the week before Zuckerberg put that announcement out, and that wasn’t Mark Zuckerberg. That is a team of Facebook attorneys, stakeholder attorneys, everybody looking at that publication which was going to be carried to Congress the next week to say, okay, since our last hearing, this is what we’ve done. This is the change we’re announcing fully vetted. The people on Facebook treat it like it was a casual conversation from Zuckerberg, it wasn’t. That thing was fully vetted by an illegal team. It had to be, because they don’t want to get regulated, and taken down, and be subject to penalties and things like that. So it’s all changing. These algorithms are based on the larger global concerns about global security for not just this country, but other security. Other countries, right? So that’s what’s behind all of this. It’s going to hit all of the platforms, okay, all of the platforms. And whoever does their business simply on Facebook, it was the easy way to have an online business that worked a few years ago, if not a few years before that. 

It was so easy, because number one, there weren’t as many people doing online businesses then as there are now, and it was just easy. That door has forever closed, and we tend to think about Facebook as being for business. The reality is probably 1% of Facebook is about businesses. It’s really about other people living their lives and doing other things. Business people have come into it, but it’s not a business platform, per se. Zuckerberg may turn it into a business platform because that’s revenue and whatnot. And then the rules are really clear about what you can do and can’t do, and you have to pay to play, which he’s doing now, which I understand it’s business. But it’s not about us as business people, it’s a larger thing. And for those people who have made their living solely on Facebook, number one, the true business people are on LinkedIn, they’re not here. They’re elsewhere, and they don’t necessarily. And the people who spend hours, and hours, and hours on Facebook that’s because they may not have a website, that’s because they’re not active really on the other platforms in the business thing, and because this is so easy, and they didn’t have to put money into it. It was kind of like fishing in a barrel. It was kind of just a little literally putting your hooks in a barrel and fishing out of a barrel. But that’s all changed. And then with the algorithms, it’s even more so. And for anybody who hasn’t read, Who Moved My Cheese, it was a landmark business book, you don’t have to read it. The concept is things will change. And they’re changing now.

Kim Sutton: Absolutely. Yeah. I am so happy at this point that I have not built my business on Facebook. I mentioned briefly earlier about the virtual assistant job group. When I started that group four years ago, not thinking of is ever going to necessarily go anywhere, it has almost 14,000 people now, and I already told you this, Carolyn, it was only a week ago that I thought about, oh, my gosh, there’s a way to monetize it. But there’s also a way to get them onto my list. And I’m realizing with all these changes across all social media platforms, I mean, Twitter just did a huge change. And I’m really dating this episode now. But it’s so important to get people into our list and have a way to contact them off of all the social media platforms that we own.

Carolyn Cole: Absolutely. And you need the email list. That’s non negotiable. I don’t care what people say about open rates, etc. If you are engaging with them, and I find that, I live stream and I do love live streaming. And the thing is, you’ve got to get visible in your business. If there’s nothing else people hear from this, get visible, get seen and get heard. You have to, and I help with that too. You have to get your face out there. And for a time, it was okay to hide behind the computer, etc. And way too many people claim to be introverted that really aren’t. Technology is making us introverted because we don’t have to engage anymore. It’s making us that way. You have to get seen and get hurt. So it’s a combination of things. Yes, keep live streaming on Facebook, but do it with a purpose, do it with content, do it with meaning. 

When I do a live stream on my page on Facebook, I spend probably three hours preparing the script to come up with something really valuable, and I deliver it. It’s like a lecture/interactive thing. But it’s real teaching, it’s real value. And I don’t do it often because you don’t want to give away your whole portfolio. But you do want to help people, and you do want to build a following, and you do want to help the people that you can help on a larger scale even if you’re not going to be working with them. So I like that. I like being on Instagram, I love having my own podcast, my business because it’s global and it reaches people. I love talking to you on this podcast because it’s global, and you can reach people. Blogging is still big. And people don’t realize, blogging is one of the most powerful things you can do for your business. Because it’s free advertising once Google gets you in this SEO and puts you up.

Kim Sutton: Thank you for bringing that up. Because I have heard so many times in the last week, people saying that blogging is dead.

Carolyn Cole: It is larger than it has been. What people don’t realize, the largest brands in the world, the largest companies in the world, the most successful ones, have hired content creation teams for their writing. Because here’s the thing, the biggest search engine in the world is still Google. It’s Google. People put in, and what comes up? Things you can go read. You read every day, but for some reason, the online business people don’t really watch their own behavior. Realize when they want a recipe, they go on Google. When they want an answer to a medical condition, they go on Google. When they want to know something, they go to the best restaurant in this place. I’m going to be visiting, they Google, and they read, and people are reading. It’s massive. Get your keywords in, and if you do run into a time with content creation, but you know this as well as I do, you repurpose your content. You take one thing, and you repurpose it across the channels. You don’t create new stuff for every single channel. I mean, that’s a given. But get your blogging on, get your email list going, small at first, small and steady wins the ratio, get clients in there, it’ll be fine. Go on Instagram if that’s for you. People say, well, it’s not your target market because of the age group. Well, yes, guess what? There are billionaires on Instagram, there are millionaires on Instagram, they’re big brands on Instagram. Do it if you want to do it. Twitter, you can do Twitter if you want to. You get your own podcast. Go and get your own YouTube show going, but get out there. That’s the thing. 

And for people wanting to start a business online, you asked this whole push button thing about, I don’t ever have to be seen. I’m just going to do this content creation and people are going to find my magical works. You can be the most brilliant writer, the most brilliant content creator, you may be able to help millions of people. But if people don’t know you exist, you are not going to make a dime.

Kim Sutton: Amen to that. I don’t know that I’ve ever shared this, but I have over 60,000 followers, or fans, or likes, or whatever across social media. But that doesn’t mean a thing if I’m not continually out there in front of them.

Carolyn Cole: Correct. And Gary [inaudible]. I think that’s amazing, Kim. So hats off to you. I think that’s huge. Gary Vee would still say [inaudible] and other business leaders, but the thing is that, are you in it for the likes and the hearts? Are you in it to actually have a business where we know what — its profit and scaling, and then go to your larger life which is, when you have bounty now because your cup is overflowing, you’re not pouring from an empty cup, you can go pour into those social causes, those concerns, those things that lights you up, and you can change the world that way. It’s so important.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. I mean, if I just ignore all my social platforms for a week or a month, I can see the results on podcast downloads, on website traffic, on emails that are coming into my box and inquiries, I could see it. And that took some time because I still use that excuse of being an entrepreneur, being an introvert. But it’s time to get over that.

Carolyn Cole: Well, and the thing is it’s so true. The majority business, 80% of sales and marketing, I’m not talking sleazy salesman out there with your bullhorn. There’s all different ways to appear, and all different ways to convey what you offer, how you can help. And that’s what it’s about. It’s like, you have to keep messaging in this busy world what you’re up to, what you’re doing, and how you can help. That’s business. If you’re not doing that, you’re not in business, and maybe business isn’t for you. I get that. But if you want to be in business and see, especially women. Women love this, it’s 80% helping others, it’s 80% content creation, making the prettiest graphics in the world, and having these virtual chats for two or three hours, and all the stuff that doesn’t move the needle in your business. Business will always be about 80% marketing and sales. The rest is content creation.

Kim Sutton: Right. Right, absolutely.

Carolyn Cole: And if you do it the right way, your content creation can have marketing and sales built in it. In this episode now, you have done a great job of letting people know you’re Infusionsoft certified. Awesome. You have this group of 14,000 people, great that you’re monetizing the group, and you’re going to be offering special programs so you don’t have to do things like separate functions. You can embed within your content creation, your marketing and sales. And that’s personally what I do because it’s just easier, and it flows naturally to me. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If I’m taking all this time to do something, I want to put my signature on it. As women, we’re so big on promoting other people. We’re like, when it comes to us, it’s like, oh, that somehow feels wrong, you got to get over that, you got to get in business, you have to do it.

Kim Sutton: Carolyn, it took 150 episodes before I actually started talking about what I did, what I do.

Carolyn Cole: I understand that, and I give you a gracious hug, and I give you all the warmth in the world. I understand. So this is the evolution of women understanding how to be business women. Guys get it because they’ve been trained this way. If guys were trained the way we were, we’d be having the same conversations with them about getting out there. But this is the conversation women, and here’s how extreme this is. Right now, how many women do you believe in the entire planet are having a conversation like this right now? Or maybe had a conversation like this this week at this level, talking about these kinds of things? How many would you guess in the whole world?

Kim Sutton: So few?

Carolyn Cole: Maybe less than 100? Maybe less than 50?

Kim Sutton: Absolutely.

Carolyn Cole: Not extreme. But yeah, maybe at the high level, the angel investors and the top people, and there are women starting milli mulk hundreds of millions. In fact, this one angel woman’s group, angel investing women’s group, to be considered by them, and it’s all women who pulled their money, like the big contracts from Google and Amazon that have made fortunes. And they’re backing women startup groups, mostly tech, but other kinds of businesses too, you have to have $250 million in revenue to be considered by them for the massive scaling because they want to go into the billion range. Those conversations are happening, which is amazing. And if you say I don’t have 250 million, if you put on paper how you can get there in three or four years with their help, they will consider you. So those are the high level conversations that are happening. And I want women to know they do exist. And they are happening because a lot of times women don’t even think women do that. And they are in record numbers. Not huge numbers, but a record number for our history on the planet.

Kim Sutton: Carolyn, this has been mind blowing since we even just started the pre chat. And I want to invite you to come back for another conversation because I feel like we are just beginning to scratch the surface.

Carolyn Cole: My pleasure. And I really appreciate you and all you’ve shared, and you are one of those fierce entrepreneurs who’s just a lovely heart. And I love what you’re doing. I can’t wait to see all that you do. And it’s my complete honor to have shared this platform with you today, and you are rounding the corner at over 308 shows. That is a huge accomplishment. Massive.

Kim Sutton: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Listeners, you know I have chronic idea disorder, this is definitely one of those, besides my children, this is one of my most major accomplishments for sticking through it. And I can’t wait to see the next 300. So Carolyn, thank you so much for being here for this episode. Where can listeners connect with you online, get to know more and know more about what you do?

Carolyn Cole: Thank you for that. Come find me at boomtank.com. That’s B as in Bob, O-O-M as in Mary, T-A-N-K, boomtank.com. And I have three signature programs. Do you mind if I talk about this canvas?

Kim Sutton: Oh, please go ahead.

Carolyn Cole: So the three signature programs, and this is what I’ve done because I had executives in high levels who don’t want to leave their career. They just want a better life where I was, and this is another for the listeners. 99% of the time when people send you on these avatar exercises and you go off for three months trying to figure out what your avatar eats, and where they shop. The avatar is you typically. So my three programs are Life Redesign with Happiness in Mind for busy Executives. Those types who still want their career, but they want a better life. So I help them with all of that. The other program is Life Redesign with Business in Mind, for those contemplating a corporate exit, super busy professionals, contemplating a corporate exit or company exit, and wanting to start their own business. I help with the learning curve, with all of that so you don’t spin and go splat and spend tons of money before you get your first win. And then my large signature program on top of those two is Winning in Business. And that’s for struggling business owners and entrepreneurs who want to move the needle, grow their business, and we do it with confident visibility, and well priced high value programs. And I create those with you, and we get those out. And typically, my programs run 30 days. Sometimes, they might go 45, it’s one on one in depth, and that’s what I offer. And my clients love them, and I’m thrilled to offer them because those are the three things that have my complete attention, those three things.

Kim Sutton: Mind blowing. The third one, especially for me, and I can hear listeners’ ears just picking up. Wow. Well,

Carolyn Cole: And you’re the same way, I’m committed on this earth to doing bigger things and a lot of things that I haven’t talked about. But for right now, in this business, what I do now and always in my business is I want to make sure that people don’t suffer the same pain that I suffered, and that you suffered, that’s not happening.

Kim Sutton: Right, that is exactly what I’m trying to do through self care systems and support. So thank you, Carolyn, for everything that you do. Can you just share your website one more time, and this will be in the show notes listeners at thekimsutton.com/pp308.

Carolyn Cole: Yeah, it’s boomtank.com, and my show is the Boomtank Business Show. Boomtank Business Show is available on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play. And that is for sharp female entrepreneurs and cool guys who support them.

Kim Sutton: Fabulous. Carolyn, do you have one last piece of parting advice or golden nugget that you can offer the listeners.

Carolyn Cole: For the personal part of your life, because I do the personal development as well as the business, the personal pieces. Don’t wait. Live Your Dreams. You can really, and I’m not a soundbite for every personal development book out there. You can have your dream life. You have to decide and go for it. It’s within you, go for it. You know life is too short. On the business side, I’ll say it again. Visibility is the lifeblood of your business. Get seen, get heard, get out there.