Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. In this episode, we're going to talk about

ADHD, creativity and how you can channel it for sales

savvy in your business. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business

strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weenie cat.

One of the fears a lot of new business owners have is that if they

quit their job, if they quit working for a company, go start a

business and decide not for them, that they're never going to

get hired again, and that the skills that they'll spend

all this time and money and energy learning to start this business

won't be applicable back on the job market. And I'm

here to call bullshit because hindsight is 2020 and

I'm constantly thinking about if I knew what I knew now

from running my business, from learning how to attract clients,

using social media and different ways to promote my business, I'm

constantly thinking about ways I could have used this in my past

sales roles. And not only would

these strategies help me be more successful, help me make more money

for myself and the company that I work for, but it

would give me an outlet for my creativity, for my ADHD brain

to thrive in these jobs that I formally

felt were a massive misfit for

me, where I felt like I had to constantly burn myself out in

order to reach quota. So really quickly want to debunk that

belief. If you leave your job to start a business and decide it's not for

you, there will always be someone who's willing to

hire you back. I mean, unless you light the building on fire on the

way out and really tear them down on social media,

at that point, you probably won't get hired back. But

excluding those circumstances, if you start a business,

that in itself is not a disqualifier for you to get hired into a job

again. In addition to that, the things that you learn through starting a

business will make you that much more valuable as an

employee. So if you're worried about that, stop it. This

is the end of that fear. Okay, deal. Episode over. Just

kidding.

So with this episode, I'm actually going to be showing you some behind the

scenes of how I come up with different

offerings in my business that help me grow into different

verticals. One of the things that I regret about my sales career

is that I didn't have the entrepreneurial skills that I have today

with what's available to us through social media and what

I've learned about self promotion and enrolling clients.

All this could have been applied to all the sales roles that I had in

the past. Now, I didn't know any of this shit back then. I

couldn't use all this back then because, quite frankly, TikTok did

not exist. Reels did not exist. LinkedIn was a

completely different environment ten years ago than it is today.

But with that regret, that shoulda, coulda, woulda, oh, my God, I wish I'd known

this back then. Comes an idea of, oh, my God. This

is an offer I could do now. So I'm going to walk you through

how I'm applying the learning I've had in the last six years in starting my

business and growing my business, and how if I had this knowledge

back then, I would apply it to these kinds of jobs, and I would show

you how I would kind of frame everything up. And from that, here's how

I develop a new offer. Here's how I roll something new out that I

know there's need for because I needed it back

then. And as you're listening to me walk you

through, here's this one job and how I would have utilized

these types of social media platforms to gain more business

there. I want you to be thinking about what are the skills that

you've learned in the recent years that you could have

applied to you ten years ago, that ten years ago,

you like. It would have been a game changer for

them. Because I guarantee you there are still people in the

world who have that same limitation that

ten years ago you did, and you in the here and now

can develop a program that will help them

overcome, that will help them be massively successful in

whatever it is that you do. One of the things that's really challenging about being

a business strategist is my brain works really

fast connecting the dots, and it's not easy

for me to explain how I come to the conclusions that I come

to to help my clients, and because I just

recently went through this and broke all this down for myself and figured out this

new offer. It's fresh in my mind, and I am so excited to share it

with you. And I'm curious, at the end of this episode, if

you come up with an offer that you're super excited to

offer your audience, then I would love it if you were

to dm me and tell me about it, because conversations like

this are where successful businesses are born. Even if that

conversation is happening in your own head while you're listening to me talk at you,

here are the things that I wish I had known back when I was in

sales for all these different companies. And that would have

made work so much more fun. That would have helped

me build deeper relationships with my clients. That would have helped me

build my personal brand and make me a more viable

candidate when I was ready to move on. And that might have

had a really awesome impact on my

workplace, allowing for everyone in my role to

be able to utilize their creative Adhdness

in different and exciting ways. And when it boils down to it,

it's essentially building a personal brand that's aligned with the company.

So there are three companies that I want to acknowledge as I'm

breaking down my shoulda, coulda, woulda's of how I would

utilize my entrepreneurial skills in a sales role. And

the reason I've picked these three companies is that they're very different.

One was Equinox, which, if you're not familiar, is a high end fitness club

where people would pay for membership and buy packs of personal

training. Another one was solar energy,

where people were choosing to have solar panels put

on their roofs to reduce their energy costs. And the last

one was a SaaS company, Cisco, where they were selling

software as a service to other businesses who needed their service.

So let's start with Equinox, shall we? Let's acknowledge the

limitations of the job, right? So if you're a sales

advisor at a fitness club, you're

limited by geography. Okay? It's not like you're selling memberships for a club

in San Francisco. It doesn't mean that you can sell to someone in Boise, Idaho.

That's not going to happen. That's too long of a drive to go and work

out. Okay? So one of the things that I would

do is I would get on social media in a very

intentional way where I was geotagging different places in the

neighborhood. And actually, as I think through this, back when I worked at

Equinox, Instagram didn't have reels. There was no such thing as

TikTok. God, do I feel old. But let's assume

that I worked at an equinox in the here and now,

where reels are a thing and TikToks are a thing. Here's how I would

build my personal brand on those platforms to

attract more people to buy gym memberships from

me. Honestly, I wouldn't do a hard sell. I would

probably set up an account on TikTok and have things repurposed to

Instagram, where I was doing a lot of day in the

life, right? So day in the life of a membership

advisor at a high end fitness club, I would probably

talk through me picking out my outfit for the day.

Because how you pick out an outfit to work at a fitness club is you

pick out an outfit that, like, halfway through the day, part of it will work

for your workout, and then you can change into another outfit. There is a

costume change in the day. I would talk through

the healthy things that I would eat and the not so healthy things

that I would eat. I would do a day in the life of here's where

I go for my coffee in the morning. I would talk about what I do

when I first get into the office. I check my email, and then I get

a call from the front desk. There's someone who's here for a tour. I'm sharing

these things because I'm allowing my followers on this

hypothetical account to see the kinds of things that I

like to get a sense of my personality, to see what

my routine is a little bit. All things that they wouldn't know

unless we were friends and slipped in there. There would be

things like, I can go for a tour of the gym if I'm curious about

membership. Oh, here's Katie working out with

her personal trainer. Oh, here's Katie doing deadlifting and getting a

personal pr of 180 pounds, which I did once. I'm very proud of myself.

I haven't gotten back up to there since the pandemic, though. Let's not talk about

it. I'm a little sensitive about it. Oh, cool. She's working with different

personal trainers who have different specialties. Interesting.

I'm curious about working with one of those personal trainers.

I might talk about. Oh, my God, I'm so excited. I get to go for

a massage and a facial later today. I'm so lucky. I work in a

place where on your lunch break, you can go and get a massage and a

facial. Or after work, you don't even have to leave the building, and you get

a massage and a facial and slipped in there occasionally. If

there was a membership drive, if I was asking for referrals, I would say, hey,

by the way, you know me on here because I do a lot of lifestyle

stuff, but here's what I do for work. And if you live in this geographic

area and you're curious about membership, when you come into the club, ask for

me or dm me and set up a time to come in for a

tour.

Another element of what I could do if reels existed and I were on

TikTok and I had these accounts is I would make very strategic

partnerships with different businesses in the area that

were complementary to belonging to a high end fitness club.

So clothing boutiques and nice

restaurants. I could potentially line up some sponsorship

things for my account if I had a certain amount of followers. And I was

saying, hey, I'm going to this restaurant. Here are the three best things on the

menu. And I was driving new clientele there. That's one way

to get the employees of a business to start talking about

you, is to say, oh, we were actually featured on that. Katie McManus

TikTok. She's an influencer. She does this. She has a lot of lifestyle

stuff. Her favorite things on the menu are this. If you've ever

thought about signing up for that gym, you should go talk to her. In

addition to a social media strategy, one of the things that I wish I had

thought of back then was to make a meetup

list of all of the different people, of all the different clients that I had

signed up for membership. And I would make this a separate email list.

Anytime I was going to be going to the food truck

park with some friends, or that I was going to go to an outdoor

yoga class, or that I was going to go to the Union street

fair, I would say, hey, I'm going here with a whole bunch of people.

If you want to meet some other members of the club and get to know

some folks, then you should come along and here's how you can find

us. Imagine the above and beyond service of cool. I've

joined this membership, maybe I just moved to the area from New York City and

I'm new in San Francisco. I don't know anyone. I'm going to sign up for

a gym. Oh, my God. The membership advisor is inviting me

to hang out with a bunch of other people who also have an interest in

fitness, in a social environment where it's not weird for me to go up

to them and be like, hey, how much are you lifting there? Hey,

I noticed that you're running really fast on that treadmill. Let me run fast next

to you and hopefully we'll talk. No, you're out of breath. Me too. Okay, never

mind. Hey, we're both in the locker room together and kind of naked.

That's kind of awkward. But imagine you're new in an area, or maybe you just

don't know a whole lot of people and someone is making it easy

for you to enter a social engagement where they know you and they can

introduce, you know. Think about that. Think about that added

element of customer service and relationship building.

A member who becomes friends with a membership advisor when

they tell people, when they refer people to join the club with them. They're not

just saying, go and talk to anyone. They're saying, hey, go and talk to my

friend Katie. She will sign you up for membership. Go and ask

for her and tell her that I sent you because they got a referral

bonus in building this list. I would also want to have

some different fields where I talk about what people do, what

their expertise is, what they're interested in. So when

a new member joins and say they're looking for a job, and I know that

one of my other members is hiring for a job, I can connect

them. Or if two people have the same interest, say they both want to learn

how to knit. If I see a post about a new knitting class, I could

send it to them. It would just be that extra touch of relationship

building, the kind of thing that you do with friends. If TikTok

and Reels existed and I somehow were still

working at Equinox, which, thank God, I'm not, these are all the things that

I would absolutely be doing to bring in more business.

Now, the one thing that I would want to be conscious of would be my

safety. Obviously, I'm a woman on the Internet. I would want

to be very intentional about not sharing things at the time I was

there. So I'd be creating a lot of content and filming a lot of

stuff and then posting it after the fact, because my job would be at

a location. But I would want to make sure that if someone

wanted to bump into me at coffee in the morning, they wouldn't really know when

I was going to coffee or if I were out to dinner with friends. I

wouldn't want them to show up while I'm out to dinner with friends. A lot

of this would be scheduled after the fact. If you

are on social media, be very conscious of how much

information you're giving people about where you are and when. But unfortunately,

there are just some weirdos out there that you have to be careful of. Be

smart people.

Now, the next company, there's no

chance in hell that I would ever want to

work for this company again. It has now merged with Tesla. If

you work for Tesla, if you've worked for Tesla or any Elon Musk

company, my heart goes out to you. It's awful. They sell you on the

koolaid of doing something good for the world, and then they treat you like garbage.

It is the worst. So for the sake of me not

wanting to vomit while talking about this,

I'm going to refer to it as a solar company. If I were working for

a solar company. And I knew what I knew. Now

I would again want to build up a following on social media.

Now, for solar, I would probably want to be more present

on a platform like Instagram. The reason I would pick Instagram

is because the average user on Instagram is a bit older than the average user

on TikTok. And we want to go for older users because

they're more likely to own homes. And the only people who can be your clients

are people who own homes because you can't put solar

panels over your window from an apartment building. The other cool thing

about Instagram is you can tag different locations. The other thing

I love about Instagram for this kind of promotion is

geotagging is really common. So you can post something and

say that you are in a certain location, and it's more likely to show that

post to people in that area because it's relevant to them. It's kind of like

using hashtags, right? So if you're in San Francisco and you

say, this is the location of where I'm posting, this is San Francisco, people in

San Francisco are likely to see it than people all over the

country. I would want to do some day in the life so that people felt

like they knew me, but I wouldn't want my day in the life to be

as personal as it would be for working in the fitness

club. I would want it to be a little more focused on

the work that I was doing. Like today I'm designing a system for

this new client I have. We're seeing if solar panels will even work on

their roof. Today I'm going to check in on a client who's

having their install today. And here's the little giftie that I'm

bringing for them. Or today I have

four back to back assessments, and I'm driving

from here to kingdom come. And here are the podcasts I'm going to be listening

to while I'm on the road. Those are the kinds of posts that I would

want to do so that people felt like they knew me enough that

they could connect with me. Like, people may be curious about what you do,

but they're not going to ask you about what you do if they're not ready

to buy. But if you're sharing something like the podcast that I'm listening

to, they may say, oh, if you like those podcasts,

here's three others that I love. I think you should try them. And that

gets the conversation started. I'd give people enough information for them to have

that in. I would also want to have a really strong vein

of edutainment where I'm educating people on

solar energy, on how they get solar panels

on their roof. And I would want to entertain them at the same time. So

I might make it funny. I might dress up like a solar panel

and hang out by the pool on a lounge chair and soak up the

sun and have a voiceover explaining how solar panels work.

I would probably do some edutainment around stupid questions that people ask about

solar and make it funny so that people don't feel

ashamed about asking them. But it also debunks them before I get to talking to

them. And just like I would with Equinox, I want to make strong

partnerships with businesses in the area. And again, I would want those businesses to

be adjacent to the work that I do. Okay? So instead of going to

restaurants and clothing boutiques, I would probably want to go to paint

stores and different home improvement, maybe some

interior designers, engineering companies,

landscapers. I'd want to connect up with them and feature

them in some way, shape or form on my instagram to

send business their way. Because here's how that works. You send business to

someone, they're appreciative, the next time they get a request for solar

panels, they're going to send them to you. And again, like

with working in the fitness club, I would want to make sure

that I'm doing this on a delay because I wouldn't want people to know where

I was and when I was there. Everything would be, oh, a few days

ago, here's where I was and here's what I did, and here's what my day

in the life looks like. And while a lot of this content would get people

comfortable with who I am, make them feel like they know me, and

educate them about how they could get solar on their roof,

I would have a consistent call to action. If you're a

homeowner and if you're spending more than x amount of dollars on

energy every single month, and if you're curious if solar would

work for you, then here's a link to book a virtual consult with

me and we can assess if this is actually going to be a good fit

for you. I mean, barring some incredible natural disaster that

makes what I do now not viable. I don't know what that natural disaster

would be, but thank God. Thank God I would

never have to do this again. And I'm sorry. If you really like your job

in solar, more power to you. Get it. More power to you. That

was not an intentional pun, but I always love a good pun.

More power to you. Okay, moving on.

That wasn't even a pun. That was like a really bad dad joke.

And last but not least, if I still worked for

Cisco or a tech company that offered software as a

service, screw Instagram. Forget TikTok. Where

I would be spending most of my time would be LinkedIn.

Now I love LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of my favorite places in the world.

If you had told me ten years ago that I would derive this

much enjoyment from being on LinkedIn, I would have thought you were on drugs or

crazy or both. But LinkedIn is honestly one of the most magical places.

And I'm not even being facetious with this. I have grown my business

exponentially by being on LinkedIn. I have developed

actual, real, honest to goodness friendships

and business partnerships through LinkedIn. For instance, my

podcast producer, Neil Valio, I met him through

LinkedIn. He was a content creator, and

I started noticing him about a year and a half

before I hired him. There was a point about six months into

us being connected that I was like, this is the guy. When I'm ready to

start the podcast, this is the person I'm going to work with. And

it took about a year for me to settle into that. Being ready,

but not ready. And when I contacted him,

I basically had to tell him, shut up and take my money

because I had built this trust with him over the last year and a

half. LinkedIn is a magical place. If I

worked in a SaaS company, I would absolutely be building

my personal brand there and attracting clients through it.

And again, my approach here would be a little different,

right? Because you have to focus on different things depending on the platform and who

your ideal client is and what you're selling. So if I worked

for Cisco and I were building my personal brand on LinkedIn,

I would be sharing some water cooler

content. Like, here's what I'm doing on my vacation, and here's

the restaurant I'm super excited to go to when I go to this

conference in February. Light personal branding stuff.

I wouldn't be sharing the vulnerable things that I share on

LinkedIn now. That's part of my personal brand. I wouldn't be

making a post about sales by telling a story about a bad date because I

would be representing the company. It wouldn't just be me that I'm

representing. I'd have to walk that line. I would want to

position myself as a sales leader. I would want to talk about best

practices in sales. I would want to talk about my philosophy

about building relationships with potential clients. I would want to talk

about what my steps were and why I do them and what makes them

good. I would want to teach good sales through my

platform. Now, this would do a few things. A, this would show

that I know what I'm doing and that my clients should trust me because I

have a process and I'm going to be supportive of them, and I'm going to

be ethical. And also, this would line

up other jobs for me if ever I needed to

transition into another industry or another role at another company. And

the beautiful thing about LinkedIn is that only 1%

of the people on LinkedIn are actually creating content.

So it's really easy to stick out, even if your stuff is a little boring.

I mean, if I were talking about sales all the time, I'd get kind of

bored. Another big part of what I would be posting about would be about the

ideal client for what I was selling. I wouldn't be talking

about, like, here's a feature that we do, and here's a thing, and here's a

button that you'll discover in the dashboard, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That's boring. I would talk about the thing that someone was

crying about when they finally got on the phone with me to buy the

thing. When I worked for Cisco, I sold a tool for

Internet security to msps, and MSP stands for a managed service

provider. A managed service provider is basically a company that

is outsourced tech for smaller companies that can't afford

or do not want to house their own tech department. So

msps are contracted by companies like law firms or

accounting firms. So I want you to imagine you're an MSP. You're a managed

service provider. Your system just got hacked. So that means all of your

clients just got hacked. That's painful. That is something that is really hard

to come back from. It violates trust with your clients,

and it guarantees some really bad reviews

online. Right. So one of the things that I would want to showcase is like,

oh, my God, I just got off the phone with an MSP. I would never

name them, but here's what they were really upset about. Here's what

happened, and this is heartbreaking. And if you had a

tool like the one that we offer, here's how it would mitigate the

risk. Now, there's no guarantee it would work 100%. We can't guarantee that

these people are smart, but here's how it

could add an extra layer of protection. Now, the tricky thing with

marketing for a thing like this is like if the product is working,

just nothing bad happens, right?

It's kind of hard to paint. Like, here's what success looks like, because it's just

like nothing bad has happened.

So I would want to lean into the empathetic marketing model

that I've developed and that I train to all of my clients to showcase. Like,

here's where you are now, and here's what's possible. Here's the peace of mind you

could have. I'd want to create distance from how they're feeling now and how they

could feel. And I would want to consistently invite people to

networking chats, even though I don't do those right now. If I were still working

for Cisco, I would have a link on there two times a day. A

networking chat with someone who's either an MSP or

works in an adjacent industry. I would

regularly create a short two

to five minute video talking about a

struggle a lot of my clients have and how my product

could solve for that. And I would send that out to every single damn

lead on my list. Another thing that I wish I had done

back then. What am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening

to find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

Another thing that I wish I had done back, because it would have been

possible we had the tools back then, even if all this other

stuff didn't happen. I wish I had hosted a networking

call for all of my clients because they all had

the same kinds of problems, they all had the same kinds of goals, and

it's really helpful to be in a room of your peers. And the beautiful thing

about hosting a networking call is that whatever smart thing

gets said in that room gets attributed to you because

it was your space. I can't tell you how many times

people come to brave biz labs. The Friday call that I do on the fourth

Friday of every month. If you want to come, there's going to be a link

in the show notes. You can go to weeniecast.com

bravelabs,

but I can't tell you how many times I've had people in brave biz

labs. Someone else says something really smart,

succinct, to the point, and is massively helpful, and a couple of

days later I get quoted for having said it. Now, I usually try to

correct people because I don't want to take credit for smart things being said. That

didn't come out of my face hole. But that's what know

if someone gets a solution or builds a relationship it always refers back to,

oh, it was on Katie's call, oh, it was on Tiffany's networking call,

oh, it was on Bob's networking call that I was able to figure this out

or build that connection. Now, of course, knowing what I

know now, I do have regret that I wasn't able to do this back

when I was in these different roles. But here's the cool thing about regret. You

can either have it and let it waste your time, or you can do something

with it. So one of the things that I'm really excited to be rolling out

in my business is a new offering for companies

that want their salespeople to be trained on

entrepreneurial sales to learn how to create their

own pipeline through building their own personal but company

aligned brand on social media. Now, this offering

is time intensive on my behalf, so I will only be accepting two to

three clients per year for this offer. But instead

of just kicking around like, oh, man, I wish I had done that. I'm

excited to create something with it. And I share that because I know there are

lots of people who have this kind of regret. Like, oh, God, I wish this

thing had been around back when I was doing XYZ. That could be a

business. If there's something you've learned now that could be

applicable to former you, I guarantee there are

plenty of former yous in the here and now who could use your help.

My ADHD self who would have so benefited

from having an outlet for her creativity, for having

something that allowed for her brilliance to come out. I

wish that I had this back then. There are so

many ADHD professionals who have to force

themselves into a mold that's handed to them. Here's how we do the job,

and here's how we've always done the job, and you have to do it exactly

the way that we're teaching you how to do the job. It's why people with

ADHD are so prone to burnout in nine to five

jobs, because we don't think like neurotypicals. And that's a very

neurotypical way of approaching business. We're not linear.

It would have given me that ability to go outside the box

and try things and get excited about new

opportunities and learn. I'd be constantly

learning. One of the things that I ran up against in every one of these

jobs is I'd get a year in and I'd be so bored of the same

conversation over and over and over and over again. There was nothing

that was adding any judge to my day. This could have been

that thing that kept my head in the game. It could have made so much

more money for the companies I worked for. It could have helped

me win awards and accolades and all that stuff, but

it didn't. So hopefully, through this new offer that I'm

doing, it will help other ADHD

entrepreneurial salespeople overachieve in a way that

showcases their talents, that uses all

of their ADHD brilliance to create new business, to develop

relationships, to build their personal brand.

If you're in corporate and you happen to listen to this podcast

and you're curious about bringing this kind of program in, then I invite you to

book a generate income strategy call with me. Now, of course, it's going to be

a little different than my normal generate income strategy calls because we're not going to

be talking about building your business. We're going to be talking about building

the business of your salespeople and how

they can really step into entrepreneurship in their roles

to benefit themselves and the company. And to book that, I want you to go

to weeniecast.com strategycall.

And for my ADHD business owners out there who are thinking

about what you want to offer, what's the thing you wish you

had ten years ago? Because while the world evolves quickly

in this digital landscape, it doesn't evolve that

quickly. There are a lot of people left behind

and a lot of skills that I'm sure you have learned in the last ten

years that could benefit people who are still living. Ten years

ago,

I didn't even realize Luna was over there. Luna, you done? Are you

done making noise? Squirrel, squirrel,

squirrel, squirrel.