One of my friends has an amazing office space. It has beer taps and coffee in the kitchen, flat screens everywhere, booths and workstations for all his staff.

It looks awesome, but to an introvert, it looks VERY people-ey. Introverts don’t have unlimited energy to be social, and that’s why I have a team where everyone works from home. 

I built a system around what allows me to be myself, while still leading my team effectively and getting results for clients. 

Here are the keys I’ve found to managing a team as an introvert.

Weekly Meetings

We are relentless about our weekly meetings. I’ve talked to my Head of Content in South Africa nearly every week for 3+ years. She also runs the weekly meeting, so if I’m traveling the meetings roll on without me. Numbers are reported, contingencies are planned for, systems are improved, all due to the weekly meetings.

Voxer

All key staff on this simple walkie-talkie app, it makes communication super fast. (And yes, we’ve tried Slack. Not a fan.) We try to limit email use to communicating with clients, not each other.

Clear lines of command

This comes straight out of Extreme Ownership. No one has two bosses. It’s crystal clear who reports to who. Our key team members are also directly involved in the hiring process, even some going so far as to train their replacement so they can take on new roles.

Metrics-based expectations

Everything in the agency is either a system or a project. And once something is a system, I can put a metric on it. Team members know the one key metric they are responsible for, or supporting the rest of the team to hit.

That’s how I protect my energy so I can put it where it matters most - marketing. 

When it comes to hitting our goals in our thought leadership business, enduring authority, influence and visibility come from long-term, consistent, relentless, and methodical effort.  

A big trap I see us fall into is thinking that a flurry of marketing activity will make up for that long-term effort, and help us achieve these goals in less time.  

No amount of activity can outpace consistent methodical action. To achieve our goals, we have to build a foundation of effort that’s sustainable in the long run, instead of relying on short-term bursts of activity. 

How does putting too much reliance on the Magical Flurry of Activity get in the way of building influence and our ability to nurture ideal clients? Why is it so critical for us to operate at a level that feels sustainable? 

In this episode, I talk about why we can’t get results from a flurry of activity, and what we should be doing instead.  

If you’re coaching or consulting, you’re going to run into client limiting beliefs. We’re going to run into the things our clients believe about the world, business in general, themselves and what’s possible for them. While we can’t deal with ALL limiting beliefs before a client signs up, we have to choose which limiting beliefs are the most important to break.

The question is when do you want to deal with limiting beliefs, after they’ve started the client relationship, or before? 

I would rather deal with them before. 

The content we put out to our audience is a great opportunity to break those limiting beliefs before they ever show up on our doorstep for a sales call.

In this episode, I give you 3 examples of limiting beliefs, how they can be dealt with by the content we produce, and how that helps us create ideal clients. We’ll deal with one example from 3 industries, business coaching, business consulting, and podcasting.

When I work with clients to launch their podcast, one of the areas we spend the most time on is their Clear & Compelling Idea. The Clear & Compelling Idea grabs attention, compels action and attracts people who are primed and ready to become our clients right away.

Our podcasts can also appeal to the people who would be ideal clients if they were exposed to the right content over time. A podcast built on the foundation of our Clear & Compelling Idea converts people to our Point of View. Every story, interview, solo episode, and client case study is an opportunity to drive our Clear & Compelling Idea home, and in the process, grow an audience of people who have bought into how we see the world. Once they take that step, buying what we sell is a natural progression. 

What are the 3 ways podcasts help us create ideal clients? How does a podcast built on our Clear & Compelling Idea become a pipeline for clients? In this episode, I talk about how to build a podcast that creates ideal clients and I share examples of podcasts with good Clear & Compelling Ideas we can learn from. 

A thought leader is someone who has the drive to teach, train and lead with ideas and concepts that change the way people think and act so that they can get better results. What sets thought leaders apart and allows them to have simple profitable businesses is their Clear and Compelling Idea. 

But in the early stages of building a thought leadership business, not all us have uncovered that positively polarizing, razor-sharp idea. That doesn’t mean we can’t get out there and start getting featured. In fact, the clarity and breakthroughs that uncover our Clear and Compelling Idea take place when we’re out sharing our point of view with the world. It’s tempting to retreat into our own internal thought process to identify and refine our message, but being a hermit genius actually holds us back.

How does external feedback actually help us arrive at our Clear and Compelling Idea? What can we talk about when we don’t have that Idea yet? What can Napoleon’s military strategy teach us about freedom of movement and why it’s a big advantage for thought leaders? 

In this episode, I share what we can do while we’re in the process of finding our Clear and Compelling Idea, and why we shouldn’t do the process of refining our message internally.  

If we want a simple, profitable thought leadership business, our sole focus should be on finding the Clear & Compelling Idea that speaks deeply to our ideal client. 

To cut through the Noise, we need a message that’s razor sharp, crystal clear and positively polarizing. We need something our competitors would disagree with, something that would cause a stir if we spoke up at an industry event.

Your belief system is like a pyramid. At the top is your Clear & Compelling Idea. Right under that are your Buying Beliefs, the handful of beliefs that support your Clear & Compelling Idea and determine if someone is your “right person.” Under that is your foundation of supporting beliefs, values and opinions, including your Bold Opinions - the beliefs that are controversial and polarizing.

Every one of those supporting beliefs, values and opinions are potential podcast topics, book topics, speaking topics, podcast interview topics. If you’re in the early stages of your thought leadership business, and you’re trying to clarify your message and what you stand for, one of the best exercises is to map out your Point of View.

By mapping out our beliefs, values and opinions, we push ourselves to uncover the supporting evidence, events, and life experiences that have shaped us. 

How does this process clarify our beliefs and help us uncover an Idea that can be sharpened and refined into our Clear & Compelling Idea? In this episode, you’ll learn about what it takes to cut through the Noise.  

You will never hear about the failures - Every time you hear a success story of someone succeeding on social media platform, remind yourself that you will never hear about the failures. Only the success stories.

Everything works for SOMEONE. Doesn’t mean it will work for YOU. And even if it could work for you, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a distraction from your other efforts in places that are proven to work. Social platforms also play to specific strengths. If you’re not a light-hearted person who easily sings and dances in your everyday life, LinkedIn will probably work better for you than TicToc.

It’s only a matter of time till you’ll have to pay to reach the audience you’ve built. 

Your energy is not unlimited. It is a finite resource that has to be invested wisely and renewed. The more energy you put into a social platform, the less energy you have to give to other marketing channels. Unless you are intentionally committing to invest more energy into that new platform, in which case you better account for where that additional energy is going to come from. Are you taking it from your personal life? Hobbies? Family and friends? Do you have a plan to replenish that energy?

This is a really interesting question I've heard a few times since the book came out.

I love it because I have some great personal experience in this area.

First, the space that I came up in, residential real estate coaching, I have multiple clients who run 7 figure businesses in a market where the total universe of people who can pay $500 a month or more for any kind of service is around 10k. MAYBE 15k in a good year.

Very small market.

Then there's a great example I give in the MicroFamous book. Brandiose is a branding and design agency that specialized in major league baseball. In the last couple of years, they just started expanding to other minor league sports based on the rock-solid reputation they built.

Because they were so focused on their target market, they came up with a brilliant idea, what I would call a Clear & Compelling Idea, that spoke deeply to those minor league sports teams. But that idea doesn't apply to any other business that might want branding and design.

But the founders of Brandiose knew who they wanted to work with, targeted them specifically, and as a result, we're able to uncover a Clear & Compelling Idea that spoke deeply to those ideal clients. In a world of agencies that build websites and do design and branding, can you how painful it would be for most agencies owners to limit themselves to one type of client? But it worked.

I think we wildly over-estimate how big a market we need to build a 6 or 7 figure business.

So let's dig into 3 questions and 3 benefits of going Micro.

Starting a thought leadership and building influence is like trying to push a rock up a hill. At first, it takes a lot of effort on our part to get our message out to the market. As we shift from getting noticed to being known, it gets easier. 

When we reach that tipping point, and that rock starts to roll downhill, we unlock massive momentum and start to reap the benefits of being MicroFamous. 

What does influence look like practically in our businesses and in how the market sees us? How does the tipping point reveal new opportunities? In this episode, I share the 3 things that happen when we tip into influence. 

There’s one thing that can really frustrate you when coaching or consulting, especially if you’re a strategic thinker. The people we serve are often more interested in tactics than in strategy.

They want to know what they can DO, before they care about the WHY behind it. That frustrated me for a long time, until I came across something really interesting in a music magazine.

Music teachers experience the same frustration when students want to skip over the foundational stuff and learn the cool bits and pieces first. But the truth is, you can’t get a music student to focus on the music theory until they learn to play a bunch of different bits and pieces. 

Similarly in the world of coaching and consulting, it’s hard to get someone to focus on strategy first if they don’t see the NEED yet. Tactics create the demand for strategy. Why do tactics create demand for strategy? In this episode, I share how we can work with our clients’ impulse to start with tactics.