Latest / Fractional Frequency / The Business of Being You: Personal Branding, Leadership & Resilience

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The Business of Being You: Personal Branding, Leadership & Resilience · Fractional Frequency

• Billie Tienda: Hi, Amy. How's it going? Good. How are you? Good. I am so excited to get into this conversation with our friend Paige today. Paige has ⁓ recently joined us for the founder roundtable. So this is our second time we're lucky enough to dig in and pick her brain. So a little bit about the conversation today. We are going to spend some time learning about Paige's journey from Wall Street to Fortune 500 marketing leadership. through the dot-com boom and the aftermath of 9-11 to building one of the earliest successful fractional CMO firms. We'll discuss why fractional leadership has stood the test of time, how marketing has evolved from intuition to science, and why every professional today is responsible for managing their own brand. Without further ado, welcome Paige. Thank you so much. I'm excited to talk to y'all today. We can't wait. To get into the conversation. ⁓ and and so let's jump right in. You have been running and scaling a fractional CMO business for over two decades, long before this fractional leadership or fractional business became the next hottest invoke thing. So, what made you believe that this model could work in the very beginning? So I g ⁓ you know, it's 2020 hindsight. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart. I feel like, you know, people give me credit for being like a pioneer in the sh sharing economy or, you know, looking into a crystal ball and seeing that this was the vision of the future. That is absolutely not true. You know, I was just following opportunities. I always say I'm I was much more opportunistic than strategic. You know, I I we I was doing this in marketing before People really outsourced marketing per se. They might hire an ad agency or a PR firm, but it always felt a little too close to the vest to quote, outsource your brand. People were happy to, you know, outsource bookkeeping or finance or even HR, but your brand, your marketing just felt Too close to home. If you fast forward from 24 years ago when I hung out the shingle, you know, now people share everything. Their houses, their cars, their sporting equipment. So, you know, Harvard Business School wrote two cases on my company about three years after we started. We were really starting to scale. It's just funny to me now because people don't think twice about it. But back then we were considered. kind of a visionary in the space. So I'm thrilled that it worked out the way it's worked out. I always joked like I get blamed for things I had nothing to do with. So if you want to give me credit for being a visionary, I'm all for it. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna push back. My last job working for someone else, I was the head of marketing at Zipcar when it was a brand new company. And the fact that multiple people could share one vehicle, it made perfect sense to me after 911 when everyone laid off their marketing department, fired all their marketing people. And I thought, well, if they're sharing marketing resources, I could hang out a shingle and we could do that for everybody. And it just seemed to work at the time. And then after the economy started to rebound after nine eleven, I thought it'll just go away. And in a weird way, it's actually more relevant now than it was when I started it. So here we are. Yeah. And what would you say was there, you know, sort of a moment or a feeling that you had that convinced you to stay the course rather than returning to a corporate CMO role? Likely those opportunities came your way at that time. What made you say no? Well, I guess we stayed busy right from the start. You know, I had clients before I admitted I was starting a company, but I thought, well, as long as people are hiring us, I better Have a website so we look professional. And some of our earliest clients were investors, board meeting, board members, and VCs who were had a portfolio of companies they were working with. And after we helped one business, then they would say, you know, I have another portfolio company that could use that same help that you just did for this one. Or I sit on the board of another company and they could really use your help. So each one of those early connections led To more relationships, more business. I never wrote a business plan. I never thought this would be my longest job of my career. But again, it's just I kept following the breadcrumbs and work led to work, led to work. And before I knew it, I had worked for myself longer than I had ever worked for anyone else. And then it became like What do I do if I get sick of my boss this time? I think I'm unemployable. I don't I could go back and work for anybody else ever again. And so here we are, you know, 24 going on 25 years later. And now it just feels inevitable. Like, of course, I would keep good doing it because it it's meaningful. I enjoy it. And it appeals to kind of the ADD nature. I guess they call it ADHD now. But I I think I like having a lot of balls in the air. I like having a lot going on. And, you know, I'm still having fun doing it. So why not? Busy breeds business. I feel like we're reminded of those wise words from one of our close business mentors, Gail, in a lot of these conversations. There's so much to be said for just kind of getting out of your head and just double down into the work and and it often will lead to the next and the next and the next. Exact. I think a lot of people feel like running your own business is a lot of risk. And at times you particularly where when the macroeconomic environment is complex or shaky, ⁓ that it's unstable. But in our first conversation, you shared that you felt like having a portfolio of clients was actually more stable than working for one company. Tell us a little bit more about why. Well, you know, if you hitch your wagon onto one pony, you know, if if you look at the average tenure of a chief marketing officer or any C level person really, but I think it really came down hardest on marketing. ⁓ you know, a company will give you a year, maybe two years, but when things need a shakeup, it was like always the head of marketing that lost their job. And, you know, when you have a portfolio of clients across different categories. different sizes, different types of businesses. You're not really overly reliant or dependent on any one revenue stream. So, you know, if you have a handful or if you're lucky enough to have dozens of clients, any one client can go away for a short period or even if they shut down. And it's just a small percentage of your business because you're diversified. You've got work in other categories. You've got work with other size businesses from startup to mid-market to Fortune 500. You've got a lot of irons in the fire and you just keep plugging along. ⁓ so I I definitely feel more resilient and less dependent on any one client, you know, representing a whole lot of work. I I always warn other consulting practices and service businesses. If you only have one or two clients, that's not really a business because if the if those folks decide they wanna put things on hold or they wanna go a different direction, you're gonna get screwed in the in the crossfire. So diversify your base, try and help people do you know, you don't wanna be a one trick pony. Cause when that trick is out of favor or out of style, you're not gonna have anything else to rely on. I mean, I look at it in sports, you know, these NBA teams, if they rely too heavily on the three point shot and nobody's making three pointers, they're never gonna win games if they can't get it right under the basket. So it's not just in business or small business. It happens in other categories as well. Yeah. Yeah. Don't get comfortable with just one or two things. The other thing, Paige, I think I'm just ⁓ in awe of is as you look at your Journey over the last 20 some years, the function of marketing has changed materially. I mean, I mean, maybe more so than most other functions in business. And it's more science than art. ⁓ to steal some of your words from our first conversation. What do you think some business leaders still misunderstand about what marketing actually is and and has become today? So marketing means different things to different people. It's one of those catch all terms that when some people say marketing, they mean advertising or they mean promotion or another kind of lever on the the dashboard. There's that old cartoon where everyone's blindfolded and they've each got their hand on a different part of the elephant. One's holding the tail, one's holding the nose, one's holding a leg. And that you ask them, What are you touching? And none of them say it's an elephant. Because they're feeling different parts of an animal, but then if they take off their their mask, they can see, ⁓ my God. That's the way marketing is in my book, because there's so many tools in the marketing toolkit. And as you said, the toolkit has changed so much. When I started my business, social media didn't exist. AI was not a thing. Facebook was just for kids in school. It was there was not an adult version, a business version of Facebook. So when when you look at how people quote do marketing, it's just very different. And so much of quote marketing is about walking the streets, keeping your head up, not in your phone, and looking at everything around you, like visually, listening, looking, smelling, tasting. It's marketing is about relevancy. It's about kind of what's happening now, what are the current trends, what used to happen, what are they doing now instead? So being good at marketing. When I'm interviewing junior marketing people, whether I was at a Fortune 500 company when I was looking for people to join my team at the three startups where I ran marketing, I would ask them questions like, what was the box office hit this weekend in Hollywood? What's on top of the billboard charts? Who won the Oscar for best picture last year? And you might say, like, why are you asking me this? I'm interviewing for like a job on your team. And it's like, well, that's marketing. Do you know what's important, why it's relevant? Spider-Man just came out last week, the new Tom Holland movie, and it broke every record ever for opening weekend and summer movies and the Marvel World and all of that. If you're not aware of that, if you can't connect those dots. And what, if anything, it has to do with your business, you're not going to be a good marketer today. You have to be able to connect your category, your industry to pop culture, to trends in the market. I think those are the marketers that are the most relevant and that connect on a real human level. And if there's one thing we know with all the AI tools that are out there today, you know, a lot of businesses just regurgitate. The same jargon, the same buzzwords, the same hashtags. And what AI does is it kind of brings you down to the lowest common denominator. So everybody starts sounding like everybody else. And I think to really stand out today and to keep your brand relevant, you have to know what's unique, special, and different about you. What's your backstory? What is something that only you can tell, only you can say about your product or service. And if you stick to that, you're going to be relevant, you're going to stay timely, and you will kind of pop versus your competition. But if all you're saying is the same thing everyone else is saying, that's a bit of a recipe for a disaster today, because you're just going to blend in and get lost in the sea of sameness. I had a professor in business school that used to say, marketing is everything and everything is marketing. And I used to kind of laugh when he said it. Now that I've been doing it for a few decades, I think he was absolutely right. I think it's a great point about are you observant and can you notice what's happening around you? I think that ⁓ if you put yourself in the shoes of a marketer, if you don't do that, then how could you possibly be successful in marketing to any audience segment other than yourself and people who look just like you? Yeah. Bingo. That's it. Absolutely. It makes a ton of sense. And I wanna spend a moment on what you were talking about a minute ago with all these various channels at cross marketing. Amy and I are actually doing some work with a marketing team right now. And as you look at these functions and these jobs, they're feeling more and more technical. I mean, they're just the spread of channels and tools that they're using is is incredible. And so what would you say to a leader who might feel a little overwhelmed looking at all of that? with respect to their business, if they're kind of starting from a low level of maturity or starting from the beginning from a marketing perspective, where should they focus their energy first? So it's easy to get overwhelmed because there are just so many tools in the marketing toolkit today. And I feel like every newsletter you read, every podcast you listen to, there's something new. Like you're always feeling like you're behind. There's something new you haven't heard of or you haven't tried. I think what's really important is that you don't let yourself kind of get swept up in the tsunami of everything that's out there. It's really important to know your strengths, know how you stand out versus your competition and seeing kind of what real estate you can own in your target audience's brain so that your product or service is what they think of first. when they have a problem that your product or service can help them solve. What is it gonna take for them to go, you know, Amy does that. Let me see what what her solution is. Let me go to Amy's website. Or you know, Aaron and I were just talking about that. Or I was on Aaron's podcast and we were just talking about that. Let me go back and see where she can help me solve this problem. So you cannot boil the ocean. You can't be known for everything. You have to pick one or two things you want to be known for, and that's the real estate that you're gonna own. So it's very easy to ⁓ to kind of try and be all things to all people. You know where like where your strengths are gonna be the best showcased in the best way. If you're if you love Instagram, then by all means make that your platform of choice. For me, LinkedIn is really the best. place to showcase my strengths. For a professional service firm that creates content and you want to be seen as a thought leader, LinkedIn is definitely my preference. I don't need to be on Facebook. I don't need to be on Pinterest. That's not where people are going to be looking for me. And that's not the place where I'm going to be able to showcase what I do best. So find the one or at most two places that are great For you that really highlight your strengths, that set you apart from your competitors and double down on the. I think where people go wrong is they spread themselves too thin. And they do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and none of it very well. But if every time you show up, you're telling a consistent story and you're reinforcing it in everything that you do, that's going to be the best reflection. So that every time somebody has a problem, that you're gonna help them solve. They think of you first. When they go to you, it's very clear you're the leader in that area. ⁓ so if you can do that well, that's the name of the game. I think where people get into trouble is, you know, on Facebook, they want to look like they're fun and they're on vacation and they're in the bikini. And it's just a very different image than the buttoned up professional on LinkedIn. And then they're trying to be kind of snarky on X. And it's like, wait, wait, wait, what person is going to show up at the meeting? If I wanna introduce you to somebody, I want confidence to know that you're gonna be a good reflection of me and my brand. If I introduce you to somebody and you come up as the kind of snarky version, not the professional version, all of a sudden it's like, well, I'm not gonna refer business to you. I don't wanna look I don't want it to be a bad reflection on me because I don't know which version of you is going to show up at the meeting or on the call. So don't don't spread yourself too thin and figure out what your strengths are. Reinforce those strengths in everything that you do. Yeah. And you took the the last question I had in mind right away for me, which which was around mistakes. You know, where do people kind of fall into easy traps? And and that makes a lot of sense trying to be Everything to everyone, spreading yourself too thin. There's so many ⁓ platforms and channels that you can play in and it's it's hard to do all of it. You brought up something that was really interesting to me around this kind of persona switching between different platforms. And obviously that's very impactful on somebody's like personal brand. And you've said a couple of times, you know, your personal brand is very important today. And I'm just wondering why and when you think that made made the switch that like as a as a person, not the company that you work for, but who you are, your brand becomes important. I again, I think a mistake that a lot of people make is you think I'm not famous, I'm not Taylor Swift or Beyonce or Serena Williams or LeBron James. I just am a small business owner. I kind of do my thing. I have this consulting business or I have this little online store. I'm not some big name CEO. That's not really true anymore. I think everybody's a brand today. I guess if we learned anything during the pandemic, it's if you don't exist online, you basically don't exist anymore. So if someone's gonna come to on your podcast, if someone's gonna meet with you. Or even return your phone call or email. A lot of times they go to Google and they just search. They go into AI. Who is this person and why do I care? Should I even bother responding to them? Are they worth my time? Do I want to go have coffee with them or not? And if they Google you, if they look for you online and they can't find you, that's a big problem because again, if you don't exist online. Are you even real? Are you just an AI robot? So, you know, I'd argue that everybody's a brand today. And back to what we were talking about before, brands can stand for two things. They can't stand for ten things. So when people think of you, what do they think of? What problem can you solve for them? And again, you gotta start somewhere. You gotta put a stake in the ground. You know, when Amazon started. They were the world's biggest bookseller. People probably forgot that. They were literally away to buy books online. Back then, it's hard to imagine, but e-commerce was not really a thing. And people were scared to put their credit card online to buy a book because it's like, are they gonna steal my identity? Like, who's who is this website? You know, I don't know if I trust them. And so After you bought a few books and they sent them to you, like they said, you felt, okay, I I got that. I I can trust them. And then they started to sell music. That was, I think, their second category. And today, you would buy a diamond ring on I mean, there's nothing you wouldn't buy on Amazon. They probably have keys to your house at this point because they're, you know, they're dropping off packages multiple times a week and you don't even think twice about it. But they didn't start there. You start small and you build a relationship. You build trust. And in that trusted relationship, the conversations get deeper. And, you know, then you start storing your credit card on their website. And then you're like, okay, well, I trust them. I like them. Let's see what else they can sell me. What else do they offer? And so that's a natural progression. And now we live in the world today where You know, again, you don't know if you're dealing with a robot or a human being sometimes. And so in this day of artificial intelligence and robots and whatnot, how are you gonna build those connections where people know that, you know, when you show up, you are who you say you are ⁓ and you're gonna deliver on every promise that you make. If you do that well, you have a sustainable brand in a long term business today. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. You said something earlier about if people Google you and there's nothing there, then they don't know, you know, if you're a real person. So what is the story that people should be aiming for others to see when they get Googled? So you wanna make sure you show up and one way to do that, I think LinkedIn is a great platform because That should be one of the things that shows up pretty high on the list. If your name is unusual, like mine with the hyphen, you're it if you Google me, it's actually gonna show up and it's gonna be me. If your name is Bob Jones, Susan Smith, a million people are gonna come up and you don't know which one is which. So, you know, some sometimes people use a middle initial. Or they have something in their brand name that, you know, maybe they put their LinkedIn profile in their signature on email so you can find them quickly and directly. You know, if you happen to share a name with a serial killer or a porn star or something, be careful because, you know, people are gonna Google you and then they're gonna be like, wait, is it does this person have a criminal record? Like, who is this person? And so You want it you you you want people to know that you're like in on the joke. Like, okay, thank you for getting back to me. Obviously you figured out I was not the serial killer by the name of Bob Jones. You know, ⁓ I'm so glad you saw, you know, my link and I'm I really look forward to talking to you. So, you know, you want those human elements, those human connections, because that's what's gonna make You break through the clutter and the noise of everybody else that's out there. And it if you don't have those kind of human elements today, you do just get lost in what I call the sea of saineness because everybody else is falling into this very deep pool of I don't know who you are, you're not relevant to me. So you have to give people a reason to care to keep keep the conversation going. A really really good advice. I definitely am gonna Google myself immediately after this to see But you know, people say like that's so narcissistic, or you know, why would you do that? Exactly. It's it's really important that you know what your reputation is. Like, how do people think of you when you're not in the room? And that's your brand, you know, it and if you If you don't own it, if you don't define your brand, someone else is gonna define it for you. So you wanna be in control of your narrative. You wanna make sure that you're the one that that influences what what are those words that come up, you know. And if you don't know what those words are, you can do a little back channel market research and talk to people who know you professionally, who know you personally. People that might refer your business? What are the first two or three words that come up when you think of me? You know, where do I stand out? What do you think my strengths are? When would you call me first? And see if those those answers are consistent. Are they people that know you personally think of you one way, and people that know you professionally think of you in a completely different way? Are there themes that emerge across the different kind of circles where, okay, you know, that's something that I really do stand out. That really is one of my personal strengths that I've turned into a professional platform. And so you have to you have to know what that is. You don't want to be surprised or blindsided. Agree. Agree. Whether you know about it or not, it's there. So you should know. Exactly. Yeah. I'm gonna switch gears a little bit and talk about about leadership because like ourselves, you bootstrapped your business from the ground up. so what lessons do you think you learned back then? ⁓ and would you change anything about your funding decisions? So I did self fund Mavens and Moguls. You know, I worked for three venture back startups. So I knew what it was like to raise institutional money and to have people on your board that could dictate timing and decisions because they owned part of your company. And I didn't always agree with the timing of things that they felt were important. So I knew right away I did not want to take any outside money. And I also knew I didn't need to because I kept my overhead really low. And I had worked at three different startups as the head of marketing. And all three had good exits. So I had some money that I had made. I didn't work for Facebook or Google or LinkedIn. So I wasn't like a multi bajillionaire, but I made a little money three times. And I knew I had a very clear vision of the company I was trying to start. And I knew that I could do it without other people's money. It's a very tricky decision because there are capital intensive businesses that you don't really have a choice. You do have to raise money to be able to kind of function and and compete. But I knew I didn't want to do that kind of business. I l I learned kind of firsthand the good, the bad and the ugly. I think one of the early lessons though, because I had seen it with other business owners, you know, the most important thing when you get started, as we talked about, you have to have an online presence. So build your website, tell your story, create your narrative in a way that you know, you own the message. You're you're putting that initial stake in the ground. I think a lot of people, you know, get enamored with all the bells and whistles. And they start doing all the, you know, they get expensive office space. They get fancy stationery and fancy embossed business cards. And they start doing all these things that are kind of all the bells and whistles. I think the most important thing is You get your website up, you get some early reference charter members, some early clients and customers who can be references for you. Start making money. Start figuring out, you know, what is the business model? Where are you getting traction? Where are people referring business? Where do they keep coming back for more and more? The better you understand who your target audience is. what messages are resonating with them, kind of where the business model is the most robust. That is absolutely critical. I started my company out of the third floor of my house, out of an extra bedroom. I had very low overhead, you know, I got some cheap business cards online. You know, the first website was not very fancy. It was like a brochure online. I saw people spend thousands, even ten thousand dollars doing all these things to make them look very professional and buttoned up. And that's not the things that really you want to be professional. You want to have a clean image, you want to have a very crystallized message, but you don't need a million different things to start. You'll figure out pretty quickly, you know, this is working, this is getting traction. This is an area that people are willing to pay for. This is a area where we have a competitive advantage versus our competition. And if you do that right, you have plenty of time later to get things dressed up and advanced. And if you want the stationery with the golden boss logo, you can do that. Just don't start there. I just recommend Figure out where you're making money, how you're making money, what's the the most stripped down version of your business. Start building momentum, start getting traction and expand from there. You gotta crawl before you walk and you gotta walk before you run. And if you do that right, you can build a sustainable business. I think that is just such great advice and it it really makes me think back. ⁓ because Fredivis just celebrated it's one year. birthday. So we've been in business for a year and it makes me think back about like the first website that we put together. It was so ugly. Like it was unbelievable. And I really wanted to change it, but I didn't know how to make it better. And then just one day I sat down and just like really thought through like, who are we? What do we want this to say about us? ⁓ and yeah, I did didn't leave my seat. Yeah, we just wanted to get started. We just wanted something out there. So when people searched our name, there was something visible. And honestly, I think when I first built it, I was pretty impressed with myself because I'd never done anything like that before. But yeah, it's it's much more about the conversations you have, the relationships you build than your fancy business cards. When you look at how people find websites online. You know, search engine optimization has changed a lot. The algorithms changed a lot. Now with AI and GEO and AEO, it's constantly evolving. So again, you have to keep your antenna up and stay current with all the trends. Understand is it a hashtag? Is it a keyword? It what are the things that you need to bake it to your business model and to your brand so that you stay current and fresh and relevant because what worked when I started twenty four years ago and even what worked a year ago when y'all were getting started, there have been a lot of changes. So keep up with all the changes and make sure that you're investing in the things that really matter and not stuff that isn't going to help you stand out from your competition. why people need you post so that you can kind of tell them what the things are to focus on because anybody who doesn't have a marketing background in this position of either being a founder or, you know, navigating their own brand voice. Is the options are endless. Like there's so much that you could dig into. And I kinda love that you said earlier that you know if you really love Instagram, then make Instagram your thing. That's fine. But I I think there's something really magical about the combination between somebody showing who they are on a platform that they're really comfortable on. The authenticity tends to come out a little bit more. And I like that. I hope people take that away. You don't have to be somebody else. You just have to know where to be yourself. Like that makes the makes a big impact. For sure. I think it was Dr. Seuss who said, be who you are and stay how you feel. 'Cause those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter. Yeah. So you know, I think it all comes back to like basic stuff. ⁓ it's not fancy advice, it's nothing rocket science. You don't need a PhD to be good at this. But you do have to be brutally honest with yourself and fentic in a way that is uniquely you because you know, everybody else what does Oscar Wilde say? Everybody else is taken. So just be you and be the best version of that. Stay in your lane because you're gonna do better at what you do best than anybody else. Yeah, that's awesome. So today your network includes around 40 to 50 ⁓ professionals. And I can only imagine over the years the personnel challenges that you might have had and I think it's really interesting for you to share with other people kind of what that looked like and how you dealt with difficult decisions with people. So, you know, I started with a handful of people, people that I had worked with in a previous life. It kind of grew organically as we got busier and more work. And the first people I knew directly and then it was kind of friends of friends and colleagues of colleagues. I feel very fortunate that I learned marketing at the highest level institutions. I started my marketing career at Procter and Gamble and Coca-Cola. I worked at three startups that all had great exits. So I I learned from the very best. But when it's your business, when it's kind of the buck stops with you, you have only yourself to blame if things are not going the way you want them to go. It was hard at the early days. We were just again trying to figure out what our niche was gonna be. And initially everybody was wearing every hat. Fasten your seatbelts like you just hit the ground running every day. But as we started to scale, things really took off in different directions. And one of the earliest lessons that I learned was that the people you start with are not always the ones that are gonna scale with you. And it it was early on in the business where it was obvious some people were kind of very comfortable adapting and pivoting and growing in all these new areas. And there were a couple of people who were clearly one trick ponies. Like they were really good at what they did, but they really wanted to keep doing that. And their sense of adventure and ⁓ the entrepreneurial spirit was ⁓ they were getting increasingly frustrated and threatened because the business was taking off in areas that they were uncomfortable with. And when you're building your team at the ground floor, you want people with a growth mindset. You want people who embrace the new and the learning and are able to roll up their sleeves and pivot and keep going and trying things. Some of it's gonna work, some of it's not gonna work. They will be undaunted. They will just keep picking themselves up and dusting themselves off at moving forward. And I realized early on that I didn't want one or two people to kind of pull us back and pull us down. And I probably should have let them go as soon as the signs were there. But, you know, my my personal bias, I guess. I grew up in the South. We have this saying, you dance with the date that bring you. I was very loyal to some of these people that were not growing with us. And I think it finally hit a point where I just had to shake hands and part ways. And it was a hard decision to make. But at the end of the day, I think it was the right thing to do definitely for my business. And it was the right thing for them too, because as soon as they left, the bar got higher. It sent a really strong signal to everybody on the team that we are moving forward. We don't have all the answers, but we're gonna push each other in a forward momentum in a in a positive direction. Even if we have to take a step back to take s two steps forward, even if something is a lateral move. We're gonna keep experimenting. We're gonna keep learning. We're gonna keep growing. And I really don't believe in making mistakes. I believe you either succeed or you learn something. And you know, you have to be comfortable knowing that everything's not gonna work the first time. But if you learn something from that experience that makes you smarter and better and the next time you move further faster. That's a great outcome. So for other entrepreneurs out there, just know you do have to get out of your comfort zone. You have to be strong enough to know that you're not going to have all the answers. Sometimes you have to manage the unmanageable. Sometimes you have to try something and it's not going to work. But if you're if you let that pull you down, you're not going to make it as an entrepreneur. You have to get out of your comfort zone and be able to. keep moving forward with energy, with ⁓ a feeling that like we're gonna we're gonna get for we're gonna move forward, we're gonna get through this and we're gonna be smarter because of it. And I think if you do that, you're setting yourself up for a great business down the road. But if you are constantly going backward or being held back by people who are not in that same positive energy, you know, you're you're not gonna get there from here. So Have the courage to to stay strong. I think that's great advice. Because it is a different I and I do I like the term growth mindset, but it it's almost so much more than that in an entrepreneurial world. It's like growth mindset combined with like Blind face and zero fear. I love that meme where it's the entrepreneur that's jumped out of the plane and reading the book that's like how to open a parachute and they've already done it. I'm like, Yeah, you have and I'm like, I don't understand how people don't love it because it's so crazy all the time, but it's not for everyone because of that. Some people don't want to deal with that kind of, okay, you've got to switch gears like fifteen times. Some people are just not that way and they're more happy in their corporate setting and that's okay. We have to let them. Like let them go be where they're happy. Okay, this has been such a great conversation. I just want to give you one last question and you've given so much already, but if there's one last thing that you could share with entrepreneurs out there as a tip especially when it comes to marketing their business, what is one thing that you would recommend people don't neglect? So we touched on this before, you know, with AI and the robots just exponentially taking over. I read a quote the other day that more than half the content on the web now is generated by AI, not humans. You can tell it's you can definitely tell. As soon as I read the phrase, put the noise. I'm like, ⁓ no. Why does it put that in everything? I know. There there's a lot of telltale signs. But I guess the the thought I would leave everyone with is there's another great great quote I like. I think it's attributed to Teddy Roosevelt. And it's people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And I think keeping your humanity in everything that you do so they know there's a real person behind it. It's not a robot. It's not AI slop. Like show that you care. Show your humanity. Show your vulnerabilities. The good, the bad, the ugly. People love the war stories. They love to hear the stories in the trenches where things blew up, they didn't go well, how you recovered, how you pivoted, and how you got back on your feet to move forward. So don't hide behind. all these stories and whitewash it and cherry pick only the things that sound great and make you look like a hero. Cause that doesn't sound real. That sounds like AI. Humans make mistakes. We screw up, we get kicked around, and we keep getting back up. So if you just keep that human element in everything that you do. Show your humor, show your grace, show your frustration. The good, the bad, the ugly. What's uniquely human is that creative storytelling. And if you do everybody's got an origin story. And that's your unique background that AI cannot copy. So keep yourself honest by kind of digging into what makes you special. And if you do that, I think you can create great marketing materials that will stand out. From your competition because that's a story only you could tell. Thank you so much, Paige. It's so great to chat with you again. I'm very excited that you've agreed to come back to the founder table. And so we'll be continuing the conversation. I look forward to seeing you again soon. And where can people find you, connect with you, and all your marketing genius? Well, the two best places are my website, MavensandMoguls.com. And LinkedIn, as I said, is my platform of choice. My last name, as you can see, is hyphenated, but on LinkedIn it's all smushed together, one word, page are not fen. And if all else fails, you can ⁓ Google Page and Mavens and thank goodness for search engine optimization. I'll pop right up. I'm the only one. So you can find me there too. And I look forward to keeping the conversation going. So many great topics and you always assemble a great group of ⁓ founders. So it'll be fun to keep it keep the conversation going. Thank you, Paige. Thanks, Paige. Tia soon.