258 – Women on LinkedIn: Building Confidence, Networks, and Successful Futures

This week’s episode of Good Girls Get Rich is brought to you by Uplevel Media CEO and LinkedIn expert, Karen Yankovich. In this episode, Karen Yankovich talks to the women on LinkedIn!

Want to build confidence, networks, and successful futures? Then this episode is for you!

#GoodGirlsGetRich

We want to hear your thoughts on this episode! Leave us a message on Speakpipe or email us at info@karenyankovich.com.

About the Episode:

In this episode, we dove deep into the challenges women face on LinkedIn and unpacked the reasons behind the gender gap on this powerful platform. We explored various factors, from incomplete profiles to societal expectations, that might be holding women back on LinkedIn. But fear not, because I’m here to shed light on these challenges and guide you on how to conquer them.

Key Points:

  1. Incomplete Profiles: So many LinkedIn users, regardless of gender, have profiles that are just gathering dust. And guess what? Incomplete profiles mean missed opportunities! Let’s spruce up those profiles and make them shine.
  2. Time Constraints: We get it; life gets crazy busy. But here’s the deal: your professional network matters, and investing time in platforms like LinkedIn can open doors you never imagined. It’s worth carving out some time for your career growth.
  3. Societal Expectations: Ah, societal expectations, the silent confidence killer. Don’t let these norms hold you back. You are powerful, and your voice deserves to be heard. It’s time to break free from these constraints and own your space.
  4. Imposter Syndrome: That sneaky imposter syndrome can haunt even the best of us. But let me tell you, you are not alone. We’ve all been there. It’s about embracing your worth and acknowledging your expertise. You belong here!
  5. Privacy Concerns: Privacy is crucial, but it shouldn’t hide your brilliance. Yes, be cautious, but don’t let it dim your light. LinkedIn is your stage; showcase your talents proudly and authentically.
  6. LinkedIn’s Perception: There’s a misconception that LinkedIn is just for B2B connections. Let’s bust that myth! LinkedIn is a powerhouse for all businesses. Whether you’re B2B or B2C, there’s a place for you to shine and thrive.
  7. Empowerment and Visibility: Ladies, it’s time to take control of your online brand. Network with purpose, refine your LinkedIn profile, and communicate assertively, all while staying true to yourself. Empowerment and visibility go hand in hand.
  8. Networking Strategies: Building connections with influencers, perfecting your LinkedIn profile, and embracing authentic communication strategies can transform your LinkedIn experience. Remember, authenticity and assertiveness are your superpowers!

Conclusion:

So, there you have it! Overcoming challenges, embracing confidence, and leveraging LinkedIn strategically can transform your professional journey. Let’s rewrite the rules, break free from limitations, and create a vibrant LinkedIn presence together. Your dreams are within reach – let’s make them a reality!

Episode Spotlights:

Magical Quotes from the Episode:

  • “LinkedIn is a tool where you can create your brand, your story, your presence in a way that’s just not possible anywhere else.”
  • “Success is not about spamming people, it’s about creating magnetic profiles that draw people to you.”
  • “Confidence is magnetic. When you show up as your confident self on LinkedIn, it attracts the right opportunities and connections.”
  • “LinkedIn is not just a platform; it’s a community where you can surround yourself with amazing people who believe in you.”
  • “Visibility leads to influence. The more visible you are on LinkedIn, the more impact and influence you can have in your industry.”

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

Help Us Spread the Word!

It would be awesome if you shared the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast with your fellow entrepreneurs on twitter. Click here to tweet some love!

If this episode has taught you just one thing, I would love if you could head on over to Apple Podcasts and SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW! And if you’re moved to, kindly leave us a rating and review. Maybe you’ll get a shout out on the show!

Ways to Subscribe to Good Girls Get Rich:

Read the Transcript

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast episode 258.

Intro 0:06
Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl, stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:23
And low there. I’m your host, Karen Yankovich. And this is episode 258 of the good girls get rich podcast. And we have a unique episode today. You know, a little backstory, when I am looking for topics for this podcast, I’m always looking all over the place, right? Like, what should I talk about? What are people interested in? So for this episode, what I decided to do is I went to chat GPT. And I said, What are the top 10 reasons women don’t use LinkedIn as much as men. And the list of eight Chachi beauty listed 10 reasons. And I was like, I don’t know if I like these topics. And then I said list 10 more and only listed six more. But as I was looking through these things, I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting for an episode instead of picking one of these things, to kind of work through all of these and just kind of, you know, this is just randomly what chat GPT throughout to me. So I feel like I can add my point of view to the answers that it gave me. So that’s what we’re gonna do here today. And bear with me, because some of these I feel like a little BS, some of them I have definitely have an opinion on and others, you know, I agree with and and I think in all cases, maybe you’ll recognize yourself. And maybe you’ll get some tips on how to overcome these challenges so that you’re spending more time on this platform, which is where the money is made. As you move into a new year, this recording is out in October 2023. As we move into 2024, I like to look at this as like the on ramp to our new year, right? Like the q4 is like marketing on ramp, right? So what are the things you need to have in place so that 2024 can be or the upcoming year or frankly, the upcoming 12 months? Doesn’t have to be a calendar year, right? But what do you what can we be doing to make it in this onramp time to make the upcoming year? What we want it to be right. So I think you know, in most cases, and even in my case, to be honest, I was thinking about something today that I was doing. And I’m like, why don’t I do this more on LinkedIn? Right? So even I get caught in these things easy to get caught in the shiny objects of what should I be doing on Facebook or tick tock or Instagram, right. But when I spend more time on LinkedIn, that’s where my business grows. So that’s what I want for you too. So if we’re going to spend more time on LinkedIn in 2024, if we’re going to incorporate it more into our marketing plan, you might have heard me say before we say this 100 times, but when I ask 100 people where their biggest opportunity came from their biggest contract, their biggest sale, their biggest job opportunity. 99% of the time, they tell me referrals, like 99% of the time they tell me referrals yet we don’t spend and LinkedIn is the biggest referral platform on the planet Earth. Okay, but we’re not spending 99% of our marketing time there, right we’re doing we’re still doing like dancing on Tik Tok. So, I’m not saying don’t do that other stuff. I’m saying, let’s use LinkedIn in 2024, or in the upcoming year, whatever that looks like when you’re listening to this in a way that it’s incorporated so that we are not leaving any of this money on the table. If we’re using it 10% of our marketing time, let’s make it 15% or 20%. And maybe add a little bit of our dollars to that or add our marketing dollars to it right? Let’s just increase it and see what happens to our business. What do you say? Alright, so some of the reasons why you might not be using it as much as men. Reason number one, that chat GPT said to me is incomplete or poor profiles. Many women either do not have a LinkedIn profile or possess one that inadequately represents their skills and experiences in this 100%. I agree with many women. First of all, I absolutely agree with the statement that says many women either do not have a LinkedIn profile or possess one that inadequately represents their skills and experiences. I just think we need to do a better job with this. I think it’s hard to do on LinkedIn profile. You know, I’m doing my part, right, we released a very low cost LinkedIn profile training program this year, you can find that at LinkedIn profile training.com. And every single thing we do that is a step above that training, includes we write your LinkedIn profile for you because it is important. And I get, you know, like if our roots are showing, if we haven’t done our hair, we might be hesitant to go out to a party, right? So it’s the same concept here. If you haven’t done your profile properly, you might not be as apt to spend your marketing time on LinkedIn. So take care of this, please, please take care of this today. So that’s off the table and it’s not in our way. Right The second thing under estimation have potential female professionals might feel discouraged if they believe managers or colleagues underestimate their potential on platforms like LinkedIn. And this one kind of is like a burr on my side, right? Because we know this is true. We know women know that very often. Our potential is underestimated. You know, you I’ve spent my, the first 20 years of 30 years of my career in the IT market, and I was often the only woman in a room and I 100%, my potential was underestimated. You know, until I opened my mouth, my potential was underestimated. So, you know, I’ve lived this. So I get, and I’m not the only one, I absolutely know that I am not the only one that has lived this, the only woman that has lived this. So if you’re feeling like the people that surround you, your managers, your colleagues, your co workers, even your clients, your other people in your coaching programs, people that might you may be marketing to, right? If you feel that they underestimate your potential, I’m going to say to that eff them, okay, like, just be you show up, show up big. And let’s, you know, absolutely slay that underestimation because it’s there. But you know what, like, let’s, let’s acknowledge that it’s there. And let’s say, Okay, I’m not letting that hold me back. Right, like, so what do I need to do to overcome that? I’m here to support you with that every step of the way, by the way. Okay. The third answer that Chad GPT gave me to my question is job application qualifications, women tend to apply for jobs only if they feel they meet 100% of the qualifications, which could limit their engagement on job focused platforms. Also 100% True, there are studies that show if there’s a list of 10 qualifications for a job, men will apply to it, if they have four of those qualifications, women need all 10 before they’ll even apply. And you might have had conversations with your friends about this, oh, I can’t apply for that job. Because you know, I’m not qualified. Well, okay. So what if you’re better qualified? What if you’re just generally better qualified, if you’re going to absolutely against delay that job kill that job? And you know, the people that have the can check the boxes of the qualifications? might not do as good a job at that job as you would? Right? How many opportunities? Are we losing out on? How much money are we leaving on the table? Because we do not feel qualified? Again, I didn’t I typically speak to entrepreneurial women. And I did not specify that in my chat. GPT prompt I probably should have. But I think that having this conversation generally serves us better for this conversation. So I left it. So even if you’re not looking for a job, that same qualifications issue might come up if you’re looking to get clients, right, you know, I heard somebody say one time and it was a guy, by the way, you might feel like a fifth grader, but to a third grader, you’re a big deal, right? So even if you don’t feel like the most qualified person in the world, if you’re qualified more than the person that’s coming to you for help, we can still support them. So let’s find those people on LinkedIn. And stop worrying about our qualifications. Okay, we know we can handle this work. And so number four, bias in work environments, women might need to fulfill more qualifications to be hired due to certain biases, potentially differing them from job seeking platforms. Again, we’ve all experienced this, most women have experienced this, okay, is bias and work environments stopping us from using LinkedIn more? I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about that. But maybe, maybe, right, do you? Like, I’d love to know what you think about this. By the way, if you go to the website page for this, if you go to Karen yankovich.com/ 258, you’ll see the show notes, and there’ll be a link there for SpeakPipe. I’d love to know what you think about these, pick one, pick three, pick old, all of them. And let me know what your thoughts are on this. Leave me a voice message, I will respond to every single one of them personally, maybe we’ll even do a follow up episode to this based on those right? I actually like that idea. So leave me your name and stuff. And we can maybe even showcase some of you in that follow up episode. But what do you think about that bias and work environments, women might need to fulfill more qualifications to be hired due to certain biases, potentially deferring them, or deterring them from job seeking platforms? If that’s happening to you, like, again, let’s get over that. How do we get over that? Right? Fundamentally, the work that I do is to hold your hand as you step over that line, right? That’s fundamentally what we do here and our she’s linked up programs, and if it’s bias and work environments, that’s preventing you from using LinkedIn as much as you as you maybe should. Let’s get over that. Okay. The fifth topic is website navigation. And the quote here is some users irrespective of gender find LinkedIn interface difficult to navigate. I find that BS frankly, I don’t know why it’s even here because it’s saying irrespective of gender, so I’m not even sure why it’s listed here. And again, it’s Chachi PT. We know it’s not perfect, right? But I just thought it was such a great talking I’m pleased to start the conversation. So website navigation really come on, let’s get over that. If you can’t figure out how to get around LinkedIn, book a call my calendar, I’ll help you. Okay, number six, professional networking perception. LinkedIn, primarily brands itself as a professional networking site, which might not align with everyone’s intention or preferences. Okay? That may be true. But if you don’t understand the power of networking, as you’re building your brand, and you’re building your business, that’s something you need to do some work on, do some journaling, do some visualization, do whatever it is you do, talk to your coach, talk to your, you know, talk to your therapist, talk to your know, your mastermind, people, right? We need to be doing better networking, you know, that we heard all the time. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, you’re the some of the people you surround yourself with. And then we don’t network, right? We need to network we need great, amazing, incredible people in our life. And this is where it happens. LinkedIn is where this professional networking happens, right? LinkedIn, primarily brands itself as a professional networking site. So if networking gives you the heebie jeebies, you know, I’m not asking you to go from 10% of your marketing time to 90%, your marketing time ago, I’m asking you from 10 to 20. Okay, and maybe maybe part of that is, you know, really embracing the concept of networking for 2024, or the upcoming year, right? Maybe that’s what that looks like. And that, again, one conversation, one great conversation with somebody that you didn’t even believe could be in your world. It could change everything for you and for your business, right. But you have to have those conversations to get there. Alright, number seven ambition bias. There’s a misconception that women are less ambitious, which could impact their inclination to use a platform centered around career progression. So here’s the thing, chat GPT, if I can call you out a little bit? If it’s a misconception, why are you listing it here? Because if we are, if women are, are as ambitious as men, then why would it impact our inclination to use a platform centered around career progression? Right? So like, there’s a part of me that almost sees gender bias in these answers, right? Like ambition bias, there’s a misconception that women are less ambitious, which could impact their inclination to use a platform centered around career progression. I don’t know that kind of just that whole statement kind of annoys me. I do think women are ambitious, as ambitious as men. I think the disconnect is not around the ambition, it’s around the energy, our ambitions, we tend to have amazing ambitions. And let’s get real, we can think bigger, I think we can think bigger. But it’s our energy that doesn’t match our ambitions. Right. And that’s where we need to that’s where we’ve got some work to do. So maybe, maybe it’s actually not a myth and misconception that women are as ambitious, maybe women are not as ambitious, maybe we don’t look at it and say, I want to be the CEO, maybe, you know, I don’t know, maybe we need to do a better job of dreaming bigger, right?

You know, let me take a minute here. And just kind of tell you a little bit about our she sent up program, you know, this program has evolved greatly over the years. And it’s evolved to the point right now where our goal is to help you dream big. Get people on your calendar, like we talked, like I mentioned earlier, like the most amazing people that you can network with, so that you can achieve these big dreams. And this is happening for our women. First thing that happens when you join us is we, we you and I get to have a call where we have some real clarity on what that big dream is. And let me tell you something, this if I had to pick a superpower, this is my superpower is helping you understand how you can create a big fat, juicy content, you know, offering for whatever it is that you do. And then from there, our team writes your LinkedIn profile for you. Right, because we talked about earlier that profile, incomplete profile it gets in our way, we don’t want that to happen. Either, we will write your profile for you. And then from there, we have a very simple system that we teach, to help you put calls on your calendar consistently. We do this in a way that a year surrounded by other women that are just amazing. I wake up every single morning, so grateful for the amazing women I get to have in my life. And sometimes, you know, I got a message from somebody yesterday that said, thank you so much for believing in me. Like it breaks my heart a little bit. I’m happy to be the person that’s believing in them. But I also breaks my heart a little bit. There’s so many women that don’t have people in their life that believe in them. So this is what we do. This is what surrounds the work that we do. LinkedIn and PR the strategies we teach. But fundamentally, what we’re helping you do is step into your next chapter and a strong powerful way for more impact, influence and income. So if you want to know what that looks like, I would love to see your name on the calendar, Karen yankovich.com/call get you to the calendar, grab a spot on the calendar and we can chat and see if maybe this upcoming year is the year that you are going to change everything for yourself. Right Karen yankovich.com/call it no obligation calls these are just calls to get a sense of if it’s a fit. If I first of all, if it’s if the strategies I teach I think are a fit To support you, and then beyond that, if I think it’s the right time for you, and if I think it’s a fit to work together, and, and then if you, you’ve got to think it’s a fit for you as well. And if we both agreed to fit, we’ll talk about what it looks like to get you some help. Either way, you’re gonna get a lot of value from that call. So I’d love to see your name on the calendar. All right, back to our list. The eighth thing on the list, which is very similar to the first thing on the list, it says profile pressure. There’s a perception that individuals are judged based on the sophistication of their LinkedIn profiles, which may deter some from creating or updating one back to the same answer for number one day, let’s get this off your plate. Let’s do this, right, like, if nothing if you get nothing else from this episode, please, let’s get your profile done. And a lot of people you might be thinking, Well, I think my profile is pretty good. And maybe it is. But is it really magnetic? Is it bringing people to you? Or do you feel like you got to spam people to get business? If you’re not feeling like it’s magnetic, and it’s keyword rich? And it’s speaking to your exact right person? Again, grab a call on the calendar. All right, number nine, gender disparity in certain industries, certain industries with a male dominated workforce might have a higher male presence on LinkedIn. Sure, that’s true. But I don’t understand why I don’t I don’t think I think this is kind of a BS answer to this question. Because obviously, there’s certain industries that have a women a female dominated workforce, right? So that workforce might have a higher female presence on LinkedIn. So it doesn’t answer the question as to why more women, more men are on wet on late spending time on LinkedIn than women. So I kind of feel like that’s a BS answer. And number 10. privacy concerns, some women might be cautious about sharing personal information and professional details publicly. This is what I hear a lot about. In fact, very often, when I when we have these calls with people,

we look at your LinkedIn profile. And if I’m not and connected with you already, I’m like, you know, I can’t see your picture. I’m like, wait, what? Right like you sometimes we don’t even know the privacy settings we have on our LinkedIn profile. And the reality is, if LinkedIn is the number one content hub on in the world, if it is the number one networking business networking site in the world, then take your the bag off your head, okay? And show up and make it all public. And just don’t put anything on there that you’re worried about. Right? If and I am saying this like, because I think that they’re not wrong about this that many women are cautious about sharing personal information. So then don’t share anything you don’t want to share. Right? Like double check, what email address Do you have out there, double check what information you have on there. And then let’s take the bag off our heads and show up and shine a light on who we are so that we can be connecting with people at the highest level. All right, so I said that was the first time and I said there’s a few that I didn’t love. So I asked for 10 more, and it gave me six more. So let me go through these six last six quickly. The 11th one, I guess is men use LinkedIn more than women with statistics from January 20 to 2022, showing that 57.2% of users were men and 42.8 were female. So all this is really doing is corroborating the fact that men use LinkedIn more than women. And my my goal on this planet is to change that. Right? One woman at a time. Number 12 women may perceive platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest is more appealing or sexy compared to LinkedIn. Well, this is another one that kind of gets my goat if that’s the saying anymore. What’s sexy is having a lot of money in the bank. Like that’s what sexy, what sexy is being able to go to the mall and buy whatever you want. What sexy is to be able to buy a first class ticket on an aeroplane. Right? Not Pinterest, right? So if this is your perception, please, let’s get over this. Okay, this is where, again, let’s just level it up, level it up. Alright, number three are 13 Subtle societal messages might make women feel that they are too much too strong or too loud, causing them to be less assertive or visible in professional settings like LinkedIn. This is a big one. This is one that I definitely understand. And I probably have experienced what we’ve all probably experienced. Right. But, you know, if you go back to Episode One of this podcast, Karen yankovich.com/ 001, you’re going to hear me talk about the fact that I you know, went to school in the 70s and, and 80s. And women and in the early 70s and late 60s women, you know, women should be seen and not heard. What is it when girls are sugar and spice and everything nice. Right? So I had a lot to unlearn to be where I ought to be sitting here right now with a microphone in my hand, right? I had a lot to unlearn. And those societal messages are not gone. There’s, I mean, if not, if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s how the gender roles are still so ensconced in our in our society. And, you know, too much too strong, too loud. Who cares? I’m gonna go back to who cares, right when you’re sitting in your first class seat on the airplane. You know, let people tell you, you’re too much too strong or too loud. I don’t think you necessarily need to be assertive, but I do think you need to be visible. Okay, I do think you need to be more visible and assertive. You know, listen, I guess I’m gonna say this, I guess it’s the way you define assertive. Right? You can, I’m going to, I’m going to challenge you to look at this, if this is something that you resonated with, when I read it, and I definitely did, I’m going to challenge myself and challenge you to look at the way you define the word assertive, right? I’m looking at the word assertive. And it’s like, is that a bad thing? Right. Is that a? I think, like, I thought it was right. Like my initial reaction was assertive was not a positive word. Well, what if it was assertive just means like, standing up for yourself and showing up for yourself and showing up for your community and showing up for people, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean, elbowing your way to the front of the crowd, right? So redefine this, because it’s probably something that you’re not going to, it’s not going to happen overnight, right, you’re gonna have to continue to come back to this, if, if it’s something you resonate with, you can’t undo many, many years of societal, you know, societal training in your body or societal messages in your body. Just because you decided to write it’s gonna take some time, you know, you’re going to revert back to it. So it’s something that you might have to work on, continually. And maybe it’s something that you want to take a journal on after this episode. All right, number 14, a gender bias exists in certain work environments, which might result in women feeling the need to meet more qualifications than their male counterparts before applying for jobs or even promoting themselves as on a professional platform. And I definitely can get this remember, like the decades that I grew up in, I definitely get this. I hope that it’s not, it doesn’t continue to be true. But I think that it, it does continue to be true. So I’m watching the show called Lessons in chemistry. Have you seen it? At the time I’m recording this, I think I just watched episode three last night. And here’s a woman who’s a brilliant chemist, a brilliant granted, this is in the 70s. I know, the 60s, I think, maybe even late 50s. So we’re not there anymore. Okay. So I don’t want to say I don’t want to be speaking as ever, but I want to talk about it, and then talk about how I don’t think some of it has not changed. So lessons in chemistry is about a woman who is a brilliant chemist, but because she’s a woman, nobody will give her what she deserves. If you watch if you I mean, like I have experienced some of the things that I’ve that I see that show it is a little triggering sometimes, right? If you watch this show, you know, in there’s a there’s a I don’t want to give away if you haven’t watched the show, and I want to give it away. But basically, she’s a brilliant chemist, and she’s relegated to glorified secretary, because she’s a woman. And they make no bones about it in the 60s in the 50s and 60s and 70s. no bones about the fact that she’s a woman and not deserving of this. And you know, there’s some stuff that happens in episode three that like, make your and she stands up for herself, by the way. And again, I’m only on Episode Three, two, I don’t know where it’s gonna go. But that’s what this one is talking about the society, the gender bias that exists in certain work environments. I wish I could sit here and tell you that that was not the case anymore. I remember specifically. But two years ago, I owned I was the president of a company and I was sitting with, we had like a informal board of directors. And we were like salespeople, and we were going out to do some, we had some projects on the table. And we were doing like a brainstorming thing. And we had like, some of the stuff had to get like typed up. And it was sitting in the meeting. It was me and like three or three guys. And I finally like grabbed a laptop and just started typing it all up. And then I looked up and said, I need every one of you to forget that I can type this fast. Because I just I’m like, You know what it was like somebody had to do it. So I just did it. But I remember thinking, This is insane. I am the president of this company. And they all sat there, like waiting for me to type up the notes of this. Right. And I did it because it needed to get done at that moment. But this was like in the 2000s. Yeah, this was in the maybe the late 90s. But the early 2000s. This was not that long ago. Right. So So I say this because I do I wish I could tell you that I think it was completely gone. It’s not. Alright, I’m gonna rambling now. Number 15. intimidation is a significant reason why many women choose not to negotiate their salaries, which may correlate with less assertive networking or self promotion on LinkedIn? Again, I wish this wasn’t true. It probably is. Right? It probably is. We’re intimidated. We don’t feel like we have all the qualifications. We don’t know that we can necessarily stand up for ourselves. Right? This woman in lessons in chemistry was certainly not letting herself be intimidated. There were certain things she had to accept, that she didn’t want to accept. But she did not let herself be intimidated by these things. It was just a fact. Right? So you know, again, this is why I do the work I do if you if this resonates with you, book a call on my calendar because I want this to change for you. And by the way, when you take control of your brand, you’re taking control of your own destiny. Right. And there’s less reason to be intimidated. You’re in less situations where intimidation is even an issue. All right, the 16th and last thing on my list here are on the lat. The list that Chad GPT gave me is the platform’s primary audience consists of b2b users where 80% of social So media leads in this sector are generated. Now I don’t know what this has to do with men or women. But I’m leaving this one in because this is an important one 80% of social media leads are generated from LinkedIn. And there’s there’s citations for all this stuff. If you don’t know what citations are, let me or the citation for that one is this kinsa.com link. The fact of the matter is, if you’re listening to this and say, Yeah, but Karen, I’m b2c, then I’m going to refer you back to an episode that I did a little while ago. And it’ll be linked in the show notes where I talked about the three types of relationships that you need to be building on LinkedIn, the first type of relationship is who’s your client? Let’s make sure we’re connecting with them. And if you’re b2c, yeah, maybe that’s maybe LinkedIn is that place, maybe it’s not. But the second two types of relationships, which is where I spend 80% to 90%, of my LinkedIn strategy with, and that’s what I teach other people to do, are what other people can you be talking to that can refer business to you. So possible referral partners where those conversations are not, here’s what I do, give me your credit card, those conversations, or here’s what I do, who do you know, even if you have a b2c program, or product or service, that’s a b2b relationship. And LinkedIn is about building relationships. And then the third category is, who are the journalists that you need to be meeting with and building relationships with that is another b2b relationship. So if you hear this statistic that 80% of social media leads in the sector are generated on LinkedIn, and you’re like, in the b2b sector, and you’re like, I’m not b2b and b2c, you are leaving an incredible amount of money on the table. Because the most wealth building categories of those three categories I listed are those second two b2b categories. And it’s simple, it can be simple. And I’m not asking you to do this times a million, and I’m not ever going to ask you to do a cold. And I’m happy to tell you what it looks like to do this and how to get some help doing this, just grab a spot on my calendar, it’s the easiest way to do that. So I’m not going to recap this, because I’m already like way over the time that I typically like to spend on these episodes. But I felt like this was a would be kind of an interesting one to do. And I am going to, I would encourage you to either go to Karen yankovich.com/speakpipe. And leave me a message there or just go to the show notes of this episode, wherever you’re watching it, there’ll be a link to SpeakPipe. I would love to know what you think about this. Because I get enough people respond to this. And this is what I one of the things I like about this the way what I’m talking about right now is it’s a way to make this podcast less about me talking at you, and more me talking with you, which is what I really want to do more of. So if you leave me a message on SpeakPipe, I will respond to your message. And maybe we can make that part of an upcoming episode where I can do a part two of this, and get your thoughts on all of this. And I can showcase you and your business in this episode. So I’d love to know what you think about this. I’d love to know if there’s any of these that stood out for you. And PS, I’d love to know if you have a completely different opinion on it that makes you think that what I said is BS, I want to hear this. I want to hear that, right? Because there’s, there’s no one right way to do this. And I’m so happy to engage these conversations because this is how change happens. Right? This is how change happens. So I want there to be change. I want there to be more wealthy women in the world, women with money change the world. Okay, so let’s get over ourselves and double our the amount of time and money that we’re currently spending on our LinkedIn marketing and our strategies and see what it does for our business. I think you’re going to be amazed not even surprised and you’re going to be freaking amazed. So remember, my mission on planet Earth is to create more wealthy women of influence. If you want to hang out with the incredible women that I get to hang out with in our she’s linked up program. Grab a spot on the calendar at Karen yankovich.com/call. If you listen before, if you love what you hear today, you know I love to hear from you. I talked a little bit about how you can leave us a message. But also leave leave me a review wherever you’re watching this on Apple podcasts or wherever. I’d love for you to take a quick screenshot of this episode and share it on social media. Use the hashtag good girls get rich tag me I’m at Karen Yankovich. And I’ll be sure to share your posts with my audience. And this is how we all get more visibility. Right. I want to help you I want there to be more wealthy women in the world. I am happy to get your profiles in front of my audience but start with you got to share this first so I can do that. Again. Karen yankovich.com/ 258 get you all the links for everything we talked about in this episode. And I really look forward to maybe doing a part two of this so I look forward to hearing your your messages on SpeakPipe I am here with for you. I’m here for you today. I’m here for you tomorrow and I would love to do this together with you. This can be simple. This can be easy. I will be back here again next week with another episode.

237 – Escaping the Procrastinate Training Trap

This week’s episode of Good Girls Get Rich is brought to you by Uplevel Media CEO and LinkedIn expert, Karen Yankovich. In this episode, Karen Yankovich explores the concept of balancing professional training, certifications, and the practical, hands-on side of doing business.

Stuck in the procrastination training trap? This is how to escape.

#GoodGirlsGetRich

We want to hear your thoughts on this episode! Leave us a message on Speakpipe or email us at info@karenyankovich.com.

About the Episode:

Training and certifications have their place, but they should be tools, not the core of your business. What drives a business forward is YOU. It’s about networking, building relationships, and gaining real-life experience. Don’t get so caught up chasing qualifications that you miss out on the fundamental aspects of growing your business.

Karen dives deeper into the concept of ‘procrastinate training’, or “procrasti-training” where we pile up training after training without considering the direct benefits to our businesses. Instead, focus your time, energy, and finances on what can rapidly bring you new clients.

The aim is clear: do what you love, do what you’re amazing at, and become a wealthy woman of influence. To achieve this, think bigger. Draw in higher-ticket clients. Delegate tasks that take you out of your zone of genius. You deserve that!

You’re invited to reach out, share your thoughts, spread the word about this podcast, and help more women succeed.

Remember: No more procrasti- training! Your journey towards being a wealthy woman of influence begins today.

Episode Spotlights:

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

Help Us Spread the Word!

It would be awesome if you shared the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast with your fellow entrepreneurs on twitter. Click here to tweet some love!

If this episode has taught you just one thing, I would love if you could head on over to Apple Podcasts and SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW! And if you’re moved to, kindly leave us a rating and review. Maybe you’ll get a shout out on the show!

Ways to Subscribe to Good Girls Get Rich:

Read the Transcript

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast episode 237.

Intro 0:05
Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl, stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:23
Hello, this is your host, Karen Yankovich. And are you overflowing with certifications, but you’re still not landing actual clients. This was recently described to me as procrastinate training. And I want to talk today in this episode about why this might be happening. And the pitfalls of over reliance on training. And I get it I have been there, right. We know that our world loves its formal education. It loves qualifications and why wouldn’t it right certifications have become these like shiny badges that we wear badges that say, I know this. I’m an expert at that. But guess what we’re doing today, right? Today, what I want to do on this episode is turn the tables and shine a light on something that’s been showing up to me a ton lately, and I do a lot of calls with a lot of entrepreneurial women. And I see I’m seeing this more and more. What we’re going to do now is we’re gonna dive headfirst into a conversation about the need for hands on practical experience. Right, the relevancy of the information we’re learning and the importance of those often overlooked soft skills. So we’re going there. We’re going there today. Okay. So let me ask you this. Are you decked out with a bunch of certifications? And you know, listen, I love a good certification. I am always taking new training class, but sometimes, maybe you’re decked out with these certifications, and you’ll find that they’re not quite translating into success, new clients actual money in the bank, maybe you invested in a coach who’s working with you on all the things right websites, branding, colors, your emails, your your funnels, right, your products, your services, maybe you’ve got a LinkedIn profile that’s loaded with qualifications, right, but somehow, it just doesn’t really reflect who you are, what you’re truly capable of was just like, I do all these things, right. It’s like resume, like, so if you’ve not addressed some of these questions, then buckle up, because this episode is tailor made just for you. I’m bringing my jersey into this one today. Because here’s what I’m seeing. What I’m seeing is that so many people are doing this. And then I say like, Okay, I hear all this. And I, I you get a lot of points for all the hard work you’re putting into this. But where’s the money? Like, where’s the money? And then their next line? I can predict it? It’s like, yep, that’s the problem, Karen. That’s the problem, Karen, and I am not here to diss other coaches and other programs. But what I’m seeing is more and more programs, more and more people talking about all the things because listen, you invest in a coach, and you come out of it with a website, you feel like you’re, you know, your money was well spent, right? But what I want is for you to actually have clients, right? I want you to make some money so that you can pay people to do things like create your website, create your branding, and do all the things create your funnels, oh, my goodness, like pay somebody to do that stuff. Right? So let me give you a couple of things that I see when I see over reliance on certifications. And I’m not, I’m not sitting here to say that there’s that certifications don’t have their place, they absolutely have their place. It’s just not in place of the client getting stuff, right. Because what sometimes happens, what I find sometimes happens is you’re coming to the actual real life situations with not enough practical experience. Right? So a lot of times he certifications they they emphasize theoretical knowledge over practical skills, right. And I know that a lot of code certification programs expect you to have to work with a certain number of clients and, and I love that you get to do that, right? But I want to make sure that you’re doing that, right, because you have all the qualifications in the world. But if you don’t have the hands on experience, to effectively, like do the work you’re there to do, then you’re never going to you’re never gonna make any money. And you know, my commitment is to be have there be more wealthy women in the world. And we only could do that if we’re making money, right? Not if we’re just getting more and more certifications. And frankly, one of the things that I’m seeing lately is a lot of these certifications have outdated or like less relevant information because things change so fast. Things are changing so fast, especially like in the online marketing world, right. This is why one of the things we do just a little pitch here for for the work that we do here in our she’s linked up program. The first thing I do when I work with people and she’s linked up is we have a call that’s like, Okay, where’s the money? Like, what’s the quickest path for you making 5000 10,000 $50,000?

Speaker 2 4:48
Because I know that you’ve got the expertise, right?

Karen Yankovich 4:52
I know about the expertise to do this work. It’s just about positioning you with all of these certifications and then getting you putting up plan in place to land that first client. My goal for everyone that joins our shoes like duck program is for them to be making money, by the end of it, not just have like a pretty LinkedIn profile, yes, you’re gonna have a pretty LinkedIn profile. But more importantly, you’re going to have a client, you’re going to have a media hit, right? Because the media hits help give you the credibility to help you land that client, all the certifications in the world aren’t going to do that, right? They’re not going to do that. You need to, you need to be doing the client getting work. So you know what that looks like, grab a spot on our calendar, Karen yankovich.com/call get you on the calendar, we can have a chat about what that might look like for you. The next thing that I’m seeing that I want to address that sometimes we are over reliant on these credentials, right, we’re focusing so much on gaining more certifications. And it leads to like, like, almost like a false sense of competency. Right. And I know you’re good at what you do, right. But we overlook the things that we are naturally good at. Because well, I’m certified in this well, is that what you’re naturally good at? Is that what you love to do? Right? So I you need to be quick on your feet in this online marketing world, right? It’s a fast paced, ever changing world right now. And I’m not saying like you, I want you to build ease into this. I’m not saying that you need to be constantly on top of things. But it’s okay. It’s confident to say, I don’t know, let me check this out and get back to you, right. And if you’re over relying on your credentials, and that’s where you’re coming from, that’s the position you’re coming from. When you have sales calls and enrollment calls for people to bring into your world. You’re not going to clip you’re not going to land them, they’re going to want to know what your what your actual competency is, right? Not your certifications. So we have to be less reliant on credentials, and more reliant in our more trusting of ourselves more trusting that we know what we’re doing, and we can make this happen. Okay, so And while we’re doing this, I want to reference you back to episode of this show that I did years ago with Kendrick Shope Kendrick talked about the fact that when she started to build her coaching business, which is now a, probably a multiple seven figure business, she decided that she was going to do 100, free, like discovery calls 100. Because discovery calls are the best way for you to learn and build your skills in enrolling people into your program, not more certifications, it’s actually getting on the phone with people. Okay? So when you’re when we’re over reliant on credentials, we’re neglecting the soft skills, the skills of communication and leadership, critical thinking, right? Like, these are the things that are going to help you bring more people into your world. And frankly, it’s comes from your heart, not from your head. That’s what helps bring more people into your world. Okay, the next thing I want to talk about is, and this is a big one, oh, my gosh, this is a big one, the time consumption of this, right? More certification means dedicating more time to studying and sending courses and passing exams. And, you know, this could otherwise be spent gaining practical experience doing those 100 calls, networking, getting on the phone with people achieving goals that are going to help you actually land the client, right. And here’s the thing to the opportunity cost you’re missing by spending another month or another three months or another six months, working on all the things you think you need to have in place, right? These certifications, these credentials, these webs, you know, the all the things you think you need to have in place, every day that goes by that you’re doing that, and not the client getting stuff. There’s a missed opportunity cost, it costs you money. So the time and energy that you spend earning all these certifications is this missed opportunity. Because Because you could have used that same time and energy, building relationships, right getting on the phone with people actually going out and networking, right meeting the kinds of people that can lead to your bigger ticket opportunities. And that’s what we want here. If you’re listening to the show, that’s we want to hear, you’re not going to get be a wealthy woman by selling a pen, you’re only going to be a become a wealthy women when you’re selling 100,000 pens at a time. Right? So what does that 100,000 Pen look like you got to go out and talk to people, right? You have to talk to people and that when you don’t have time for that, then there’s an opportunity cost to that. And all of this, and this is huge. This is huge. All of this puts a huge financial strain on you and on your business because this stuff’s expensive, right? And putting your resources to these things to trucks from other areas, right, like personal growth opportunities, like you know, hiring a VA that can help you get your emails out so that you can get out networking or getting on the phone with people or building those relationships, maybe joining a mastermind, right things that where you are surrounded with other people who are lifting you up and are there for your success, not just training you and certifying you in something now listen, I want to say again that I am I there’s nothing wrong with training and certifications, right, we have a certification program that we’re working on right now for virtual assistants to be certified in the strategies that we teach to support their clients. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I so and I’ve got a ton of training and certifications, I’m always working on one or another. But I don’t do these, I don’t want to be over reliant on these, because I know that what makes my business profitable is not the certifications is not the training. It is me talking to people. It’s getting out there and talking to people getting on the phone, getting on Zoom, and talking to people, right, joining masterminds, you know, building relationships, getting, you know, finding ways to be interviewed on podcasts, building relationships with other podcast hosts, so that my podcasts and the work that I do get showcased in front of their audience, right? This is where I need to best spend my time. So it’s not doesn’t mean that I’m not training and getting credentials, but I’m only doing that after I do the client getting stuff. Right. And that’s really at the heart of what I want to talk about here. Because, you know, I talked about this earlier that we that I this was referred to me recently as procrastinate training. And I get that I get that, especially as women, we like to check off boxes, we like our to do list, right? Like, Oh, I gotta do this, gonna do this, I gotta do this, I gotta do this. I want you to have money in the bank. And, you know, listen, I procrastinate with the best of them. I procrastinate. And right before I recorded this episode, I’m like, kind of laughing as I’m saying this because it wasn’t a training, but I was doing something else. Right? So what’s gonna happen, but just take a step back. All right, I’m gonna kind of slow down a little bit here, take a step back. And think about the things that you are invested in right now. The trainings, the programs you’re invested in? Are they leading to a very quick opportunity to bring in a new client? If not, we need to talk, we need to talk because that is why that is for front and center of all the work we do. And she’s linked up, I want you to have the bank account, to hire people to do all these things that you’re getting all this training to do, right, the branding and all that other stuff. So let’s recap this a second, right over reliance on on certifications, procrastinate training, right gives you less practical experience, over reliance on credentials is giving you like not enough real life conversation experience. Right. And we’re gonna refer back to Kendricks episode on the show, because it was brilliant. It takes up time that you could be spending on the client getting stuff on the relationship building stuff. And frankly, it’s a financial strain, because you can’t keep putting money out and training without even seeing an opportunity where the money is going to come back in. Right? My goal, in this show, good girls get rich, I want you to be doing what you love to do. I want you to be doing what you’re good at. And I want you to be a wealthy woman of influence. Okay, but it starts with really thinking bigger, and not thinking that you have to do all the things. But thinking like, Well, how do I quickly get some of these higher ticket clients so that I can pay people to do the things that are taking me out of my zone of genius? No more procrastinate training, okay, no more progressive training. You want to invest in yourself, by all means invest in yourself, go get a massage, do some work with a mindset coach, get some sales call training, right? Get on the phone and talk to people and stop procrastinating. Okay, so if you loved if you if you love what you’re listening to today, or if you’ve listened before, you know, we love to hear from you. So make sure you’re following this podcast on Apple podcasts or wherever you’re listening. I love your reviews, I would love a review, because that helps me understand what shows are resonating with my audience. And of course, most importantly, I’d love for you to share this episode on social media. Use the hashtag good girls get rich tag me so that I can be sure to see it so that I can share your posts with my audience. And we can both get more visibility that way, right? In the show notes, which you can check out at Karen yankovich.com/ 237. There’s a link for SpeakPipe where you can leave an audio message I respond to every one of those personally. So just leave a message say hello. Tell me an episode that you loved. Maybe a guest you want me to interview or a topic you want me to talk about? Just go to Karen yankovich.com/ 237. And you will see that link right there. Ladies, no more procrastinate training. Okay, can I hear that? Can you shout that across the room? No more progressive training. Okay, I am here to support you. I’m here to support you. to level up your business to level up your life. I would love to see your name on my calendar. Let’s lift each other up, support each other. All good things happen when there’s more wealthy women in the world and it starts with you. Alright, see you back here next week for another episode of The Good girls get rich podcast.

125 – Accumulating LinkedIn Recommendations

This week’s episode of Good Girls Get Rich is brought to you by Uplevel Media CEO and LinkedIn expert, Karen Yankovich. In this episode, Karen shares how to accumulate LinkedIn Recommendations.

LinkedIn Recommendations show the world who you are and why they can trust you. The more Recommendations you have, the better. Karen shares how to accumulate Recommendations.

#GoodGirlsGetRich

We want to hear your thoughts on this episode! Leave us a message on Speakpipe or email us at info@karenyankovich.com.

About the Episode:

Most likely, you already have testimonials on your website. Testimonials are an important tool to show others that they can trust you and your business, but what if there were an even more effective way to utilize those testimonials? Enter LinkedIn Recommendations.

When reading testimonials on a website, there’s no way to know if those testimonials are genuine or if they came from that person’s family and friends. LinkedIn Recommendations, however, are written by LinkedIn users, so you know who is writing the Recommendation. Another benefit is that once someone reads a Recommendation, they can then click through to the profile of the person who left the Recommendation and ask additional questions about the person they’re looking to work with.

How to Accumulate LinkedIn Recommendations

You might be wondering, “How do I get Recommendations?” The most effective way is to give genuine Recommendations strategically. Think about who it is that might write a Recommendation for you if you write a Recommendation for them.

Another way to get Recommendations is to ask for them. If someone is complementing your work, try asking, “Would you mind popping that in a LinkedIn Recommendation?” More often than not, they’ll do it. It’s also okay to cold ask.

Start giving LinkedIn Recommendations, accumulate them for yourself, and watch your business opportunities skyrocket.

Episode Spotlights:

  • Where to find everything for this week’s episode: karenyankovich.com/125
  • Introducing this episode’s topic (1:53)
  • The confidence to use LinkedIn Recommendations (3:45)
  • The power of LinkedIn Recommendations (4:45)
  • What is a LinkedIn Recommendation? (5:24)
  • How to get Recommendations (6:49)
  • How to give great Recommendations (12:15)
  • Episode recap (14:27)

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

Help Us Spread the Word!

It would be awesome if you shared the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast with your fellow entrepreneurs on twitter. Click here to tweet some love!

If this episode has taught you just one thing, I would love if you could head on over to Apple Podcasts and SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW! And if you’re moved to, kindly leave us a rating and review. Maybe you’ll get a shout out on the show!

Ways to Subscribe to Good Girls Get Rich:

Read the Transcript

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast Episode 125.

Intro 0:06
Welcome to the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are, girl. Stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies, and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:24
Hello, I’m your host, Karen Yankovich. And this is Episode 125 of the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast. And we are brought to you by Uplevel Media where we teach simple relationship and heart based LinkedIn marketing to women that gets you on the phone consistently with your perfect people, people who you can’t wait to have the opportunity to chat with people who can change your business, your life and your bank balance for ever. Basically, what we teach is digital marketing with the human touch. We want you to actually get on the phone with people because we know that’s where the money is. So if you’ve listened before or if you love what you hear today, you know, we love to hear from you. So take a quick screenshot of this episode as you’re listening, share it out on your social media. tag me I’m @karenyankovich so that I can see it and I can share it with my audience. You know, we love your ratings and reviews. Also, they help us get a better handle on the kinds of shows you guys like to see. So also in the show notes for this episode, there’s a link for Speakpipe where we you can leave us an audio review, I would love that. Just go to karenyankovich.com/125. And you’ll see the blog for this page, you’ll see the link to Speakpipe and I can play it on the show. Give you a shout out to my audience. Check that out and leave us a review. Or maybe you just want to leave me a message. Tell me something you loved about the episode Tell me somebody that you think we should interview on the show, whatever, whatever you think we want to hear from you. So we’re going to be talking about today is LinkedIn Recommendations, and we’re living in a virtual world right now. And frankly one I think we’ve been living in For a long time, I think we’re just all starting to see the power of our virtual world. It’s been there forever. But when we’re only looking at the virtual things in our life, it becomes more visible and more powerful and more obvious to us. Right? And you know, mainly because we’re seeing doing so much less than person, we’re really seeing the impact of what our first impression is digitally, right? If you want to work with somebody, anybody that you want to give your money to, the first thing you do is a search on them. Right? See what comes up, you know, and people doing that for you, right? People are searching you before they invest in you. Hopefully your website will come up, right and hopefully on your website, you’ll have some testimonials, nice things that people say about you. But you handpick them, right? Of course you did. I did do right. That’s what we do. We handpick the testimonials that we want to have on our website. And we know that when we’re looking at other people’s websites, we know that they handpick their testimonials. You know even when someone asks you for references before They work with you. You can pick them, maybe you call them ahead of time and say Is it okay? If I, you know, give your name out to someone as a reference? Of course you do. That’s what I do. That’s what we should do. That’s what you should be doing right? So can you relate? We’re good soldiers, right? We learn digital marketing. We do what our website designers tell us to do. We handpick some great testimonials and put them on our website. Listen, I don’t hire a plumber and tell them how to fix my pipes. Right? So when I do what my website designer says, what all of the digital marketing mentors I’ve had have said over the years, right from Marie Forleo, two coaches, I’ve had two mastermind, buddies, right, everybody says, Put some testimonials on your website, and that’s what I do. And probably that’s what you do, too. Can you relate to that? But imagine in addition to that, if the next time somebody asks you for references, you have the confidence to say, just go on over to my LinkedIn profile. There’s 25, 45, 55, 85 Whatever LinkedIn recommendations there, and you’re welcome to reach out to any of those people, you can just click right through to them. And, you know, ask them anything you want about the work that we’ve done together. That, my friend is confidence, right? Yes, you can still provide a list of references. But when you can confidently send people to your website, when they’re looking to find out more about working with you, or confidently send people to your LinkedIn profile, when people are looking to work with you, that is powerful stuff. That is powerful stuff. And that is going to make you stand out from everyone else. Maybe you’ll still give them a list of references because you don’t want to make them have more work to hire you. Right? You want to make it easy for them. But the difference too is they can click right through to that recommendation to the person’s profile that left the recommendation. See how credible they are. You know, we can give references and we don’t know if they’re your brother or sister or cousin or uncle or next door neighbor, right? We don’t know That. So, you know, by by using LinkedIn recommendations as a way for people to check you know to check into the work you do, they can click right through the recommendation to see the profile of the person that left the recommendation. They can reach out to them right there on LinkedIn makes it really easy. And it is super, super powerful. Can you see that? So let’s talk about what our LinkedIn recommendation is. So a LinkedIn there’s two different ways that you can kind of get support from other people or leave support for other people on LinkedIn. One is endorsements and skills and endorsements. We’re not talking about that. That’s when people click on that they are endorsing you for a skill that you have listed on your on your profile. We’re not talking about that today. I love that. Okay, but don’t, don’t look at that. Like you’re being helpful to someone. You are being helpful to them, but nowhere near as helpful as you if you’re leaving them a recommendation. So if you want to do something nice for someone By all means, write them a recommendation, don’t just take the easy way out and click that endorsed button endorse away. I think endorsing people is a great way to just build goodwill. In LinkedIn, I kind of call it sprinkling fairy dust on your LinkedIn network. But recommendations, that is something really powerful you’re doing for someone I recommend recommendation is, was where you say, you know, I’ve worked with Mary, and we worked on a project together. And it was so beautiful to work on the project with her because I just, it was so nice to work with somebody where I knew that whatever was in her lap was going to get done. Not only was she going to succeed at it, she was going to exceed my expectations every single time. She picked up the ball when I dropped it a few times. And she’s been amazing to work with. That’s a recommendation, right? That’s a recommendation. And that’s what we’re talking about here. So I’m saying to you, I want you to get more recommendations, and maybe you’re thinking in your head. Well, Karen, how do I get I understand how I give recommendations. I’m going to talk more about that. But how do I know Get more recommendations. Well, one way you get more recommendations is to give more recommendations, just give more recommendations, especially if it’s somebody that you did partner with on a project. Let’s say you and another coach, were partnering on a project for a client. And at the end of it, it was just so nice to have a supportive that other coach, and you write a recommendation for them on LinkedIn, there’s a pretty good chance they’re going to say, huh, good idea. Let me write one back. Right. So, so give recommendation strategically, of course, to people that you think can will possibly write one back for you. But don’t just do that. Because I want you to be just really, really generous with this. If you had, you know, I mean, I wrote a recommendation one time for someone that did a facial I was at a estheticians place and somehow we got talking about LinkedIn and she was so excited about using LinkedIn that I wrote her a great recommendation after I left there because she was awesome. And I loved that she was using LinkedIn right now. It’s not gonna help me But where it does help me is like that social karma stuff, right? So don’t just give recommendations in an attempt to get one back, give them generously freely. I have a client one time that wrote a recommendation for their medical doctor and the medical doctor just truly because he was a good doctor, right. And the next time she went to the medical doctor cuz she was sick or had a checkup or something, right, just a general doctor visit. He said to her, you know, thank you so much for the recommendation, which was so nice that he remembered that right, hopefully, he made a note of it. And then said to her, I didn’t know you were a health coach. And that was they had a whole great conversation around that. And by the time she left his office, she had an appointment to do workshops for his patients, right, some workshops around the coaching that she does, simply by just providing value to somebody in her life that she thought was doing a great job for her. So the first way you can get more LinkedIn recommendations is to give more LinkedIn recommendations. And then the second way That you can get more recommendations is literally to just kind of have your ear out for opportunities to ask for one. You know, I don’t typically ask for them cold, although I’m going to give you an example in a little bit. But if somebody says, You know what, it’s been great working with you, you really over delivered if they’re saying nice things to you, it should be in the back of your mind to flip that and say, thank you so much. I’m so happy I love you know, I love happy customers, whatever nice things you would say as a result of that and then say, how would you feel about popping that on LinkedIn as a recommendation for me, because that’s really helpful to me. Now, they’re already saying something nice to you. They already want to, you know, they are looking for a way to help you, right? So nine out of 10 times they’re wishing they thought of that first. So by saying that, it’s just it’s okay to do that. Just say, I’m so glad it was helpful would really be helpful to me is right, and I bet they’re gonna do it. Very often they do it. So sometimes it’s in an email that you get after a job is finished. Sometimes it’s in the middle of a job, right? You don’t have to wait till the end, but by all means, what you can do is kind of like if you have like a wrap up checklist, you know, that’s typically when the conversation comes around to tell us how this oh, you know, tell us, what are we, you know, what are the next steps? And typically what happens when you talk about the next steps is you go over the previous steps, right? And if they’re saying nice things about you, maybe even put it on your checklist, look for an opportunity to ask for a LinkedIn recommendation. because let me tell you something. It is not just powerful to send people to it. It’s powerful when people see them when they’re checking you out. Right on their own. People check you out and said, Oh, my gosh, you have 60 LinkedIn recommendations. That’s amazing. That’s powerful, even if you’re not sending them there, right. So be an accumulator of LinkedIn recommendations. And then the last way, there’s probably 10 more, but the last one we’re going to talk about today is literally flat out asking for them. You know, I had an opportunity to pitch for a paid speaking engagement at a chamber of commerce in another state and I’ve done a ton of talks to Chamber of Commerce’s here in New Jersey. And I’ve just never really followed up to get LinkedIn recommendations from them. So I reached out to a couple of them. And I said, You know what, I’ve got this opportunity, I’d really like to send them to LinkedIn to see some nice things from other chambers, you know, that are said from work I’ve done with other chambers, which How would you feel about throwing a LinkedIn recommendation up for me? They’re happy to do it. Right there. We’re happy to do it. I mean, I didn’t you know, you could flat out ask certainly after speaking engagement, if they say nice things, again, all part of the say nice things. And but in this case, it was a year later. And and what happened was, I had an opportunity that that recommendation was going to be helpful to me if I had it. So I reached out to them specifically for that and they were happy to help. So what I want to do is go back to giving more recommendations, okay, because that’s really the power most powerful part here because yes, we want to get more recommendations. But let’s talk about giving more recommendations. You know, I already mentioned that it’s just good social media. Karma, right? When you’re giving recommendations, it’s just good social karma to, you know, to be giving out recommendations all over the place. Like you’re kind of putting the you’re filling up your social state karma savings account by doing that, right. So when you’re writing LinkedIn recommendations, you don’t want to just write Hey, I loved working with Joe, or I loved working with Mary. Right. When I would tick, I want to talk a little bit about how to write a great LinkedIn recommendation. The first thing you want to think about is how are you starting it, you want to, because chances are, they’re going to just read the first sentence first. And you want to hook people with the first sentence, right? Like it, you know, so some if you and by the way, look at the ones I’ve written, if you want an example, for people, and frankly, you’re welcome to write one for me, if you love this podcast, if you want practice writing one, See how easy that was to ask you. Right? But look at the ones that I’ve written. And, you know, kind of model them right. I like to try to make the first line a powerful first line. Okay. You want to talk a little bit about what your professional relationship is. You Want to talk of course about, you know, the achievements and what’s happened, right. So putting a little bit of information in about the role that you know the person was in when you worked together, right? Or that you even had to work together, they could have worked for you. You could have worked for them, whatever, you can write a recommendation, based on a PDF of theirs you saw, right? You gotta do something for me if you want a recommendation from me. But it could be as simple as I’ve downloaded your, you know, your free lead magnet, right? If you’re a great free lead magnet. That’s enough for me to write a legion recommendation, right? We don’t have to have worked together for six years, I can say I downloaded her free lead magnet and learn four things that I didn’t know before just from one thinking PDF. Right? Like, that’s amazing. So do you see how powerful that can be? Right? So you want to you know, provide some details of what you’re talking about talking about what their contribution was and how you know how that helped you in whatever way that you know that they helped you and tell me a little bit about the person Right, tell me a little about the person, maybe their energy or they’re so smart, or their, their attention to detail. Right? These are really important things that people are going to want to see, when they’re looking at these recommendations, right? Do yourself a favor and proofread them. It’s always a good idea to proofread. Because, you know, you know why it’s a good idea to proofread. Right. So those are just some ways to get started writing recommendations. So let’s just recap a little bit here to get more recommendations, you want to give more recommendations to start. You also want to kind of just put that at the end of the conversation when somebody says something nice about you. Right? How would you feel about writing that popping that in LinkedIn for me, and then the last time as you might flat out, reach out to someone and said, you know, that talk I did for you a year ago? Well, I’ve got an opportunity to do something similar and it’d be great to have a reference around that specific thing. Would you mind doing that for me? Right, so it’s absolutely okay to do that. And then giving more recommendations. Remember that it’s just great. Social karma. You know, it’s it is, you’ve heard this from me before, right? The best and most profitable strategy on LinkedIn starts with giving. Right not getting giving, the more you give, the more comes back to you. Okay, so so that social karma piece is so important. And then we went over a little bit about how, what makes a good recommendation, basically just starting off with a punch, and then you know, moving through the recommendation. So I hope that this is starting to make you see the power of these recommendations. I can tell you, I’m blessed to have lots of them. I do a lot of talks on LinkedIn. So it’s really easy for me to say, you know, like I said to you guys here on the podcast, if you need practice, by all means, I welcome all your recommendations if you think I’ve done a good job. So when when the time comes when I say just check out my LinkedIn profile, I get the I get the business and you know, almost all the time, because I’ve got so much social proof and it’s not just social proof like on your website of this testimonial. Social proof. But this is like social proof on steroids. Because not only is it the social proof, but you can click right through the profile, get right to the person that wrote the recommendation and ask them directly about how they felt when they worked with you. So I hope that this was really helpful in that you’re going to dive in I would love to see if you want to task for this week. I’d love to see you put a calendar item on your calendar maybe once a month to write to LinkedIn recommendations. That’s easy, right? I’ll probably take your half hour. So maybe you just put on your calendar make it a recurring calendaring item to write to LinkedIn recommendations once a month. I think it’d be great if you did it even more often. I know I slack on this and don’t do it as often as I intend to. So hopefully I will be able to do more of that in the coming weeks as well. And if you want more tips like this we do we have a LinkedIn Masterclass that you can check out at karenyankovich.comm/masterclass or go to my website, karenyankovich.com. There’s just links to it all over the place. It’s an on demand Masterclass. You can watch it at any time. You know, obviously if you have any questions after the Masterclass you can always email me or come to me we are you know, we try to be really responsive to your questions and your needs. But check it out karenyankovich.com/masterclass helps you get the next couple steps. And now more than ever, our LinkedIn profiles and our digital presence and our visibility is more important than ever. So this giving social karma thing right, a rising tide lifts all boats. I do this podcast to support you. I’ve got this free Masterclass to help you get started, which is the first step towards LinkedIn success. Let’s lift each other up. Help me Help you share this podcast. Take a quick screenshot of this episode. If you liked what you heard today, you know, take a screenshot on your phone share that on social media. Tag me I’m @karenyankovich. Use the hashtag #goodgirlsgetrich so we don’t miss it. Okay, and you know, I will share it with my audience and then we both get more visibility. We’re each lifting each other up. Let’s do this. Let’s kick some 2020 booty together. We still got plenty of time this year, to have an amazing year. I’m here to support you I want it to be simple. Let’s create our simple empires together. I’ll see you back here next week for another episode of the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast.

123 – Supporting People of Color with Lisa and Simone

This week’s episode of Good Girls Get Rich is brought to you by Uplevel Media CEO and LinkedIn expert, Karen Yankovich. In this episode, Karen discusses with Lisa Brathwaite and Simone Craig what we can be doing through a #BLM lens to support people of color.

Lisa Brathwaite is the marketing copywriter and content consultant for Uplevel Media. She helps people create and craft their stories for conscious connection. 

Simone Craig is the CFO of Uplevel Media. She owns an accounting business, and she also is the host of the A Mind for Money Podcast.

#GoodGirlsGetRich

We want to hear your thoughts on this episode! Leave us a message on Speakpipe or email us at info@karenyankovich.com.

About the Episode:

It’s a sad reality but even in 2020, racism still exists. As it’s been brought into view for all to see in recent weeks, are you struggling to find just what to say or do in your personal and business response? 

If so, you’re not alone. At Uplevel Media, we wanted to have an open, honest conversation about how #BlackLivesMatter aligns with us individually and in our company.

It’s important that we at Uplevel Media make the time to take stock to ensure we’re being inclusive, not exclusive. In this episode, Lisa, Simone, and I share our perspectives on issues you may be grappling with in your sphere of influence. We also examine Uplevel Media to see how we can help our clients create and feel welcomed in inclusive spaces.

We’re dedicated to walking the walk, not just talking the talk—but it does start with a conversation. Listen in and join us.

Episode Spotlights:

  • Where to find everything for this week’s episode: karenyankovich.com/123
  • Introducing this episode’s guest, Lisa Brathwaite and Simone Craig (3:48)
  • Lisa’s introduction (4:47)
  • Simone’s introduction (5:35)
  • Where Uplevel Media stands (9:49)
  • Lisa’s experience with Uplevel Media (12:41)
  • Simone’s thoughts on the challenge of racism (16:43)
  • Having values (19:46)
  • The richness of diversifying (26:05)
  • What Uplevel Media should be addressing (28:00)
  • Incorporating diversity (35:37)
  • Closing thoughts (46:24

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

Help Us Spread the Word!

It would be awesome if you shared the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast with your fellow entrepreneurs on twitter. Click here to tweet some love!

If this episode has taught you just one thing, I would love if you could head on over to Apple Podcasts and SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW! And if you’re moved to, kindly leave us a rating and review. Maybe you’ll get a shout out on the show!

Ways to Subscribe to Good Girls Get Rich:

Read the Transcript

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast Episode 123.

Intro 0:06
Welcome to the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are, girl. Stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies, and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:23
Hello, everyone. I’m Karen Yankovich, the host of the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast and I am here with a really special episode today. It is Episode 123. And I need to give you a little backstory as to what’s kind of why we’re doing this episode what we’re doing. This episode is scheduled to go live on June 8, and we haven’t recorded it yet. And that is so like, Listen, I’d love to be saying that I’m weeks ahead on this stuff. And I’m not typically weeks ahead, but I’m usually more than two days ahead. And the reason for that is you know I’ve had a lot of conversations in the last week or two around diversity and equity and justice and inclusion. And as I started looking at my podcast schedule, I was looking at it going How can I release a podcast this week that says, Here’s how to use your LinkedIn recommendations. So that show is coming, because I do think that’s what you guys listen to the show for. But I also think that because LinkedIn, and the LinkedIn strategy and the marketing strategy we do is so baked in personal branding, that we can’t not talk about this. And you know, when COVID-19 hit, I distinctly remember the first podcast episode I recorded I was still in Florida, and I came home from Florida on March 13. So I was talking about COVID-19 on my podcast before we were before we were shut down before we had to, you know, kind of shelter in place. And I because I basically what I was saying were things like if you offer virtual services to people, now’s the time to talk about it. If you think you can provide a service to people that can help them through a trying period. They won’t know that if you don’t tell them about it, right. So I was talking about that from the very beginning, and it felt really out of integrity. To not be talking about this yet, here I am sitting here a white woman as the CEO of Uplevel Media, not really doing a lot of listening this week and not doing a lot of talking yet on my podcast, I do a lot of talking. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do around this and what I landed on. And thankfully, I have two smart, beautiful, amazing women of color on my team that agreed to do a show with me, where we literally are going to pull the curtain back and have a brainstorm. None of us have talked about this before, on how we can incorporate these policies, not into not just into our business, so that they’re more diverse and and equitable and inclusive, at the same time, incorporate it into the work that we’re doing with our clients into the she’s linked accelerator program and into the LinkedIn profiles we write. So we’re kind of just going to see where this conversation goes. And I thought that I can’t be the only white Woman CEO that’s that is having these same kinds of issues to having trying to figure out what my voice is. I think that it’s important, my voice is part of this conversation because it is my podcast and you look, you look for my voice on this, and I’m not looking to hide behind the people on my team, but I am going to kind of let them lead this because, for me, I’ve had many, many experiences more than I am happy to even talk about where I have been confronted with my own racism. And, you know, you don’t know it until you’re confronted with it. So I surely am not qualified to lead this discussion. But, you know, I definitely want to be a part of it. So hopefully that makes sense. Lisa and Simone, does that make sense to you, you guys on board for that? Okay, they’re shaking their heads, yes, even though you can’t see them. Alright, so let me introduce them to you Lisa Brathwaite is she is the marketing copywriter and content consultant for Uplevel Media. Lisa helps us with some of the experience in our groups, and some of The emails that go out and some of the ways that we built she helps us writing LinkedIn profiles. So a lot of the work that Lisa does a lot of the copy, you see Lisa’s had a hand in. And Simone Craig is my CFO, my chief financial officer. And they are both very much involved in the day to day business of uplevel Media. But I also want to be really clear that neither one of them are coming to this conversation as an expert in, you know, advising me or anyone else on diversity, equity, justice as inclusion and inclusion. They have experience not only as women of color, but also as people that are part of my team. They know the kinds of work that we do. So that’s, that is kind of where we’re going with this and we’re kind of just going to see where this goes and take you lis take you the listener along for the ride. So Lisa, why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit to everyone here.

Lisa Brathwaite 4:51
Hi, everyone. I’m delighted to be here. Again, I am Lisa Brathwaite, marketing copywriter and content consultant with Uplevel Media. At my essence, in core, I’m a writer, and my words have taken me many places around. Well, they’ve taken me many places and opened up a number of doors for me and hence professionally, I’ve held a number of roles. But I’m just happy to use my words. I’ve helped people create their stories and craft their stories. And in a time like this, I think your words and your story and your positioning is very important. So I’m delighted to be here and be a part of this conversation. And I’m looking forward to it.

Karen Yankovich 5:30
Thank you, Simone. Tell everybody a little bit about you.

Simone Craige 5:35
Yes, so as Karen mentioned, I’m CFO for uplevel media, and my background really is in accounting. And I, I started a accounting business for myself in 2007, and then landed in the online space about 10 years ago. And as Lisa said, I think it’s an important A conversation to be having. I’m very much about my my mission, which is why I have chosen to work with Karen really is not just because I love the work that she does in the world, but it’s really important to me to support women entrepreneurs, specifically in closing the wealth gap for themselves. And just really on a on a personal note, and I guess professionally too, I’m really hoping that however we land on the other side of what’s happening, what’s really important that’s happening now that we also start to have a conversation about economic empowerment. Economic Empowerment, is the foundation for empowering communities empowering families, and so we can’t really have a conversation about changing the inequities in the world until we talk about a shift in economic empowerment and that’s where I’m really excited. about continuing the conversation, once we get through this, this time that we’re in right now that I think is really powerful and important. Oh, you have a podcast that supports people with that too, right? So tell everybody what your podcast is. And we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Thank you. Yes, my, my podcast, my new podcast is called a mind for money. And you can find it at simonecraig.com/podcast or at amindformoneypodcast.com and it’s, it’s all about wealth mindset for women entrepreneurs.

Karen Yankovich 7:36
Awesome. So, you know, we were I was really intentional about really trying to not have a lot of this conversation beforehand so that we could really truly do it live because I do feel like, again, I know, I know where I have trouble knowing what to say where to say it, how to say it what to do, and I can’t be the only other person that is is in that situation. So one of the The things that I did when I first started, I mean, listen, I feel like I’ve been listening for a long time. But in this past couple weeks, it is different. It is just different. And I don’t know what why that is or what it is. I’m happy that it’s different. But I feel called to stand up in a more powerful way around around these topics. So I did a little poking around in my entrepreneurial friend community to find out who was supporting people like me, too. And I remember distinctly looking for this a couple years ago, and I couldn’t find it Who can help me know what to say how to say when to say it. How can I learn to be better at this as a business owner, and I couldn’t find it but now I was able to find it. And truly LeBron had a did a workshop on this called show up and serve. And I subscribed to that I didn’t get to see it live, but I did subscribe to the replay. And I listened to it once all the way through it was long, and we’ll link to that too if anybody wants to listen to that and kind of and I listened to it once already. way through. And I’m in the process of listening to the second time taking notes, because I felt like I needed to just take it in once. So I can. So here’s the here is this is this is, this is purely an issue that I’m having around this. And that is like time, I want to show up and be present for this. I want to listen to her entire two and a half hour workshop. I am in the process of listening to the E book, how to be anti racist. I’m loving every minute of it. But I also have a business to run, right? So I’m not there’s not excuses. I’m trying to manage all the time around these things. And I would have loved to come to this call already having gone through that a second time and taking notes to the whole thing. And I just didn’t get all the way there. But I did take a few and really what, what I think there’s a couple things that I think are really important. And I kind of want to start with just up level media. Right? I think that, you know, one of the things that Trudy talks about is there should never be a question about where we stand and up level media. like nobody should be able to see anything we do and have a question about where we stand. That sounds good, right? I don’t know how we actually do that. And that’s what we’re here to talk about. You know, so basically how are we baking this in? You know, we have to we have to really talk a little bit here about how we can bake this in and I guess we can start by saying the easy things like the website, but what are we saying on the website? Right, like and I and I’m truly asking you guys this question. Like, from the work that you’ve done with me and uplevel media so far, and again, I’ll be I will I need to say this because I feel the need to say this, I love that half of my team are women of color, but that happened, because I love you guys. Not because I said I want a team that’s diverse. And I’m just being honest about that. Right? Like maybe I need to be I’m not maybe it clearly I need to be more intentional about that. Right? So it was almost like I was like, okay, check. Got that one checked off. Right. And I don’t say that I’m not proud to say that but that’s just the reality is that, you know, I and you know that I listened to you guys about everything you say. But we’ve been having had this conversation before. And there’s many, many things I’m sure that may have happened over the time Lisa’s fairly new to the team, Simone. I’ve known longer, but she’s also you know, we’ve literally expanded our team a bit in the last six months. Have you seen anything that you know, right off the bat that you say? I think we should start here? Like, what do you guys think? I’m gonna let you take it away.

Lisa Brathwaite 11:19
Well, let me just before we get into that, I have to share something that I just was kind of amused at this morning that I saw on Twitter is by a comedian named Z Wei. And her tweet was right now every employer in America is terrified that their black employees will be honest about their work experiences.

Karen Yankovich 11:39
Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

Lisa Brathwaite 11:44
I share that just to share that she’s probably right. And you’re probably not alone. And it’s it just made me chuckle I just…

Karen Yankovich 11:53
Yeah. So Lisa, here’s the thing. Like I also have to look at this and go Where’s How do I come at this then? from a place of integrity, not a place of my voice, somebody is waiting to hear my voice. Do you know what I mean? Like It Is it can’t really be about me. Right? So yet, if I don’t say something right now, that saying something as well, so so that’s kind of what I hear when I hear that I totally get with what they’re saying. But at the same time, you know, I do feel an obligation, not just morally, but culturally, you know, and that’s why we’re doing this because I really couldn’t figure out what the right method was or media was or whatever was to, to do that where it felt like it was an integrity for me. So that’s a great way to start this. And that’s awesome.

Lisa Brathwaite 12:40
Well, and And with that, I will say, you mentioned how you brought Simone and I along on your ride up level media ride because you thought we were smart, intelligent women and for me, I like working with and associating with courageous and brave women edition. And that was one of the things that I appreciated about you and that I saw on you. Because there are so many instances over the course of my professional life where I could say, I’ll be at a conference or something. And I’ll I’ll just know, someone will say, that’s just too much work to try to even engage. It’s just too much work. And so they’ll go to another portion of the room or something or other. So the fact that you’re brave enough to engage, I just want to appreciate that and tell you that that’s the fact that you were deliberate or intentional about thinking, well, maybe the podcast shouldn’t just be me business as usual on Monday, maybe I should bring in my team members. And by the way, the fact that you had to readily available that you could reach out to that you were already in relationship with as opposed to Who am I Rolodex can I find?

Karen Yankovich 13:50
Can I tell you Lisa I started that way. I mean, full disclosure, I started that way. I reached out to Trudy LeBron, as soon as I heard this, and I said, I need to have you on my podcast, and she’s probably swamped and I do Today, if you’re listening, I do still want to have you on my podcast. But but that happens maybe later because this isn’t a conversation for just now. Right? This is a conversation that needs to continue. At the same time, you know, I need to be continuing to deliver the kinds of content people have signed up and download this podcast for every week to do right. So again, that’s where that’s where it comes back down to how do we bake it in? So then there’s no question about where we stand. It’s baked into everything, but we’re still supporting people in the way that they’re expecting to be supported by us.

Lisa Brathwaite 14:30
Right. And I think the bake again, starts with an awareness first and foremost, and that’s what I’m trying to tell you that let’s let’s get to a place of awareness. You can’t bake a cake. If you’re missing an ingredient and expect that you’re gonna have a gorgeous cake like you have to be aware of well, do I have all my ingredients in place and do the work to go and purchase what you might need? If you need eggs? go seek out getting eggs. You don’t have to say to someone Hey, do I need eggs can can you bring me eggs like it’s your cake. Get some eggs.

Karen Yankovich 15:01
So I’m kinda asking you if I need eggs.

Lisa Brathwaite 15:03
Well, yes, but you’re not making you’re not expecting me to bake the cake. You’re saying, I’ll bake the cake.

Karen Yankovich 15:10
Right.

Lisa Brathwaite 15:11
You know. And so I appreciate that. And the fact again, I will say this right off the top, this is Lisa, coming from Lisa’s experience so important. I just want to make that clear. I do not speak for everyone in the African or black community, because they might hear exactly what I’m saying right now and say, Oh, my God, I can’t believe she said that she should have said, so please understand that when you all don’t know when I should see you all, when people who are not people of color are challenged, to come up with the right words to say, just understand that black people and people of color. We’re not a monolith. So we face the same things of Hey, I’m just speaking for myself based on my own experience, and someone else will speak and they’ll say something and it will be their experience. It’ll be authentic, if they’re true and real about it. I’ve just coming to you with what I have based on what I’ve, what I’ve experienced. And I think that’s all we can really ask of anyone. Yeah. And then when you just come with that bravery, then we get into all the messiness of baking the cake, right, the flour on our nose.

Karen Yankovich 16:15
So I feel like that message, hopefully, is already baked into everything. Because I’ve say, almost every week on the show, and certainly in the course, this is the way I teach it. This is what works for me. There are other ways to do this. There’s probably a few wrong ways there’s not one right way, you know, so take what from this what you think works and move on. So that just ties right into, you know, into the message that I hope is baked into everything we do. And I know Simone, you are shaking your head. Yes, on that, too.

Simone Craige 16:42
Yeah. Yeah, I guess awareness too. And it and I think now, right now is it really calls for I think there’s the challenge. Again, my opinion that I think happens with Racism, prejudice is that there’s all these assumptions running underneath the surface that never gets spoken, you know, that are never like brought to light. And so I think that’s what can be powerful about this conversation in this moment is that it gives, as she said, everybody an opportunity to really say and speak, where you stand, like, Where Where are you on this like? And very specifically, you know, do you do you believe that black lives matter? Are you black lives matter? Are you all lives matter? I think that’s kind of what she’s asking is kind of, very specifically is, where do you stand? And it’s not so much about where you stand necessarily, but are you? Are you communicating that clearly to your people? And is that communicated clearly to your team? And is everybody feeling like that what happens in the business is in alignment with what it is that you believe.

Karen Yankovich 17:59
So here’s But I think about that, I think and we will get to this in a little bit. But I think that the better job we do of communicating that the better and alignment the people that we attract will be to that message.

Simone Craige 18:10
Yes.

Karen Yankovich 18:10
Because that could be a challenge as well. And I love that. I love that because I think that it’s important, but you know, it is coming. From my perspective, it can be a little bit confusing, because even just, you know, as I process through ways that I can build equity in, right, I mean, equity really means that equity doesn’t mean we’re, you know, your equal equity means we’re not equal. And what do we need to do to to make it more equal? Right? So I think about things like, you know, do we do scholarships? Do we do you know, do we do just, and then I read things that say, No, we don’t want a handout, we want a hand up and then I read No, you need to do. I mean, I can’t even tell you how many. I’ve gotten 20 different suggestions on that topic from 20 different people. And I take it all right, I take it all in because I don’t know because I will have to process it and see where I feel on it, but at the same time I don’t want to be in a place where I’m being insulting, or whatever, which is why we’re having this conversation. Right. So So, you know, coming and I’m just being on, you know, just being honest about that, like, as I try to listen and learn, there’s so many different messages to listen to. And I mean, I was Lisa, I joke this to Lisa the other day, like I totally, you know, there’s on the surface, I know a crap ton underneath the surface that I’ve no I still have to deal with. But on the surface, of course, I believe Black Lives Matter. I donate it and I donated money to them the other day, and then the next day, they came out with this defund the police campaign and I’m like, do I believe that? I don’t know if I really believe in that. Do you know what I mean? Like I don’t know Do we really want to defend the police today? You know, so it’s so there’s there’s always i think that i think what I’m saying is that it’s Oh, I’m feeling like it’s okay to to have a value but then have things be the not be in full agreement with every single little piece of the of the conversation. How do you guys feel about that?

Simone Craige 19:59
Yes. I mean, I there’s, as you said, we’re not a monolith, you know, everybody has a really beautiful time. And it’s a very emotional time. And we’re all kind of processing this, this together. And I think we have kind of different things to process. I think that we as black people have different things to process about this moment than white people do. And so we’re all kind of figuring it out, you know? So I don’t I don’t know that now is necessarily the time to affirmatively say, Okay, this is what I’m going to do, because this is what this person said at this post. That’s… You know, so I think we all just need to kind of step up where where you feel called to step up, but really just giving ourselves I mean, we’ve been in this maybe a week, two weeks, right? And right, this is offseason pain of 400 years. In this country, right, okay. So a lot to kind of ask anybody to come up with anything, especially is not an expert in this. Right, right, Aaron, this is what you should do to move forward. And this is the right thing to do. By way of black people like that. I feel like that’s almost impossible right now. But I think it’s helpful to hear from you that you do believe that you do stand with black lives matter. That’s good to know, you know, right, right. Right, right. Like, he was a personal friend, right? I know you professionally as a CFO, so I understand who you are as a human being and I have the assumption, but didn’t know really affirmatively till you said, Oh, I do and I donate it to Black Lives Matter, you know. So that’s very me, and I appreciate it. But well, you know, the cop thing and how should I feel about that? I can’t tell you how to feel about that. Right? Right. All black people feel the same thing about that. Yeah, the best, you do the best where you can, and but you but you have to stay true to you and what you feel is, is best for you and be willing to just to be honest about it. Like, personally, I feel it’s not even so much the the because I really feel as Americans racism is the air we breathe, right? It is no…

Karen Yankovich 22:24
And I have come to learn that. But let me tell you, that was a hard lesson for me to learn that I truly am a racist, still, in many ways that there’s things that I have to learn. And I have to uncover layers of that layers of conditioning that is not easy for me to say and it comes up and that is why I need to be called out. Because I don’t know. I mean, sometimes I catch it myself. And other times I don’t, you know, and…

Lisa Brathwaite 22:53
I feel like, I feel like I need to stop you there Karen because I just said I am a racist. Again, this is Just Lisa and misinterpretations and feelings about this. I would not, I will not let you go out there and say that okay, that you benefit from white privilege? Yes. I’ll let you say that. But to say that you’re, racist, no, I’m not going to let you say that.

Karen Yankovich 23:20
See this is the these are the things I’m listening and learning about. And but here’s what Okay, so I really don’t want to make this about me but but this is why it’s important that we have this conversation, because I don’t know what I don’t know until I see it right. And I’ve told I think I’ve told both of you guys this, but I go back to the conference that the talk that I did a few years ago where it was a talk to, you know, a group of women of color. And I’m sitting there in the morning flipping through my presentation while watching the Morning presentations, and realize there wasn’t anything but a white woman woman in any one of my slides. And I was like holy hell, and I just didn’t ever see it. I created the slides. I have no one to blame but myself. Right. So of course, thankfully, I caught it. And I ran out in the hall and I grabbed my laptop and I, you know, and I was able to adjust it before I did a presentation to a roomful of black women with not a single person of color in my slides. But that’s what I mean about me needing some help around my business. I thankfully caught that, but it is just as likely that I didn’t catch it. Right. So that is why I say that, like that’s, those are layers of things that I have to uncover, to be able to get to the to be able to get to where and I probably will be doing that till the day I die, right? Because how would I how and there’s some other things we can talk about, we’ll talk about we get to help in supporting our clients, but you know, how would I know that right? And I’m not making that as an excuse, right? But that’s why I need to, and maybe we need to find maybe we need to hire a consultant like maybe that’s what we need to do to bring somebody in here professionally to help us do this from a business perspective. Right. I do think that we have to talk about it from a how we bake that in Everything we do, because I really don’t feel. And please tell me if you disagree with this, I really don’t feel that I do want to have a comp when this podcast comes out, I do want to have some conversations in my groups about this podcast, and just see what you know where it comes up, especially as it relates to when we start talking about things like the LinkedIn profiles that we write, and we help people with, um, but I don’t think that I am the person to be out there, you know, talking about you know, I mean, we certainly can be talking about diversion and equity and things like that, but I don’t know that that’s not what I teach. I teach people how to show up in a big way how to create a personal brand that allows them to, to fill their bank account, right, they show up in a way that positions them with people that that are powerful people. And I don’t know, is it naive to say that’s not my message to do? I mean, what do you guys think?

Lisa Brathwaite 25:51
Well, no, I think you can do that. I say yes. And Okay. Yes, you can do that. And you can I know we can get into more specifics about it later. But yes, you can do precisely that what you’re doing in your business. And you can say, by the way, as you’re looking for speakers for your next event, if that’s what you are, consider a person of color, have consider that you might want to diversify your panel. And it’s not just, it’s just really because you’re missing out. But you’re missing out. You don’t, you’re missing out on a great deal of richness and a knowledge base that you’ve probably never tapped into. And it’s really I mean, the way I look at it, it’s really it’s too bad. Like, yeah, I feel I feel personally sorry, when people don’t engage with others that don’t look like them. Don’t think like them, because you’re just so limited. And I really feel sorry for you versus going out and looking to access the vast the vast richness that is available to you. Yeah, just give it an opportunity.

Karen Yankovich 27:00
I’ve ever looked at it that way. I don’t think I’ve ever really looked at it that way. Because I think we just tend to include the people that are around us. Right. And, you know, MC, thankfully I have, I have lots of diverse people around me. But that still doesn’t mean. I mean, it’s still, I still have to intentionally I’m not intentionally doing it enough. For example, I know there’s a lot of and this is exactly where we said, we didn’t want this conversation to go, you guys, but I think we’re hot. We’re here. So let’s go there. We were, like, we’re gonna keep it focused on how we support the business around this. But maybe that is what this is right? You know, there was a conversation a few years ago, and this might be where I was initially looking to bring a consultant in a diversity consultant in around, you know, I get asked to be on summits all the time, not one time in my life. Did I look at the list of other people there to see is it diverse, not one time in my life that I think to do that, I think to do it now, right? But I didn’t think to do it then. You know, so and this is what I mean about uncovering the layers, you know, that I’m sure there’s going to be more layers that I haven’t found yet. So, so just Do you think that at this moment in time, like, do you guys see anything we should be addressing right now from a corporate perspective and we’re not really looking to hire more people at this point? You know, maybe one more person depending on you know, what’s going on we just brought somebody else in to kind of help us with the team. Do you think there’s Is there anything you that stands out to either one of you and please be real here that I should that we should be doing right now from a corporate perspective? To you know, to support the team and to to bake in this message into every single thing we do?

Simone Craige 28:32
There’s one thing I don’t I don’t know about baking it in. But there was there was one thing that I remember you and I had a conversation about, hopefully, it’s okay to bring it up. But you and I had a conversation about how you know, you were doing your I don’t know what it was, it was a workshop or something. And and I think it was a black woman or women of color said yeah, this you know, I like this. This is great, but I don’t feel comfortable. Putting my picture up on LinkedIn, because I have, I feel that I, you know, as a black woman, I’m not going to be hired or there’s going to be, you know, a judgement about, you know, me as a black woman on LinkedIn, I can’t approach my LinkedIn profile the way a white woman or a white person can get. I don’t necessarily I don’t know the answer to that, you know, LinkedIn is not my…

Karen Yankovich 29:23
Right. And that’s that’s really where that’s exactly where I wanted to go. Next was how because I she, I mean, what could I do other than just sit there and stunned silence because i would i have i it had never occurred to me. Right. He was of course absolutely right. And I all I really did was applaud her because she had just put her picture up. So I was like, applauding her for kind of stepping into it and just saying, screw it. I’m out there. I’m amazing. I’m going to tell the world I’m amazing. And I’m going to show the world I’m amazing. But if we’re going to start to dive into the the work we do, there’s actually did that that’s actually the beginning. controversial right now. So on the whole thing was your LinkedIn picture? Oh, and the reason for that is LinkedIn requires you to have a picture of yourself, well, it didn’t require you to have a picture of yourself, but they require you not to have a picture of something that’s not you can’t put a picture of a dog, you can’t put a picture of, you know, a pen. Right? And, and there were people that were using, like blacklivesmatter signs or things like that as their profile picture. And LinkedIn made them change it and said, LinkedIn requires you to have a picture of your face. You don’t I mean, yeah, and I got I get that. I mean, it is about you. It is about your personal brand. So I get that that is their rule. And I also know that there are probably many people out there that have a picture of a pen that we’re not told that they have to change their thing. My guess is that LinkedIn doesn’t really pay attention to it unless somebody reports it. And this is such a hot topic right now. And I have no idea if this is true. So I probably shouldn’t be saying this. Right? But think that that there may be people that are reporting profiles that are out of the LinkedIn Terms of Service. And it sucks. That that’s the kind of thing that’s getting reported. But I kind of understand the LinkedIn saying, you know, these are our rules. And this is why we have these rules. We are not Facebook, we are not Twitter. We are not standing on Capitol Hill, trying to defend the bots and the fake profiles. We stand here and say, we want to see your face. We want you to show up. We want to hear your voice as you that that’s and I didn’t we really haven’t talked about this at all, because I wanted to hear your thoughts on that. Like I, I kind of understand it, but I’d love to hear what you guys think about that.

Simone Craige 31:38
I understand it too. And I think as Lisa was saying, there’s an opportunity there like there’s an opportunity to serve people and maybe in a different way or specifically the people of color or black women or men in your community that have that kind of That hesitation or that block? And I don’t know that the answer is necessarily that you don’t put your picture up. Maybe you put your picture up, but there’s a different conversation about how to still be successful or still make your LinkedIn profile work or still work it even with your picture. Or maybe there’s some mindsets of I don’t know that there’s there’s a lot of opportunity there in you know, instead of getting caught up in Oh my God, this black woman just told me about it. I don’t know, you know what I mean, which, you know, it can be wow, you know, wow, okay. That what a curious what a curious challenge that is, wow, I wonder how we can navigate that. And I think that’s a powerful way to incorporate it in your, in your business or even in your program, even to just…

Karen Yankovich 32:48
I think we do want to talk about that because I think we do need to do that. But I think that those are two separate things, right. One thing is, do you put you know, I mean, that there is a hesitation to put your personal picture up. Because you’re a black woman or a black man, but this issue is LinkedIn is racist because they LinkedIn is shutting our messaging like LinkedIn is not letting us speak our truth, because they’re not letting us do put this where the picture is. And I think that those are two separate issues. I mean, I can’t do anything about that, right. Like, I don’t have any control over what LinkedIn does or doesn’t do. But I can have a point of view on it. Right. And my initial point of view is, is I kind of get it, you know, like, I kind of get it. But am I being naive when I say that?

Lisa Brathwaite 33:30
I think there’s an intersection there of policy and personal. Yeah. And I really, I look forward to having the conversation about people saying, I feel like hiding behind the the framing of Well, that’s a personal thing. And that’s political. And I I’m about this and it’s just my business, and I don’t get into things like that. But again, talking of opportunities. I understand LinkedIn, as far as I know, that was their policy before. Yeah, recent events. Yep. So They want you to have a picture. Yeah. That’s a policy thing. And that’s their company. And that’s their right. Um, where I see the opportunity with that, though, in the personal is we say, All right. Do you Are you aware that there is a segment of the American population that you think nothing of putting your picture up on LinkedIn? But for some, this is a real professional concern? Yeah. That if they put their picture up, someone might pass them not even take a look at their profile, simply because of the picture that appears? Yeah. Are you aware that this is happening? Yeah. How do you feel about that? And if you’re not aware, I’m telling you, so now you can be conscious of that. Yeah. Ask yourself Have you done that before? Have you looked to reach out to someone and as soon as you saw their picture Did you say up? Let me go on to the next. Yeah, all of these things are things that people I feel like once you see them and once you’re aware Then, if you’re it’s up to you to decide quietly, I would just ask anyone, you don’t have to post on Facebook, you don’t have to scream. But just ask yourself these questions quietly first and sit with them. And if you know better than after that do better. And if you don’t, and you willfully say, yeah, that’s what I do. But you know what, I don’t feel like changing that. Okay. Okay. Yeah, time will tell if you were on the right side of history with making that decision or not, but that’s certainly your prerogative, right?

Karen Yankovich 35:35
Absolutely. So there’s a part of me so in our She’s LinkedUp Accelerator Program. And at this point, we’re gonna have more ancillary videos, then we have actual training videos and each in each module, but there’s a part of me that wants to do a video for each module that is around diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion. How does that apply to this piece of content that we’re doing? teaching in this module. And again, we have one on PR, we have one on mindset we have we’re in court, we’re about to add one on how your assistant can support you. So now I want to add a fourth ancillary one, but, you know, what do you think when I say that? Do you think it should? That’s how I feel like we can bake? Or do we bake it into the content? Do you know what I mean? Like call it like, and this is not something we have to decide right now. But these are the kind of conversations I want to have about how do we incorporate more of this because everything we’re talking about here for Uplevel Media and you know, Karen Yankovich, his name is and picture over everything else also applies to every single one of our customers because we teach visibility, we teach visibility, we teach personal branding, and this is a part of their personal brand and maybe they’re looking for help with how to I’m gonna keep saying bacon any, you know, baking it into their own brand, right. So Lisa, I mean, Lisa writes LinkedIn profiles for us, among, among other things, So just let’s start that conversation a little bit. What do you think about that? You know, just in general, like, What is your reaction? When I say we can pull it, we can make it a separate little video under each module? Or we can just incorporate it into the module? Or do we? Or am I just saying, What am I just going over the top? And, you know, it’s not something we really need to even address.

Lisa Brathwaite 37:21
You know, it’s like Simone said before, I mean, these are things that we’ve been processing. I can say, I’ve been processing this all my life, I think most African Americans or black people, I’ve been processing these sorts of things all my life. So when you asked me specifically about something like that, I don’t feel this is just me, you know, my favorite word is marinating on something, I don’t feel that’s something I would have to sit with. You know, like, I that’s near enough. It’s something I have my initial reactions to things, but then it’s like, okay, but how does that work? What would that look like? And so I that’s where I’m going kind of add. I’m like, I think you could look at it from a number of angles, and just say, Well, I don’t I really don’t know. I have some thoughts. My initial thought is that I don’t I still kind of wrestle with the fact that you have to put out a sign that says Black Lives Matter. Like that’s sad to me. Yeah, I know. I’m have to actually make that statement to say yes. As a litmus test. Oh, yes. Black Lives Matter like that, to me that, that we’re talking about this and having this conversation in 2020. Like, I have to get past that to even say, well, should you or shouldn’t you? Yeah, cuz it’s just sad. Yes, we do. Yeah, but we Yes, we absolutely sad as it is.

Karen Yankovich 38:46
Yeah. Because if I’m saying there cannot be a question when people look at my brand, my website or my LinkedIn profile or anything about where I stand, then we have to, how do we then incorporate that into when we help clients have that same thing like when when we put out their LinkedIn profile? Do I really? Do I want each profile to have to say NPS? I believe black lives matter? Of course I don’t, you know, but how do we make it then? So that as we’re helping people create the brand, which very often is the first, the first thing people see about someone, right? Like if somebody says you need to work with someone, Craig, first thing I’m going to do is put some on Craig’s name and Google and her LinkedIn profile is going to come up. Right, so So how can we as we advise people, and frankly, we’re writing so many LinkedIn profiles now? How do we then incorporate that? So that there is never a question about where our clients stand in this? And again, I’m, I don’t have any answers on this. I’m just saying these are the conversations I think we need to have.

Lisa Brathwaite 39:48
Well, I feel like in that case, I would ask the client, I mean, is this something that you want to unequivocally say, in your profile, if we’re teaching people this is about your personal brand If we’re teaching people to lead by your values, if we’re teaching you people to be authentic, and telling your story, that’s a part of your story. That’s where we’re at in the world today. Like, it’s, it’s part of your story.

Karen Yankovich 40:15
We are saying, like, do you do work virtually? If so, rewrite your about section to talk to off, make sure you offer that. We don’t however, and maybe we should. We don’t however, say, you know, do you have preferred pronouns? Right. So we’re not asking that question. Maybe we should be asking that question, too. Right. You know, but I think that because, you know, if we want, if I want to walk the talk, right, then this is a conversation we have to have, and then we’ll have to figure out and I guess that’s what we’re doing now starting the conversation and figuring out how to bake it into your LinkedIn profile. So that so that there isn’t a question on where you stand. And it doesn’t it maybe it’s not, I don’t know, is it a cop out to say maybe it’s in your images Maybe we’re looking at their media as we share it and say you realize all the media you’re sharing is just a bunch of white old, old white men. Do you know what I mean? Like, maybe it’s that maybe those are the kinds. Maybe that’s a start for this. I don’t know. I mean, you know, maybe we start with that, so that there’s, you know, that starts the conversation. And maybe we update the maybe we need to update the intake form to say, you know, what, I mean, how important is it for you that people understand, you know, where you stand on any of these? I don’t know, what, how do you? I mean, I don’t want to do it in a way that’s insulting, but at the same time, you know, on gender issues on, you know, on issues of race and issues of diversity issues, you know, I mean, on gender issues, our program is called, she’s linked up. We are like, by the name of our program, you know, we are maybe not being inclusive and I, and really my, my goal with calling it she’s linked up isn’t to be exclusive. It’s because I feel like women don’t feel included in the conversation on LinkedIn. All right, I’m gonna just say Because what came to my head but this is maybe this is like the women on LinkedIn like, like, you know, I need to be speaking to the women on LinkedIn, like Black Lives Matters speak to the people here like you are included here, right? And I don’t mean to equate them, right. But that’s kind of what came to my head when I said that I’m not saying I don’t care what your body parts are, I don’t care, you know how you identify, we can help you in this program. But I know that women are feeling excluded on LinkedIn. And I feel like by naming our program, she’s linked up, it helps them feel included, and therefore they can benefit from the amazing opportunities and the relationship building that can happen there that and believe me when I tell you, I get challenged with that decision a lot. Because us women aren’t as easy to whipping out our credit cards as men are. You know what I mean? So I did challenge with that decision a lot. You know, I can tell you at Simone, you don’t even really know this, but I can tell you at this moment in time, one third of the people that bought the program in May were men And two people of the people that bought the program in may ask for refunds because they got buyer’s remorse, clearly buyer’s remorse and they’re both women. So just by virtue of doing this alone, you know, I feel like there’s not a standard we’re taking. But, you know, I’m really I really feel passionate about really making feel women feel feel welcome on LinkedIn and to and to help them understand the power their men are really willing to invest in themselves. Women are just not which is where Simone’s work is so important, right? Yeah. So, you know, are we being in Are we being you know, are we not being inclusive, even just by that or do when I say all that, what do you guys, what do you guys think?

Lisa Brathwaite 43:44
Again, still processing all of this. I feel like when you say, okay, the name of our program is, She’s LinkedUp, then yes, that’s clear. It’s called she’s linked up. You’ve made a stand instead. You didn’t say people are linked up. You said, She’s LinkedUp. So you’re clear. Now, whoever comes by and learns about She’s LinkedUp. They can then decide, okay, I identify with that. that resonates with me. Someone who believes that women are second class citizens, a man who believes that women are second class or what have you. He’s not going to join up for your program. He’s he’s not he’s moving. Yeah, but isn’t that okay with you?

Karen Yankovich 44:34
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Lisa Brathwaite 44:36
So you’ve what you’ve done is you in my opinion, you’ve made it clear where you stand so that people, if that resonates with them that it’s not Well, I’m not sure if if I’m looking at Karen, who says she’s linked up and if I’m looking at someone else, who offers coaching and says, We’re linked up, if she’s linked up means something to me, value wise, if that really resonates with me, I’m likely going to go with You’re she’s linked up program, I could probably find a place for myself and that we’re linked up program. But I know for certain she’s linked up. There’s something there. There’s an element there that resonates with me. And the gentleman who thinks that women are second class citizens will probably say, Nope, She’s LinkedUp. It’s not for me, I’m going over here to We’re LinkedUp.

Karen Yankovich 45:19
And the guys that join our program are the coolest guys too, because they are confident in you know, themselves in a room full of women. Cool.

Lisa Brathwaite 45:26
I am there to engage with,

Karen Yankovich 45:28
I swear we’re gonna make this an hour and we’re already coming on an hour. Do you guys don’t realize that? I feel like there’s so many things we didn’t talk about. What didn’t we talk about that we need to talk about?

Lisa Brathwaite 45:40
I think we just need to I mean, to me, this is indicative of where we’re at. This is a conversation. It’s not a one and done. This is something that’s going to just continue. And the question is, are you going to keep showing up for it? The question is, Are you just going to wish it away? I hate to inform folks, but this conversation is not going anywhere. It’s not going to blow over. So, you know, it’s it’s, it’s uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah. To be Yeah. If you call yourself a leader, if you call yourself a leader in the business world in any way, shape or form if you’re trying to show up as a leader. Here’s your time. This is what it takes. Leadership is not easy nor convenient.

Karen Yankovich 46:22
All right. Well, I you guys, I am so honored to have you on my team honored that you agreed to do this. I don’t know if this was helpful to people or not, I guess we’ll find out when they listen. It was certainly helpful to me, because we’ve now taken the first step as a company down the direction of incorporating a lot of this into our world. And clearly, the naivety of me thinking we were gonna have a half hour conversation and we were gonna have some answers. It was it was pretty funny now in hindsight, but I feel good about it. I feel good that we have some ideas. Lisa will marinate on some of these things as it relates to incorporating it in the LinkedIn profiles. You know, so because I think we have to I think we have to, I think I think we have to be there for people that want that. And and we have to, and maybe they don’t even maybe no one’s asked them if they wanted that right. So maybe we just maybe weren’t for now we just need to people that need to be the people that ask them if they want to be to be no, you know, how they want to be known on these issues? And do they want that to be, you know, clear as people look at their profile, right, maybe that’s where we start with this just being the people that ask those questions of the people we help. And for those of for you that’s listening, you know, by all means, please give us feedback on this. If you have ideas, I want to hear them. I am a big fan of what I heard what I learned years ago called lateral learning. You know, this is not just me, preaching or the or Simone and Lisa preaching. I learned from everyone that listens to this podcast and share things with me and I encourage that I you know, I am an absolute sponge. These days, I just need to find a few more hours in the day. And then I’ll be able to listen to all the things I want to listen to, I might need to go on a drive or something, you know, just go out for a three hour drive and put some audiobooks in the car. But I don’t I’m not even really sure how to close this out. You guys. I think that I think that well, do you want either one of you want to say anything before I wrap this up? I know you both kind of did a little bit. But is there anything else you want to say before I want to make sure I’ve got your voices heard?

Simone Craige 48:29
Well, I just I want to clarify something that I said. Is is that i i do truly believe again, it’s just my opinion. I do truly believe that as Americans that racism is the air we breathe. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I mean, it’s kind of like the it’s, you know, we’re fish in. And the water is, you know, this but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I believe that everyone’s racist. I just that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying is there’s there’s certain, you know, I guess the term is unconscious bias or exert bias that we’ve all been brought up in, and we it’s now in our face, and we’re here dealing with it. That’s, that’s, that’s what I’m saying. And I think as Lisa so beautifully said, I think the PowerPoint right now is awareness. That’s, that’s the power right now.

Karen Yankovich 49:28
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. How about you anything else you want to add to this? Or have you just said your piece?

Lisa Brathwaite 49:33
I think so. I just want to say it just in general, To be continued and just be brave.

Karen Yankovich 49:41
Cool. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So you heard Lisa To be continued. This conversation will be continued. I don’t know what that looks like. But we are doing our what I am doing what I can to continue to learn and to continue to support you. As you listen to this. I hope that this helped you if there was any. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know if there was any answers, but at least you know, you’re not alone if you know that there’s confusion. So, you know, this is if you are not already in our complimentary Facebook group, you can check that out at LinkedIn for women community calm, we’ll get you to the free Facebook group. We encourage you to join us there. Once this goes live, we will absolutely continue this conversation there and in our paid groups, and we want your feedback. I want your feedback. I you know, I am you know, I won’t I won’t know what I don’t know what I don’t know, right. So don’t hesitate to give us feedback. Give me feedback. And I look forward to hearing from all of you, Lisa and Simone, thank you so much for being here today, you guys. And I’ll see you back in the office on Monday. And we’ll see how quickly we can get this out to our community. And I’m grateful for both of you. And I’m grateful to all of you that are listening to the show. Have a fabulous week, everyone. We’ll see you all again here next week for another episode.

120 – It’s Who You Know

This week’s episode of Good Girls Get Rich is brought to you by Uplevel Media CEO and LinkedIn expert, Karen Yankovich. In this episode, Karen shares how to grow your network.

Virtual networking has never been more important. To grow and cultivate your network, start by taking a look at your first-, second-, and third-degree connections on LinkedIn.

#GoodGirlsGetRich

We want to hear your thoughts on this episode! Leave us a message on Speakpipe or email us at info@karenyankovich.com.

About the Episode:

Have you ever heard the phrase “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? I’m sure you have. And there’s a lot of truth to that saying. As we’re all navigating this unprecedented time in our lives, virtual networking has become more important than ever.

In-person networking still has its value, but while we’re under shelter-in-place orders, now is the time to take full advantage of virtual networking opportunities. And that starts by growing and cultivating your connections.

LinkedIn’s First-, Second-, and Third-Degree Connections

As you’ve most likely noticed, LinkedIn has three different degrees of connections. Ever wondered what the degrees mean? A first-degree connection is someone you’re directly connected with on LinkedIn. A second-degree connection is someone you’re not connected with, but you have mutual connections. Lastly, third-degree connections are the connections of your second-degree connections.

Cultivating Your Connections

The first place to start when virtual networking is to look at who you know – your first-degree connections! Find the people you’re connected with that you meant to follow up with but never did. Then start a warm, heart-felt conversation with them. Remember, this isn’t a sales pitch!

Growing Your Network

The next step in growing your network is to take a look at your second-degree connections. How do you know these people? Maybe you’re part of the same in-person network. Maybe you know them from high school or college. Perhaps you’re even both members of the same business group on Facebook.

Find the people you can relate with and start connecting with them. Keep in mind, you don’t want to connect with just anyone and everyone. Make your connections targeted.

I want to see you succeed. As we’re all weathering this COVID-19 pandemic together, virtual networking is the tool that will help you grow your business in stressful times.

Episode Spotlights:

  • Where to find everything for this week’s episode: karenyankovich.com/120
  • “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” (1:46)
  • The fastest path to profit (5:59)
  • The skill and value of virtual networking (7:56)
  • First-, second-, and third-degree connections on LinkedIn (8:28)
  • Go through your first-degree connections (9:31)
  • Look at second-degree connections (12:49)
  • Think about who you used to know (15:24)

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

Help Us Spread the Word!

It would be awesome if you shared the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast with your fellow entrepreneurs on twitter. Click here to tweet some love!

If this episode has taught you just one thing, I would love if you could head on over to Apple Podcasts and SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW! And if you’re moved to, kindly leave us a rating and review. Maybe you’ll get a shout out on the show!

Ways to Subscribe to Good Girls Get Rich:

Read the Transcript

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast Episode 120.

Intro 0:06
Welcome to the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are, girl. Stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies, and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:23
Hello, I’m your host Karen Yankovich. And this is Episode 120 of the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast and we’re brought to you by the She’s LinkedUp Accelerator Program where we teach simple relationship and heart based LinkedIn marketing to women. We get you on the phone consistently with people that can change the course of your business and your life and your career forever. People who you can’t wait to have the opportunity to chat with and this episode is gonna tell you exactly why that’s so important. We basically teach digital marketing with the human touch so you know that if you listen to for if you’re loving what you’re hearing today, we love to hear from you. So you can subscribe to this podcast, wherever you’re listening, take a quick screenshot of the show. Right now while you’re listening and share it on social media tag me, I’m @karenyankovich, use the hashtag #goodgirlsgetrich, and that allows us to see it and we can then share your post with my audience. And that’s how we will get more visibility. We have a link to Speakpipe in the show notes where we can get your audio reviews. So you can leave us an audio review there. Just give us a chat and let us know who you think we should have as a guest or topic you’d love to hear us speak about that link is in the show notes at karenyankovich.com/120. That’s where you’ll find the blog for this page where you’ll see all the other links we talked about and all that all the good stuff that you want to follow up on.

So I know that you’ve heard over the years that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, right. We’ve heard that. I mean, I’ve heard that I feel like I’ve heard that forever. Right. And I you know, I think Listen, I think you also have No, I think is also what you know, right? Like you, if you want to be if you want a sustainable business, you got to be good at what you do. And but a lot of times, we’re really good at what we do. But we don’t we overlook the who we know, right? We work so hard on the what we know that we don’t really put time and effort into the who we know. And that is exactly why I teach LinkedIn marketing, because that’s what I teach you how to do. I teach you how to build relationships. And sometimes we have to reignite relationships with people we know. Or we’re looking to intentionally build relationships with people. Because when you have contacts in places that can more easily open doors for you. Yeah, when you show up and the doors open, you got to be able to deliver, right, so you absolutely have to know your stuff. But if somebody can open the door for you or somebody can make an introduction to you, it just makes things so much easier. And you know, somehow we got stuck in the past 10 years of social media, I think on this cycle of growing our networks. growing on networks and having a million followers and you know there’s there’s a lot of value to that in a lot of ways I’m not gonna say that there’s not value to that I you know, having a lot of followers on some of the platforms helps establish me as an influencer. It helps me land gigs when I need them. But if you had to ask me today, which is more important, having a lot of followers are having specific people that can open doors for me 100% I would say, who I know is more important than having tons and tons of people who follow me. Can you relate to that? Can you think of a time Have you ever experienced a time where one solid introduction changed the trajectory of your life or your business or your career? Maybe it’s even when you were younger and somebody you know, you know, one of your high school friends had a job somewhere and they were able to get you in on that job right or somebody you know, worked for a company that you really wanted to get in on and they were able to get you hired there right they got you the interview. You know, you still have to do your thing and you know, you have to show up and and do a good job but it You know, that somehow when who, you know, let you know that there is an opportunity, right? And who you know, that can introduce you to people, that can be the big context, the important context in your life. Right. So, maybe you’ve experienced this at some point in your life where, you know, somebody, you know, either introduced you to a client, that was a huge opportunity, or somebody, you know, just put you, you know, we say, I was in the right place at the right time, but why were you in the right place at the right time? Right? Maybe you somebody, somebody put you there, somebody introduced you to someone that got you there. So, you know, thinking back to that, I want you to now fast forward to today to future you to current you’re not future you to the you have this in this present moment in time. And, you know, as I’m recording this, it’s spring of 2020. And we are reimagining what our businesses look like in many, many, many ways. We’re reimagining what our careers look like and I think certainly in my business, and in Many of the people I speak to in their businesses, we are starting to realize that this is the beginning of the new normal, right there is no flipping a switch that’s gonna put us back to how it was in January it is this is the beginning of what the new normal looks like, and remembering the who you know, value in your business in your career now, and developing and strengthening and, and, you know, building relationships with people that, you know, one person at a time, not by getting hundreds and hundreds of followers. That is, it’s kind of almost remembering how powerful that was in your earlier in your life. I know that’s how it was been for me, and it’s why I teach this because I’ve known for years how powerful that those one or two relationships are, you know, if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know that there’s lots of people that teach you know, connect with 100 people a week or 100 people a day and that is absolutely not what I teach. I teach Connect with five people a week, because I want those five people to be people that can get you in front of big audiences, people that can maybe feature you in their magazine, people that could maybe you know, I don’t know, the big clients not, you know, not the numbers, I want you to be really intentional about who you connect with. Because I know that that’s the fastest path to profit, not by having lots of followers by being really intentional and building relationships specifically with the right people. And you guys know what I mean, right? You get you probably are getting lots of LinkedIn connection requests from people immediately followed by by my stuff, right? I don’t want you to do that. I want you to be think think long and hard about warm opportunities to connect with people, even if you have to create those warm opportunities. So let’s talk about this as it relates to LinkedIn for a second. You know, LinkedIn, to me is about building relationships. And we’ve talked about this before. You know, if you build intentionally build relationships that you think can bring value to you and your career and your business, the sales will follow. You don’t have to lead with sales. So on in my world, LinkedIn is not about selling, it’s about relationship building. And then of course, it is all business. So everybody knows you’ve got you’re there to build your business and to grow your business. So it’s okay to talk about business. It’s not okay to just build relationships with the intention of just selling, right. Like, you know, if you’ve gone to a chamber of commerce event or a networking event or a women in business event or, you know, be in a meeting, whatever, and you go to these meetings and injured people, somebody introduces themselves to you. And they say, you know, hey, yeah, I sell widgets and you need widgets. I’m like, really? Do I really need widgets? I don’t even know you and you’re already ready to sell me widgets, right? Doesn’t happen as often as in person as it does virtually. But I want you to think about, you know, using LinkedIn As the virtual networking, right virtual networking, and you wouldn’t, you know, if you’re doing in person networking properly, you wouldn’t be walking up to people and immediately pitching your services. I think that virtual networking is a skill that is going to be really valuable to us in the next six months. And maybe for the rest of our lives. I mean, I think it’s always valuable, right. But I think it’s going to be particularly valuable to us for the next six months. So that’s what we’re going to really be talking about here. So on LinkedIn, I want to talk a little bit in case you are not familiar with how this works. on LinkedIn, you have a network, and you have first degree people in your network. You have second degree people in your network and you have third degree people in your network. And if you and I are connected on LinkedIn, we are first degree connections. My second degree connections are your connections that I’m currently not connected to. Okay, so so by being connected to you, it opens your network to me as second degree connections. Now there’s probably people you’re connected to, that I’m also connected to, and those remain first degree connections. But if you’re connected to 200, people 10, of whom I’m already connected to, then you’ve opened me up to 190 second degree connections that are new to me, right. And then a third degree connection are people that you and I are not connected to, but are connected to my second degree connections. Okay, but for the most part, the power in LinkedIn are those first and second degree connections. And that’s what we’re going to talk about here in this episode. So the first thing I want you to do in this virtual networking world is to take time to go through your first degree connections, you probably have hundreds, if not thousands, of people that you are currently connected to on LinkedIn, right people that you connected to, or they’ve connected to you, and you never really took the time to build a relationship. Now, I don’t want you to be building relationships with every single one of those people, because I don’t know who they are. But I do want You go through them. And and if you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, we’ve did a couple episodes on that we can link to the them in the show notes, it helps you do this even more powerfully and more quickly. But whether you’re using Sales Navigator or not, go through them and start to make a list of people that you are connected to first degree connections that you want to get to know better, right? Because who, you know, you want to make sure you know them. They know who you are, and you’re looking for opportunities to collaborate with these people. And your message to them is, you know, hey, Mary, it’s Karen, we’ve been connected here for a couple years. And then whatever is true, you know, we haven’t talked in two years or we met at that event, and we intended to follow up and somehow we never made it happen, right, whatever is true or maybe it’s, you know, we connected I’m not even sure how we initially connected but it looks like you’re doing some really cool things. And it looks like we serve a similar audience. I you know, I’d love to get to know a little bit more about what you’re doing. I’m taking this time of being you know, have a Having a little bit more time in my day, while we’re still sheltering in place, and I thought I would reach out to some people on my LinkedIn network that I that I want to get to know better. So it is as simple. You’re not pitching them, please don’t pitch them. Okay? Because it is true networking. But you probably have gold in your first degree connections, okay, you probably have gold, but you have to go through it to see who those people are. So whatever you think is going to be valuable to you. Now is the time to do this. Because we are open now I’m finding people are more open to those deeper connections to the opportunities to get on the phone and have an actual conversation, maybe jumping on zoom, which is the closest thing we have right now to face to face. Right. But you are you probably have a lot of gold in your first network right now that you haven’t tapped. So I want you to go in this week and tap that and just five people a week. Five people a week. Reach out to them as well. message as you can, as warmer messages you can you’re going to hear an upcoming episode, I interviewed Nigel nickel and episode that’s coming up in a few weeks. And one of the things that he talked about doing, which I thought was such a great idea, he has packs of business cards from people he’s met at events, and most of them are in his LinkedIn network. But what he’s doing is he’s going through the business cards and saying, well, this person could be really valuable to me taking a picture of the business card, and then messaging it to them on LinkedIn and saying, Hey, Joe, you know, look, what I just came across. How cool was it? You know, it’s been four years since we met, and I got this card. I know, as you’re not even at that company anymore, maybe it’s time to catch up and see how we can support each other, right? True networking. He’s not pitching him, but you’re doing it intentionally. You’re not doing it to everyone. You’re doing it to people that you think for some reason or another could be really valuable to you on the other side. So the next thing I want you to do is start to take a stab now, at your second degree network. And this is not something you’re not going to go to your second degree network. This is going to be enormous. Okay. But I want you to think like have your second degree network in the back of your mind. And then think about maybe I want you to build out your network, I want you to start to connect with five people a week, micro targeted, we talked about that a lot here, micro targeted five people a week. So five people you already connected to reach out to them, and five new people. Maybe you belong to an organization, maybe it’s nabo, National Association of women business owners, maybe it’s a chamber of commerce, maybe it you know, whatever you belong to, maybe it’s a Facebook group that you think is got your ideal client, your ideal people in it, go through those two member directories, whatever that looks like for you. And I don’t want you to, it’s not about I don’t want you to, you know, I want to make sure you’re following the rules. If there’s rules in the Facebook group that says you cannot reach out to people outside of this group, then don’t reach out to people outside of that group. But if you are, maybe there’s probably threads in that group. If you search for enough, there’s probably threads in almost every Facebook group that says hey, let’s connect on LinkedIn. Go to those people. Red’s pour through it, see if there’s people in there that you think could be valuable. take a little time to do this. All right, don’t don’t rush this, because I want these to be incredibly valuable to you, I want you to have a microphone in front of their group at the end of this conversation, I want you to, you know, have them say, let me introduce you to my, you know, cousin, Sue, who’s going to be the biggest connection you’ve ever had in your life, right? So start to build out your network and start with your second degree connection. So like, if you are part of let’s use us nabo and they probably have a LinkedIn company page, right? You could say hey, you know, I’ve been and I’d start with your local chapters, by the way, because it’s just the warmer you could make this the better shot you have getting on the phone with people, you know, hey, we’re both members of Nova we’re both members of this chamber of commerce wherever that is, and I’m, you know, I’m taking some time now to really look at the people and then in the, that our other members because I joined this organization, because I knew they were really cool people that were also members, but I haven’t been You know, I’ve kind of dropped the ball and haven’t really made the time to get to know these really cool people that I joined to meet. So that’s what I’m doing now. I love to be connected to you here on LinkedIn. And you know, learn a little bit more about what you do. That’s it. Okay. But the warmer you make that the better shot you’re doing it now you’re building out your who, you know, network, but you’re doing it in a really specific and targeted way. Right. And then I want you to think about who you used to know maybe these are people you went to high school with, that you went to college with, like, dig deep, okay, dig deep, open up your high school yearbook, open up your college yearbook, open up your sorority, you know, alumni directory, go like Who did you use to know that now would be a good time to rekindle that relationship. Maybe when you’re going through those business cards, you’ll see some people that you’re not connected with on LinkedIn already. And you can, you know, you can connect with them. So think about who you used to know That you can reach out to now and say, you know, I was going through my directory. And you know what, just for kicks, I was like popping up names of people we graduated with on LinkedIn. And you know what, like, it looks like we serve the same kinds of audience. I’d love to hear more about what you’re doing and catch up. Right? So who did you use to know that now would be a good time because again, you never know who they know, okay? You never know who they know. So taking time now to go through your first degree connections to see who you’re already connected to, that you haven’t really made the time to reach out to start to build out your network, using organizations maybe you belong to or warm, make this as warm as you possibly can, using your second degree network to do that, and then thinking about who did you use to know maybe there’s a company that you used to work for me, you know, there’s just there’s no end to this stuff, right? Because there’s so many people, I don’t want you to to reach out to everyone. I only Want you to reach out to people that you think if you can get on the phone with them could bring real immense, huge value right to your network, to your business, to your career to your personal brand. And that’s it. Right? Remember that one solid opportunity could be gold, that one person that got you that job when you were in high school that led to this great career you have right? Like thinking back to that it could be gold. So you know, there’s a couple things you need to keep in mind with this. You have to be open. The goal is not to just be connected to them. By the way, the goal is to take that conversation and try and get a phone call out of it. An actual dial the number talk on the phone with your headset on to people, okay? I want you to look to actually get on the phone with these people because you don’t really know them if you haven’t had at least one phone conversation with them right? So get on the phone with them and but here’s the thing when you get on the phone with them You’re still not pitching them, you are just open to seeing where these calls go. You have to be truly networking, not just selling, truly networking. And we know that networking is valuable actually looked up the definition of networking, and Webster’s is the exchange of information or services among individuals, groups or institutions. So the exchange of information, not just the push of information, and then specifically the cultivation of productive relationships, for employment or business, specifically, the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business, do this really specifically, virtual networking is, is going to be a skill that’s going to make, I mean, I’m going to say it’s going to make or break you, in this moment in time. It’s if you can, I’m not gonna say it’s gonna break I’m not gonna say you won’t be successful if you can’t do it. But if you’re struggling, virtual networking can take you to the next level. And the other thing that was in Webster’s and I don’t know who how, I don’t know who this person is, how long can I didn’t I didn’t really look them up I should have I guess, networking networking remains the number one cause of job attainment. Okay? That is the same thing for sales attainment and networking. Networking can be done right now. virtual networking is being done get on the phone with people don’t be afraid to do this right now. This is the beginning of what this next season in your business and your career and your life is. So start to be networking and building relationships and building the who you know. Rolodex now Rolodex I just tells you how old I am, right? virtual Rolodex, I don’t know. But you got to do this now. People are investing right now. People are there’s many, many people that are taking this time to invest in their learning to invest in their businesses and in their careers. You know, I want you to do this but I want you to do this with integrity and with authenticity. So I if you want to dive a little deeper into this stuff, we are doing our Mastersclass which you can check out at sheslinkedupmasterclass.com. The She’s LinkedUp Masterclass get you more detail on all of this, how to find these people that are your second degree networks, right goes into some other stuff too about your profile and, and why now is the best time to be doing this, but just know that I know you I’m hoping that as you’re listening to this, that little niggling thing in your head is going yeah, you know what if it wasn’t for this person, right, this and this and this wouldn’t have happened, start meeting those people now get on the phone with those people you don’t know which one of those people are going to be the one that’s going to, you know, catapult you but it’s so nice when when you say I wonder who I know that works for this company and you pull it up. And not only is it somebody that you’re connected to on LinkedIn, but you’ve had a phone call with them, they will remember you and they’ll be more likely to support you and help you with whatever it is you need help with. Right? We’ll talk about this rising tide lifts all boats, right I do this podcast to support you. If you’re supporting each other if you’re supporting people in your network and they’re supporting You and you’re lifting each other up you’re both going to have a better chance of, of surviving and thriving in this new season of your world. So you know, let’s lift each other up. Help me help you share this podcast. again take a quick screenshot of this episode on your phone if you like this, share it on social media that helps me and then I will help you by sharing it with my audience. And that’s how we lift each other up join us for the sheslinkedupmasterclass.com. It is the time to do it. We are focused on connecting while disconnected. So we get to detail on a lot of the things we talked about here in this episode. And let’s kick some 2020 booty together. What do you say? I want this to be simple for you. I’m here to help you make that happen. And I will see you back here again next week for another episode of the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast.

100 – How to Grow Your Business with Ease

 

Growing your business doesn’t ALWAYS have to be a struggle and fight. I want to share with you how to grow your business with ease and exactly how I did so too!

This week’s episode of Good Girls Get Rich is brought to you by Uplevel Media CEO and LinkedIn expert, Karen Yankovich. In this episode, Karen reflects on the past 100 episodes and how she niching down and simplifying her business has proven to grow her business exponentially with ease. Karen shares multiple personal accounts on how she got to be where she is at how she grew her business with ease and how you can get started with doing so too!

 

#GoodGirlsGetRich

We want to hear your thoughts on this episode! Leave us a message on Speakpipe or email us at info@karenyankovich.com.

 

About the Episode:

 

Wow! Can you believe we’re at episode 100 already?! 

 

I’ve learned SO much since episode 1 and that’s what I want to talk about today.

 

I do a ton of reflecting in my OWN business within this episode, that I wanted to give you the advice I have on how to grow your business with ease. 

 

I like to compare this to being like a mermaid! I tell the story in the podcast on how I went to my friends house and she had gone through a ton of stuff in her personal life, and she had multiple Wonder Woman mugs. I was pretty overwhelmed at the time and she gave me one of these mugs to keep my strength!

 

One day I was making myself tea in the morning and I was completely exhausted… I was burnt out, had a to do list 45 miles long, was late to a million things, and all of a sudden I look over and I see a mug that said “I want to be a mermaid”

 

So I put down my Wonder Woman mug and from there on out I decided that I wanted to be a MERMAID! I didn’t want to have to “fight’ for my job like Wonder Woman, I wanted to swim through my business like a mermaid!

 

Since then I have made it a priority to help women just like you grow your business with ease, however I know it can be tough to even just get started with that. So I wanted to give you a little boost in this episode and give you the basics on where to start on how to grow your business with ease so you can swim through your business and grow your Mermaid Empire just like I have!

 

Make a list of everything you market and sell in your business

 

When making this list, include absolutely EVERYTHING; both free and paid. This is where you can really see everything that you have to offer to clients.

 

When writing down this list, think to yourself…

 

  1. Does it flow with my business?
  2. Do I love everything on this list?
  3. Does the site of one of my projects stress me out?

 

Feel free to add things you want to bring to your business within the next 12 months as well! This is one of the crucial steps in growing your business with ease and building your mermaid empire.

 

Create a VERY basic business plan for each of your offers

 

And when I say basic, just know, we are brain dumping here, so no need to get into too much detail for each of these.

 

When outlining a basic business plan for each service make sure you include the following things:

 

  1. How much revenue does this plan to bring in?
  2. Cost associated with the product or service
  3. Do I need to adjust my pricing?
  4. Do I even love this/want to do this, or  should I let it go?

 

As you go on with creating a mini business plan for each of your products or services, this will allow you to really recognize what’s important to you and your mermaid empire and what you need to cut out. 

 

While looking at this list, it may not feel like your about to grow your business with ease, but like I mentioned in the podcast… 

 

“The more I niche my business down, the more successful my business is!”

 

Niching down and really understanding what you need to put your time and energy in, will free you up from those burdens that take away time from the ideal life you want to be living.

 

Apply your list to your life

 

At this point you should understand what direction you will be headed in the upcoming year, so now it’s time to apply them to your life!

 

Remember: I want you to grow your business with ease… but why? It’s because I want you to build a business that supports your dream life! 

 

We are building your Mermaid Empire here! Niching down and growing your business with ease will help support what’s important to you in your personal life, whether it be spending more time with your children, traveling more, etc. 

 

Each of your products or services should lead to supporting your ideal life. If it doesn’t, ask yourself why. Is it because it’s a new product that you need to put a ton of time into developing? Maybe it is, but once it’s developed and sold, that means you’ll get to live off the profit and allow your business to grow with you on the beach!

 

As we move into a new phase into your life, I want you to dream BIG! That’s why I wanted to give you this free download to help you get started with thinking big and growing your business with ease and creating your ideal life!

 

Join us at karenyankovich.com/facebookgroup and share what YOUR ideal life looks like so I can support YOU in getting there!

 

 

Episode Spotlights:

  • Where to find everything for this week’s episode: karenyankovich.com/100
  • Terry’s review of the podcast (1:32)
  • What Karen learned from starting her podcast to now (2:51)
  • How Karen discovered that niching down leads to more success (5:17)
  • What Karen is setting her intentions for in 2020 (10:10)
  • The effects on Karen’s personal life from niching down (16:42)
  • How to get started on simplifying your business with more success (19:42)
  • Make a general business plan for each business (22:57)
  • Figuring out the pricing associated with each task (25:00)
  • Having your business support your ideal and dream life (27:08)
  • What Karen teaches her clients to start this process (28:19)
  • Recap the plan to building your empire with ease (29:33)
  • Karens free tool that can help you dream bigger in 2020 (31:05)

Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

 

Help Us Spread The Word!

It would be awesome if you shared the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast with your fellow entrepreneurs on twitter. Click here to tweet some love!

 

If this episode has taught you just one thing, I would love if you could head on over to Apple Podcasts and SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW! And if you’re moved to, kindly leave us a rating and review. Maybe you’ll get a shout out on the show!

 

Ways to Subscribe to Good Girls Get Rich:

Read the Transcript

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the Good Girls Get Rich podcast episode 100

Intro
Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl. Stop being the best kept secret in town learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:24
Hey there, I’m your host, Karen Yankovich. And can you believe it? We made it to Episode 100 of the Good Girls Get Rich podcast it’s unbelievable to me anyway. I’m loving this and I love the feedback that I’m getting from all of you. And we have a really special show for you today to celebrate. We’re going to talk a little bit about the changes in my business in the past 100 days and how that’s helped me support you better and then how we can incorporate some of those same changes in Your business so that you can have the year of your dreams.

So as you know if you’ve listened before or if you love what you hear today, I love hearing from you. So make sure that you subscribe to The Good Girls Get Rich podcast on Apple podcasts or whatever your pod catcher is of choice. We love your reviews. So I if you leave us a review, we can showcase you and your review on an upcoming episode.

We have a bunch of new reviews which was so fun to get last week or the end the week before. But one of them I’ll read to you is Terry in Fairhope. Terry says that Karen and her guest experts help you win by growing your business the get rich part with her LinkedIn and social media strategies. Karen is an excellent host listen and learn.

Terry, thank you so much. I love that you talked about the LinkedIn strategies that we teach, because I know that it is sometimes a little scary for some of us to be jumping onto LinkedIn for some strategies. I do my best to make it simple for you. And I’m glad that that resonates with you.

So of course, if you leave us a review, you can leave us a review on the pod catcher that you listen to. Or you can take a screenshot of this episode on whatever it is you’re listening to it on and share it on social media, make sure you tag me @KarenYankovich or use the #goodgirlsgetrich, I can be sure to share your post with our audience and that way I can get you more visibility, we all get more visibility that way.

So that’s always fun to add in the show notes there’s a link for speakpipe where you can leave us an audio review. I would love that if you are so inclined. Just go to Karen yankovich.com slash speakpipe or go to Karen Yankovich comm slash 100. And you’ll see the link there as well. And then we can play that for you.

So so much change since episode one. So much changed since episode one. And if you listen to Episode 96 we’ll link to it in the show. notes, I talked a lot about how much I’ve walked away from, in order to be able to be creating the business in the life that I love. I mean, I have no problem working hard. But it was getting to the point where all I was doing was working and I wasn’t really seeing the results that I wanted to see, in my business.

And in my life, I was finding myself having to say no to personal events, or, like summers, I live at the Jersey Shore. I wasn’t getting to the beach enough cuz I was working too much. And so it is for me, it isn’t about that I am not a fan of hard work. It is about the fact that I’m a fan of working so much that it impacts my life, right.

So that’s why I went into business for myself so that I could build a business and allow me the flexibility to do things but when you have a to do list 45 miles long, you just don’t do it even even if you have the flexibility to do it right. So one of the things that I’ve done very intentionally, and I’m probably still doing in the past 100 episodes, is looking at what I have to walk away from.

And that’s what we talked about an episode 96 You may remember that get seen be heard workshops that Christina days when I were doing we closed that down fully, mainly because, you know, we were teaching social media and PR and it was, I mean, people were having amazing successes and Christina and I love doing it. But social media changes so much that everything needed to be updated a million times. And I was starting to get out of my zone of genius, which really is relationship marketing and LinkedIn marketing.

So what that did when we first shut that down about two years ago, or a year and a half ago was it allowed me to refocus on LinkedIn strategy and LinkedIn marketing. And what I’ve done since then, is I’ve niched down even further as you know, in the past couple of weeks I guess or month to LinkedIn for women, she’s linked up my course has been rebranded she’s linked up.

And here’s the thing. The more I do this, the more I walk away from in the morning niche my business down, the more successful, my businesses.

Let me tell you a little a couple of things that led me to some of these decisions because I know that it’s not easy to do.

I absolutely suffer from shiny object syndrome. And I try not to I’m trying to stay more focused. And guess what, the more I build space into my life, the easier it is for me to stay focused on shiny object syndrome and not take not jump into those shiny object because I have more time to think about it and plan for things as suppose for jumping into things going. Sure I can do that. Right.

So a couple years ago, I have some of the most amazing friends and I’m so blessed for that. And I have a friend and I was I was doing some work with somebody and we were we were kind of talking about warriors and I was like, I’m like one woman I can do anything and I had these bracelets if you guys are familiar with the oh my gosh what is the touchstone crystal bracelets the the the ones that are kind of like the circle bracelets I can’t remember what they’re called they look like they’re just colors they have like lots of lots of colors and I happen to have like a red one. A purple one not a blue one and a white one and yellow and so I felt like they were like wonder like a Wonder Woman cup.

So I was wearing them one day because I was like I am like I can do anything I can do this. I got it. I can do this. And I went to a friend of mines house and she also is in that same mode and she has gone through tons and tons of stuff in her life that personal life that she’s had to really, I guess fight her way through right? So she had multiple Wonder Woman mug so when I was telling her she handed me a Wonder Woman mug. I happen to have these bracelets on so I was telling her the story about it.

She gave me this wonderful she gave me the mug to take home and it and at the time that was serving me right I’m I can do this. Like I felt strong. I felt empowered. I can do this. And then one day, I guess it was about a year ago, maybe a little more, maybe a year and a half ago, I was making myself tea in the morning and I had the Wonder Woman mug in my hand and I was exhausted. I had a to do list 45 miles long.

None of it was getting done on time. I was late to 5000 different things. I felt like I was being pulled in 100 different directions. And I looked at that mug and I was like, Oh, my gosh, I am so tired of fighting my way through life in my business.

And I looked over at my shelf and I had a mug that says I want to be a mermaid. And I put the Wonder Woman mug back and I grabbed the mermaid mug and I said I am so tired of fighting through bank business.

Time for me to start swimming. I want to be a mermaid. I don’t want to have to fight every step of the way. So that mermaid mug has been kind of like my anthem. Ever since then I want to be a mermaid I want to swim and enjoy and and just feel empowered. I want to feel empowered, but I I was kind of tired of all the fighting and feeling like I needed to fight. Right.

So then I met a woman that I had lunch with a woman a couple months ago, maybe six months ago. And she was extraordinarily successful in the corporate world, and was building a mentorship program for women. And we were chatting, and she showed me her website. And one of the things she had in her website was about, you know, pulling from your superhuman powers, and I had like, a visceral reaction to it.

She was like, What the heck, I was like, honestly, I hate this. And she’s like, What do you mean? I said, Why can’t we just be human and be successful? why don’t why are women expected to be superhuman? Why can’t women just be human and be successful?

And it stopped her in her tracks too, I think because as women were like, you know, you guys can remember that like, you know, the am woman hear me roar. I can do anything I can, you know, bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan and all that stuff. And it’s exhausting, right? But we’re still conditioned to being superhuman.

So I have intentionally been building what I’m now calling my mermaid Empire Ever since then, because I don’t want to fight through 2020 to keep to be successful, I want to enjoy it. I want to enjoy the journey. I want to flow through the journey with ease. And when I build ease with intention into my business, the most amazing things happen, the most amazing clients come into my life. The people that that you know, when you’re, when you’re fighting through things, sometimes you take clients that you know, we’re not perfect clients, but you just need the money to take them.

But when you set the intention that you’re doing this with ease, I can’t even tell you how amazing it is when the perfect clients start to come your way. Because you’re no longer fighting and you’re no longer fighting it. You’re just kind of opening your mind and your world and the universe, whatever however you believe it to be for the perfect people to step in.

So here’s what my mermaid Empire looks like for 2020. And by the way, this episode 100 is coming out, I believe it is my calendar. And December 2, December 6, is my birthday. So I feel like this hundredth episode is like a birthday present to myself, and the setting the intention for the upcoming year. I can’t even say the words, but it’s a big year for me. The December 6 2020 birthday is a is a big year for me. So I have big plans. If I have to turn that age in 2020 I’m going to be doing it with, you know, with with having the best year of my life.

So I’ve got big plans for 2020. So let me tell you a little bit of what that looks like for me and then we’ll talk about how we can incorporate this into your business.

So right now I love this podcast and I am in a great great move with it with my team and with you know, just getting it produced and I love the content. We’re getting great feedback on it. It’s growing pretty quickly now. And so grateful for that. So the podcast is going to continue. And I want to do more speaking I want to get in front of more women audiences.

So if you have a woman audience reach out to me at info at Karen Yankovich. calm. I do a lot of speaking now. But but for me for 2020, the podcast and my speaking line of business, right, because we hopefully you have multiple income streams. So the speaking is an income stream for me. That’s the front end of my business.

And that’s the visibility that I built. Right. I promote my podcast I promote myself as a speaker, when I’m standing in front of a room with 100 or 500 people with a microphone in my hand, that’s more visibility for me.

So I absolutely teach visibility and you two should have a visibility plan and visibility by itself, right? It doesn’t pay the mortgage.

So beyond that, we’ve got you know, you’ve got to get people onto your email list and build your email. Listen for us right now, not sure exactly what this is going to look like yet. But I do know that a big part of that is going to be the LinkedIn profile challenge that we did in October of 20 of 2019. It was hugely successful. I got such great feedback from it.

We’re going to do it again in January. So January 2020. And I don’t know if we’ll do it again. After that, I’m sure we will. So depending on when you’re listening to this, go to LinkedIn profile challenge. com, either the registration will be open for the challenge, it’s completely free, or you can get on the waitlist, either.

Either way, if you go to LinkedInprofilechallenge.com and get on the waitlist, this is completely free. There’s no obligation, but it was hugely successful. We had people got such great results. I’ve so many people ask me what we’re going to do it again that we’re doing it pretty quickly after the first one. Because I think that I learned a few things about how we delivered it, I want to do it better. I have a low end LinkedIn profile course and a little bit of a higher end LinkedIn strategy course.

So those are the things that we’re going to also be marketing in 2020. But that’s it. I’m not looking to market a million different things.

One of the other things I walked away from or I’m walking away from is my membership course the triple your biz club. I love it. I love the people in it, but it just didn’t. It wasn’t in my mermaid Empire Plan, it was a little bit more of a struggle. I think that people there got had success of it, but it was a little too. There was too much. We were just trying to do too many things.

So what we’re going to be doing in 2020 is putting a new membership out there, but it’s going to be on the other side of the LinkedIn strategy course. So if you want to get in my membership, if you want ongoing support from me around LinkedIn, so that you’ve got accountability that you’re getting the work done, you’ve got to have gone through my course first. And that was a hard decision to make because obviously, putting it on the front end of my course I can open it up to the world. Putting on the back end of my course I can only market it then to the few people that have taken my course.

Right. But again, mermaid empires, it feels right. And the more I stay true to that the more successful my businesses. So you’ll hear more about that in in the beginning of 2020. But again, you’re only eligible for that if you’ve taken my course.

We started running masterminds in 2019. And they have also been very successful. So we’re going to continue to run masterminds in 2020. And they’re small masterminds. They’re five people, they only last for three months. And I’m going to still continue to do a small number of one on one clients, because I love that.

I love meeting with people for a day and spending a day with them. So we’re going to continue that as well. So that is what my mermaid Empire looks like for 2020. The podcast and speaking you’ll see a lot about the LinkedIn profile challenge will be marketing a few times during the year, presumably let’s see how it goes in January.

And then maybe there’ll be some other LinkedIn freebies that will offer over the course of the year. And then we’re staying true to the course with just the two digital programs. And the membership on the other side of the strategy course, the masterminds and the number of one on one clients.

Now, that sounds like a lot, right? I can’t even tell you how much I stripped out of my business to get down to that.

Okay. But what this does is it allows me to say really, really focused, okay?

It’s allowed me to grow my team in a way that helps me and my clients feel really supported. And here’s the thing, here’s the best part of this, my clients, whether you’re in my digital programs, or my free LinkedIn profile challenge, or a one on one client, or mastermind client, you’re getting the best of me, because instead of spreading myself thin, with teaching social media in general and trying to keep on top of what the strategies are for Twitter, and Instagram, whatever, I could spend more time testing and tweaking and monitoring LinkedIn strategy, so that I can dive deeper and help you have more success with that. I can make all the mistakes right, I can do all the work, and then I can just share the room. results and the benefits of that with you. So to me, that is what my mermaid Empire looks like for 2020.

And I cannot tell you how excited I am about it. I feel really good about it I for the first time and a lot of years, I’m able to take more time off in my business and I’ve been able to take and I’m loving it.

So are you feeling that can you understand, can you feel the difference in pushing to get your business and, and fight chasing all the shiny objects and and never really feeling like you’re always feeling like you’re catching up versus just feeling like things are happening with ease, like does not feel amazing?

Are you feeling that? Are you ready to be human and successful in 2020? Instead of feeling like you have to be superhuman?

Okay, I’m like, I’m not totally sure that mermaids are human, just to be clear, but at least they’re not known to have to fight their way to success. Okay. So we’re going to be we’re going to pretend that they’re human for now. And we’re going to just feel like we’re swimming through life in our business like mermaids do. Imagine the difference that this could make in your life.

I’ve made time this I mean, I’ll tell you a few things that have happened in my personal life this year, as my business has grown, as I’ve stayed more focused, and, and pulled things out to create a business with ease, I’ve made I know, these sounds might sound a little like little things too, but they are huge things to me. I’ve made time this year to meditate twice a day.

I mean, you can hear how fast I talk, my brain goes as fast as my mouth, my brain does not stop. And I have struggled with meditating forever, because I know that it helps me. But it was really it’s really hard. It’s always been really difficult for me to stay, to do it and to to be consistent with it. But I found a technique that works for me, so that not only am I meditating once a day, I am meditating twice a day, because I know that if I stop in the three o’clock range or the two three o’clock range, and just spend 15 minutes, not an hour, but 15 minutes, clearing my mind.

And just like letting everything go for 15 minutes, I come back for the next couple hours of the day, so much more productive, that I’m generally stopping work around four or five o’clock, which is unheard of for me also, I mean, I I am a morning person like you are more likely to see me working in the morning than at eight o’clock at night. But let me tell you lots of NFS I mean, I’m not ever working at eight o’clock at night. Of course that happens on occasion.

But generally, I am now keeping to pretty normal work hours and taking time off during the week which is amazing. I’m also being consistent with a morning routine. Because Because I’m a morning person I wake up and my brain is immediately on 100 miles an hour.

All the things I need to do well, I you know, I can go on and on about my morning routine, but basically just know that it supports my self care not just my business, but I have incorporated business stuff into it because It is when my brain is most on fire. And I want to make sure that my business gets some of that right not just my, just my personal, you know, my personal life or my self care.

So I’ve incorporated a morning routine that allows me to feel like I’m doing some self care and getting an A power hour in my business and then back to some count, self care. And then by nine o’clock, I’m at my desk and I’m, I’m raring to go for the day.

What has happened with these little things that have changed in my life is that so many things are better in my life and in my business. So we’re going to talk a little bit about how we can you can start to incorporate a mermaid Empire into your life in the upcoming year. So we have some tasks for you here and I’m going to walk you through a few things that I would love to see you do. And I am here to support you with this.

Okay, but the first thing I want you to do is take some time, maybe put a half hour on your calendar. block everything out. I’m a fan of a kitchen timer. You’ve heard that before. If the kitchen timer is ticking, nothing else gets done half an hour and make a list of everything you market in your business free and paid. Okay, free and paid.

Do you have a free offer? Do you have a podcast? What are you marketing in your business? And then I want you to look at those things and feel like, does it flow? Right? Does it feel like ease? Or does it stress you out to even look at it? Right?

Like I can tell you like for me, one of the things I mentioned earlier is my masterminds and I have to tell you, my business coach, people that I’m in, I’m in masterminds with they’re all like, why are you selling three month masterminds? You have to fill them continually. Why don’t you sell a year long mastermind. And you know what, because this is what feels right to me.

A year long mastermind stresses me out because if if I have a three month mastermind I know I could make it short and powerful and results. And I can teach people exactly how to replicated. I’m not going anywhere. If they want to work with me when the mastermind ends, they still can write, but it to me that feels like ease and filling a year long mastermind feels like stress. Okay?

So even though I can’t even tell you how many people are telling me, you know, you should be doing a longer mastermind right now. I don’t like it. I don’t feel it. It doesn’t feel like it’s right for my business. I feel like that I just don’t feel it. So that’s what I want you to look at when you make this list of everything you market for your business. Do you love all the things on there? Okay.

Alright, and maybe if maybe what you want to do as you’re making this list of everything you are marketing in your business. Now, you might also want to add to that list, things you want to you’re looking to bring into your business in the upcoming 12 months.

Okay, so that list, if you’re anything like many of the clients I work with that list is probably going to be long. Because we there’s a lot of things we want to do, right? There’s a lot of things we want to do. And I love the passion around the people that come into my life. But I also know that, you know, if you if you are doing, you know, there’s the there’s what you’re doing right now to pay the bills, and then maybe that maybe that you’re not ready to give that up yet.

But there’s a few other things you’re doing. And maybe you’ve got three other things you want to do. And maybe they’re not all that related. And you know how I know this because we read your LinkedIn profiles.

And it’s the number one question that I get asked is okay, I do this and I do this. I’m an accountant by day and I’m a Reiki Master by night. How do I infuse them? And we work on that, right?

We work on that with you. And by the way, you know, maybe at the same time, you want to be a business coach, right? So I get it, I get it. You are a good company. If you’re thinking about this right now, right now, for the first step in this process, just write it all down.

Because what I want you to do in the second step of this process is to grab A Google Sheet or Excel document or something simple, and I don’t want this to be geeky and techie doesn’t have to have formulas in it. But if you’re like me and you like that stuff, you can create some formulas create a very basic business plan for for the upcoming 12 months based on those services.

So what does that mean?

It means that if you’re telling me Okay, I want to build I want to get more coaching clients, then I want to know how many of those Do you want to get? How many of those Do you want to get in January in February and March and April, etc, etc. And what is the revenue stream that brings into your business? Just generally, okay, really generally. And then list that for every single thing you listen to number one, okay? I mean, right now, we’re just doing a brain dump. Okay? And it’s probably going to, it’s probably going to not feel like your mermaid Empire.

But what you need to be looking at this, you have to look at it with your with your pricing in mind. Are there things on this list that you’ve created that you’ve, you’ve built out not just the services, but the revenue associated with the services. And if you have if your overhead is significant, and I don’t mean overhead, like I have a VA, and you know I have, I have to pay for ontraport, I’m talking about you sell $100 product that costs you $50 to produce, okay, so really, then we want to do we want to write that hundred dollars, we want to know that that’s really a $50 top line, right?

So it’s $100 top line, but it’s a $50. It’s not even a $50 bottom line, it’s a $50 mid line after that you have all the other expenses. But if you have a very fixed costs associated with a particular product, incorporate that but very simple.

Don’t worry about all the other stuff like that your your CRM and your zoom account and all that other stuff. Don’t worry about that stuff. For now. Just if there’s a very specific cost associated with a particular product, just note that because I want to make sure that you know, we’re at least clear where like generally how much profit we can generate And then look at the pricing associated with these things. Do you feel like it’s abundantly financially supporting you? Or do you need to adjust your pricing? Do you need to cut back? Do you need to hire somebody? Right? Do you love everything on that list? Or is there something that you have to let go? I don’t care how much money is making you I’m telling you, you know, get seen bring hurt brought in a lot of money.

We let it go because it just wasn’t right. Okay. Is there more than one thing you have to let go? And this is on paper right now. I’m not saying you have to call up and fire people today. I’m saying on paper. Are there things you want to let go? Are there more than one things that you think that you want to let go?

Maybe you start looking now at the things you’ve always wanted to do and we’d love to add this year, right? So add those in and maybe add some preliminary pricing associated with those things. Okay. Is there a demographic you want it that you love to focus on? Is there a demographic you want to walk away from? Maybe you’ve been supporting some demographic, but you stay up at night worried about them, and they’re not really worrying about themselves enough.

And you’re, maybe you need to walk away from them so that you can build the ease in so that you can more abundantly support to hear that so that did you remember Episode 98, so that you can more abundantly support the people that you will love to support? Right? I love to support people on LinkedIn, and I can more abundantly support them if I don’t have to worry about Instagram algorithms, right and teaching people about that. And so that’s what I want you to think about as you’re creating this. I don’t want it to seem I don’t want it to be complicated.

Just get it out of your head and get it onto a piece of paper or a Google Sheet. So that you can have some sense of of what you’re looking at. Because if you’re not look, if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you are not Going to be able to know what has to happen for that to be feel like you can accomplish it with ease.

The next thing I want you to do is now that you’ve done that, and you’ve on paper, you’ve made some adjustments, maybe you’ve increased some pricing, maybe you’ve reduced some pricing, maybe you maybe you’re redlining, some services, because you just say I cannot do this for another year, right? And then maybe you do for three more months, right? This is not, you know, just start this January 1, right? This is just, this is ease.

Remember, this is ease.

So now look at that list again and see how it applies to your life. does it allow you to get a house cleaner so you can spend time with your friends and families on the weekends instead of doing laundry? Right? does it allow you to travel if that’s what you want? What is it in your life that you want your business to support. And then look at that plan that you’ve created. And see if it feels like you’ve it will allow you to have the life that you’re dreaming of.

And I want you to dream big here.

Okay, I want you to dream big here. This is the place for dreaming big, and building your mermaid Empire, and all of the other things that that have to happen to make all that happen. We’re not worried about that. Now, we’re just laying it out.

Okay, one of the other things, you know, when I, when I work with people with LinkedIn marketing, one of the first things we have them do is identify what their win looks like.

And a lot of times they come to me and say, I want to get 530 $500 clients by this by February 15. And I say, Okay, well, how about if we just focus on getting 130 $500 client, because if I can teach you how to get that 130 $500 client, you now know how to get the other four, right.

So that’s what I mean by with ease. I want you to build out the plan that feels believably amazing. That is going to give you the life and the business of your dreams, without worrying about how you’re going to get there.

Okay, because you know how they talk about, you know, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time, even if it feels like an elephant right now. Just try to shift your mindset to that mermaid Empire mindset and know that if you learn how to get one of these things, then you can start to implement that strategy with ease to get some of the other things on that business plan so that you can ease through the upcoming 12 months, like a mermaid with flow and not having to fight your way through it like Wonder Woman. Does that make sense?

So let me just recap this a second. So, first thing I want you to do is make a list of everything you market in your business free and paid. Okay? And then add to that list. Other things you’ve been always wanting to market but you haven’t done yet because, you know, 24 hours in the day.

The next thing I want you to do is very creative, very basic business plan for the upcoming 12 months based on those services. Put some dollars associated with them. Put some quantities if I can do you know, don’t say I want I need if I oh my gosh, it would be amazing to get 10 $10,000 clients next month. Are there enough hours in the day for that? Because that surely doesn’t feel like a mermaid Empire. To me that sounds like a lot of friggin stress, right? So don’t don’t give me Don’t put numbers that when I say Dream Big I don’t want you to be to be putting yourself to the point we have to work 20 hours a day, I want you to put yourself in a place where you can you can abundantly support that business that will abundantly support you financially make sense. So create a very basic business plan that does that.

And then look at that list again, and see how it applies to your life. You know, are you creating services that allow you to be home with your kids at three o’clock if that’s what you want to do? are you creating services that allow you to travel and spend a month in Italy if that’s what you want to do? If that’s your case, you certainly don’t want to create a service that requires you to go physically to your flying in New York City once a week, right, that’s not going to work.

So see how this applies to your life. I’m always here to support you beyond this podcast and I had about, oh my gosh, 10 or 20 different ideas, this time for this podcast on what I could give you to supplement the work that you’ll be doing on this podcast. And what I decided on was something to help you dream bigger, because I know that Listen, you know, I don’t have a magic wand. There’s some work that’s associated with this, you’ve got to do some work.

But I do know that if you put your focus on the things that you love, and the work that you love, and the people that you love to support that and if you dream bigger around those things, that is the first step to building your mermaid Empire.

So what I’ve got is a download for you that I’ve done in my group programs. I might have even shared it here on this podcast before, but we’ve updated it and we’re going to share it again. And what it basically is is a download worksheet. That helps you list 100 things that you want to be do or have in the next 12 months that you’d love to acquire with ease mermaid style.

Okay, so download this worksheet print it, keep it with you. It’s not meant to do in a day, it’s meant to be with you for the next month or more so that you can add to it when something comes to mind. Remember, this is easy, not stressed to complete this, you can go to Karen Yankovich comm slash 100 download, to grab this.

I want you to have the life and the business of your dreams in 2020 and beyond. I want you to know that you can have it and not be superhuman to achieve it and you can be human and still and and do this mermaid style and still have an amazing life and an amazing business and I’m here to support you every step of the way.

That’s why I do this podcast so you’re going to hear a lot about having a mermaid and Fire in the upcoming months and year. So fun. Is that not fun? I love it. And I hope that you do too. And I can’t wait to share all my amazing fun ideas around this as soon as I, you know, can grab them and bring them in a little bit.

Before you go though, can you help me out? Can you take a quick screenshot of this episode on your phone, and share that on social media and tell the world that you’re ready for your mermaid Empire, you can use the hashtag mermaid empires, you can use the hashtag good girls get rich. tag me I’m at Karen Yankovich. And you know that I’m going to share that with my audience to help us both get more visibility. And that is how we start to support each other, to lift each other up supportively and abundantly and start to build our mermaid empires together.

The bottom line is I want this to be simple and have this done with ease. So let’s create our simple mermaid empires together. I’ll see you back here next week. As we move into the next 100 episodes of the good girls get rich podcast.

Thank you. I’m so grateful for you the listeners that have supported this podcast for the past 100 episodes and I’d love to hear from you on the link and speak pipe in the show notes about what you think about this podcast and what you think you’d like to hear moving forward. And of course any reviews on this episode or any other episode are welcome as well, but allows me to hear your voice and that’s always fun. And I’ll be back here next week for Episode 101