Bill: Welcome to another episode of Not Your Typical Leadership Coaching Podcast with Dr. Martin Kettlehut and yours truly, Bill Tierney. And today we have a very special guest, Meredith Banka is joining us today. Meredith is someone I've known as long as I've been in coaching, she was one of my first coaching clients, in fact.

Bill: And for about that same period of time, Meredith has specialized in marketing and she'll tell us a little bit about her story when we get to talking with her here. She has her own marketing consulting company called Banka Consulting, and she considers herself a marketing coach and consultant.

Bill: Thanks for joining us today, Meredith.

Meredith: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Bill. Thanks for having me, Marty. It's good to be here.

Bill: So this is not your typical leadership coaching podcast. We are talking to leaders, aspiring leaders, established leaders, but mostly leaders that recognize that what they understand currently about leadership maybe isn't quite enough for getting the results they want to get and being who they want to be in the world as leaders.

Bill: And so one of the things I want to make sure we do today when we're talking to you about marketing is tie in what you do with what leaders are going to want to know about marketing and why is that so important? Let me give you one more piece and then I'll hand it off to you and just, I want to hear more about you, what you're doing and your philosophy towards marketing.

Bill: I have known for years and years that there's a lot of different aspects of business, but I think they can, they fall into one of two categories. One category is doing the business. The other category is getting the business and you're, you help me get the business. You I've worked with you and you've always been helpful.

Bill: I always get results when I work with you. Yeah, take it away, Meredith, what's the magic of marketing and how does that tie in with leadership?

Meredith: I think the magic of marketing is actually relationships. And I think for those of us that have attained a more interesting age of, let's say 40 or greater, we grew up in a very transactional society where everything was about just getting people to buy your thing and to any ends or means necessary to just get someone to buy something.

Meredith: And I think in some sense, people, customers, clients, business people, leaders. Those of us in marketing became accustomed to being marketed to in a way that we didn't really enjoy that we didn't really like it was just something that we were going to be subjected to if we wanted to get to the other side of buying the thing.

Meredith: Amen. Amen.

Meredith: And as consumers, and you know all of us as consumers have gotten smarter. And we at some point stopped enjoying, not that we ever were enjoying, but we began to resist even being sold to.

Marty: Yeah.

Meredith: And that's when marketing really started to shift. And to me, it's all about the relationship.

Meredith: And so how do you build a relationship in a way that allows someone to feel comfortable and open to working with you and do that in a way that's reflective of who you are as a business person? And that's really what I help my clients to do.

Bill: So I'm going to ask even a more basic question, um, for myself, as well as the listener, and that is how would you define marketing and distinguish that from sales?

Meredith: Well, Marketing, that's a great question. Marketing to me is really storytelling. And I don't think you have to have the best story to win. I think you have to tell your story best. A really good friend of mine, I will give 100 percent credit to that statement that I just made to a gentleman named Frank Swoboda that I've known for many years.

Meredith: And he is a videographer and he taught me that great video, whether that's a television commercial or, a movie or a TV show. Great video is all about telling a story. And so to me, there's an intersect between relationship and story that intersect between relationship and story is where marketing happens.

Meredith: And the sales part of it when done appropriately is really A small part of the conversation, it almost becomes a foregone conclusion. I'm a big believer that everything you want is already here and waiting for you. And even sales, your clients are here, they're waiting for you. And it's a matter of creating an opportunity for that intersect to happen between what they need, what they desire, what you offer and the intimacy of your ability to build relationships and share your story.

Meredith: That's where the magic happens. And so I, I really think of myself as helping someone to tell their story more over than helping them to market their business.

Bill: Thank you. Yeah that's very clear. So it, your answer was marketing is storytelling and whoever tells their story the best, not especially the best story is the one that's going to win the business.

Bill: And so marketing. is whatever it takes to get the word out about the business that you're in so that people know that you are an option when they're considering your service or product. Yeah,

Meredith: exactly. It's really, it gets defined in a lot of different ways. There's promotions, there's public relations, there's advertising, there's social media, there's earned media.

Meredith: There's all these different tactics, if you will, all these different channels, all these different tools that you could use. But ultimately they all come back to the story. They all come back to the story of the brand and they all come back to the story of the person that you're wanting to do business with.

Meredith: When it does come to sales to just touch on that for a quick second I believe that sales is service. And for people, if you're listening to this and you're an entrepreneur and you're saying to yourself, oh I hate selling. I hate sales. I hate it. It makes me feel yucky. It makes me feel smarmy.

Meredith: It makes me not feel good. If you can do the work to shift your mindset, if you truly believe that what you have to offer in the world, your gifts, your skills, your talents. Can be transformative for the person that you're working with. And if you have that strong belief. Then it allows you to tell your story completely as you are, no false pretenses, no, fluff and bells and fireworks and, all those types of things.

Meredith: It

Marty: just let's

Meredith: you, it lets you be you, and it lets you trust that, that business is there for you because authenticity, although I think that word is a little bit overused. It's ultimately what we see, as people, we want to be heard. We want to be understood. We want to be valued and that plays out in marketing and it plays out in sales.

Meredith: So I love the fact, Marty, that you shared with me before we started recording, that you've written a book about listening because to me, sales is listening

Marty: and

Meredith: it's service. Because if you believe in what you're doing, then when you're having a conversation with someone and you on the other side can see the direct correlation between that person's need, want, problem, desire, and the solution that you offer.

Meredith: By helping them to put those dots together, draw that line, that's an act of service.

Marty: And that line is the story

Meredith: Yeah, that line is the story, and that story might be told on the television commercial, it might be told in a social media reel, it might be told in a, any one of these different types of marketing or advertising, but ultimately that's the thread.

Marty: I'm sorry, can I jump in? Yep. So at first I heard you say it's about telling your story, and then I heard you say it's the story of the brand, or now I hear it's the story of the customer. . So I And you're nodding. Yeah. So I take, it can be all three or one or two of those, or it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have it could change.

Meredith: I think it's the intersect of all those stories coming together where, if you will, the sale happens, right? So you have a story of your life, your experience, what brought you into being in the business that you're in. And your brand, you are your brand. So that is similar, if not the same. And your client, your potential client, your avatar, if you will, of the person that you're trying to find also has a story.

Meredith: Your ability to understand their story. And relate your story to their story is where relationship comes in. And if it's just a transaction, like I drive a car, a little alarm went off on my car. It said, I'm out of gas. I need some gas. I go to the closest gas station because I don't want to run out.

Meredith: So I fill up my car and I move on. That's a transaction. And there, there's a lot of what goes on in our world, but still very transactional, but there are gas stations that have actually chosen to tell a story. Like Bucky's.

Meredith: It's this huge, these gas stations are massive. They're like 30, 000 foot gas stations and they sell like, you know, tri tip, they have made. Buying gas and experience and there's a story behind that. And people are choosing to do business there, rather than the transactional gas station, because it's just simply more enjoyable and

Marty: I also hear that, in my own as I'm feeling into your approach here that like that old version of marketing that got inundated by and tired of.

Marty: It was trying to do a transaction with everybody and if I'm really telling my story and your story and relating the two, there's a lot of people who aren't going to be interested and that's okay because it narrows down the field and you and I can start to have an authentic relationship and you're not, you're not having to deal with the bluff and fluff that was meant for, all the world and didn't hit any of it.

Meredith: Exactly. And that does depend on what it is you sell in market. If you sell something that is for everyone, a soft drink, it's not it's for the masses, and no, Coca Cola is not for everybody. Some people prefer Sprite or whatever it might be. But when we enter into the realm of people that I choose to work with and, that are probably listening to this podcast.

Meredith: We're talking about people that have service based businesses that are using some modality or some education certification that they have in order to help a specific segment of people. And so when you begin the process of niching down and understanding, this is who I want to serve. This is who, when I serve has the greatest results.

Meredith: This is who, when I serve, I, I feel the greatest joy. I feel the greatest satisfaction. Then what I talk about and what I teach. Is that absolutely okay to be polarizing it is absolutely okay to have to get on to it, a discovery or clarity call with someone and to quickly figure out that it's not a fit.

Meredith: removes the whole component of the need to be convincing.

Meredith: And not that our language and the messaging that we use. Is not convincing but there's a there's an energy around being convincing That I think falls into the yuckiness of sales and marketing and that's the thing that people don't like

Bill: needy When there's neediness in the conversation that can be smelled from five miles away That neediness on the part of the person that's doing the marketing or the selling I want to give you an example of what you just said So I was in a conversation with a potential client several months ago and in this conversation it became evident that what they needed was support that probably looked a lot more like therapy than it did for coaching.

Bill: She'd already had a couple of conversations with me by then and liked how it felt to be in the space that I provided and wanted to be supported by me. And so I discovered that when I said to her At some point I think coaching probably will be a good fit for you But in my opinion right now before coaching is a good fit for you I believe therapy is what's really going to be called for I've been trained next to therapists, but i'm not a therapist I do a lot of what therapists do but i'm not a therapist and My strength is in coaching.

Bill: So what I recommend is that you go to therapy for a season and then let's talk again She said no I want to work with you

Bill: That's almost like 180 degrees from that neediness that we were just talking about.

Meredith: I think in that conversation, you actually were showing up in service to her by saying to her. Right now, based on where you are and what you're sharing with me, what I offer is not the best fit for you.

Meredith: You're not going to receive the result that I believe based on my expertise that you need. And she doesn't need to agree with you. Clearly she did right. Clearly she didn't. But if you know that you're not going to be able to deliver the result, that's the difference in sales and marketing between trying to say, I want to sell everyone.

Meredith: I want me one to buy. I don't care if they're going to get, the result that they're looking for from my product service or program. I don't care. I just want to go to Ching and see the dollars flip through, my, my online account. I think there are people that still do that, obviously, and there are people that are still very heavy into transactional marketing.

Meredith: I just believe that people that are most likely to benefit from, have interest in, and are willing to invest in the types of services that you both offer are going to fall into the group of people who want to build relationship and who respect that as a part of the process.

Bill: Meredith, I have a quote, and I want to see if you can recognize who said it.

Meredith: Ooh. It's like a test.

Bill: Ready? It's like a quiz. Maybe Marty can play the game too. Here's the quote. I'm going to get it just right. I hate marketing. Oh, that's

Meredith: you. Yes. And about about a hundred other people that I know. No wonder you hate it, right? I mean, Think about it. Think about if we truly believe that we are the result of the experiences that we have had.

Meredith: We have all have you ever tried to buy a car and the guy had the paper and the T chart and you had to go to the office and come back and go and come back and go and come back. And it's. It's psychologically developed in order to get you to the point where you're just going to say yes in order to get the heck out of the room, even if you want or even if it's far beyond what you're able to afford.

Meredith: That's where sales is being imposed upon you. And so no wonder now that you find yourself after, doing different things in your life and career, owning your own business and being an entrepreneur saying, wow, I just want to do the work that I want to do. I just want to be able to do the thing that I know I'm really great at.

Meredith: I don't want to have to sell and market it because it feels like crap, no wonder you develop that belief.

Bill: Let me count the ways how I felt like crap no return on investment. In fact, in the hole. By the time I started talking with you about marketing, Meredith, I was, this is not an exaggeration, probably 30, 000 in the hole in investments that I'd made in marketing that had zero return,

Meredith: and that's not uncommon.

Meredith: It's not uncommon, especially when we start talking about things like digital, social media advertising. It is very easy either with help or on your own to blow through thousands and thousands of dollars in online advertising and see nothing. I actually was having a conversation with a woman today and she was so excited because she had spent a little bit of money promoting one of her posts on Tik TOK.

Meredith: And she'd paid 50 for this promotion. And it had resulted her in about 8, 500 views on this video. And she was really excited about it. And I said, from those views, how much business did you generate? And the answer is, a big zero and I said, okay, even those platforms that are out there and I believe in social media advertising.

Meredith: It does work. Absolutely. All forms of advertising and marketing work. It's whether or not. You, your business, your client is ready for, and if you're using appropriate tools and messages and stories with those advertising, I guess I would say modalities to get the result that you want. And so it's easy.

Meredith: It's easy to get into the hole. When it comes to marketing and that's why when I work with clients, either in groups or individually, no matter how long they've been in business, we always start at the beginning. And the beginning is really understanding. What do you value? What do you stand for it?

Meredith: What is your mission? What is your vision? Who is it you want to serve? Do you truly understand your product and the benefits that it derives for people before you just go out there and start throwing money at something and hoping that it's going to stick because the way that you tell your story earlier, I said, um, it's not having the best story.

Meredith: It's telling your story best. Telling your story best is the way you choose to tell it. And If you don't know who you're telling it to or why you're telling it or what you stand for or what differentiates you, then you're just talking, you're just blabbing on and I believe in niching down because.

Meredith: When we market and it's done well, people, they're gonna lean in, they're going to see themselves in your posts. They're going to see themselves in the language you'd use, and the video that you produce and the brochure that you create, the billboard you put out there, whatever it is. , that's what you want.

Meredith: So it all starts with understanding and I think a lot of entrepreneurs are really hungry to get past that part. And to just dive into more of the tactics without having the overarching vision first. So we always start with the understanding piece. And then based on who you're marketing to and the price and the, all these different things will apply the appropriate tools to get you where you want to be.

Marty: So that takes me back to this question of the story. I could hear some of my own clients saying things like I'm just a lowly CPA. I don't have no story to tell, what story am I going to tell and you started to uncover a little bit of this. I'd like to see if you could expand a little more.

Marty: It's about what you stand for your values, the mission you're on. What is it? You're trying to. Accomplished by being a CPA or whatever, I think a person like me, who thinks a lot of himself, it's easy to come up with. I'm the story of this philosophy teacher who became a businessman or all kinds of.

Marty: Highfalutin stuff I could come up with, but I think there are a lot of people who are like I don't have a story to tell. Yeah. So that's where you start with them is with what?

Meredith: Yeah, let's take your let's take your hypothetical, CPA, right? That's this person. And let's say that they're tired of the 9 to 5 grind working for a big firm, they decide they want to go out and they want to open up their own firm.

Meredith: And they're like, Oh, I don't have a story to tell.

Meredith: I'd say do you love numbers?

Marty: No,

Meredith: hopefully if they're an accountant, they're going to tell me they like numbers or they like math or they like money or something, otherwise I'm not going to send them to you guys. Cause maybe there's something else to talk about there, but let's say they come back and they say, yeah, you know what?

Meredith: I used to hate math, but now, I really love it. Tell me about that.

Marty: I see.

Meredith: Tell me about that. And and again, we're just making this up, let's say that this is a person that really struggled. Until they, tapped into statistics. And then all of a sudden

Meredith: they loved it. Or until they go to an accounting class and it just made sense for them. And it, that's the story. It doesn't have to be complicated. And then if you think about the person that's maybe going to be this accountant's client, don't you want your accountant? To love numbers. Don't you want your accountant to be significantly more passionate about taxes than you are?

Marty: So that when you bring your taxes to them, you're like feeding them what nourishes them.

Meredith: And they're excited to do the work. And then that comes through. So then, what do they value? What's their differentiator? And how do we help them to tell that? And now all of a sudden, they're not just an accountant.

Meredith: There's a person that has joy and excitement for the business that they're building, and that's who you want to have helping you. And that, that changes everything.

Marty: Got it. Got it. Very interesting. I mean, I noticed when you 1st mentioned story there was like, part of me that reacted to that.

Marty: I haven't quite identified what it is something like a manipulation of sorts? I'm going to take you down this lane or shouldn't there be some matter of factness about marketing rather than this? And engagement and I'm just asking this, objectively naively, I, it's not like I don't get what you're saying but I just noticed that piece of me like what if I don't have a story or why does there have to be a story?

Marty: How does story becomes so important? And how can we see that? And it's. Most powerful light. Like why is that important to human beings and to marketing?

Meredith: That's a great question. And I'll answer it in a couple of different ways. One, your story is a differentiator. So if we look at your story as the business owner, your story, what makes accountant a different from accountant B different from accountant C.

Meredith: There's a couple of levels of that. Maybe accountant A is brand new, just new in the business. Maybe accountant B used to work for the IRS and maybe accountant C came from the corporate world. Maybe one of them is just a bookkeeper and maybe two of them are CPAs. They have different initials after their name.

Meredith: Yes, those are differentiators, but we have to ask ourselves in the buying behavior of a person who is really seeking for you to solve a problem for them that they have begun or already deeply realized that they are not going to be able to solve on their own.

Meredith: If they can relate to you. That's where the story becomes a differentiator, and that's where it becomes really important.

Meredith: It's also recognizing the buying behavior of people. There comes a point in time where the, and Bill has heard me say this many times. But there's the sizzle and then there's the steak.

Meredith: And the sizzle is the story. The sizzle is the part that's going to stop the scroll.

Meredith: This, the sizzle is the part that's going to grab somebody's attention. The sizzles will be the part that has somebody lean in and say, wow, I think they just said something that makes me believe that they might understand me. But

Meredith: eventually it does come to the stake and the stake is, yes, this car has, X, Y, Z engine and a heated steering wheel.

Meredith: It has features, and. Those things do become important in marketing, and they do become important in the buying decision, but they become important much later, right?

Marty: The human connection is first.

Meredith: I believe it is. There's probably somebody out there who would argue with me exactly the opposite, because this is all belief.

Meredith: It's based on what my experience has been and the success I've been able to help. Clients received and based in figuring out a way to help people share a story that resonates with their audience and then allow them to know at the appropriate time. Exactly. What's included.

Marty: Yeah a little bit of a side story, just for a 2nd that made a lot of sense.

Marty: Thank you. A friend was here visiting and we went down to the bus station to catch the bus up to the nice beach and while we're waiting at the bus station, there were all these. Really dark skinned black people like from Africa, black people, and we were like, what are they all doing here?

Marty: What's going on? And what's the story is really in our mind. And one of them looked up at his big bright eyes, big wide, bright white teeth smile on this young black man from Mauritania.

Marty: And he started to tell us his story and we became enraptured with wow, how did you get here? Where are you going? What are all these people and. We've been what's happening with him ever since. He's seeking asylum from a regime that is very oppressive and murderous, actually of anyway. And we're still following his story.

Marty: So there's the power of story right there.

Meredith: Yeah, absolutely. And if you think about. Brands you love, or practitioners you love, or marketing that you resonate with. Start looking for the story in that, start looking at what part of that attracted me, wasn't the fact that they told me that, there's X, Y, Z number of modules in the course that I can buy from them or no, that's not what got me to say, wait a minute, I'm going to pay attention, wait a minute, my ears are perked up, I want to hear more.

Meredith: And just like in a relationship, marketing starts with an introduction before, it has any kind of conclusion. And so we really need to think about how to tell the story in a way that attracts people. Allows them to say, this is maybe for me or nope. It's not for me. That's where the transparency and the authenticity piece.

Meredith: If, you only want to work with a certain type of people, then speak to those people,

Marty: right? It occurs to me. Looking at marketing it. It has a much broader like, we can begin to, instead of, dreading marketing, we can start to see marketing in everything we do.

Marty: It's if you're talking to your wife about where to go on vacation, you can use these same principles what's the story here? What are we, let's connect on the, on that line between being here and where we're going to go and, in a meeting, It doesn't have to be just, okay, what's the agenda?

Marty: Let's cover stuff and check them off, but you could market to, to the conference table about the, the story that's going to be told here in this meeting and then the way we're going to connect. It has very wide implications. The way you talk about it.

Meredith: Yeah. Thank you. I see that as well, because.

Meredith: Let's take that, that meeting. Why should they care? Why should they care about what's on the agenda? Why should your potential client care about your program? And that's where the construct between talking about value, talking about results, talking about transformation, talking about the things that your audience wants to see happen in their life are far and away.

Meredith: Where you should start.

Marty: Yeah. Yeah.

Meredith: Imagine the meeting you go in and, maybe it's with the CEO and they just come in and they say, okay, this is what needs to happen, Bill, you do this, Meredith, you do this, Marty, you do this, and we all just nobody's looking up, right?

Meredith: Nobody's looking at each other. Everybody's just furiously, taking notes and counting the seconds until the meeting ends, because there's no engagement. There's no greater reason to want to be there or to care about what is happening. Versus CEO that comes in and says, let me tell you a little story.

Meredith: She called in the other day and this is the experience that she had and I'm not happy with the experience she had. It shouldn't have been that way. That's not what we stand for. That's not who we are. It's not what we value. So we're going to make some changes and these changes are not going to be easy.

Meredith: We're going to have to redo our whole system. We're going to have to do this. We're going to have to do that, but if they can bring you along with the reason why this story that you're bought in. So there, absolutely. I'm not a human behavior expert, but there are absolutely elements. Of human behavior that when we look at them from a place of empathy and care and concern, we are better marketers.

Meredith: If we just look at it of how do I get to the bottom line build you this Marty do this Meredith do this now go, we may still end up at the same place. But the energy around it, the feeling around it, the likelihood that person is going to want to stay employed there and or that your client is going to want to do business with you again, it's probably pretty low.

Marty: Yeah. And we will not have had much of a life in between either. Why not be engaged? It's

Bill: back to that word that you said gets overused, but I don't know that there's a better word to use than authenticity. If marketing without heart probably just doesn't connect with the target client.

Marty: I was thinking about that same issue.

Marty: I thought about transparency, being transparent. That's another good way to look at what you're talking about as authenticity.

Meredith: Yeah. And I think also. Letting people know that you're coming from a place of service, like when you're bridging from that marketing, however, you met this person, however, they came into your sphere, however, they are experiencing you.

Meredith: And you're now at the point where you're talking with them. I find it. It's highly successful to say to someone in that sales conversation once you've gotten there. Listen I want to hear from you first, and then based on what you tell me and what I know about where I find success for people, I'll let you know whether this is a good fit or not.

Meredith: Sweet. Absolutely. Diffuses the whole energy around feeling that I need to convince them their energy around feeling that they're going to be sold to there's remorse.

Bill: Yeah, it occurs to me that an idea that was expanded for me in a recent training and IFS training applies here.

Bill: I've been aware of this idea of the principle around in the coaching world. But it was explained to me in a way that really popped for me, it must have been the right time. Essentially what the trainer was saying is that when facilitating a group of people that are here for transformation and or healing or personal development, what's required is enough safety to support the amount of discomfort required to take the risk to change.

Bill: So if we think about a sales opportunity. Or a sales circumstance where let's just say that I'm the client and whatever it is that you're presenting to me provides me with the information that I'm going to need in order to make a buying decision. If I don't trust you, if I don't believe what you're telling me, if I think you're skewing the information, if I think you're being manipulative or that you're handling me, my safety level is gone.

Bill: Yeah. And if I don't feel safe with you, if I can't trust you, or if I even believe I can't trust you even if you are trustworthy, then I'm probably not going to take any kinds of risk, like spending a bunch of money for whatever it is that you're offering.

Meredith: Exactly.

Bill: And I think, isn't that what we're talking about here?

Bill: And that kind of, you call the program that I'm in, Conscious Connection, and I think it's just the perfect name for what we're doing. We are coaches and therapists in a group that. You are the consultant of, and we are all about connection and consciousness and awareness. And what you're teaching us how to do is to market at that level.

Meredith: Exactly. And, I named the program conscious connection because that's what I know that coaches like you want. In the process of marketing, they want to connect with the right people and they want to do it consciously and by consciously, they want to do it thoughtfully, but they also want to do it strategically and they don't want to waste time.

Meredith: They don't want to waste money and the majority of my clients are building multi six figure businesses, not multimillion dollar businesses. And that's my choice. If many of them could build multi million dollar businesses if they chose to, but they're choosing the size of their business to fit their life.

Meredith: And that To me also brings out in the niche that I work with this need and desire for authenticity, for transparency, for working consciously in their business. And this whole we're just going to throw money at ads or, we're going to have a loss leader or we're going to do this or that.

Meredith: It just doesn't, it doesn't fly because it doesn't resonate with them in the first place.

Marty: What do you find most challenging in leading your own business? I can see why it works I'm totally engaged. I want to hire you, right? What I'm so I'm curious on the other side of things, what is most challenging for you as a business person with this business model.

Meredith: I think the most challenging, honestly, is Helping people make the bridge to also the brass tacks and reality of sales and marketing because business owners often have ended up in business for themselves because they're really good at what they do. And at first, maybe they started part time or they became artistically successful and now all of a sudden they want to scale and they want to get bigger.

Meredith: And in order to do that, they need to be able to talk to more people. And. There are elements of promotion, sales, and marketing in your business that do not ever go away. And so helping business owners to understand this is not one and done. This is not like when you decided to form your business and you decided you were going to be an LLC.

Meredith: So you hired somebody to create the LLC for you. You check that off on the box and you do not have to touch it again for the duration of your business, because that's the business structure that you wanted. Marketing and sales. You don't just do once it's perpetual. And so helping people that as Bill said, when he first started working with me, Meredith, I hate marketing.

Meredith: I think he actually said he effing hates marketing. I said, yeah freaking. Yeah. Hates marketing. Helping somebody who tells you like, I hate this thing. And here in the back of my head, I know, hey buddy, you know what, you're going to have to do it forever. And even if you're not going to do it forever, you're going to have to know enough about it to be able to manage the people who are going to do it for you.

Meredith: And I use this analogy sometimes with a variety of feedback. So we'll try it on for size here, but if we owned a brick and mortar business, I often think of marketing as making sure that the bathroom is clean. You could have the best business in the world, you could have the best restaurant, you could have the best food, but if somebody goes in there to use the bathroom and it's a mess, they're probably not going to want to come back.

Meredith: And you have to make sure that it's clean, that it's kept up always. It's just simply not a choice. It's not something that you can set and forget the Ronco food dehydrator that doesn't exist here. You have to buy into the idea that it's something that you will need to continually do in order for your business to grow.

Meredith: Does it get easier over time? Absolutely. But it also changes. It's the part of your business that is perpetually changing. When Bill and I first started coaching, there was no Tik TOK. There was barely Instagram. There was Facebook and LinkedIn. Somebody somewhere right now is on the verge of releasing a new social media platform.

Meredith: None of us even know we need. And we will all be marketing on it in, 12 to 18 months, right? We don't even know it's there. So if you can approach this from a perspective of the consistency of my story. It does not matter what new social media platform comes out. Your story remains the same. Your story is solid.

Meredith: Your story is yours. You just need to find a way to tell it on that platform. That's a long answer to your question, but it's helping business owners accept the reality that marketing is ultimately what drives their ability to do the thing they love.

Marty: Yeah, I know. I appreciate to take your hygienical bathroom.

Marty: Maybe a good analogy would be like your doctor like you have to stay healthy. It's like you got a body. That's what you do. Everything you do with is with your body. So you need to stay healthy. So it's and it's ongoing. So, just It might be a better analogy than the bathroom. I

Marty: don't know.

Meredith: The bathroom gets people thinking about it though, right? I see. Because we've all had that experience where we've really loved a business and then there's maybe it wasn't the bathroom, but maybe it was part of it. That wasn't what we thought and all of a sudden it changed our mind tomorrow.

Marty: Totally. Yeah. Even friends houses, I'm going back to visit them anymore

Bill: tomorrow morning. I'm going to go have breakfast with a couple of therapists and a practitioner. We've been meeting almost every Friday. At first we met at a restaurant that was centrally located and it was the most convenient one to go to.

Bill: Food was okay, prices were good, but the place was dirty. We just stopped going there. They didn't dust the counter, the shelving just inside the window, the desk, we would often be seated at a table where there was Hash browns and ketchup on the seats. Yeah. We just didn't go back and somehow the place is really busy, but not with us anymore.

Bill: We need to begin to wrap up and I'm just wondering, we've been talking about stories. And there's two things I want to do in the last five, six minutes that we have here before we need to wrap up. And one is we haven't heard your story and two, how do people get ahold of you?

Meredith: Sure. So let's start with the shorter of those two.

Meredith: If they'd like to get ahold of me, the best thing to do is to just visit my website, which is meredithbanka.com and you can see all the different services that I offer. And you can even book a time to chat with me so we can understand how to make your marketing less hard. All right. My story in a nutshell I went to school, university, I'm from Spokane, Washington, and found myself in a sales environment, ultimately ended up working for a travel company, started out as an entry level position and rose through the ranks there over the course of about 13 years to the Vice President of Marketing.

Meredith: And wonderful company, wonderful product, learned so so much there. But I traveled 50 percent of the time and worked about an 80 hour a week. And with two young kids, that just wasn't a match for me anymore. So I walked away from my corporate job with absolutely no idea what I was going to do. I just literally quit and walked out the door.

Meredith: And I swore to myself at that point in time that I would never work for anybody other than myself. And that was 12 years ago, and I have never worked for anyone other than myself. Since then, I truly believe in the power of small business. And small business and entrepreneurship has completely changed my life, the life of my husband, the life of our family.

Meredith: Thank you. And I think that it's honestly where we can see so many people uplifted and their ability to live the life that they want to live is through entrepreneurship and lots of entrepreneurs get stuck on marketing. I happen to have spent 20 plus years in the sales and marketing environment and I love to tell a great story.

Meredith: And so my ability to be able to put those things together and help people live the life that they live is what drives me every day to help. Small business owners and coaches to be the best at what they are.

Bill: Would you also tell Chris's story, especially around the barbershop? I love this story.

Meredith: Oh, so Chris is my husband and my favorite client.

Meredith: And he was in sales. He worked actually, speaking of bathrooms, he sold septic systems. For a really long time and hated it, absolutely hated it. We were in our early thirties and he wanted to do something different. And so he thought to himself, okay, I want to do something where I can be myself and I can create something really cool in our community.

Meredith: And he chose barbering. He looked at wrenching on motorcycles. He looked at becoming a tattoo artist. He wanted to be able to be himself. And he said no to both of those and yes to barbering and went to cosmetology school at 32 years old with a whole bunch of 18 year old women and graduated. He cut women's hair for a year, came home one day and said, I don't like this.

Meredith: I I don't like it at all. And I remember being so mad, if you quit your job, we paid all this money for you to go to school, all this. And he was going to go back to sales. And he needed to get a haircut for an interview. And he went to a guy that he had gone to school with who was barbering in a barber shop.

Meredith: And as he was getting his hair cut, the owner of the barber shop walked in and said, Oh, Hey, I heard you cut hair. And Chris said, yeah, I do. And he said, I know you don't want to do it anymore, but I had to fire a barber yesterday and my phone's ringing off the hook. Anyway, you just want to fill in and cut hair here for the next 30 days.

Meredith: While you're looking for a job, you could make some money. I won't even charge you anything. You might as well give it a shot. And he came home and he was like, what do I do? And I was like it sounds like a good fit to fill a gap right now. You might as well figure it out. And so after two weeks of cutting hair there, he was like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. it was fun. He did that for nine years and then ultimately decided that he wanted to create meaningful jobs for. People in our community. And so he opened his own barbershop seven years ago and has seven barbers in there that are all killing it, doing a great job. And it's been a fun process, but speaking about relationships, they have, I, in seven years, I would say they have spent no more than 5, 000 on sales and marketing ever in seven years.

Meredith: And if you want an appointment there, it's going to take about four weeks for you to get in the door. Yeah, and it's all based on story and relationship.

Bill: I finally gave up and just shaved the top of my head. I was

Meredith: thinking about it, but I think

Bill: Meredith. Thank you. Anything else? Marty. You want to add or ask before we say goodbye to Meredith?

Marty: No, thank you very much. It was enlightening and inspiring. Yes. Thank you

Meredith: for having me. I enjoyed the conversation and I appreciate you both very much.

Bill: Likewise, Meredith. Thanks.

Meredith: Take care. Bye bye.