Shi:

Alright, well, let’s get into marketing now and talk a little bit about that business side of things that we’ve experienced and lessons that we’ve learned. It’s one of the things that has been able to help us be successful no matter what realm we’re in and there’s so much to marketing that it’s a gigantic subject, much bigger than many people first realize. So, we would not say we are experts by any means, but we’ve learned a few things that really help and that really matter outside of advertising and algorithms.

Kay:

Yep. Let’s expand the view of marketing into relationship building, into branding, into content creation, into how someone shows up in the marketplace. It’s not just like Shila said about the algorithms and the content that you post online or the things that you pay for. Marketing is really about how you… It actually says it in the name market-ing. It is how you present yourself in the market and that is a very dimensional thing. But one thing that we’ve learned in regard to marketing that is pretty much tried and true, whether you’re brick and mortar or you’re an online business like we’ve helped to build with Joseph McClendon III and our other clients within the Launch Your Certification business. Now, if you’re in that realm, there’s one really cardinal rule and that’s never ever, ever stop collecting people’s information.

Shi:

List building is huge and it’s one of the things that we’ve always known whether it is in the restaurants building that email list or building the list of prospects for the John Maxwell Team, which is really where we have our biggest marketing juggernaut of success. Now, our mom was an advertising and PR agency partner when I, Shila here, was in high school and then they bought the Squeeze In. So, she brought in what she knew. But our family always kind of had this obsession with marketing. So, it was a focal point for us in the restaurants in a big way and a lot of really amazing, innovative ways that helped us grow. But the people started asking us, who does your marketing? And eventually, Kay and mom originally founded a little boutique marketing agency.

Kay:

Yep. It was called The Young Social, and we launched it initially to help people, particularly with social media. We figured out a social media game that was really cool. So, I went out and got a few digital marketing certifications, worked with Facebook to learn a little bit more about how the platform worked and how we could leverage it for business. We ended up–before the John Maxwell Team–actually helping run advertising for, and the strategic marketing behind the west coast expansion of Rita’s Italian Ice franchise and help them actually sell over 400 units on the west coast which was totally unprecedented for the franchising industry. But we were bringing this fresh perspective of the wild west days of social media back in 2015 when Facebook was still a little bit green in the most popular sense from what we’ve seen at least today.

So, we’ve learned a lot along the way in the midst of that. But continuing to list-build for every single client that we’ve had or partner that we’ve worked with has been so important. But when you have that list, you have to be able to communicate effectively and clearly to them. I think, Shi, that we demonstrated this well within the restaurant company in clarity around mission and company values.

Shi:

Well, one thing we took our restaurant through when we realized the importance of clarity and not when we realized it for the first time. When we re-realized it and brought that focus into our restaurant company, we saw that we had a mission statement that was a paragraph long that nobody in the company, including the owners could recite word for word from memory, and everyone should know the mission. Isn’t that key to a successful mission that everyone knows what the mission is? And so, we went through a process where we boiled it down so that it’s just a very strong, clear six-word mission statement, which is “Happy guests, happy associates every day” and then boiled down our values to be, I think the whole set of four values and the words that go in them is less than 12 words. They’re all very short statements. Show the love, live to serve, provide an experience and grow. Those are our four company values and using something simple and clear like that has given all of us a matrix for decision making, a foundation for decision making, and for approaching different problems and challenges and it’s been so helpful for our brand clarity overall.

Kay:

So, we were able to take that lesson and brand clarity that came from cultural clarity within the restaurant industry and directly apply it to everything that we did in the marketing realm, which ended up creating a really cool skill for our little team around communication and articulation. So, one piece that we learned within the marketing realm is that it’s okay to take a long time to massage your messages. Sometimes Shila and I, we’ve been brainstorming on one initiative and its messaging and haven’t really gotten it right for eight months.

Shi:

Eight months.

Kay:

And we finally, I think have had some…

Shi:

Close.

Kay:

…breakthroughs. We’re really close, but we’ve been working for eight months. Our biography for when we apply for speaking engagements or anything… it’s gone through like six iterations. We are always refining our communication to be more clear and to be more centered on the user.

Shi:

Well, one thing I want to make sure we bring forward here. If you’re like, “Okay, well, that sounds great for marketing and for restaurants and for helping selling franchises, Rita’s Ice.” But what happened when we joined the John Maxwell Team in 2015 was that we were at that event getting certified and we did what millennials do and pulled out our phones and we were like, what’s the hashtag? And there was no hashtag, there was no nothing online. So, we went to the president at the time of the organization and said, just let us run the social media for the event. You guys are really sitting on an amazing marketing opportunity here and you’re not utilizing it and we have this heart to serve and please just let us. And he said yes, which was amazing, and we had some amazing results from that event.

Trending on Twitter, sales on the spot, all kinds of amazing things, and two weeks later, we found ourselves in Florida negotiating a six-figure contract to come in and architect the marketing system that they still use to this day to make over $90 million in sales. So, that’s definitely our biggest marketing juggernaut. Kay moved to Florida, helped the John Maxwell Team build it out, and then moved home and then they asked us to be their marketing teachers so that we could teach the 40,000 coaches, speakers, and trainers how to market their businesses. So, we do have a passion for marketing for sure, and helping people find that clarity and understand it is so much more than advertising and algorithm.