The Fundamentals of Resiliency with Nancy Seeger

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] Ryan Chapman: Hey, this is Ryan Chapman with the Fix Your Funnel interview series, and we have a real treat today. We have Nancy Seeger from Seeger Consulting Incorporated, and Nancy, you come up from the North country of Calgary, don't you?

Nancy Seeger: Yes, I do Ryan, thank you for having me.

Ryan Chapman: It's my pleasure. My son lives up there and so I'm always impressed with the people that can deal with that much cold. I'm in Tucson, so you know, it's fairly warm most of the time here. And I'm a Southern California boy, so I'm just not built for snow.

Nancy Seeger: And I'm always impressed with people who can deal with the heat cause that is not me.

Ryan Chapman: Well there you go. Everybody's got their thing, I guess. Why don't you introduce, how you got into this line of work? Cause you do a couple of different things. But the thing we'll probably talk the most about is you do a lot of consultancy and actually implementation work with small businesses around marketing automation not only in Infusionsoft, but some other systems as well.

Nancy Seeger: Yeah. Seeger consulting is focused on, you know, primarily [00:01:00] women coaches and entrepreneurs. I always like to say that are technology challenged, which is a lot of people, I mean, my background is, you know, marketing. I started out, that was what I studied in school, was marketing. And then I spent many years in system analysis and design, but it was really a customer that introduced me to Infusionsoft that kind of pulled it all together. And it made so much sense to me to look at it. I was, you know, designing CRM systems back in the days, DB three and database three and ACT all of those a lifetime ago, right? But...

Ryan Chapman: You've spent a lot of time thinking about this topic.

Nancy Seeger: Oh yeah, you could say that. You could say that. And you know, it's funny. I think the world kind of pushes you around until you get the message and, and then you, you find your path. Eventually you find your path. I was always pulled back to marketing automation and technology and coding. We always joke because in my family I have [00:02:00] five siblings and four of them are coders. You know, the dynamics of how things get pulled back, and then the way you all think and analyze things, it stays the same way. So...

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, that's very interesting. You know, my story, you know, I don't know that I would have ever guessed that would be doing what I'm doing today when I was a kid.

Nancy Seeger: No.

Ryan Chapman: I don't know what I thought it was going to do...

Nancy Seeger: But I was gonna say, did you have big dreams when you grew up?

Ryan Chapman: Well, you know, I thought as a teenager, because in my church I had some, some youth leaders that were dentists. And so I thought, well, that's interesting. My dad always talked about construction as being pounding on rocks with a rubber mallet. He didn't particularly enjoy it, but he was really good at it. So he did it, you know, I mean, I shouldn't say he didn't enjoy it. He did enjoy some of it, but he just felt like you were always trading time for money, and that was something that really bothered him . Because it was always how much time of the day, cause you know, he would start [00:03:00] early and then work late into the night to do that. But yeah, I thought it was going to be a dentist. I mean I look at my hands, you know, I'm 6'7, so my hands are pretty big. These would be terrible to put in people's mouths. I don't know if I have the dexterity for the small movement. So it's probably good I didn't go into dentistry.

Nancy Seeger: But like you say, we never know where we're going to end up. We just kind of, yeah. I don't know about you, but I found for me, the universe just kind of guides you along and you keep getting lessons and having failures and having successes until you end up where you're supposed to be.

Ryan Chapman: No, I feel like that's pretty accurate. You, you mentioned before we started recording that you kind of were a pioneer of sorts with working from home.

Nancy Seeger: I was.

Ryan Chapman: What year did you start working from home?

Nancy Seeger: 1995.

Ryan Chapman: See, I think that would have been a real challenge cause that was like when American online or you know, the tablet internet was just barely starting to really get...

Nancy Seeger: It was AOL was the big, big email. Everybody had an [00:04:00] AOL account. I can tell you it's, and I actually, I was also a bit of a pioneer because back then I was a woman in technology and that wasn't very common. And you know, they have a real push up here in Canada to get women into science, technology, and math. But it is, back in the 1990s, it was quite a challenge, but I had, you know, for me it was really important because I had a very successful career. I was actually director of international sales for a small computer software company, and it was a company that I traveled the world. I got to go to Europe. I was all over the place, running conferences, selling software, working with partners. I had partners in Australia, the whole nine yards, but I was young enough, I wanted to have children and when my children were starting school, the company I worked for actually kind of spoiled me because they had, they paid for my nanny to travel with me rather than lose me. And that was also very rare. But after, after all of that, when my kids [00:05:00] started school, my husband was an engineer and he also traveled a big percentage of his work life. Once my kids started school, it wasn't an option anymore. And so I told them I was either taking my job home or I was leaving period, and I worked with them it actually lasted about Oh, less than three months, I think, because the company was sold. They were being bought up and sold, and it was a big transition time. And I dealt mostly with fortune 500 companies anyhow. So, you know, phone conferences and stuff were pretty common back then. But it, you know, it was just one of those changes that my kids came first. So I stayed home and when the job went away, I created another one.

Ryan Chapman: I think that's really important. You mentioned also before we started that you just hated the corporate world. I think it's, it's one of the critical things you have to, you have to do, especially as an entrepreneur or business owner, is you [00:06:00] have to hit that point at which you realized, what is it that I will not sacrifice?

Nancy Seeger: Exactly.

Ryan Chapman: What is it that I will not do. And what do I want this world that I'm creating to look like when it's all finished?

Nancy Seeger: Well, and it's one of my mindset coaches use the, the word and the statement on, I always look at this, I say, what am I tolerating in my life? Cause if I'm just tolerating it, I'm not thriving. And, and as much as, I mean corporate treated me extremely well. They made it really hard for me to leave cause they kept spoiling me, but the reality is, is it just, I just knew it wasn't right for me. It wasn't the fit, it wasn't flexible enough. And my priorities were very different.

Ryan Chapman: So that kind of leads us to the topic I think that is really important that you have quite a bit to say about, which is resiliency. If you are going to be out on your own, if you're going to set up, this is the way things are going to be, they don't immediately turn the way that you want them to be. [00:07:00]

Nancy Seeger: Well, yeah and we were talking about this before. I think none of us gets through life without experiencing some failure. And I've always believed the biggest skill you can have is resiliency, whether especially as a business owner, especially as an entrepreneur. Team members come, team members go. As I mentioned, this is my number six incorporated company. Right now I own two. And, and you know, I'm never going to be satisfied with. One thing because I know that, and it's not about putting all your eggs in one basket or not, it's just the way I am. I'm never going to be satisfied with one thing. I'm always looking for the next challenge. The next opportunity. And I want to share a little bit about why, you know, where resilience came in for me, and obviously it's from, you know, changing up different businesses and other things, but I spent five years of my life working with an organization called YPO. Do you know who YPO is Ryan? [00:08:00] YPO stands for young president's organization.

Ryan Chapman: Well, I've heard of that. I just didn't know by the initial.

Nancy Seeger: Yeah, so I worked with both YPO and WPO. They're like, you graduate from YPO and go to WPO. That's kind of the guys with the big b ucks. But YPO is, for those who don't know, it's a private, very exclusive CEO, high level executive, membership group, excuse me. And it, and it, you have to qualify every year to get into it. They have very high standards. You have to be recommended by two of your peers. And they run chapters worldwide. And, you know, I went through, I'd gone through two or three companies on my own, and you know. Some were successes and were able to be sold and quite a few of them were not and got shut down because it was time to move on to something else. But once I worked with YPO and I did it again in a contracting position, I had some friends in there and they needed somebody to set up and manage and I technically was the only paid person in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the two [00:09:00] provinces here, equivalent to your States, running on average, we ran 30 events a year between September and June and kind of. Every year, the volunteer board would change and we'd redo all the branding, redo all the marketing, redo the website, redo everything, and then from between June and September, and then relaunch it again and do this whole series of events around training and educating and teaching executives and CEOs how to work with, you know, balancing work life and business and making decisions and finding peers, et cetera. And it's the fascinating thing that I learned from them was there was a few really great lessons and one of them was, your number one thing is always your mindset. The biggest difference between them and anybody else that followed was the mindset and how they approach every problem, but it wasn't a problem, it was a different kind of opportunity. You never said no to anything. You said, you know, a qualifier. There's just a whole way of approaching things, [00:10:00] sitting in the meeting rooms with those guys every year. And the other thing that really, really came home, and I said it had come up before in my life so many times, so it was a really important lesson for me was about resiliency. It was about watching some of these people have $50 million a year companies and lose them and bounce back. And knowing how to play that game and to come back and forth and to get in and out of situations. It was so inspiring. It was the best five years of my life.

Ryan Chapman: So resiliency seems to me that there has to be a decoupling of your personal worth from your net worth.

Nancy Seeger: Well, there has to be a decoupling of you from just about everything. You can not be attached to outcomes. You cannot be attached to, you know, you know what the plan is. You know what the goal is, you're going to move forward. But, you got to expect that things are gonna change on a dime. And if you're attached to it, you're going to collapse when it fails.

Ryan Chapman: Interesting. I think because you know, the most [00:11:00] common thing, I'm sure you see this a lot cause you do a lot of, getting people, you know, businesses started with marketing automation. So you see a lot of variety of businesses. I'm sure even though you have a general category that you focus on. At least what I've observed is people get very attached to their business. Very attached to the way they do things, very attached to the way that they sell things, the way that they market things.

Nancy Seeger: Well, it becomes an extension of, of a lot of people, and not, not everybody, but it really does, you know it becomes an extension of who they are because they invest so much personally that they take on... I'm not sure if the business takes on their personality or they take on the branding of the business in their own personality, but it gets confusing for some people. And I think it's really entrepreneurs are really, really good at getting kind of too immeshed in their business because if you don't have that, that distancing, that perspective, the metrics in place, and I know you're, you love metrics [00:12:00] as well, Ryan, but if you're not measuring, and working on what's important, and then you're not switching the goals for changes. You know, there is going to be failure that's going to hit you a little bit harder, you know? But everybody fails. Every plan fails. I don't know a marketer that can tell you that, you know, any more than 20% of the marketing plans that are put out there ever fully succeed.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. Yeah. You know, the thing that you know for sure is that it's going to fail. You just don't know how. And then it's just a matter of adjusting. That's why, you know, I'm very, very hesitant to have somebody go do a full on automation thing all at once, because I don't know anyone who really is smart enough. Or is so, you know, aware of everything that's going on that they can actually predict exactly how people are gonna respond.

Nancy Seeger: Well, and I don't think in today's time it would be an answer. And I don't know that smart is, the [00:13:00] limitation exclusively, there variables out there for even a supercomputer to calculate it, to be honest.

Ryan Chapman: Well, even if, cause I was thinking about that as I was formulating that sentence this is like, well, machine learning that has some promising effects, but it's still limited by the data you give it.

Nancy Seeger: Exactly.

Ryan Chapman: And so what data do I actually need to give it to make it, you know, to discover what's going to work and what's not.

Nancy Seeger: And anybody who does statistics can tell you. They're going to prove or disprove the hypothesis you have, but if you don't have one, you're kind of not going to know what you're going to get. Right? Numbers are just numbers. You have to have context. And sometimes that context is based on judgment and that judgment isn't always a hundred percent accurate.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. So I mean, for me, resiliency kind of, it sticks in having some, so you have to have some deeper underlying philosophy about what your you're about. What are you doing. That is deeper than even the business and something that is almost like a North Star [00:14:00] in that it's, it's a fixed entity off in horizon that you will, you will never reach that is, but is there to give you direction and some sort of movement so that as you hit obstacles or things don't go as planned, you can continue. How would you describe resiliency?

Nancy Seeger: Well, I think resiliency really for me, is a little bit more, you know, yes. I love the North Star analogy. And I think having, you know, something that you can focus on is great, but for me, it's more about your core values. It's really, you can never grow your business more than you can grow yourself. You can never do more for your clients or for anybody else than you can do for yourself, and you need to invest in number one first.

Ryan Chapman: Interesting. So when you, when you heard North Star, what did you understand?

Nancy Seeger: What North star to me is just something external. It's something I'm focused on.

Ryan Chapman: Like a goal? Like I want to hit this much in revenue.

Nancy Seeger: Yeah.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. I was actually on the same page with you. [00:15:00] It's gotta be deeper than that. I think that's where people get themselves into trouble is when they're, their focus is purely on some sort of financial objective. I think you have to go deeper than that to get it right.

Nancy Seeger: Yeah. And that is so true. I mean, it's my other company is a, is a women's speaking group. And people say to me, why are you, you know, they're so different from a digital marketing agency in a women's speaking group, but they're not, because the truth of the matter is they're both about really helping women learn to speak up and stand up and own their identity. And they're women. And you may agree with this or not, but women really hold the family unit together, hold the community unit together, hold the structure together. And because of that, the more we support women and the stronger we make them individually, the stronger our communities are.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. No, I agree a hundred percent with that.

Nancy Seeger: So for me, it's really about that's the core value. That's the [00:16:00] core driving force. Teaching a woman to own their story and and speak and be publicly visible is something that most women, particularly women over 40 still have some struggle with.

Ryan Chapman: Well, I don't know if it's even, I think there's a certain challenges in gender, but I think it's almost universal as well. I've seen a lot of men that also struggle to know what their story is and to be able to be independent, but also interdependent.

Nancy Seeger: And I agree. Totally. I agree totally.

Ryan Chapman: But there, there's different approaches for each. So that's why it's so special that you're doing that for women is because women face unique challenges and trying to get to that objective. Well, it's different from what men face.

Nancy Seeger: Exactly. And for us it's, we are two women coaches helping women. We do actually own the male equivalent. So the company is Women Talk and we also own Men Talk so that we can do it. But the whole model for men is [00:17:00] significantly different. And you know, as women, we're having a harder time getting the male mentors to step up and do that.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, I could see that as well.

Nancy Seeger: And I personally, I'm good speaker, but I cannot speak to a male's life experience. I'm sorry.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. Those definitely uniqueness and each is important and that they also face different struggles and those need to be addressed uniquely.

Nancy Seeger: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Ryan Chapman: That's, that's exactly what I was trying to get at with this North Star. It has to be a deeper overriding principle of service that, that drives resiliency and in business from my perspective, for it to be one that can last the long term.

Nancy Seeger: Oh, I agree. You will burn out so quickly if it is not very deep and very personal.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, and I see that too often where people have made it about the money and the objects and the things, and I don't think it's really about those things. It's about what they believe those mean to them. [00:18:00] But if folks will investigate a little bit deeper, they'll find out what is actually driving them and then they can see, is this something that I want my whole life to be about? And you know, answering that question is, you know, finding for me it is. It came out of that experience of growing up as an entrepreneur's son and seeing the challenges and the demands that were put upon him to provide for a large family. And how can I facilitate that for other business owners, whether they be male or female, they have that responsibility to the people that they love, that they're trying to produce results for. They have that responsibility to their employees, to their customers. How do I help lighten that load by giving people some, some better ways to communicate and effectively grow their business. And so that takes on a lot of different forms. And that's reflected in the businesses [00:19:00] that my brother and I own is that mission of how do we lighten that load and make it so that they, cause if anyone's hung around, Fix Your Funnel very long, they realize, I probably talk more about business and marketing in general than I do a product. That's because the product is just the facilitation of the. The overall practice of how do I make a business more effective so it produces profits for myself, great opportunity, employment opportunities for our team, and then great solutions for the customers. And so that's where the discussion always has to go. That's why I say, if you can get deeper than just how do I get an exchange of money for value? Now you're going to have a lot more to draw from as you try and solve that. You know, that is a problem you have to solve at some point. What value do we bring to the market? How is it described? How can it be expressed so that people go, Oh, I'd happily pay what you're asking. [00:20:00] And in order to get there, you have to have that deeper element, I believe.

Nancy Seeger: Yeah, I totally, totally agree with that. It, it is about that really deep core that that drives us. And I think entrepreneur is probably, once you've had a few companies, you start to see it in yourself, I think a little bit more.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. Yeah. You need those I'm hitting the brick wall experiences to shake out some of that stuff that is extra. That's not really the meat of what it is that you want to be about. And for some, for some of us, maybe we figure that out as we, we've got a mess up.

Nancy Seeger: Well, I think most of us, like I said before, I don't think any of us gets your life without failure at all.

Ryan Chapman: That's true.

Nancy Seeger: And you know, and I think most of us, we learned so much more from our lessons than we do from, you know, the successes, we celebrate the successes, but we don't analyze them quite the same way.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. Well, it's interesting cause, I'm planning to give it a little class after this about, [00:21:00] creating irresistible offers and you can't really know what the irresistible offer is until you get some negative feedback about what you're doing.

Nancy Seeger: Exactly.

Ryan Chapman: So many people avoid the negative feedback.

Nancy Seeger: They do. I always have the same conversation with, with startup clients about when they say that, you know, I have to know my niche from day one. Until you've had five clients, you don't know who you want to work with. There's no way you can figure that out ahead of time.

Ryan Chapman: The worst is when you're hip deep into it and then you find out, yep. Yeah. It would be better that I figured this out ahead of time.

Nancy Seeger: And we've all done that.

Ryan Chapman: So how does it, how does resiliency manifest itself when you're doing things well?

Nancy Seeger: Well, when you're doing things well, that's a tough question. I think, you know, when you're doing things well, the resiliency shows up more in, I would say, a center of calm. You know, it's, to [00:22:00] me, I always call it my Zen level. You know, if I'm not attached to the outcome, then I'm also not as extreme in celebrating it when there's successes and other things. It's kind of a Zen state and you can focus on the next thing a lot quicker, right? You can just keep adding and keep building channels of income because you're not getting the highs and lows on either side. So to me, that, that core resiliency, that being able to bounce back. Removing all those big ups and downs and swings in a business and your mood personally in your life. In your sales. It's about structure. It's about systems. It's about getting to that Zen space where you know it's going to run, whether you like, as an example, we just, my husband and I just took the month of January and took off we went to Costa Rica, went totally offline. I didn't even take my computer. I told people, you can email me, but I'm not going to answer. All of my clients. All of my team. You're on your own. And I couldn't do that if I [00:23:00] wasn't in a Zen place where I know my systems and everything, my numbers, my team, even my clients, because as a consultant, you walk away from your clients for a month, there's pretty good chance they're not going to come back. But you have to be in a, in a certain place of resiliency where you know that if they walk away, that's okay.

Ryan Chapman: So resiliency can be that. It seems like it can also be building your business to the point where it's not dependent on you too.

Nancy Seeger: Yeah. Yeah. Well, like I say, the systems and all of those things are a big part of it. It's, it's that Zen place where you can walk away for a month where you can recharge, where you can take care of yourself, where you can go. You know, I have two businesses. If I was needed every day, in both of them I couldn't function. I would have long days.

Ryan Chapman: That's interesting. You know, cause I think, you know, for me, I was raised very heavily on goals and so that's why I got burnt out on them. And then I almost [00:24:00] rejected the idea of goals for a period of time, but I realized that I hadn't really rejected the idea of goals, I had gone deeper than kind of a number type goal. It was more of, okay, what is it that I really want to try and build? And that became the obsession, so to speak, is how do I build an outcome that has resiliency in the business? So even when things go totally sideways, hopefully the business will be able to absorb some of that shock. And be able to deal with it so that, you know, that kind of became a driving factor as I was looking at how do I incorporate resiliency into the business. And then, I don't know that I'm a hundred percent there, but I'm probably much closer than I've ever been before, but getting to that place where the business would actually do even better if I was gone for six months, then if I stuck around.

Nancy Seeger: And I think that's a huge part of it. [00:25:00] It's you know, the business has to function with you and without you. But it's, it's kind of like, for me, marketing, and one of my core values is marketing is about momentum. So to give you an analogy, an airplane sales, if you, if, if your business was an airplane, sales are the jet engines that get it off the ground, but it's the lift, the momentum that keeps it going. And if you're doing your marketing right, you should be in that kind of hover place where, you know, it is to me, that's kind of the definition of resiliency. It's just bouncing just enough on the airflow and using less fuel because you now have enough momentum to carry you forward.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. So it's interesting. We kind of set weight into two different topics, and I want to draw that line for people because there is a personal resiliency.

Nancy Seeger: Yeah.

Ryan Chapman: Which is independent of a lot of these other things that we talked about. And we kind of started to flow into a business [00:26:00] resiliency, which is a different. It's the same core concept, but there's a difference, in terms of how you apply it, right?

Nancy Seeger: It is different in how you apply it, but like I said, you know, I am a firm believer your business will reflect you personally. You don't have to be attached to it, but you grow as you grow, your business will grow, and as your business grow, if you don't grow with it, it's going to implode on you. So...

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. So that you have to do that personal resiliency before you can really build a business resiliency.

Nancy Seeger: I totally agree with that one. Yeah.

Ryan Chapman: Okay. So when it comes to this kind of rubber hits the road of a business resiliency, which we've already established, can only happen as soon as you establish an internal resiliency. What is kind of your, your approach? Are there some checkpoints that you're looking for if you're trying to help a client build a business that reflects the resiliency that they've created within themselves?

Nancy Seeger: Yeah. So I often go through, you [00:27:00] know, kind of like my onboarding process includes some questions about their personal goals, their definitions, how things are going, you know, cultures and values, exercises. I do what's called the power of one, the power of one, because one decision can make a huge difference. So we do these exercises together and the, and the threshold for me is really, you know. You can be right or wrong. It doesn't really matter, but how willing are you to look at it. If, if you're not willing to look at all these questions and not willing to understand or talk to me about, I don't care if your list is big or small. I care if you have a brilliant idea and you're willing to work on yourself and you're willing to work on the business, then we can do great things. But if you're, you know, embarrassed by things or are coming from a place of shame or limitations or expecting to just hand it off and have me build it for you, that's where I draw the line. I just, there's just work that needs to be done before we can make that happen.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. That's very interesting. It's that internal work that has to happen. You have to [00:28:00] think through, you know, from my perspective, all of the money that a business makes usually comes from that exercise anyway.

Nancy Seeger: Yup.

Ryan Chapman: Because the mechanisms are universally available to everybody.

Nancy Seeger: Oh, totally.

Ryan Chapman: So anybody can go buy Infusionsoft, anybody can go buy Fix Your Funnel, and they can start implementing the mechanisms. But if they haven't done what you just talked about, which is that the hard work of thinking before that, it doesn't really matter. It's not that the mechanisms are, are important, but they can't do what has to be done first, which is that thinking, that expression, that discovery.

Nancy Seeger: Yeah. They have to be really clear on what it is that they're trying to do. And you know, it's... it really is the kind of the key to business growth in my mind. If, if you haven't done that work, then no matter what you put in place, you're going to trip over yourself. You're not going to get their team members are going to leave. Other [00:29:00] things are going to keep happening to you until you can get to that place of, yeah, this is clear and this is how we have to move forward. And this is the structure and the value.

Ryan Chapman: So everybody you work with, that's the first kind of thing you put them through.

Nancy Seeger: Yep. Yeah. We have an exercise that we go through and we do the calls and we start off with, you know, I always start off with an intro package just to go through that and to get some work done with them and see where things are at and then see if we're a fit.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. I think that's really neat. I, and that must come from, like you're saying, the decades of working in marketing automation.

Nancy Seeger: Yeah. Well, it, it comes from that experience, and it also comes from, you know, some of my own experiences having good and bad clients, you know, I know, I know from experience that you can say all the right things, but if you don't do the work, if you don't put the effort in, and if you're not open to feedback and you're, you're just, you're going to stall. And so it doesn't serve you and it doesn't serve me. You got to do the work.

[00:30:00] Ryan Chapman: Now, what I find in business, just generally kind of taking a step back, is that there is this ideal that we go for, right? But then there's a matter of practicality in terms of I've got a great cashflow. You know, I've got to service the customers, you know, meet the promises I made marketing and sales. So there's all these things that have to be done, but there's this ideal that we're working towards in the process. How do you negotiate the ideal and then the reality? Because there usually is a discrepancy at first.

Nancy Seeger: There is, but there isn't. So if somebody says, you know that they've got this great idea, you know, but like Women Talk as an example. There's a lot of people say, you know, it's a, it's an odd idea just having women. They speak for free, but people pay tickets to come and listen to these stories and we coach them on how to be better at it. You know, people say to me, how do you get people to show up so often? How do you get so many people every month? Cause we run as I was [00:31:00] saying to you earlier, 14 events every month. It really is about being really clear on what you're delivering and not. My partner and I are both adamant that this form of it has existed forever. We're not solving a problem. We're not manipulating anything. We're giving a stage to people who need the stage and helping them grow and empowering them. That's all we're doing. We're coaching them to get up there and share and other people want to support them. It's about, you know, I can go into a business model and how you, how you pull into other people's audiences and tap into all this. That's the practical side of it. That's how we turn a profit on it because we look at those aspects, but we couldn't do any of that if that core value of the business model wasn't there. No matter what we did, it would fail.

Ryan Chapman: So always, the core value has to be there.

Nancy Seeger: It always has to be there.

Ryan Chapman: That's very good. Cause that's the question. I know a lot of people have. They face this [00:32:00] dilemma of I've got to put food on the table, but I feel like I've got, there's so much to be done before I get to the place where I want to be.

Nancy Seeger: And I know you'll agree with this one. You always start closest to the cash.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah.

Nancy Seeger: Right? So design your business model so that you can start closest to the cash and as you increase your revenue, and that's the practical side of it. As you increase your revenue, you add tools and systems and people, but you start closest to the cash. You always start closest to the cash. And none of us, you know, I'm not a sales person. I don't call myself a sales person. I'm a service person. Everything I do is in service on my customers. So if somebody wants to buy from me, it's not a sales conversation. I never worry about it that way. And some people say to me, Oh, I can't sell anything I need. It's not a sales conversation. When you are truly delivering from a place of value, it is never a sales conversation. It's a service conversation. How can I serve you? What is it that is [00:33:00] can support you right now? Where do you want to take this?

Ryan Chapman: Very interesting. I think, I think that sometimes people think that there has to be a compromise on establishing that core because they imagine it takes so long.

Nancy Seeger: What do you mean by that? I'm not sure I understand that one.

Ryan Chapman: Okay. So you help people at the very first stage to be able to identify what it is that they're all about. Who do they serve? What problem are they solving? You're helping them get to that central core. But a lot of people that I see put that off a little bit and I think they put it off cause they imagine it's much more difficult and it takes too long. They just want to get to know, just no just build me the campaigns. We'll worry about all that other stuff later.

Nancy Seeger: We do run into, you know, to clients who just, you know, want to keep broadcasting to a list that's half dead or you know, getting low engagement. Those are the clients that you don't, you know, like I said, we do our little trial with them and [00:34:00] then you bless and release.

Ryan Chapman: Let's answer that question though, cause I think you have an answer for this. How long does it really take to answer those questions? How hard is it really to do that thinking?

Nancy Seeger: It's not that hard. It really depends on your life experiences I've worked with, with millennials who have the answers to those questions. And I've worked with people, you know, who are much older that are just coming into it. I think at each stage of our life we have that answer to a certain degree. It's about the experience and how much we're willing to, to detach, bounce back and deal with the way things are coming at you as to whether or not you're gonna keep learning from it. I don't think we ever, I know personally, I, you know, I know my core values, but I'm always learning. I'm always expanding. I'm always stretching, so it's not like it's a static thing.

Ryan Chapman: So it's more of a refinement.

Nancy Seeger: It's a constant refinement.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. I think that that, that just, it sometimes is intimidating to people to do the thinking work, but it really isn't as hard as it looks on the outside, it does [00:35:00] require some effort. It does require some introspection. It may have required talking with some people. Right? But it's not as intimidating as it looks. I think that's the big thing I'd like people to take away from what you're, you're talking about too.

Nancy Seeger: It's so easy. I mean, we do it in the first hour on most calls.

Ryan Chapman: If you have the right guidance. It can be really easy if you're not sure where to start, that's where it really gets intimidating. But if you have somebody like Nancy walking you through this process, it can be a lot easier than it sounds. I think the problem is people, when they think about thinking they don't think of productive work. But what I want to really emphasize here with this whole conversation, if you have to listen to it again to really pick up on these concepts, is that the thinking is the most valuable work that you'll do.

Nancy Seeger: It is.

Ryan Chapman: And if you have somebody that can guide you through those processes of thinking before you start doing the actual manual labor work, you know, writing up the emails or anything like that, everything else comes easier if you do the thinking first. And that's why [00:36:00] Nancy I think it's so valuable to have somebody like you that can guide people through that thinking process because it has to be done. It feeds everything else that will be done after that, and it makes it much easier. But if you don't do it, nothing will be as effective as you would hope it would be. So it's just so critical it's gotta be done. But if you can have someone guide you through it, it'll be that much easier. And then it won't be an intimidating thing. It'll be something you can work through, discover, and like you said, it's not, you're not going to be done cause you did some thinking for an hour, but it's going to give you a good enough foundation to get started. And as you work with clients and you know, you sell or you service people or whatever, what's going to happen is you're going to get a refinement of those concepts.

Nancy Seeger: Yeah.

Ryan Chapman: Well this has been a great, how do people get ahold of you?

Nancy Seeger: Well, the easiest way, of course I have my website, but you know, you can always text, "call me" and I'm going to give you a number. So [00:37:00] I'll say it slowly, to (587) 805-0045 and of course that's a Fix Your Funnel number, so you'll get the automated messaging and get a chance to set up a time to talk to me.

Ryan Chapman: Well, that's fantastic. Well, that'll be in the show notes, so you guys will be able to see that a keyword in that phone number and connect with Nancy. Nancy thank you so much for being here. This has been a real pleasure. We've hit on a lot of fascinating topics that we haven't been able to cover in this series yet, so I'm really glad you did.

Nancy Seeger: Great. It's been an honor to be here and I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. I always enjoy chatting with you, Ryan.

Ryan Chapman: Oh, thank you.