Feb 28

Feb 28 Why I love crickets (and how to find the lessons in the silence)

After two years of trying out my marketing ideas and another two years of being asked by Fempreneurs for marketing advice, I built a three day workshop called, The Workshop for Moms in Business. I had a guest speaker each day, so not only did I invest many, many hours of my time building the workshop slides before selling even one ticket, I asked three other women to prepare a 45 minute segment, too. I’m not saying this was bad or that you shouldn’t do it, but I will say I learned later a better way to do this along the way.

(This is an excerpt from my book called “We Should Be Friends”. Click here to order it on Amazon)

Here’s what happened before the happily ever after part of this story…

The Workshop for Moms in Business

Six tickets for $39 each were purchased (the early bird price), for my three-day, two hours each day, workshop,. One ticket even went at full price - $99 - to a woman who actually didn’t show up and just wanted the recordings. I’d be willing to bet she didn’t watch any of the recordings, by the way, but it did boost my confidence a bit to have someone pay full price! So for that, I’m grateful!

About six months after The Workshop for Moms in Business, I was asked by someone I met on LinkedIn to apply to speak at an annual convention for lawyers in Maryland, USA. This person had noticed me thanks to the “Book cover A, B or C?” post that went viral about a year prior. Because I already had a workshop built and feedback from my Moms in Business crew which made the workshop even better, I was set. After slightly revamping the title and content to appeal to female lawyers seeking marketing ideas and social media confidence rather than only moms, I made a one-page summary of the workshop, attached a price tag and emailed my proposal. It took a video interview with the conference organizer and a few follow up emails, but three months after I sent my initial proposal, I was in. Being on the roster for a state bar association conference meant my official title of International Speaker was on the horizon.

One thing I had learned from The Workshop for Moms in Business experience was I must have something for the attendees to participate in afterwards, and not only one-on-one coaching packages. I was beginning to see the power of teamwork and peer accountability over one-on-one coaching and pre-recorded training material. It was around that time I had hired a new business coach and she did a fantastic job of helping me prepare the post-workshop options for my attendees and prompted me to print them on bookmarks to give out to my attendees.

Although it saved me tons of time having the workshop already prepared, there was lots to do still. My new business coach suggested that I hire an assistant on indeed.com, someone local to spend the day morning with me, sit at the table where my books would be for sale, and generally make me look like a bigger deal than I was. A videographer would be a great idea too, of course, so I hired one.

The very awesome bookmarks I created at Canva.com went with me south of the border to my big international speaking gig, along with a box of books that were purchased as part of the speaking fee. Flying to Maryland from Calgary in my first class seat was a major pinch-me moment and gave me a feeling of being on the right track. Flashbacks to visions I’d had for “adult Lyndsie” when I was a teenager were coming true. Feeling prepared and organized was a huge part of the vision coming true, and for that I have my (then) new business coach to thank. She was a guardian angel!

Don’t leave them hanging

If you haven’t had a guardian angel come into your life to share this important lesson with you, I have finally arrived to say:

YOU MUST PROVIDE FOLLOW UP STEPS FOR YOUR GUESTS/AUDIENCE AT EVERY EVENT YOU HOST AND/OR PARTICIPATE IN.

Whether it is your event or you are a guest speaker, you must provide a few natural next steps. Not one next step, but two or three, ideally. Your follow up steps must answer their questions before they ask:

How can people learn more about the other things you offer?

What free gift is waiting for us on your website? When does it expire? What is the value of it?

Put all of this goodness on your website (on a hidden page, for example, yycfempreneurs.com/freegift), or if you don’t have a website yet, on a free landing page you built at mailchimp.com.

Recap

Let’s recap what you’ve learned in this book so far about the following essential mindsets, the thoughts and beliefs you must have in order to build a strong, caring community of women:

Know what motivates you to build a community of women. (If it’s mainly money, you’ve got work to do! Your mindset will get in your way if it’s all about money for you.)
Believe you are lovable. Consistently reroute the neuropathways in your brain away from negative thoughts about yourself. Get around more people who lift you up and are working towards similar goals.
Embody your role as a servant and leader. Consistently prepare and TAKE ACTION using the steps in Part Two of this book. Own your purpose. It is your responsibility.
Know exactly who you serve - your niche. Consistently drill down to learn what they need from you by asking meaningful questions and having real conversations with them.
You don’t need to have all the answers. You don’t have to be the expert to be an expert. Simply show up consistently as someone who cares about them. That’s what matters most to them.
Know your mission. The answer to, what do you do? Must always be at the tip of your tongue and it must describe the actual positive change you make in others’ lives, not the name of your company or the tasks you complete each day. Your mission is to serve, but how? Know the answer and never stop sharing your clear, bold message with the world!
Know your vision. Knowing what success looks like for you and for those coming into the community is essential. Your vision describes the feeling you and others get from being part of your community. Your vision statement may also include a number and a date, for example, My vision is to welcome one hundred women each year into my community so they can feel heard, seen and loved by others who are experiencing similar challenges.
Know your values. The Fempreneur Values can be found at yycfempreneurs.com/values. These are read at the beginning of every marketing school and most events to ensure everyone understands what is and isn’t OK. For example, one of the YYC Fempreneur Team Values is, We never approach another member of this community to sell to her. Instead of focusing on short-term financial gain, we focus on developing long-lasting friendships and team spirit.
Spread your message with conviction and authority. Know what you stand for. Every person on this earth craves strong leadership. Even the strongest leaders like Oprah and Tony Robbins are seeking leaders who are stronger than they are in certain areas.
Know your go-to life stories. Have three to five of your most powerful life stories written down so you are ready to share them on stage, on Instagram Live and in grocery store line ups. Your go-to life stories share the key reasons why you care about serving your niche and talk specifically to the women you feel called to help.
Notice when you are sitting, waiting and wishing. How do you get yourself moving again? It depends on why you’re in a “slump”. Are you afraid of doing something bold? Or are you simply feeling unmotivated? If the source of your inactivity is fear, shush your inner cave woman. Thank her for trying to keep you safe, but tell her to stop with the excuses and lies about how hard it will be. She needs to shush because you’ve got this. On the contrary, if you’re feeling unmotivated, perhaps stumped about what to do next, you have three secret weapons ready! Use them! (Reminder: you built your secret weapons in the Faith & Fear chapter.)
Kick the ball. Do something. Sitting on the sidelines watching the pros isn’t an option. Keep putting out “good enough” and getting feedback. No one expects you to have all the answers, but they do expect you to keep showing up and trying your best.
It’s all about them. You have to believe at your core that you are a servant. Using too many “I”s, “Me”s and “My”s in your language tells people you are in it for you. Remember to avoid starting a sentence with “I”, “Me” or “My” whenever possible. Clearly communicating the benefit, what’s in it for them, is essential. No one cares what you want. People care mostly about… yep. Theirself!!
A community is a group of connected people who call each other “friends”. A community is not a group of fans or followers who don’t know each other. Your number one responsibility as a leader is to connect your community members with each other. That’s why I wrote this book for you and why we are going to get back into the nitty gritty of my tried and true launch steps, which I call, how to start the fire.

Write it down:

How has your mindset around marketing and growing a community changed since you began reading this book? What big “aha” moments have you had that are worth writing down so you don’t forget them?

What to do when no one says, YES!

Let’s discuss the differences and similarities between crickets and rejection.

Sometimes, when you are growing your community by offering something for free, like a workshop or seminar, no one will say, yes please! Or a few will say yes then not show up. There are ways to minimize crickets, but you can never eliminate crickets. You are 100% guaranteed to hear crickets during about one-quarter of your launches.

When zero to only a few people want what you’re offering, you’ll hear crickets. It feels like you’re doing something wrong. Perhaps you do need to make some slight adjustments to your launch like adding a dollar value to a free offer or posting twice a day on Instagram rather than every other day, but no matter what is actually happening that is stopping people from registering/saying yes, this is a fact:

You posting on social media and your website about your event or any free gift is positioning you as someone who cares and has knowledge to share.
You posting on social media and your website about your event or any free gift is keeping you front of mind.

Therefore, the acceptance and delivery of the event/seminar/free gift is irrelevant. You offering it is all that matters. The offering, the execution of the marketing plan, is you actually TAKING ACTION.

Did I ever have zero people register for an event? Yes.

Did I ever have five people registered for an event and only one show up? Yes.

Did I ever feel super frustrated with all the work I put into building a bunch of seminar slides, literally more than twenty hours, and having no one to share them with? Yes.

Guess what? There were valuable lessons in every one of those frustrating experiences which we call crickets. For me, the feeling of frustration comes from my inner ten year old self. Ten year old Lyndsie wants to be liked and HATES it when she doesn’t get her way. She gets very upset when people don’t do what she wants them to do.

Combine ten year old Lyndsie with the wisdom that I actually have something to offer that can help people and you have some very icky feelings that most of us describe as “rejection”.

Get used to it.

That icky feeling of rejection is part of being a leader. If you’re going to be a leader, get used to it. Sometimes the wind will blow our fire out. Are you going to sit there, teeth chattering, or get up and build another fire?

In my experience, 80% of the time, people don’t do what we, the super smart leaders, have set up for them to do. And at any given time, 80% of your ideal community members who actually see your super catchy, clear and powerful Instagram post will not actually join your community or say yes to an event invite. The good news is the 20% are ready and as long as you keep following my seven essential steps to building a community of women, they will quickly realize:

You are someone who cares, has knowledge to share and is ready and able to serve them.

How will they know this? Because their brain will associate you with the problem you have talked about on Instagram and have said you can solve. You’re front of mind because you’re consistently showing up on social media delivering a clear message. Your awesome job of being a human who cares is why you’re front of mind. It’s also why many of the 80% who aren’t ready yet will still be talking about you in rooms full of opportunity, saying good things about you, before they’ve even met you.

Why I love crickets

While volunteering at Rivers Edge Summer Camp for the first time in 2017, I posted only a few photos and videos on Facebook of me at camp because I was nervous my clients would think I was a slacker for taking 2 weeks off work. They could still reach me via email which I was checking once a day, so this was ridiculous, but I felt that way because I still wasn’t fully ready to be “niche”, to boldly serve my niche people and let the others go. I wanted to please everyone and felt I had to filter my true desires and goals. Not surprisingly, I didn’t see much engagement (likes and comments) from these Facebook posts. At least, that’s what I thought.

It turns out the right people were seeing my posts, and although they were not tapping “like” or commenting or even sending me text messages or emails to share their thoughts, they were liking what they saw. My name was coming up in conversations between my clients and their friends. My new business was being shared in rooms full of opportunity. Not to mention, the Facebook algorithm was pushing my posts in front of sets of eyeballs who didn’t know me. Talk about a fantastic first impression! Yet it took over a year for me to realize any of this was going on!

The following summer, 2018, I was back at camp. This time for 4 weeks. I had come a long way over the past year after taking more risks being honest about who I am and who I serve on social media. This had resulted in noticeable marketing success and a few of my “Mompreneur” friends had asked for help with their marketing. That spring, I had organized a workshop for Moms in Business. Without giving it much thought, I stepped into the arena of teaching women how to market their businesses online. I had also started dating an entrepreneur who let me build him a new website including a merch store and membership registration, which was challenging and exciting. Since I pulled it off and had enjoyed learning how to do it, I wanted to find my next marketing and web design project.

While at summer camp, I decided to offer a Six Week Business Reno package. It was a six week one-on-one coaching package valued at $697, I decided. Using a new contest app I’d found (kingsumo.com), I ran the contest for 2 weeks. People could enter by liking my Facebook page, subscribing to my YouTube channel, forwarding the link to friends and the KingSumo app tracked it all for me. It wasn’t a crickets situation at all because I actually had nine people enter the contest, each person with two to five entries in the draw and one woman who had a total of sixteen entries! The day the contest closed, I knew who I was going to pick as the winner: the woman with sixteen entries in the draw. After researching her on Facebook I concluded she looked like a nice, normal mom. We had one mutual friend on Facebook. I couldn’t tell what her business was in my research, so I figured it was something she was hoping to launch soon. Excited to meet and help her in any way I could, I announced the winner in a video and posted it on Facebook and Instagram.

Did she know this was my first time marketing a stranger’s business? Nope.

Did she know anything about me at all? Only what she’d seen on Facebook over the past few months.

Here’s what I found out after our first phone call:

She was not sure how she found me, but she knew we both had been to Rivers Edge Camp. Her sons had both attended camp there before.

She knew I had written a book to help moms become more financially savvy and thought that was fabulous.

She had seen me advertising both financial workshops for women (this was a crickets situation) and she had wanted to register for my Moms in Business 3 day workshop but it didn’t align with her schedule. She was so stoked that she won this marketing package and was going to get to work with me one-on-one - $697 value - FOR FREE!

(We’ll discuss how to attach a dollar value to your free gifts and the importance of it later.)

Remember when I described how frustrating it was to invest over twenty hours in building a workshop and no one showed up?

That was the financial workshop that I spent tons of time building is one of the reasons she wanted to work with me. It was a touch-point, a way I kept myself front-of-mind for her.

After the six week free business renovation coaching package, she and her husband hired me to build their website and continue working with them for another eight weeks for $1200. This was my first time ever getting paid to market someone else’s business.

At the same time, my entrepreneur (personal trainer/gym owner) boyfriend and I had scheduled a workshop for entrepreneurs called “Strength in Community”. We held it at his gym. Each of us shared a bit of our marketing brain and we had another guest speaker. I also asked my first ever marketing clients to share what they’d learned from working with me so far. To help them gain some accountability from the other business owners in the room, I asked them to share a SMART goal or two (SMART = specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-sensitive). At the event we had two personal trainers, a massage therapist, a chiropractor, a yoga instructor, a children’s clothing store owner, a realtor and a life coach.

The children’s clothing store owner hired me to help her with her marketing later that week.

Six weeks later, we held another Strength In Community event and although the turn out wasn’t quite as good as the first, it was exciting to see our community of Calgary business owners growing.

In the fall of 2018, I had the opportunity to participate in a group therapy retreat (many describe it as a “transformational retreat”) called the Hoffman Process. The price tag for this seven day retreat was $5000. I was one of 26 people who got to attend absolutely free thanks to a local philanthropist (and super successful entrepreneur) who prefers not to receive credit.

It was during that first night at the retreat that I saw clearly how I would do what I’d been feeling called to do for about a year: start a community of female entrepreneurs through offering a FREE marketing school.

My retreat experience was in November 2018 and my first ever class of “YYC Fempreneurs” graduated from my six week marketing school in March 2019. At the end of 2021, there were 162 graduates.