People have been asking me the same question lately: “Dr. Janine, what are you doing? You seem so busy.”
And yes, I am busy, but I want to rephrase that. I’m being very IN10TIONAL.
A few years ago, I started seeing that marketing was changing. There were whispers of AI, customer behaviour was shifting, and I knew the business landscape was going to change with it. I started looking at our own environment, what we offered as a business and what we would need to change if we wanted to remain relevant.
I remember sitting in a Leadership Boardroom session when Dr Mark Manley said something that has stayed with me ever since: “Strategy is set in jelly.”
That clicked for me. You absolutely need a strategy, objectives and a direction, but your strategy cannot become so rigid that your business cannot move when the environment changes. And right now, things are changing incredibly fast.
We got our team involved with AI early. We learned the tools, then went deeper and deeper into understanding what they could do and what they would mean for marketing and business.
Through that process, something else became very clear to me. Almost everything I do today fits into three areas:
* I grow companies through tools.
* I grow the people who lead those companies.
* I put those people into communities where they can continue to grow.
That has become the ecosystem around my work.
1. Grow the Company
As the JDC Group of Companies, we are a fully fledged marketing agency. You may know and recognize us as Learn Social Media We work across strategy, graphic design, websites, digital marketing, social media and the different marketing tools businesses need to grow.
But there is something I have said for years that business owners need to understand: your brand is your reputation, marketing is the tools, and sales is an organisational function performed by a person.
Those three things work together, but they are not the same thing.
You cannot keep posting on social media and call that a marketing strategy. You cannot expect marketing to do the job of sales. And you cannot build a reputation once and assume that it will take care of itself.
There is a process.
* You have to build the brand and the reputation.
* You have to make people aware that you exist.
* You have to understand your customer.
* You need the correct marketing tools,
* and then your sales function needs to use those tools to turn opportunities into business.
This is also why I still believe in traditional marketing. I believe in digital marketing. I believe in social media, websites, books, podcasts, radio and face-to-face conversations.
The days of choosing one channel and expecting it to carry your entire business are disappearing.
Your Customer Decides Where You Need to Be
I often hear business owners say, “I don’t like social media.”
Okay. But does your customer?
That is the question.
Different generations spend their attention in different places. Even that changes as people get older. Your customers move through different platforms, their buying behaviour changes and the way they want to interact with businesses changes.
You need to understand:
* Who is your ideal customer?
* Where do they spend their attention?
* What problem are they trying to solve?
* How do they want to interact with you?
* What needs to happen before they trust you enough to buy?
* What happens after they become a customer?
Your marketing cannot be built around where you feel comfortable showing up. It needs to be built around where the customer you want to serve is already paying attention.
2. Grow the Person
Then something interesting happens when the marketing starts working and the company grows.
The leader starts struggling.
There are suddenly more people, more decisions, more responsibility, more accountability and more pressure. The business has increased its capacity, but the person leading it has not necessarily increased theirs at the same rate.
This is where the consulting, strategy, workshops and G.R.I.T. coaching side of my work comes in.
If we are going to help you grow a bigger company, we also need to help you become the person capable of leading that bigger company.
For a long time, this equation worked incredibly well. We grew the company through the tools, and then we grew the leader to manage what that growth demanded.
Then I started seeing another dip.
Something was still missing.
3. Put the Person Into Community
That missing piece was community.
I have said for years that people buy from people they like, love and trust, and I believe more strongly than ever that community is the currency of the future.
This thinking is also becoming an important part of my work around IN10SIVE Business and The Delta Code™.
A business does not exist independently. It operates inside an ecosystem, and so does the person leading it.
You need people around you who understand what it means to carry a company. You need people who challenge your thinking, open their networks, share their experience and sometimes simply tell you, “I’ve dealt with this before. Here’s what worked for me.”
This is why communities such as the Leadership Boardroom and The CEO Collective have become such an important part of what I am building.
We grow the company. We grow the person. Then we surround that person with an ecosystem that can help them continue growing.
So, Where Are You in the Process?
This may be the most important question I ask in this entire episode.
Where are you?
* Maybe you need the tools.
* Your website needs attention,.
* Your marketing has become inconsistent.
* You have been posting for years without a proper strategy, or your business has evolved, and your brand hasn’t caught up with it.
* Maybe your business is growing beautifully, but you know that you need to catch up with what you have built.
* Your leadership needs attention, your capacity needs to increase or you need somebody outside the business who can help you think through the decisions you are carrying.
* Or maybe you have both of those pieces working, but you are doing too much of it alone. You need the room. You need relationships. You need accountability and access to other leaders who understand the road you are walking.
Sometimes the reason you are stuck is simply that you don’t know where you are in the process.
And until you understand where you are, it becomes very difficult to work out what needs to happen next.
Yes, I’m Officially a Radio Host Too
And then there is another question I’ve been getting lately because apparently I haven’t found enough places to talk yet. 😂
Yes, I am officially a radio host too.
I am incredibly excited about this part of the journey because it fits directly into what I am speaking about in this episode. If we understand that our audiences are consuming information in different places, then we need to be willing to meet them there.
I write. I podcast. I create social media content. I speak face-to-face. I publish books. I still believe in traditional marketing. And now I am taking these conversations onto radio as well.
You can join me every week:
* 📻 Mondays at 19:00 — Radio Kansel
* 📻 Tuesdays at 13:00 — Hartklank
* 📻 Fridays at 09:00 — Radio Kansel
Different channels allow me to reach different people, but they all lead back to the same work: growing people who build businesses that transform communities with IN10TION!
Come and Join the IN10TIONALIST Community
If this episode has made you think about where you are in your own process, then continue the conversation with me.
Join our IN10TIONALIST Community on Substack — it’s completely free and it’s where life, marketing and business growth live.
📬 Substack:
And follow 10 IN10TIONAL Minutes with Janine wherever you love to tune in:
🎧 Apple Podcasts
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📺 YouTube: https://youtube.com/@janinedocabo
And if somebody came to mind while you were listening to this episode, share it with them. We are growing this community one person, one business and one room at a time.
Let’s build ecosystems, not egosystems. Momentum over manipulation. And growth that actually lasts.
Until next time, stay IN10TIONAL.
Dr Janine Do CaboThe IN10TIONALIST™
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