Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Marie Wiese: Mastering Old School Marketing in a Digital Era
46 Plays8 years ago
Marie is a fascinating figure in marketing, blending the "old" with the new. But the truth is, there's not a huge difference between the old and the new. Marie is an extremely clarifying figure in the marketing world, especially if you're just coming into the online scene.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Marie Wease
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to this week's episode of The Art of Authenticity. I'm your host, Laura Ko, and today we have Marie Wease joining us. She is an entrepreneur and writer who focuses on helping entrepreneurs master old-school marketing in a digital era.
Core Principles of Marketing
00:00:36
Speaker
Her first book, You Can't Be Everywhere,
00:00:40
Speaker
was released in September. She came on the show and she shared 30 years of industry information about marketing and how really nothing has changed. It's just the technology. To be totally honest with you, I've come into this space in the last
00:00:58
Speaker
few years and I at 40 was completely dumbstruck by all of the internet marketing systems. I felt like I had to be everywhere and I ended up being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Marie was extremely clarifying a lot of the things I wish I had had information to access to several years ago. I think I would have saved myself a lot of wasted time and effort. She has a system that you can use
00:01:26
Speaker
to leverage the marketing digital world to increase your business in profits and simplicity because you can't be everywhere but you need to figure out where your actual customers are. That's how it's always worked and it continues to work
00:01:43
Speaker
You just have to understand what the tools are and how to use them. I definitely would recommend this to anybody out there that's thinking about doing anything online. Read this book, don't waste time. I certainly wish I could have had access to it and I know you'll really enjoy what she has to say. Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you enjoy the show.
Marie Wease and Marketing Copilot
00:02:03
Speaker
Welcome to this week's episode of The Art of Authenticity. Today we have Marie Weeds joining us. Hey Marie, how are you this morning? I am great, thanks.
00:02:30
Speaker
thinks about marketing online and really the marketing space that of today is really not all that different from long ago. But Marie is going to walk us through that and many other things. So Marie, you are currently the president of Marketing Copilot. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing today, your work, and what kind of people you find as your typical client? Absolutely. So I've been running this business for about 10 years now, but I have a
00:02:31
Speaker
Thank you.
00:03:01
Speaker
long history in marketing and in communications. I've had to reinvent myself several times. I think that's fair to say. When I started this business, I was doing a lot of work with business-to-business companies, meaning businesses selling to other businesses, primarily in the financial services industry and working with a lot of technology companies. I started to recognize a need for a repeatable process in marketing that these companies weren't falling
00:03:30
Speaker
following a process for bringing marketing programs to life that had measurable results for the business. So I started to study that closely and that's how Marketing Copilot evolved into, I guess what you would call a digital marketing agency. And we do a lot of work online, but really it's about getting your message right, understanding how to connect with your customer and your buyer, and applying that in a new online world of creating content
00:03:59
Speaker
and connections with people to understand where they're at in their buying journey. And that's where marketing co-pilot has evolved to through the methodologies we've built over the last 10 years. And we like to call it evidence-based marketing that we're using evidence and data to really figure out the next step in a marketing program as opposed to just guessing and try this, let's do
Focusing on Customer Journeys
00:04:20
Speaker
this. So we work with a lot of small and medium-sized businesses across Canada and the United States. We've had clients in Europe as well.
00:04:29
Speaker
And we work with them to take them through the first part of our methodology around who are you selling to and what you need to understand in the buying journey. And then we typically apply that to a website and then an ongoing program of connecting and tracking to see how it's resonating with prospects and companies that you're trying to connect with in your marketing cycle. Interesting. So you've been doing that for about 10 years. And what would you say you found to be the number one misconception that people have about the online marketing space?
00:04:59
Speaker
I think the number one misconception is that because these tools are now readily available and they're cheap and the barrier to entry now is so low to get online with something, whether it's a website or social media, is that people get this impression that by doing these things, they can be everywhere and that they should be everywhere when the reality is you can't be everywhere, nor should you be.
00:05:27
Speaker
I think that you need to be very conscious of where your customers are. We see lots of companies that do things online and it really has no bearing on results for the business. We like to study and research. We've done research reports with the National Research Council in Canada and we like to study these things and see. We're starting to learn a lot about really back to the basics of human relationships and what you need to do to connect.
00:05:55
Speaker
And I think people have to get back to basics. And so when you say back to basics, like give me a couple examples because I totally agree with you. I mean, there's this whole Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, right? Like Instagram. And there's new ones coming up, Vine. I mean, you know, Periscope, I don't even know what that is.
00:06:16
Speaker
How do you trim that down? How do you start this process? What does it look like to get back to basics? And what would you suggest to somebody who's looking at all this and just has that deep sense of overwhelm? Well, again, I'll speak from my point of reference, which is the type of companies and businesses that we work with. And I work with a lot of companies where they might have had people in sales and sales reps who would go out and tell the story of the company.
00:06:46
Speaker
And they would be the one positioning the company and the products and services and out finding people who wanted to buy. And that was a very traditional sales model and a lot of companies use it even today very successfully. But the buyer has changed their buyer journey and they've changed the way they want to buy things and now they do a ton of research and they're way, way more educated in the buying cycle than they were ever before because we do have the internet and we do have a Google search bar and we have all of this information to
00:07:16
Speaker
to us. So the real trick here is to understand what somebody is doing in that buying journey and figuring out the best way to serve them and offer up content and information that meets them where they're searching instead of trying to push content or information out through these channels thinking that it matters to someone because if you're not taking the time to figure out what matters to the buyer,
00:07:41
Speaker
the customer and meeting them where they are, you're just wasting time. Yeah, no, that makes total sense, right? So if you're going to go purchase something, you're searching, you're looking at a new phone, so you're looking at all the different options out there and the pricing and
00:07:56
Speaker
you're organizing yourself before the purchase, unlike before where there wasn't a lot of ways to find out about products. I did my business before the internet and really selling was just an incredibly stressful and difficult and expensive challenge. So you call it evidence-based marketing. So when somebody learns about their customer and starts to attempt to find their customer through a specific angle, say they know where they're searching or that they're on this
00:08:26
Speaker
Facebook page or something. How do you track that and then look for the results and figure out if you're in the right path? Well, we call it evidence because the one beautiful thing about the internet world and online today that – and I'm going to fess up, Laura. I've been in marketing for a long time. I'm a little bit older and a little bit wiser.
00:08:50
Speaker
The thing that's dramatically different from when I started my career in the late 80s is that we now have all of this information and data available to us. On the flip side of it, it's a double-edged sword. It causes a lot of angst for some people about privacy and information. Go online, you can be tracked, and cookies get stored, and information is now being shared with companies. That's why you're seeing a lot of talk lately about ad blocking and things that are happening.
00:09:20
Speaker
Basically, if you choose to have a relationship with a company, you choose to accept their email, you choose to want to connect with them on their website because you're interested in what they're doing. When you start that relationship, there's information that is being provided that as a marketer you can go and see. I'll just give you a really quick basic example. Not a lot of people go and look at the analytics on their website to see what pages are actually viewed.
00:09:46
Speaker
There's this beautiful tool in Google Analytics called reverse funnelization that shows you what somebody does before they complete a task or activity on your website, especially if you're a company that has something that you could do on your website other than just contact us. You can download something. The most obvious one is put something in a shopping cart and check out. But if you're a business selling to another business, there's other things you can be doing to test and engage with people.
00:10:13
Speaker
Just seeing where people go and what they read and what they do is really useful information in deciding what you should be doing in your marketing program and what kinds of information you should be developing and sharing.
Importance of Online Presence for Local Businesses
00:10:27
Speaker
A lot of people just miss that basic step of who's on my website and what are they doing. Even if they're not a named individual, it really doesn't matter. You have numbers that say X number of visitors visited my site this month.
00:10:40
Speaker
Here's all the pages they looked at. Here's what the most popular page is. I've worked with companies that have existing websites that are like 60, 70, 80 pages of content. There's pages on there that haven't been viewed in a year. You ask, what's the purpose of this content? What's the purpose of this page? The answer is, well, we don't really know. We just thought it should be there. Simple stuff like that, you can really skinny it down and make it easier for your customer.
00:11:09
Speaker
because you're paying attention to that kind of evidence. Yeah, yeah. No, Google Analytics is amazing, but like reverse funnelization. I mean, that's the challenge. All of this stuff isn't in a specific spot. It's all over the internet. Is this the kind of stuff you put into your book? Do you have these details for people to learn or is it really about signing up as a client with you to walk through? Because there's so many details like that in my experience.
00:11:37
Speaker
I think there's a couple ways that you can look at it. We've tried to create a framework and a path for people to follow. We have a lot of workbooks and things that we allow people to download and use on our site for free. We try to show them the framework and allow them to do that themselves. Now, sometimes you do need a coach. Sometimes you need an expert. It's a little bit like knowing you need to eat
00:12:02
Speaker
better and exercise and some people are really good at doing that on their own and other people need to go to the gym and have a trainer because they just need that guidance. And so that's really the essence of our brand marketing co-pilot is that we will provide guidance around those things or we'll actually just do it for the company but we like it when we're in a coaching role where we get together maybe once a month and we review somebody's analytics and all of the data that they have that they can
00:12:30
Speaker
glean about a customer and then give them feedback on what they should be doing the following month. We find people will spend a lot of time doing things online and they're not producing measurable results. So we're really trying to
00:12:44
Speaker
cut it back to where they can really win. Yeah, because I've had this summer of a deep Oprah-aha moment in this space. But I was like, you open up a pizza shop, you can see the customer come in and eat a piece of pizza. And whether or not the cheese pizza is selling or that new fancy garlic oregano, spinach thing that you decided would be cool. This space, it's the same answer, right? If I'm hearing you properly that
00:13:12
Speaker
you want to track? Are people still loving the cheese? Do they like this new offering? What are you doing with it if nobody really wants that pizza? Yeah, absolutely. I don't know whether this is the time, but I have a funny story. It's in a blog post on our blog last Christmas. The family got home after a particularly busy holiday season and said to me, why don't you go online and order some Chinese food?
00:13:39
Speaker
We live in a neighborhood that is very Asian and there's a lot of Chinese restaurants in our neighborhood. We live in part of Toronto. I thought this was going to be an easy exercise. The restaurant we used to order from wasn't open the day we wanted to order. I went online and I searched Chinese restaurants in Unionville, which is the little community within the bigger city that I live in, thinking that I would get a closer match from a
00:14:07
Speaker
Google local search perspective and it offered me up a bunch of websites many of them weren't in English many of them were just PDFs of a menu and there was very difficult to read and about the fifth search result I hit on this beautiful website that was well laid out it was just very easy to understand that menus were nicely organized told me hours of operation it told me how to contact them it had methods for contacting very simple picked up the phone called them they were delightful
00:14:36
Speaker
Well, lovely, helped me order, called me back about 20 minutes later and said, we've just discovered that you live in Toronto. And I said, yeah. Well, we are based in Unionville, Connecticut, not Unionville, Ontario. And that would be about an eight hour delivery charge for us. And they were joking and laughing. But I thought to myself, how could a restaurant in Unionville, Connecticut come up ahead of
00:15:05
Speaker
all of the restaurants in my neighborhood, even from a local perspective, and it's because people weren't doing a good job with their online strategy. Yeah, Google wasn't prioritizing them in the search engine. Because they had bad websites, bad content. So your point about the local pizza place and testing who likes the pizza, even right down to being able to test online who likes certain recipes, who clicks on what on your website because they really like your dinner for three or whatever, that's all data you could be using.
00:15:35
Speaker
to even direct your business even if it's at a local level and you've relied on street traffic in the past. You can't think that way anymore because even the person who lives five blocks from you is starting your search for your product or service online. The point of resistance for people is looking at all of the different options and all of the Google Analytics and
00:15:57
Speaker
how to get started and how to set this up properly and how to track it. So that's what you help them with. And is that what your book is mainly focused on? I think the point of resistance is what it's always been since the dawn of time, and that's time and money, right? It's I don't have the time, I don't have the money, help me figure this out. Or I don't have the time, I don't have the money. What's the best way to do this? And I have to say as a brand, I think Home Depot has gained so much popularity because of all these
00:16:27
Speaker
people want to do it yourself and it just hit the movement at the right time. We'd like to think that even if you're a do-it-yourselfer, we're still able to provide a framework for you that is going to be a lot more efficient of time and money than just jumping in and trying to guess at it and figure it out yourself.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yeah. And I can attest, everyone listening today, I jumped in. I'm such an entrepreneur. I'm like, oh, no big deal. I can figure this out. It's not. Just don't. That's all. It's really complicated. You've got to get that education curve. And I learned the hard way, but I wouldn't suggest that. There's a lot more to it than meets the eye.
00:17:13
Speaker
What we've got going for us after 10 years of building a framework around this and trying to figure it out is we've worked with hundreds of companies at this point. I've tested a lot of the stuff that we've worked on from a framework perspective at innovation factories or regional innovation centers near and around where we're based and really put a group of startups in a room and walk them through it. They kind of nodded in agreement and said, yeah, we get this. This will work.
00:17:41
Speaker
So we've got hundreds of companies that we've worked with who've tested this out. And for those who stick to it, and I go back to the food and exercise, those who stick with the diet and exercise regime will reap the benefits if they keep at it and follow the journey. Because that is the thing. If you do get this set up properly, because the internet is such a huge space, it can be just phenomenally
00:18:08
Speaker
successful on a team of sales reps, which you're always hiring a new person and the cost goes up for every rep. The internet is great that way. Yeah.
Content Co-pilot Methodology
00:18:20
Speaker
When we originally were trying to pitch the idea of using your website as your best sales tool, and even as recently as 2011, we would go talk to business owners and say, your website is your best sales tool. It's going to be almost like a sales rep in your business. It's there 24-7,
00:18:38
Speaker
It's what people are going to look at in the first step of their buying journey and how good is your website. And business owners would look at me and say, nobody goes to our website before they buy from us. And then in 2011, and I don't know if it was later up here in Canada, I don't know what maybe the date might have been down in the States, but it started to turn. And then I would have CEOs coming to me saying, I lost a deal because somebody went to our website and it was so bad and they couldn't understand what we did.
00:19:07
Speaker
They walked away because my competitor is doing a way better job of articulating their products or services online. Then people started to wake up to the fact that they wanted to fix that problem. The advent or the intersection of the popularity of social media then really drove people to start to realize they have to change their attitude towards what's going on with their website and what's going on with their online presence in their business.
00:19:34
Speaker
I was struck by this awesome tool you have on your website, the content co-pilot methodology, because it really is so similar to how you'd walk through a business strategy.
00:19:46
Speaker
Can you walk the listeners through what this is? It's such an incredibly cool, you can check it out at her marketingcopilot.com site, but it's this really cool image and it shows you how to start with your value proposition. Again, like you're saying, old school marketing in a newer environment. It really is very similar to what we did when we owned a company that was brick or mortar, but can you walk through value proposition, buyer map, and some of the key components there?
00:20:15
Speaker
Sure, I'll try to make it simple and painless. I'll just quickly tell a story as well. I started my career early on as a press secretary to a federal cabinet minister here in Canada, and you said something early in our discussions that really resonated with me when you said the 10-second sound clip. As a press secretary, my job was to figure out how to get the 10-second sound clip on the nightly news.
00:20:43
Speaker
You really worked hard to distill down message or content to make it easy to consume, in this case, for the TV viewing audience. And so what I discovered as I started working in financial services and technology is that that kind of went against everything that people in that sector believed. They wanted to make things as complicated as possible, and they wanted to be as confusing as possible because then they would really have a need
00:21:13
Speaker
to exist. Somebody's going to have to come to me to figure this out. That's particularly true in the financial services industry because you've got very complex tools and instruments happening to run and monitor a whole bunch of very complex financial instruments and they all have to be validated and checked at the end of the day. This ginormous thing that exists within banks called the back office is doing a whole bunch of data calculations and everything else.
00:21:43
Speaker
So it behooves people to make it as difficult and as complicated as possible. But unfortunately, that translates out to the front end to the customer. And anybody who's had to go get a mortgage and understand what the heck is going on with the mortgage, or go get a financial services product and try to start an investment strategy, it's not easy. And even the smartest person who's trying to figure it out, it's not easy.
00:22:11
Speaker
What we tell people at the front end of the methodology is, get your value proposition right. And value proposition is not a tagline, a slogan. It is a, why should I buy from you? And there has never been a more important time than right now in 2016 to be able to articulate in eight seconds or less on the homepage of a website. Here's why you should buy from me.
00:22:37
Speaker
And while I appreciate that bigger companies have multiple customers and multiple product lines and everything else, at the end of the day, your company needs a value proposition and every product or service that you sell needs a value proposition and that needs to be clearly and simply laid out for your best customer.
00:22:55
Speaker
And really one of the hardest, sorry, one of the hardest things is to say something simply in a small sentence. I mean, when you get yourself to a point that you can say it quickly, you really learned about your business and you know what you're doing, wouldn't you say? Absolutely. So that's why we tell people to start with a customer scorecard, to go and look at their best customers because whatever the reason is that their best customers bought,
00:23:25
Speaker
there's usually a way to articulate it within there. And there's usually a way to articulate it that will draw more of those types of companies to you. So we take people through a customer scorecard to really understand the attributes of who's buying and what they're understanding they're buying and how to simply state the value proposition and the offer. And that's the front end of the very first thing that we think anybody should do. And we believe that companies should do it every six or 12 months. You should always be revisiting that as your business evolves and as your business grows.
Building a Buyer Journey
00:23:54
Speaker
And companies that are really aggressive in the marketplace today are doing that all the time because they're always evolving to meet this next set of customers that they want to attract. So that's the first part. And then the second part is understanding then of those types of customers, what do they do when they're making a decision to buy something? How do they see the problem? How do they see the opportunity to fix something or do something differently? And we document that so that we can figure out what kinds of content they might need then
00:24:24
Speaker
to take themselves through the buying journey before you hear from them. Because you'll see stats online today that say buyers are 70% through the buyer journey before you ever hear from them. So your sales guy doesn't have a chance to talk to them yet. They're doing things and learning. Say that again. I'm not sure I caught it. Your buyer is 70% through the process before you speak to them? Before you ever hear from them. Before you even know their prospect. Before you even know they're buying. Because they've researched it online for so long.
00:24:54
Speaker
They're online looking for stuff, and they might even be online looking on LinkedIn, seeing who else has done a similar thing and reaching out and speaking to them. They're doing a whole bunch of things before they put you on a shortlist. Yeah. Because the joke we used to make when I would run workshops and I would say to people, think about the last big purchase you made in your life, either for yourself or for your business. What's the last thing you wanted to do as you were deciding what to buy?
00:25:22
Speaker
and everybody puts their hand up and says, speak to a sales rep. Right. It's so annoying. Buying new cars is a perfect example. What's the last thing you want to do? Walk into the showroom and speak to a sales rep. And no offense to sales people, but it's kind of the last thing they want to do because we all have a very different way of wanting to buy things today.
00:25:47
Speaker
People who have embraced that strategy, companies that have embraced that are doing phenomenally well. That's so interesting. The proof is in the pudding. Before they call all you, and this is where I go back to most small businesses, the only thing you could do on their website is hit the Contact Us button, pick up the phone and call them. If that's the case, the 500 people who
00:26:10
Speaker
showed up on your site before they decided to pick up the phone and call you, because conversion rate usually only hovers around 1% in anything that's happening. So of those, you know, you've got a thousand visitors and only ten are actually going to call you, of the, you know, 990 that might have visited, what did you offer to them to help them understand why you might be the right person for the shortlist?
00:26:34
Speaker
And so we reverse engineer what some of that content needs to be, how you need to talk about your services. A lot of people struggle with that. They just want to talk about features and functions. They don't want to actually talk about how it helps somebody. And so we try to sort that out and then build it into a reasonable navigation path on a website with other types of things like email marketing, social media, SEO, search engine optimization, and then to drive traffic and test it.
00:27:02
Speaker
So that's, in a nutshell, the framework, really. Yeah. And the one thing I want to just point out is this piece about helping someone, right? I think that's the thing that gets lost in all the complexities and all your intentions to try to make a great site and everything is you're really there trying to solve a problem for somebody. And I made the mistake of trying to explain who I was too much or what the product was too much.
00:27:25
Speaker
when really the discussion of exactly where that consumer is and what their pain point is and how this could solve it was missing, you know? And it's like, really, when I'm on the internet and I'm searching, it's like, I need this. Is that it? And I just want to make sure that they understand that this is what I'm looking for and that this is the actual solution. And it's not that complicated, right? I'm hungry and I want pizza.
00:27:53
Speaker
example up here in Canada that I really like. I'm a customer of theirs. There's a product up here that they're all over the place now, but they really launched in Canada and I think it's a good success story called FreshBooks. It's an accounting application that helps you do invoicing as a small business entrepreneur, solopreneur, if you're a consultant and you don't want to get your invoicing under control because most people just do their invoicing through Word or something like that. They're trying to keep track of everything with
00:28:23
Speaker
shoebox full of receipts. They launched into the marketplace with a very simple statement on their homepage that said, stop running your business out of a shoebox. It was a picture of a guy sitting at a table trying to do his accounting on a piece of paper and an overflowing shoebox of receipts. So simple. Didn't get into the fact that it was an accounting app. Didn't get into the fact of how it competed against QuickBooks or all these other big products that have been around forever. It was just
00:28:49
Speaker
Very simply, here's the problem I'm going to solve for you. Within 30 minutes, you can be online solving it. They got tremendous uptake in the marketplace. It didn't happen overnight, but people signed up and started using it. Gosh, this is so dead simple.
00:29:03
Speaker
We signed up because we were sending out all our invoices via Word, and it was a nightmare to organize and wasn't tracked back to anything. So the next step was this product. And I just think it's a great example. Their website has changed quite a bit since then, and they're selling in a very different way online now. But when they first launched, the way they got attention was just by saying, this is the one problem we're going to solve for you.
Marie Wease's Book and Authenticity Journey
00:29:25
Speaker
And if you want to solve this problem, you should come and talk to us. And it wasn't anything more complicated than that, and it worked tremendously well.
00:29:33
Speaker
That's awesome. If you are looking for this and many other tips, Marie has shared them with you in her blog and her latest book. You can't be everywhere. You can find that on Amazon. Is that right? That's correct. Getting into the second part of the show, I ask all of my guests a question I'm going to ask you as well.
00:29:55
Speaker
What does it mean to have an authentic life to you? You've had all this success, you've run this huge company, you've worked with all of these people to help them build their businesses. But what does success in an authentic life mean in your world? I love this question. Thank you for asking me this question and why I was excited about being on your show is that it gave me time to sit down and really think about it. And not because I haven't thought about
00:30:23
Speaker
it before, but because I was able to sum up a real journey I've been on that I hope it's okay to share and it leads nicely into the next project I'm working on, which is working with women entrepreneurs. I would say that to answer this question in a long-winded way, I apologize, but I started the first part of my adult life doing what my head told me to do and what I thought I should do.
00:30:52
Speaker
I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast of being a woman, a woman of a certain vintage. I sort of was starting my career in the 80s and late 80s and there was a real feeling amongst myself and my friends that, you know, was about having it all. This great career, you needed to have it all. You need to have a great career. You need to have a great house. You need to have the kids, the husband, all the extracurricular advance.
00:31:21
Speaker
And I worked very hard towards that goal. I had gotten married in my mid 20s to somebody who was in the financial services industry. And we bought our first house. We had two children, a boy and a girl. I was working really hard to get to the next level, always getting to the next level, always driving on to the next part in my career. And I had it all or the perception of what was it all. And I was miserable. I was unhappy.
00:31:49
Speaker
And my relationships are what I would call fractional. And I wrote that word down and I thought it was such a fitting word because I realized that it was fractional because I would fit people in where I had time, including my kids, including my husband, and fit them all into this picture that I thought of what I should be doing. And it was anything but authentic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I would agree with that. And it was anything but authentic.
00:32:20
Speaker
And then a few things happened in my life that I would say were truly life changing. And it started with getting unexpectedly pregnant with a third child. I hadn't planned that. I got pregnant and discovered that I had a very bad bowel condition that I didn't know about, but it had been rearing its ugly head in my late 20s, early 30s, and then just full onset when I got pregnant with a third child.
00:32:48
Speaker
And I was working at the time I was working in a software company and I had invested a significant amount of money in it and I felt at that point in my life that I had better, bigger obligations to the company than to myself or my family. And I was sort of racing through my pregnancy to get better so I could get back to work and I spent a good deal of my pregnancy in the hospital trying to get my baby to term
00:33:11
Speaker
And here's what happened. These three things happened. My baby was born prematurely but healthy. We were able to do a bunch of things to get her healthy before she was born. I had the baby and then six weeks later had a major operation on my bowel and that caused, you know, it did not go well. I got very sick, a huge infection. I basically couldn't leave the house for two months and I couldn't even hold my baby during that time. And I needed
00:33:41
Speaker
I still had the sense that I needed to get back to work, that I needed to be there. Really, I went back to work three months after I'd had the baby and gone through the surgery and everything else. Then suddenly, the bottom fell out of what was going on in the business world. It was the late 90s. The financial sector and the tech sector just imploded.
00:34:03
Speaker
9-11 had happened in the United States and it had caused a significant shift in our company and our company was forced to sell in this fire sale. I lost my investment and despite thinking I could impact these things, it didn't go my way. Within 24 months, I had to leave and I was scrambling to figure out what to do next. That's when I sort of sat back and started my journey
00:34:32
Speaker
I think into what I would call wanting to understand an authentic life and authenticity because I was doing all these things my head told me to do, but none of the things my heart told me to do. And so I completely wanted to change my life at that point. And we did a couple of things. We sold our house in Toronto so that I could put money aside to start my own business.
00:34:58
Speaker
decided that his best contribution to the family would be to be a stay-at-home dad and he'd had to be in that role when I was ill and so you know he he decided to do that and we just completely changed our lives we moved to the country built a house in the country and started yeah started to do to live a very different life and I I know it might sound like oh well you were just running away and you know but it was for me it started the journey that's where the journey started for me of saying
00:35:28
Speaker
I'm not being good to myself, and if I can't be good to myself, I can't be good to the people around me who really matter, which are my children and my husband. And it was a journey of just total reinvention and saying, this is not a healthy life. I need to live a healthier life, and I need to listen to my heart more. And that really sums it up for me, I think.
00:35:51
Speaker
Yeah, no, thank you for sharing that. I think there's so many people out there that can relate to this idea of checking off a ton of boxes. I remember, I'm 45, I remember the whole have it all, a woman can have a child at 45 and have a career and it's like, okay, really? No, like you can't. I realized one day it's like do an 80-hour work week plus the same quality of a stay-at-home mom in the 50s and somehow we're supposed to bring that all together.
00:36:18
Speaker
and be in shape and be happy. And I think so many people receive that message and it's so interesting how far we have to be pushed. I was having panic attacks. You're in a hospital setting before you sort of think to yourself, well, wait a minute. Maybe what was taught to me, maybe this cultural message isn't really true.
00:36:39
Speaker
And I just applaud so much that you took the time to recreate your
Upcoming Projects and Conclusion
00:36:43
Speaker
life. And so from that point forward, was that where you started this business and coming into the space that you find yourself in now? It is. Yeah, it is. And a lot of things transpired along the way. It was not easy in the beginning. And there's a lot of dark periods, as any entrepreneur will tell you, that you second-guess yourself. You're not as successful as you. It's not happened
00:37:08
Speaker
having as quickly. Let's not use the word success. It's not having as quickly as you would like. You're second-guessing yourself. You're coming up with these great ideas and you're struggling to understand why nobody's buying into them. It can be quite lonely. I went through my second stage of trying to understand authenticity. I did a lot of things that I'm sure people can relate to as well that I thought
00:37:35
Speaker
You know, just my physical well-being, I went out and ran a triathlon and took up all these hobbies and did all these things because I wanted to prove to myself that my body was fine. And what I realized was that it was not helping my mental and spiritual well-being to be constantly busy and thinking that that's how I was going to get myself better physically, that it was really about being well-mentally that will lead to physical enlightenment.
00:38:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, that is not what we're taught. We're taught heads down, push through, man up, suck it up and it'll all just work out. And it's like our bodies are literally retaliating and we're like, nope, it's fine. I'm just totally having anxiety or I'm having outbursts of anger. You know, my clients come to me all the time falling apart, but they're like, it's fine. It's so sad that we're taught this message so aggressively, you know, through our childhoods.
00:38:28
Speaker
Absolutely and I think somebody said it really well to me is that you know women in particular evolution is a slow thing and it wasn't so long ago that we were expected to be home having kids and not doing all of these other things and so our body is struggling to evolve and it took me a while to understand that as well and took me a while to understand that it takes you know our bodies and so the
00:38:53
Speaker
The point in this story and why it's led me to want to write my next book for women, because I do have a lot of female friends who are entrepreneurs who all have very similar stories to tell and some moments that forced them to do things differently and to reevaluate and to be able to be brave enough to tell a different story and say, no, you can't have it all, nor should you be trying to have it all.
00:39:22
Speaker
And it's OK for it to look this way. It's OK for it to look differently than you thought it was going to look. That's the story I really want to tell next with a group of very brave women who I think are doing things differently. And those are stories we need to start telling a younger generation of men and women so that we will have what I think leads to a more authentic and healthier society.
00:39:48
Speaker
I love it. I love it. Thank you so much. I think so many people will relate to that story. I do. I have the same experience and I know I speak to people daily who struggle with this very question of what does it mean to have it all? And is it really this universal idea or
00:40:04
Speaker
shouldn't we all just define that for ourselves and really think about our own lives and our own goals and what having it all looks like for you and how that shifts year after year, decade over decade. Marie, thank you so much for coming on today's show and sharing your work and your beautiful story. What people are looking for you, find out more information. Where can they find you? Well, in conjunction with the book, we've just put up MarieWece.com.
00:40:29
Speaker
And so despite the pronunciation, it's W-I-E-S-E, Marie, M-A-R-I-E. So MarieWeese.com. You can see notes there about my background and about the book. And we've been putting up regular blog posts that we hope will help entrepreneurs with their content strategy. And so it's a good place to subscribe and go get more information.
00:40:55
Speaker
I already pulled up my page to fill out so I can get my customer scorecard workbook. I love it. I think your approach is really easy and comprehensive. Thank you for sharing your story today and coming on today's show. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.