I am the worst romantic I think you'll ever meet, and I know that

that surprises a lot of people because I love the idea of love.

I think the world should be in love.

And if you've listened to any of my podcasts before or watched anything

on YouTube, you would know how much I love, love, but romance.

I don't know.

It just.

Gives me the ick.

Can you even say that?

when I first met Mark, so this was like 15, 16 years ago.

I don't, we were having a random date and we were talking about,

products that we use in the house.

So boring.

Anyway, his birthday was rolling around and he invited me to his

party and I thought, well, I've gotta get this guy present.

What do you buy someone that you've

just started dating?

And then I, I had a, an epiphany.

And I rocked up to his party with all his friends with an Enio mop because I

thought the Enio mop was amazing and it can move in all different directions.

It had swivels heads on it.

It was yellow and black, and he's Richmond.

I was just like, you know, this is gonna be perfect.

And do you know what I got?

Do you know what I got from Mark?

Pretty much this.

That's right.

It was kind of probably more like a grunt, Hey honey, if you're listening.

But anyway, I bought him a mop and he never said a word.

I mean, he said, thank you, and then we moved on.

It wasn't until about eight years ago, I reckon that we were talking

about the worst presence you have ever received and Mark pipes up with.

Emma's first present to me was a mop.

That was awkward.

that did not bode well for any of our friends who kind of went, all

right, you're really not romantic.

I've tried to make up for it over the years, so in about the fifth

year, I bought him a wobbler.

Now, I don't know if you've seen these wobblers, and if you're watching me on

YouTube, you'll see how big this thing is.

It was about 50 kilos.

It's a plate and you you step up onto the plate and you like.

Wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble.

And it's meant to be really good for core workouts.

Anyway, I thought it was the best present ever Again, just another grunt.

I'm just not very good.

It's not that I'm not good at picking presents because it was a helpful

present and he loves the wobbler.

He loves the wobbler, but it's just not that romantic, isn't it?

And then my third fail, and then now I stopped.

But my third fail was, um.

If you have heard of a guy called Wim Hof, he does ice baths in like, I wanna

say Switzerland or somewhere in the snow.

He basically just gets in his shorts and he goes and does

ice baths and all the things.

Anyway, mark was really into it and I'm like, this would be awesome

for him to like, you can go and spend five days with him, Wim Hof.

You learn the breathing and the meditation techniques and all the bits and pieces.

and so I thought, yeah, we'll do that.

So January, 2020.

It was a pretty special birthday for Mark and uh, we're sitting across the table

and I handed him an envelope and inside the envelope was five days with Wim Hof

and Flights for him to go and see Wim Hof.

Now I thought.

Romantic, practical, present, really wanted it.

He was stoked.

And, Evie at the time, so five years ago, she was about six or five or

six, and she didn't quite understand.

She said, what is it, mom?

And I said, I said to Evie, we're sending dad away for three weeks

so he can go and play in the snow.

In which case she burst into tears.

I'm just not very romantic.

I am.

Just Miss Practical.

Miss Practical to give you another version of me, I think

I've done two romantic presents.

The first one was our first year anniversary.

It was super cute.

It was a poster with a road directory.

Three love hearts on where we met, where we got married, and where we live.

Aw, isn't that romantic?

That's all I've got.

And then, on the 13th, our 13th anniversary, which was this year, married,

I got a song written for him on Song Finch and I thought it was super romantic.

we were driving in the car and, My kids were in the back and

they're like, play the song, mom.

Just like play the song.

He hadn't heard it yet.

I'm like, okay, cool.

I'll play the song.

So we got into the car, we'd all been for a family dinner.

We got into the car, I put the song and I turned it up.

He got into the car, turned the song down, and we're all like,

oh, oh, what's gonna happen now?

And then he heard something about a boxing gym.

He's like.

What, what is this song?

Anyway, turn the song up And, uh, needless to say, it was a song.

No, I try, I tried.

I'm not trying anymore.

That's it.

I'm done.

I'm miss Practical and how this outworks in my life is I love a good gadget.

I love a good organizer.

I love good travel bags and for work.

That's amazing, isn't it?

'cause you get to travel and you get to play with all

these little bits and pieces.

But for work so, so practical that I sometimes can miss intuition,

gut feeling, all the things.

'cause I'm so busy, so busy being practical.

Let me tell you how that out works.

I wanna tell you a couple of a couple of things and how that works.

First of all, we are known at Emma McQueen for our community.

We build a community and very practically speaking.

We build that community with intention.

Now, you might say to me, how the heck do you build a community with intention?

Great question.

Well, you don't just gather people, you actually curate rooms filled with aligned.

I. Generous people who have the same values.

You are extremely deliberate about the people you bring into your rooms,

and I'm extremely deliberate about the people that I keep out of my rooms.

Now, no one will say that that's so unpopular, right?

Because we're all being inclusive.

But the reality is

One rotten tomato ruins it for everyone.

And so people know when they work with Emma McQueen that you come into the

community, you've been vetted, you've been filtered, you've got the tick of approval.

And very practically, I sit down for a go-getter day.

For instance, we had a go-getter day, 65 women in the room.

I curated every single table at that event.

To make sure that each person got what they needed and what they came there for.

They walked away with help from that table.

That's how it practically outworks.

When you are curating a community, thriving women dinners, I

make sure that we seek people next to each other who need.

In that moment.

Now that might sound like a lot of effort, and to be honest,

it is a lot of effort, right?

But what's the payoff?

The payoff is that someone walks away and goes, oh my goodness, I

did not know she could do that.

That woman is magic.

I need that woman in my life.

And so I think when you are thinking about building a community with

intention, you have to think really micro

on what that actually looks like.

For Go-Getters day, we have a 15 minute call that you can

do with me before the day.

And the reason I do that, and that's 65 women, ladies, but the reason I do

that is I'm like, what do you need?

Who do you need to meet?

Where can I sit you?

And so every single event that we do at Emma McQueen is down to that micro

level of detail because community doesn't just happen on its own.

So that's a really practical example.

The other practical example from the Emma McQueen business is.

You would've heard this.

I am obsessed in a good way.

I think over sales activities, lots of people come to me and say, I can't get

the leads, I can't get the clients.

I'm not busy enough, et cetera, et cetera.

And I obsess over the numbers.

I track my LinkedIn time, I track the meetings booked.

I track the calls made.

I track proposal sent.

I track all the things, right?

Because I know that what you measure matters

and if you are measuring the wrong stuff, well then you'll get the wrong result.

And so when we're talking very practical, I use some simple tools.

It could just be a spreadsheet to my left.

I have a whiteboard.

I have a whiteboard with all the names of my VIP clients on it, and

every day I look at that and go, how can I make their life better?

It's just a really practical example of how it outworks.

And on the bottom of the board is, who do I wanna work with?

And I name names who I wanna work with.

You should see it.

You're not allowed in my cave, but I'm just saying.

So I obsess over sales activities because

sales activities moves the dial

in revenue generating activities.

And can I just add that I've had a few different calls this week

around sales activities and someone reached out to me on LinkedIn Bliss

and she said, I'd like to come to something that you've got going on.

Will it help me with my sales?

I'm like, depends on where you wanna come to.

Anyway, she had said, someone has given me some advice.

I'm like, mm-hmm.

Anyway, she told me this piece of advice, which was basically to

go into Facebook groups and spry herself, which just gives me the ick.

and she was asking me what I thought of that, and I said.

I think you've gone into some Facebook groups and maybe you've

asked some opinions and people have given you well-meaning, opinions,

and perhaps they're not in the arena that you are trying to be in.

I was very gentle and then I said to her, can I just give you one thing to do

that will help you grow your business?

And she said, yes.

And I said, awesome.

I said, I just wanna ask two questions.

First, How many people do you have on your email list?

And how often do you send your email?

The answer was I actually don't have an email list and I don't send any emails.

Ladies, the I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard this.

This is not uncommon and it surprises me that people don't start there.

Start with your email list.

Start building that thing because LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram,

they can rip it all away in a second.

But unless you've got your own people that you can add value to and

sell to, you don't have anything.

So anyway, she left.

That conversation and she was, didn't respond after that.

which is sad because I'm obsessed with sales and I know what works.

And so, some of my clients will come to me and they'll say, I'm not

getting traction on a, B and C. And my first question is, how many calls

have you made to sell that thing?

And if they say, I've made no calls, I send them off to make some calls, and

if they tell me I've made 30 calls and I've converted one person, I say, send

the recording to me and I'll have a look at what's happening with your sales.

Very practically, I obsess about sales.

The third thing that I obsess about is my intellectual property.

I hate even saying that word, right?

Ip, intellectual property, whatever, blah, blah, blah.

I wrote a book in 2020.

We all know what happened there, called Go-Getter, which was amazing,

and I'm very, very proud of that book.

I. It was a lot of work.

Writing a book is a lot of work.

Since then, I've written three others.

I've got to 20,000 words and then I ditch them, uh, because I just didn't

love them and I need to love them.

Instead, what I have done to turn my.

brain, my content, my ip, inter tangible assets for my clients

is I've created master classes.

I've created all the content from the master classes.

I have built planners.

I have built a revenue and pricing calculator, which I'm really proud

of, which helps women work out how many hours they've got versus

how much they can actually charge.

And then I've written five.

Roadmaps and the five roadmaps are your guide to making more money.

So the first roadmap is how to go from $0 to a hundred thousand dollars.

And unfortunately it's 42 pages 'cause it's all my IP in it, right?

So it starts with your business values and missions and all that kind of stuff.

And then it whittles it down to what gonna do for the next 30 days basically.

And it's an editable PDF.

It took me a long time.

I'm really proud of it, and people really love it.

But you have so much intellectual property in your brain box

that you are not tapping into.

How about you think about how can you add value to the community that you're in?

And if you're a thriving woman, you get all of this because I

want to fact check that it works.

I want it to be super practical, and I want it to move the needle on revenue.

Now, the first roadmap is zero to a hundred.

The second is.

hundred to two 50.

The next one is two 50 to 500.

You get the point.

But I wrote the first one because the first one is foundational.

You know the interesting thing, the people that have read it have said

to me, yeah, I'm making like 300,000 and I haven't done these things.

I'm like, go back and do those things.

So I think every time you teach something or you repeat something, or you.

Get the same set of questions.

How can you turn it into a tool or a framework or something that is

really valuable for your community?

So you've heard me talk about those things and they are very

practical, and I love practical.

I love common sense.

I love all the things, but when I make decisions, especially business

decisions, if I don't include my head, my heart, and my gut.

Things go awry.

If I take on a client and I'm sitting there thinking, you are

not aligned, my gut is going off, it feels like a mistake.

It doesn't last.

So just because I'm practical doesn't mean That I can get rid of my

intuition, that I can ignore my gut.

You need to have both.

You need to have both in business, you need to make sure that you're doing things

that move the needle in your business, and you need to make sure that your

head and your heart are aligned, and again, practically, which is hilarious.

How I do that is through meditation and through having my own CEO time

to do my own thinking about that.

So it's not all just.

Go, go, go.

Busy, busy, busy for the sake of it.

It's actually got some really big intention behind it.

And my CEO time is twice a week.

I sit on the couch with a cup of tea and I stare out the window and I ask myself

just one question that I can ruminate on.

Because if we forget our gut and we forget our intention, all the other

stuff doesn't actually come into play.

'cause we are not in the best head space to outwork that stuff.

So again, very practical.

But that is how Emma McQueen operates, and that's how we make sure that the

practical and the, gut and head and heart all come together so that we can feel

like this business is a holistic business.

It's not just pushing out more content for content's sake.

as you've heard, I'm not romantic and it's taken me years to be okay with that.

And now I am okay with that.

I'll take my husband to a nice dinner and we don't smushy, smushy,

do kisses and all the things.

We just go out for a nice meal and that's it.

I have grown to love the fact that I am not romantic and laugh at myself

when I try and when it falls flat.

And that's okay because also in business you gotta try and if it falls flat,

you just get back up and start again.

I hope that you have enjoyed this episode of me not being a romantic.

And if you are not a romantic, can you also let me know?

Am I alone?

I don't think I'm alone.

I think other people are not romantic.

They just don't wanna tell us.

But anyway, now I've let the secret out the bag.

I would love to hear from you by dm. In LinkedIn, wherever you want.

I would love to hear from you.