The Momentum Effect

Transcript

Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy, and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camargo people here in Sydney, Australia.

In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.

My two children approached this little hill at their local playground completely differently. My eldest child attempted to climb this little hill, which was barely worthy of the term hill. It was a tiny little hillock. She came straight up at the steepest gradient. And of course it was difficult. It was time consuming. You know, she was struggling.

She was kind of falling back a little bit. Whereas my second child who is just innately creative, even though she doesn’t do art and she doesn’t do craft, she doesn’t play an instrument, there’s just something about the way her brain works, which is innately creative. She came at the hill from a diagonal, from a slant. And of course it was quick and it was easy and she was up the top in no time.

This is the momentum effect in action because the momentum effect means that a little push, and you’re getting a much bigger result than the effort that you’re putting in. And of course the opposite, you might’ve experienced the opposite. I see this in businesses all the time, this stop-start effect. I guess the opposite of momentum is the stop-start. And the stop-start looks like you take a break over the holidays, or you get really busy with client work and you stop business development and you stop marketing and you stop following up and you stop sales, and then everything is a hell of a lot more difficult, right?

It’s a lot more difficult to get the clients or get the inquiries and get the clients back in the door. So this is not what we’re doing. Now, the momentum effect is something that I’ve been doing in my business for some time now, but I’ve specifically been ramping it up this year, I’ve been doing a lot more of it this year. So what it used to look like before COVID is that I would plan about four launches a year, more or less.

So I had my Hustle and Heart flagship program and I launched that twice a year. And then I also have various courses and programs that are shorter. And before COVID, I had this fantastic routine happening where I would visit Melbourne once a quarter. I would have regular holidays more or less once a quarter, sometimes long weekends as well. And I would plan all my promotions and my launches around that. This year I’ve been doing it as well, but I’ve also been doing it with a lot more content events.

So I’ve had the Life’s a Pitch party, which I ran in February, 2024 and August, 2024. I also created Amplify, I ran Amplify in June. 2024, and I’ve just finished Amplify again in September 2024. So the idea of this is that you’re layering on events, you’re layering on marketing and promotions, and you’re building momentum like a wave. And like a wave, it needs to crash. The wave won’t keep going forever. Yeah. So think about momentum as a sprint. rather than a marathon. And most people are sprinters, most people are not marathon runners. Yeah, most of us, not all of us, most of us do better with short bursts of concentrated activity and then a break than we do keeping that kind of steady pace, steady pace, steady pace.

And the steady pace is happening. We’ve got our minimum viable marketing plan. But the joyful thing about the minimum viable marketing plan is firstly, it’s not very much activity. If you haven’t got yourself a copy of the minimum viable marketing plan, I’ll, I’ll drop the link into the show notes. So make sure you grab a copy of that. So this is my methodology for creating consistency. But when I say consistency, I’m not talking about you need to be on fire, feeling great marketing every single day.

It would be wonderful if you did. But let’s be real here, most of us aren’t like that. I’m not like that. There are plenty of days where I don’t want to human, I don’t want to talk to anyone and I certainly don’t want to do any marketing. And the joyful thing about the minimum viable marketing plan is that you can schedule stuff ahead. Yeah, you can totally schedule and you don’t have to do a lot.

Minimum viable is not maximum, but you can have that marketing ticking along and then you layer the momentum marketing on top of that. So how this has looked like, particularly in 2024, it has meant that I’m layering not just paid offerings, but also unpaid content events where it’s free for people to participate, one on top of the other, on top of the other, on top of the other. And the point is that whenever you’re doing more marketing than normal, whenever you’re doing more promotion than is typical, you’re gonna increase your visibility and reach. And everything sells everything.

So people are gonna see you and perhaps they haven’t seen you for a while. It’s been some months or maybe even years and they had a good experience of you. You’ve got a good reputation in their eyes. They know who you are. They trust you, but they simply forgot about you. And now all of a sudden you’re promoting something specific on the internet. They’re seeing your marketing. They’re reminded of you and they reach out and they engage you for something else entirely.

This happens every single launch. Every time I launch the hustle and heart program, I gain one or two VIP strategy session clients, or I gain one or two one-to-one business coaching clients. Because of course people are remembering who you are and they’re like, oh, well, I don’t want to buy that particular program that Brooke’s promoting, but I do want to work with Brooke. I find it really weird to talk about myself in the third person apologies. Sounds so strange, doesn’t it?

So how could you implement this? If this is sounding attractive to you, and if you’re looking for a life led business, because make no mistake, the momentum effect is super useful for a life led business. This is how we’re gonna do it. Yeah, I’m gonna spell it all out in as much detail as I can muster. so that you can implement this yourself. So the first thing is that we need to put in life before business, we need to factor in those big breaks. And I had a client, I’ve got a client, I’m still working with her, and she had a really big 2023.

She got married, she had a honeymoon, and then very sadly, she lost her father. And it was a year of great ups and downs and a year that really challenged her, of course personally, but not just that, it challenged her business because she needed to be out and away. She needed to be off the tools. She needed a business that actually worked when she couldn’t work. And I’m happy to say that was the case, that she did continue to grow not just her revenue, but also her take-home pay. and that the wheels did not fall off her business. She continued to service her clients or her business continued to service her clients and the inquiries continued to come in.

So first things first, we want to factor in those big things. If we’ve got a holiday planned and hopefully we’ve always got a holiday planned, we’ve always got a holiday booked at all times. That’s one of my kind of rules for life. When I’m on holidays, I want to book the next holiday. I always wanna have something, at least one holiday that I’ve got coming up, but anything else as well, things like concert tickets, things like dates, things like long weekends, things like school holidays. If you don’t wanna work school holidays, you don’t have to work school holidays.

You don’t even need to have kids if you don’t want. If school holidays are great because everybody in your town leaves and you can actually get to enjoy your town, then why not? You know, make that a thing, why not put that in the diary? So that goes in first. The second part of this is that we’re scheduling only a quarter ahead. We’re scheduling only a quarter ahead.

And I’ve said this a few times, I’ve shared this story a few times to clients, but recently I was a facilitator on a panel discussion for a group of CEOs and board members. And it was a pretty conservative room full of people. The people on the panel that I was facilitating were pretty kind of stalwart, you know, old school kind of titans of business here in Australia. And what got talked about quite a bit, which I have happily relayed to my clients over and over again, is the uselessness of planning 12 months ahead of how the way things used to be done, was the CEO would provide the board with financial projections for 12 months or two years ahead, and business plans for 12 months or two years or five years ahead.

But multiple people on this panel discussion said the same thing, which is, the rates of change right now are so exponential that this is a useless undertaking and that we only ever look a quarter ahead. And of course this is music to my ears because I don’t… I might have big aspirations for things that are going to take a lot longer, but I’m only chunking things down three months in advance. And that’s what I recommend for you as well. I think for a lot of business owners, I know for a lot of business owners, this kind of need or perceived need to plan the business space and to be able to do that plan, you know, to write the perfect business plan, to know in advance what the next 12 or 24 or 5 years are going to look like, to have the vision and the mission locked in.

I know that this is actually procrastination in disguise. I’ve seen it so often, so often, and people think, you know, they believe that it is true. Of course they don’t think that they’re procrastinating. Why would they? They think they’re being very productive and very responsible. But in fact, it’s the opposite. It’s procrastinating planning, it’s procrastinating work. It is postponing the inevitable, which is to actually do the thing. So back to our three months or 12 week planning cycles. We put in the big rocks first, which is the break, the time away, and then we put the launches and the promotions around that.

And what I want you to consider is how can you layer things? So that you start off fairly small, maybe the first month for example, your focus is getting in front of other people’s audiences, getting on other people’s podcasts, getting on other people’s websites, other people’s stages, getting into other people’s groups and training or talking or speaking or writing. And then the next month, month two, you’re going to do a content event and a promotion. So a free content event such as a challenge.

And of course I turned my life’s a pitch challenge into a party because as my lovely assistant Faith said, who the hell wants a challenge? Business owners don’t want another challenge. I’m like, oh my God, Faith, of course they don’t. Let’s call it a party. So whatever the free content event is. Amplify has been an audio only event. I’ve run it once through Telegram app and second time through the WhatsApp app. And then we’ve got a promotion and then we’ve got more promotions and then we’ve got more promotions.

And there might be other business coaches who will give you more detailed information, but I don’t think it really matters what exactly you’re promoting. So long as there is some variety in not just the price point. but also in the topic, yeah? Cause you’re not a one trick pony. You might think you’re a one trick pony, but you’re not. There are multiple aspects to your particular expertise.

There are multiple aspects to your particular topic, related topics to your main topic. And the point is you wanna give people multiple invitations to get closer to you, to have a real experience of your expertise and to have a real experience of your expertise in a paid capacity. And make no mistake, some people will skip the free stuff and they will dive straight into the paid stuff because they have absolutely no desire to participate in a free thing. As one of my clients said to me the other day, she’s like, I don’t want to participate in your free thing. I just want to perhaps buy your other thing.

And some people want to have a $49 experience or a $97 experience or a $200 experience before they jump into the $10,000 experience. And they would never dream of jumping into the $10,000 experience without first having some paid experience with you. So the point is we’re giving people multiple ways, multiple layers, multiple options to get involved, multiple ways to experience us. free, paid, low, mid and high, if you have low, mid and high, don’t for a moment think that you have to run off and get low, mid and high offerings.

But if you’ve already got these offerings ready to go and it’s not gonna take too much time, too much effort to create it, then go ahead and layer those things on. Now, when I first heard of this, when one of my colleagues first described her launch, her big program launch to me and she said, I’m going to do this and then I’m going to do that and then I’m going to do this and then I’m going to do that.

The first time I heard this, I was like bamboozled. I was overwhelmed. And my very first, you know, response or reaction was that’s too much work. I can’t do that. That’s too complicated. I’m tired. I don’t want to do it. So if that’s how you’re feeling right now, you’re not alone.

Uh, and it gets easier with practice because I’ve now run the life’s a pitch challenge party several times. I’ve run it one, two, three, four, five, six, seven times. So every time I run it, of course, I can never do the same thing twice. Uh, I always have to change it a little bit, but every time I run it. I’m iterating on the last time I did it. I’m copying and pasting. I’ve got certain things set up that weren’t set up the first time. And it gets easier and easier and easier. And this is what I suggest for you.

So I have a folder that says life’s a pitch and it’s got all the assets for life’s a pitch. It’s got all the marketing for life’s a pitch. It’s got all the promos for life’s a pitch. It’s got all the pieces so that my assistant can just jump in there and copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. And a lot of marketing is just that. That’s what we’re doing. We’re copying and pasting and hopefully we’re iterating. Hopefully we’re improving just a tad on the last time, just a little bit, a little bit better.

We’re trying to beat our personal best all the time. And if you listen to me and you’re thinking, well, that sounds great. I like all of this. I would like to try this, but I don’t know if, you know, I actually have the offerings. The other thing I would suggest is to do the pre-sale. And this is really, you know, a big topic for another day. But a pre-sale is simply that you create yourself a sales page, which I always do first for multiple reasons, including it forces me out of my head and into the heads of my ideal clients.

And you have the sales page, you promote the sales page off the back of, you know, some kind of free thing, some kind of free lead magnet or free content event. And you’re either growing an interest list, which is great and a really low cost, no risk, easy thing to do, or you’re selling the thing. And when you do a pre-sale, you can measure whether or not people actually want the thing. And this is not uncommon.

And I’m sure you’ve heard this before. And I’m equally confident that you will ignore this excellent advice because people ignore it all the time. But. If you can pre-sell what you’ve yet to create, this is a really great thing to add to the momentum. And if you think about crowdfunding, this is a lot of how crowdfunding works, right? You’ve got a business idea, you’ve got creative business owners with a business idea, and they describe the idea, they give rewards for people pledging different amounts.

And the people that are pledging the different amounts, the people that are buying in the pre-sale, they likely know it’s a pre-sale. They likely know the thing doesn’t exist yet. But what they’re doing is they’re jumping in early because they’re those kinds of people, they tend to be kind of early adapters, innovative, creative people that trust their gut and trust their instinct with the business owner. And they know that they’re gonna get a really great experience and they’re gonna be the first people to do it and they’re going to get the best price that the thing will sell for. And so they’re willing to wait in a pre-sale or in a crowdfunding campaign.

You tend to have to wait, right? You don’t order the item on Tuesday and it arrives on Thursday. It doesn’t work like that. So this is how that works. And this is how you could use pre-selling pre-sales in creating your momentum effects. All right. Couple of Before I say goodbye, how do you take small steps towards the momentum effect?

First thing is to batch like-minded tasks together. You’ve probably heard this already, but this is how we create momentum, right? We do similar things, similar tasks together, and in so doing, we create momentum of efficiency and effectiveness. We’re not losing energy, swapping between very different tasks that require very disparate ways of using our brain. And then the second tip I have for you is to follow all wins with another win.

Anytime something goes well in your business, anytime somebody says yes to you, anytime things have gone well, follow it up with yet another outreach, yet another pitch, yet another phone call, yet another email, yeah? Don’t sit and go, wow, that was fantastic. Let me do some admin now. Don’t do that. Use that momentum, use that energy to take the next brave bold step. Alright? This is the Momentum Effect. Tell me what you think. I’d love to hear from you. Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favour and write me a short review? Toddcast Review means so much to me and it helps other values based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.