Episode 083 Part 1 – Chloë Thomas

Chloe Thomas  0:00  

Just standing as – for how I operate and how to play on my strengths in the sales process. Because I’m either in a sales call, or in a sales meeting, I can be really good, but I can’t do it all day every day. So I have to make sure I keep my energy levels for the calls where I have to be great. And you know, find ways of automating or avoiding the things that may be destroying my energy reserves.

 

Richard Matthews  0:31  

…

 

Hello, and welcome back to The Hero Show Podcast. My name is Richard Matthews and I am live on the line today with Chloe Thomas. Chloe, are you there?

 

Chloe Thomas  1:42  

I am here. Great to be here too.

 

Richard Matthews  1:44  

Awesome. Glad to have you there. For those of you who are following on with our dream. We’re still in the Midwest or during our travels. We’re out just outside of St. Louis at my wife’s family’s home. Chloe’s joining us today. You said from the UK. Where are you?

 

Chloe Thomas  1:58  

I’m down in the county of Cornwall. So the very, very far southwest and if any of you’ve been watching Poldark that’s where I am at, Poldark –

 

Richard Matthews  2:07  

Nice, so I don’t know what the – Do you guys have the same spring fall? We do, is it like springtime over there now?

 

Chloe Thomas  2:15  

We’re surrounded by daffodils. And the sun was out today. So we actually saw it in the garden.

 

Richard Matthews  2:24  

We got the sun out a couple of times this last week and the mosquitoes were already here. I was, “Oh man.” It’s just as soon as the sun comes out, they’re ready to come and bite you.

 

Chloe Thomas  2:35  

So luckily, we didn’t have mosquitoes but the bees did the same thing.

 

Richard Matthews  2:40  

Let me go ahead and introduce you for our listeners who don’t know who you are. So, Chloe Thomas is a best selling author, international speaker, host of both the Ecommerce Masterplan Podcast and the Virtual Summit. She’s a top 50 UK influencer in ecommerce and shipping rated by Security in 2019. And your podcast is regularly included in the list of top ecommerce and marketing podcasts in the world. So before we get any further into that, let me start off, tell me a little bit about what your business is like now, what do you do professionally? What do people come to you for? You know, but basically what are you known for?

 

Chloe Thomas  3:16  

So I help solve marketing problems, ecommerce marketing problems on the whole. And most clients, people come to me with the question of Chloe is what I’m doing what I should be doing? And the flip of that which is clearly what should I be doing. So for the client side, I do audits and I do kind of coaching and bits and pieces, but that’s a tiny part of the business compared to, I guess, the content side. So most of what I do is speak and write these days. So, I produce my own content via the books and the podcast. And I also am now the co host of someone else’s podcast, and I regularly write white papers. For B2B businesses targeting the ecommerce space that they can use for lead generation. And I also speak out and chair events for other people too.

 

Richard Matthews  4:10  

So almost all of this is exclusively in the ecommerce space?

 

Chloe Thomas  4:13  

It’s all exclusively in the e commerce space. 

 

Richard Matthews  4:16  

So do you focus on any particular type of ecommerce, like Amazon or drop shipping or, custom made products or anything that involves selling physical goods on the web?

 

Chloe Thomas  4:27  

My focus is physical goods on the web from your own website. So think Shopify, Magento, those kinds.

 

Richard Matthews  4:37  

Ecommerce those kinds of things. 

 

Chloe Thomas  4:38  

With ecommerce that kind of stuff, rather than pure Amazon, eBay selling. Although obviously a lot of those people are now also selling on Amazon, eBay.

 

Richard Matthews  4:47  

‘Cause there’s market share available there. So, if your products are popular, might as well get them there.

 

Chloe Thomas  4:53  

It is crazy the whole new kind of genre I suppose in the ecommerce space, which is D to C or DTC which is a Direct to Consumer, which is these brands who are all about kind of the brand and the product. And it’s about getting it in the hands of the consumer in the right way, rather than necessarily thinking of yourself as an onsite business, or an Amazon business or a frugal business or whatever marketplace you choose to be in. So there’s a lot of people now creating their own product, creating a great brand around it, and then selling by their own site, by other marketplaces by other distributors, just to create because the relationship is the product and the customer rather than the website and the customer. If that makes sense.

 

Richard Matthews  5:36  

That’s where we’ve been going with most of our brands. I have a supplement brand, and a CBD brand that I work with a couple of clients on and that’s what we focus on. How do you create the relationship with the customer wherever the customer is shopping? Whether that’s Amazon or your own website, or you know, Google Shopping or whatnot.

 

Chloe Thomas  5:55  

It’s a very interesting new angle on the same old problem.

 

Richard Matthews  6:02  

How do you get good customers to be aware of your product? And how do you help solve their problems with it? So awesome. So I want to talk about your origin story, right? We talk on the show all the time, every hero has their origin story. It’s where you started to realize that you were different that maybe you had superpowers, and maybe you could use them to help other people. And how did you get started on this entrepreneurial journey of yours?

 

Chloe Thomas  6:27  

Mine was kind of a slow burning awareness, I suppose rather than a eureka moment, I got started on this entrepreneurial journey when I was working for a retailer, and they went under, and I got asked in for chats with other retailers to see, this is back in the early 2000s. And one of the job offers that came as a result of those chats was to become head of ecommerce for a group of mail order businesses, so catalog retailers, and if that went, well, that would become an agency. And that was the first time I’d ever considered running my own business. And that was the big carrot that got me into that job. And then as that kind of story unfolded, we did turn it into an agency. And then I spent pretty much the next 10 years trying to escape the agency. Because I realized, I realized it was, it was not if I was going to be my own boss, it was not the right way for me to do it. Because I’m an introvert to a pretty high level. And looking after staff and looking after new business and looking after clients, was a really great way to slowly destroy myself. So agency life was not working out for me. So I spent 10 years trying to find a way out of that. And Ecommerce MasterPlan has been my route out of that, and it’s been three years since I sold it and it’s been- Now, usually I have written around here. I’m terrible for someone who studied history at uni. I am awful, awful at remembering. It’s even in my own life. So ecommerce masterminds have been around for about seven years. But it’s three years since I left the agency. So I’m not sure if that fully explains the origin story. But that’s the meandering path that got me here.

 

Richard Matthews  8:14  

It makes a lot of sense. So you started out in the corporate world got a chance to sort of start your own agency with that knowledge base and then eventually transitioned out and use that expertise as a sort of a content, education business.

 

Chloe Thomas  8:28  

Yes. And it kind of throughout I found speaking and writing has always been something that’s just come naturally to me. So it’s kind of slowly all coalesce. And if you look back, it’s like, well, that was obvious. But it’s taken a long time to get there.

 

Richard Matthews  8:44  

So specifically on the Ecommerce MasterPlan, that’s your podcast, right? You said you’ve had it for seven years.

 

Chloe Thomas  8:51  

It started off as a book. A little dark blue one, the tiny one, and then it turned into a kind of a coaching company. And it’s still the overall brand for everything. But the podcast has been going for just over five years now.

 

Richard Matthews  9:08  

So just curious, for my own sake, because my podcast just had its first birthday. 

 

Chloe Thomas  9:12  

Oh, congratulations. 

 

Richard Matthews  9:13  

How have you seen the growth over five years for consistently putting out content? I’m starting to see an uptick on our first year.

 

Chloe Thomas  9:22  

It’s been, I think every year has been at least a 50%. growth year-on-year. And some years, it’s doubled year-on-year.

 

Richard Matthews  9:28  

Nice. 

 

Chloe Thomas  9:29  

And we made the switch from IAB1 to IAB2 stats last year, which was so destroyed, because you go from – to a more precise way of counting plays. So all of the stats dropped, and they’re now back up where they were on the proper rankings where they were made for if that makes sense. So, last year’s uplift is hard to calculate. But it just continues to go up there. And if I could tell you why it keeps going up, why the listeners keep coming, I would make an awful lot more than I do. All I know is that you know something’s working and the listeners seem to like it. And –

 

Richard Matthews  10:10  

So how many listeners have you hit in five years?

 

Chloe Thomas  10:15  

We’re doing just over 10,000 listeners a month at the moment.

 

Richard Matthews  10:19  

That’s amazing. That’s really cool.

 

Chloe Thomas  10:23  

That’s about just over 1000 listens per episode in the first 28 days, it’s live.

 

Richard Matthews  10:30  

So with that, for monetization, do you do advertising? Or do you have your own products that you sponsor through your podcast? Or do you not do any monetization at all with your podcast?

 

Chloe Thomas  10:43  

I do sponsors. So I have two sponsors per episode, who get a pre roll and a mid roll each that’s an ad at the beginning just before the interview starts and then an ad before my top tip section and this year, I started the year with the aim of let’s try and sell all the podcast advertising space for the whole year. No timeline on that one. Obviously, December will be the timeline on that. And due to a couple of people who basically wanted the whole year, I’m sold out through November. Was by the end of January, which is marvelous, but it was actually getting probably priced that wrong didn’t I?

 

Richard Matthews  11:24  

Could have asked for more.

 

Chloe Thomas  11:27  

So I’m now trying to work out how to make more money, focus and how to deal with it, because I do so much writing and speaking to people, I have a lot of partners or people who are potentially interested in sponsoring the podcast and I get two or three people a week. I should probably be just as pretty light. One to two people a week contacting me saying, “Can I sponsor the podcast?” It’s like no. So I’m trying to come up with some ideas for them. And one of those will be a new podcast, the second podcast launching this summer.

 

Richard Matthews  11:55  

Nice. We’re looking at using the audience we’re building with the podcast too, as a filter for some services that we offer. And that’s probably where the monetization will come for our podcasts. But the podcast for me has existed because of the message first. And we’ll probably continue to do the podcast, regardless of whether or not we ever managed to turn it into a revenue stream. 

 

Chloe Thomas  12:24  

I mean, last year, year four was the first year the podcast made a profit. If you purely look at the cost, not my time, but the cost of production versus the income. And so yeah, it took a long time to get to the point where you can make money off the advertising. You know, and I do advertise my books on it when they’re coming out. And I know, some of the people I’ve had on the show, do very nicely thank you very much from their coaching programs as a result of being on which is good to know. So, I know it works for a lot of people with the product side. But for me, I kind of find that I’m more naturally attracted to making money on the front end than on the funnel. If that makes sense. 

 

Richard Matthews  13:11  

That does make sense. We’re one of the things that – and you probably speak to this really well, because you’ve been doing it for so long is we found that for every like hour of content that you create, it takes about eight to 10 hours of work to get it out and live and promoted and done everywhere. Which is where, like you mentioned, the cost of production, like we actually had to turn that in. That’s the service that we’ve created. We’ve got a service called Push Button Podcasts that we actually use for clients who have podcasts and we handle all of that for them so we can reduce their production costs. Because we had to build all the systems for our business.

 

Chloe Thomas  13:48  

And it’s just, I now have, I’ve got an audiogram guy who’s new to the team. He’s brilliant. I’ve got a VA over in the Philippines doing a whole load of the grunt work. I’ve got Various clever tools we use for creating social media content. And then I’ve got a shot, some notes, the show notes and someone who does the editing. And I do spend a fair amount of my time just making sure the right information is with each person and getting it all back into the right places which I’ve considered outsourcing but from my show, I find I’m adding a little bit of extra value each time I’m briefing someone. So I’m a little bit of a control freak at times too. So I’m quite happy doing those parts of it with all of us, I shudder to think how many hours it is per episode.

 

Richard Matthews  14:36  

It’s quite a bit we’ve tracked it down with our team because we have – The way we’ve got the system going. We have an editor for multimedia. And then we have transcription and writing, which is where our transcriptions get done and all the writing gets done. We have graphic designers for all the graphic pieces. And then we have the systems that get it all published and promoted everywhere. So we have a good idea of how much it takes each episode to get done. And, it’s quite a bit.

 

Chloe Thomas  15:06  

And then you add in the getting the guest and getting the guest to actually turn up on time. And all of that is a whole other extra thing. I mean, our first year, I think we asked for the 20 episodes we put out in the first year the podcast was live. The first calendar year the podcast was live I think we asked three times as many people. No, we asked hundreds it must be more than that. So we’ve got 20 episodes out and we asked 400-450 people to be a guest on the show. 

 

Richard Matthews  15:38  

Wow. 

 

Chloe Thomas  15:39  

Because retailers who are the majority of my guests, I love you retailers if you’re watching this and listening to this, but you are real nightmares as podcast guests because I’m not offering you a route to talk to your audience. You know, you’re the audience for this podcast is an audience who could be relevant to my business. But if I get a retailer on the show, they’re speaking to other retailers who are not my target audience most of the time. And retailers, one of the reasons I created the podcast is because retailers are notoriously bad at leaving their desks. So to try and get them to do anything, which is not directly related to driving sales is really hard work. So I’m forever grateful that I get retailers on the show. But gosh, the first couple of years, filling the interview sauce was a nightmare.

 

Richard Matthews  16:27  

I could imagine because like the way that our show works, we’re looking for entrepreneurs who want to tell their story. We did 80 episodes last year, and we had more people interested in showing up on the show than we did have space to do the show and like we’re booked out for the next year for guests. So it’s interesting how the audience changes that completely.

 

Chloe Thomas  16:51  

I mean, I turned away a lot of supply side people from being on the podcast, but retailers. Gosh, the idea of being booked ahead, it’s just crazy. I mean, well, it’s kind of last year before we really got to the point where I was happy with the flow of retailers we were getting. It’s hard work, but it pays off.

 

Richard Matthews  17:14  

I can imagine. So after your origin story and just coming into talk a little bit about your superpower, right, this is, you know what you do or build or offer this world that helps solve problems for them. And the way I’’ve been framing this for my guests recently is, you have your set of skills in your life or in your business, and your superpower. The way I like to think about that is it’s the one skill that sort of energizes the rest of them. Right for me, I’ve always been a systems and process guy and realized, recently, that a lot of the other things that I’m good at like doing webinars and branding, and things like that, that we do in our business are as a result of being really good at seeing the systems and processes. So for you, what has been the sort of a superpower, the power or the skill that has energized the rest of what you do?

 

Chloe Thomas  18:08  

For me, it’s being able to look at something complicated and make it appear simple, which is something I think often the type of power you’re talking about is often something that you don’t realize no one else can do.

 

Richard Matthews  18:25  

Very true.

 

Chloe Thomas  18:26  

Until you’re kind of like talking to someone about it and I kind of first came to realize it when I would say we go from there to there. And I tell people about point A and point Z. And then you know, they go, “Why?” “How?” Obviously, I don’t get it. And then you’d explain all the points in between they go, “Oh, no way. That’s amazing.” And you’re like, Okay, does not everyone see it that way?” And that’s what I do with with my books, with by my talks, with the not so much the podcast because the about asking people questions, but you know, and asking the right questions, but with the books and with when I’m working with people, it’s always about trying to take something really, really complicated and break it down to make it simple and easy to follow. So people can follow that process, which is where the word MasterPlan came from in the first place because I was frustrated at the fact that having worked in mail order where the process to build a mail order business is very simple. It’s very straightforward. Everyone knows what the steps are, they’re experts at each step. It’s a very tried and tested model, you find some data, pick some products, get it, photograph, get it reprint, get it laid out into the catalog, print it, bind it, wrap it, mail it, it’s linear. It’s very straightforward. And that didn’t exist in ecommerce. And I was seeing a lot of people doing things that were blindingly obvious to me that they shouldn’t be doing, what they should be doing. And so the first book The Ecommerce MasterPlan was about helping people trying to work out something approximating to that linear journey. Although, it’s never going to be linear in ecommerce to build and market a business. So, it’s certainly the bit in the middle, which everything else comes out from and sits on top of.

 

Richard Matthews  20:15  

So I call that skill being able to put the cookies on the lower shelf for people, taking in complex and making it simple for them.

 

Chloe Thomas  20:23  

That’s a great way of explaining it. I think the British equivalent.

 

Richard Matthews  20:28  

Cause’ I don’t think you guys use cookies. Cookies are different for you. I can’t remember what they are, crisps maybe?

 

Chloe Thomas  20:33  

Biscuits, because cookies, biscuits and I mean, although we do increasingly eat cookies, but it would. But then of course, cookies or cookies for web marketing. So cookies are a difficult word.

 

Richard Matthews  20:45  

So, I was the metaphor essentially, is that you know, we would put the cookies on top of the refrigerator so the kids couldn’t get them. Because it was complicated, they got to stack things up and figure out how to get there. But if you can put the cookies on the lower shelf where someone can get them and understand whatever that’s there. It’s a unique skill. And not a lot of people have it. And what’s interesting is that even being an expert in the space doesn’t always make you a great teacher of the thing you’re an expert at. And so having the skill of being able to take something complicated and make it so someone who doesn’t have that expertise and doesn’t have that, that skillset can understand it and also go implement it is a really rare and valuable skill. 

 

Chloe Thomas  21:30  

Thank you. I like it as a skill. I’m quite happy with it. And people seem to seem to find it incredibly useful. I get really lovely messages every now and then from people saying, “Please don’t ever stop doing the podcast.” “Your books are amazing.” “Thank you so much. I can’t believe I find you in it,” which is quite heartening. It keeps me going.

 

Richard Matthews  21:53  

Absolutely. So just out of clarity for sake. All the books that are behind you. Those are all yours?

 

Chloe Thomas  21:58  

There’s them. There’s five of them. The first one I wrote was the little navy blue oneEcommerce MasterPlan, which is your three steps to successful online selling. And then, this one here is the most recent one, the white one. This one, I’ll get the easy one out. This is the latest one, it came out in November, it’s sitting at number one for e commerce on amazon. co, UK. And it’s usually somewhere near the top in America, as well. And it’s all about how to get traffic to buyers to your website. Models and different things in there. And then, this is the one that goes alongside it, Customer Persuasion, which is about the customer journey.

 

And there’s, for anyone using ecommerce to sell to other businesses, there’s this one, which is about selling to other businesses, and then, hold on, I can reach it. There’s the tiny one, ecommerce delivery, which I’ll be brutally honest, I wrote for two reasons. One, because I’m going to challenge myself to write and launch a book in a week, which I did with the ebook version of this and got it to bestseller status in that week too. It was quite good fun. And the other reason I wrote it was because if you search for ecommerce delivery on Amazon, nothing comes up. And I was like, there’s an opportunity here. But it’s tiny. And there’s nothing in it that’s wrong, but it really needs an update.

 

Richard Matthews  23:36  

I can understand that. My first book from 2009 or something is desperately in need of updating. none of it is relevant anymore. It was called, Why Your Website Annoys the Hell Out Of You.

 

Chloe Thomas  23:50  

Good title. 

 

Richard Matthews  23:52  

It was, I’m sorry, Why it Annoys the Hell Out of Your Customers and it was in the transition from the old web 2.0 to sort of the more modern websites, and, the advent of mobile phones and some other things, and people were just doing a lot of things that were just not good for sales like you’d start up open up a page, you probably remember this open a page and music would start playing from nowhere.

 

Chloe Thomas  24:19  

My favorite story of those is a guy who used to work at the agency and moved to Australia to work on a, kind of a healthcare brand, I suppose, moisturizers, shampoos, those kinds of products. And one day when they’re in the office going, “Why all the results? What’s happening with our Google ads, this is insane.” I went to Google and so they had a new competitor who was just out bidding them on everything, which most of us would go, “Oh no, what we’re going to do this is crazy, etc.” They actually went on to the competitors website and tried to place an order, to find out how they were doing and all the rest of it. And they put all the products in the basket, clicked check out and they went to a page that said, please call us to place your order. At which point they went cool. We’ll just cut back our budgets for a week because they ain’t gonna be around for long. And needless to say, within a month they’re gone again. But that’s the worst one I’ve ever come across.

 

Richard Matthews  25:22  

That’s amazing. The worst one I came across and I’ve got a picture of it in the old book was, it was a Haitian website, a Haitian government website, and you opened it up, and it was like a Photoshop document with just like logos of everything. And like someone had taken, a six year old had made a collage of company logos, and plastered it on all the websites and when you tried to click on the logos, it would take you to that business’s page, I assume it’s like an affiliate thing. It was just the worst. That’s like, “Oh man, I can’t believe things like this exist.” But they did. So a curious question on the books you held up, you held up one of them that was called the Customer Journey. That one, I’m curious if this is where you’re going with it because I think it’s one of the most important things in any sort of product selling is understanding the customer journey and where your products and services fit in. It’s something that I teach a lot on. And I’m going to give you my 32nd overview and just curious how yours fits in with it. And the idea is that we look at, and the way I coach my clients as you look at your products and your services, in light of your customer being the hero in their own story, and your products or services are  the wise old man who comes in and helps them accomplish their journey so to speak, on the hero’s journey and that’s sort of how we look at and frame our marketing and our customer journeys as the customer is the hero in their own story. How do your products or services come along and help them complete their hero’s journey. And I’m just curious how that sort of fits in with what you teach.

 

Chloe Thomas  27:04  

It would fit entirely. But my model comes at it from another angle, uses the customer journey in other ways. So for those watching on video, you can see the model. I think that for those of you not watching the video, let me explain what it looks like. If you think of six circles on an app in a row across the page from left to right, with arrows in between them, and the one on the far left hand side is called the world. Then you’ve got inquiries, then sorry, then you’ve got visitors forgetting my own model. So I got the book open. So we’ve got the world, we’ve got visitors, we’ve got inquiries, first time buyers, repeat buyers and regular buyers. And each of those circles I call a customer relationship level. And that’s the level of relationship everyone out there in the world has with your business. Everyone in the world fits into one of those and our job as marketers as ecommerce businesses. To be fair, any business owner is to get as many people as possible from the left hand side to the right hand side as quickly as possible. That’s how we make money by turning people around the world into regular buyers. And so the arrows in between each of those circles are stages 1 to 5. And the whole point of both customer persuasion and the customer ecommerce marketing book is about helping people to understand that they should think about wherever I got a problem. Am I going to problem turning inquiries into buyers or turning buyers into repeat buyers or turning people, or getting people from the world to my website? Where’s my problem? And then right, so I need to do some work in stage one, stage two, stage three, whichever the stages are. And then, each of the books outlines different solutions you can use in each of those stages. It’s kind of to stop people from going, “I should be doing email marketing,” or “I should be doing Facebook ads” and going “I’ve got a problem getting target customers.” From the world to visit my website, how could I solve that? Well, I could use Google ads. I could use SEO, I could use Facebook ads, I could use X, Y, Z. Why don’t I test Facebook ads in this way. So, it’s to try and make people think of it that way. And then the customer persuasion book also goes into a lot of neuromarketing and a lot of things you can do on your website, as well as just the traffic activities.

 

Richard Matthews  29:26  

And I think I assume one of the things that you probably talked about, at least at some point is that you probably at some point, need to have every one of those things in your business, but you don’t need to have all of them to start you need to have. You can build them on like piecemeal as you grow in your business. You’re like, okay, our business at this level, we need to grow. Let’s start talking about turning more of our buyers into regular buyers or let’s talk about getting more people from the world into our interest group and use it as growth strategies.

 

Chloe Thomas  29:56  

And one of the kinds of training tools that goes with ecommerce with the book Ecommerce Marketing in particular is to take a piece of paper and to draw a route to those stages. And to go, what are we doing? You know, keep it really simple. I’m not actually looking at numbers or anything, but literally what are we doing to get people from the world to our website. And we break that down into three different types of marketing, because there’s so much of it, but I’ll keep it simple. We’ll just call it that one stage. And then the stage two from visitors to inquiry, stage three, from inquiries to first time buyers, and so forth, and write down what you’re actually doing to try and make the change. And if you’ve got a box where you’re not doing anything, and that’s a great place to start. It makes it a really simple, easy to use tool. And after you’ve done it a couple of times, and you start looking at going right, which of those have I looked at in the last three months, especially when you get further down? You know, I’ve set up some ultimatums. Have I actually looked at how they’re performing in the last three months? Could I go back and improve them because it’s often not about doing something new, it’s often about improving what you’re already doing, which we can be very bad for.

 

Richard Matthews  31:08  

I love having systems in place that do things regularly. And it’s very often that you can get a system going and running. And it runs on its own for so long that you forget, it’s there. And so you have to go back and look and can we improve that and see how it’s performing. And sometimes you’ll see, just in light of new information, come at your stuff that you’ve set up a long time ago and be like, “We could improve in a lot of ways.” And sometimes it’s not at all sometimes you’re like, “It’s perfect the way it is.” you can go on but at least remember and get checked up on those things.

 

Chloe Thomas  31:39  

I often find when I go back to look at something, like an onboarding sequence for podcast guests or something else I’m doing and I look at it and I go, “Oh, I thought it already said that.” like, “Oh, I thought I’d already built those things into it, but I completely haven’t.” That would explain why all the guests are turning out really confused when I asked them that question. 

 

Richard Matthews  32:03  

When you thought about it so hard you thought you did it.

 

Chloe Thomas  32:07  

You’ve written on the to do list sufficient times, but it never actually happened.

 

Richard Matthews  32:13  

I always like that when I was like, my wife would call me on that and be like, “I’m certain we did this.” She’s like, “I’m pretty sure all you did was think about it really hard.” So, I totally feel you there. So my next question is actually the flip side of the superpower, right? So if your superpower is what you do to help people, your fatal flaw is your weakness, right? Like Superman has this Kryptonite, something that has held you back in your business from growth that you’ve had to work on and fight against in your own  sort of life? What has been that sort of kryptonite for you that’s held you back that you wish you could have changed and more importantly, actually, I make sure I finish that, how have you worked on so people who suffer from the same thing might be able to learn from you?

 

Chloe Thomas  32:59  

Quite a convoluted one I can’t give you a convoluted answer. So it’s my hatred of sales, which I know many people will when you say that again. You don’t hate sales. No one hates sales. Everyone has to do sales. But sales are exhausting when you’re doing the wrong way and I spent many years doing sales the wrong way. And you know taking what because it’s the bit I find the hardest. And because of the introversy. Because it involves invading someone else’s time and space. Even at – back about when I was running the agency and I was in charge of new business there. It was like when there’ll be the list of people I had to chase up, proposals to chase up and it would get moved to the next week. It moved to the next week. And inevitably at four o’clock on the Friday before I took a week off. That’s when everyone got a message because at that point, I felt I was being helpful, letting them know that I was going to be away next week. So I finally had something helpful to say to them, not just did you like the proposal, but I could say, I’m away next week. So if you need me, well it has to wait till the following week. And then I felt “Okay,” sending out these messages. So, you know, I often joke that I have left hundreds of thousands of pounds on desks around the world by not following up. So I’ve had to come up with a number of strategies to help myself deal with that, because you have to make sales. I’ve also part of that has become understanding as an introvert, how I operate and how to play on my strengths in the sales process. Because in a sales call, in a sales meeting, I can be really good, but I couldn’t do it all day every day. So I have to make sure I keep my energy levels for the calls where I have to be great. And find ways of automating or avoiding the things that destroy my energy reserves. So that’s been an interesting journey and is one of the reasons why my business is focused on making money on the front end, not on the funnel. Because any kind of coaching program or having a lot of clients that I’m having to work with intensively is just going to wear my energy levels out. So trying to sell into those people is never going to happen, because I’m also not going to sell it because I don’t want to have to deliver it. It’s also that kind of getting the cart in the horse right around you know, you’re selling something you actually want to deliver and you actually believe in which, not that I’ve never believed in things I’ve been selling, but that you really want to deliver because I’m trying to sell something I don’t actually want to deliver. I tend not to sell it at all.

 

Richard Matthews  35:52  

I totally feel you on that. So I’m not quite like a full introvert. I am definitely on the introverted side, but and taught myself to be really good at being an extrovert growing up over the years, but it’s not a thing that energizes me like a normal person who would be an extrovert. So like, I totally get that if I spend too much time doing all the things, then I get worn out, right. And I’m like, I have to go recharge. So I’ve done a number of things in my life. One of them is our lifestyle, we travel all the time. So I’ve always got rest recharge sort of built in my life. And so I can come and be who I need to be for my business. But the other thing that has been really helpful for me, has been, to your point of like, selling things that you actually care to deliver is realizing for me, it was moving out of things that I had developed skills in  moving into sort of my zone of genius, which is – my superpower is building the systems and processes and then building businesses around that. Because those are things that I really love doing and I can build. And they’re easy for me to sell. Because I know I can deliver really well on them. And so it makes the whole process more energizing. Because I know, I can sell that I know I can scale it. It fits in with my lifestyle that sort of fits together. So it’s an interesting discussion to really look at where are my strengths? And how can I build my business to play to those strengths? And then fill in people that will take care of your weaknesses in that area.

 

Chloe Thomas  37:30  

And it’s not just a case of going, I have to do this, keep bashing my head against a brick wall. It’s trying to make sure that actually, you work out why it’s difficult. And then you solve those problems.

 

Richard Matthews  37:45  

‘Cause willpower is a limited resource.

 

Chloe Thomas  37:49  

And trying to, forcing myself is like trying to force a square peg into a round hole. Even if that square peg looks great in the round hole once you get it there is just slightly random analogy but roll with it. It’s still taken a hell of a lot more effort to get the square peg into the round hole than it would have just done the round hole in the first place and it’s kind of seeing myself as a square peg and finding the square holes rather than going, “Okay, I can do this but it destroys me.” So maybe I should not do it anymore or find someone else to do it. Mostly the audiogram’s is a case in point I often find these days with the small things you realize you shouldn’t be doing is the audio Graham’s was on my to do list week after week after week for the beginning of the year. It’s been on the streets, we’re doing audiograms this year, and I quite like using the tool. But actually of all the things I could be doing it got left to Friday afternoon at four o’clock on Friday and you’re like audiograms, no, no audiograms

 

Richard Matthews  38:53  

I don’t want to do that.

 

Chloe Thomas  38:55  

And I’ve got a guy who does it for me. You know, really reasonable. I just hired him in January. 

 

Richard Matthews  39:07  

Now, I have a lot of things that I’ve been a lot more judicious over the last year. I don’t want to do that, even when I’m good at it, because being good at it doesn’t necessarily mean its highest and best use of your time. There’s things that are much better especially as you grow your business, you sort of step more into that CEO role. The things that you should be doing are like, the vision and the processes and the systems for your business and like figuring out where the growth engines are and stuff like that. Getting in and doing the actual delivery of the product is generally not a high enough level task for the CEO of the business to be handling.

 

Chloe Thomas  39:49  

And also as the owner you need to be there to be able to sprinkle fairy dust. I always think, and if you’re involved in the day to day with the clients, you can’t sprinkle fairy dust and solve problems. When   when something goes wrong you need to be able to go in and be, fix it for them you know, make everything better get the big man, came down and source it all out for us and we’d love your company again or something, or you know, just to turn up randomly and climbing and go,” Oh my god, you’re actually speaking to me, this is amazing.” And when I had the agency that was something which I found the team found really useful was if when a client was being an ass, we were doing the best we could for them. They just weren’t getting that. They just were refusing, we had one client who we did a lot of Google ads. We have one client who sold fake flowers like really beautiful fake flower arrangements. And they, – every quarter with the team. We’re going to see them, see how things we’re going to find out what’s new come up in the products and they would, inevitably the owner of the business who didn’t really understand what we did would say, “Why aren’t we bidding on flowers?” The key word ‘flowers’? And they kept saying, “Because it will cost you a fortune, it won’t get you any sales.” “No, but how we really should,” we can’t let you do this. And then this kind of went backwards and forwards for about a year, the client going, “Can we please do? In the end, the guys are just like, “They’re going to ask us again. What do we do?” So I had a chat with the owner and said, “Look, I know you really want to bid on flowers. We are going to bid on flowers for one day for you. And then we’re going to send you the results. And then you can decide whether you want to do it again or not how much you are willing to spend.” And so we’ll spend 1000 pounds, okay, because they were only spending about 1000 pounds a month anyway with us. But he was so convinced this was going to be the solution to his business. So, right, okay, we’ll do it. We spent 1000 pounds in a day and they got no sales and we sent him the results and he went, “Okay, I get it now.”

 

Richard Matthews  42:02  

He just threw away a thousand bucks.”

 

Chloe Thomas  42:04  

But it’s like the team. It was the right space for the team to have me go and do that with him because he also then thought, “Oh, I’m getting, we’re getting some special service here, which also made the bitter pill of – I’m a moron.” Easier to say. But I was banned from the agency that was quite cool. I was separate to some extent. So I could really help out the team when they needed that extra bit in a sales meeting or they needed that extra bit when a client was being a pain.

 

Richard Matthews  42:36  

I’m working on that with our Push Button Podcast Agency. I know my next couple of hires are going to need to be like the project managers where you’re working with the clients all the time, and it’s not me. So I can start moving into that role that you’re talking about where you’re the one who sprinkles some fairy dust, so to speak. Instead of the one actually doing the delivery.