How to Not Stop

Speaker A: In this episode, I'm going to share with you the kind of like a mental model that you can hold onto that's going to ensure your success as a fractional cmo. Uh, this is an important one. Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems? Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over? And why are we giving away marketing strategy for free? With advancements in AI, we're all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up. And companies need you to serve them their fractional chief marketing officer. It's time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck. It's time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact. This is the Fractional CMO show and I'm Casey Stanton. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders. The Fractional CMO show is sponsored by CMOX M, the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert and serve high paying fractional CMO clients on your terms. Hey, welcome back. It's Casey. Let's talk about this. So here's the big idea is that most people give up. They just give up. They give up too early. They give up on a lot of stuff. You've got people in your life that continue to give up on things. What do they give up on? Think about it. I say that is there someone in your life that is perpetually stuck? They want to do a thing, they get started, then they do another thing and then they get started and they do another thing. And their garage is full of hobbies that are half built. Do you know someone like that? Are you that someone? When you think of the work that you're doing, maybe you're in an agency, maybe you're a agency owner, maybe you're a full time CMO VP Marketing director, something, right? You're in marketing somehow and you think about the work that you're doing and you think, I could be a fractional cmo. It's cool. I'm gonna do the fractional CMO thing and I'm also at the same time gonna build the SaaS app. And I'm also at the same time going to build this other thing for my church or my synagogue or my community or a non profit or you're like splitting your focus. I find people give up too early. So much so that we have a distinction in the accelerator, which is our year one members versus our year two members versus our year three members. I'll tell you the people that are in year three in the accelerator, they're just like crushing it. They're crushing it. That doesn't mean that there isn't a setback that happens here and there. They have a client and then out of nowhere they lose the client. Oh, that sucks. That can happen in year three for sure, but also it's not the norm. And in year three they have a very stable business and they have a pipeline and they're the person that people come to solve problems around marketing, leadership and strategy. Year two members a lot in the same way. It's the people that come in year one and they're 30 days in and they're like I'm not rich. Like it's tough if that's their thought that they like they're just going to join the accelerator, then overnight everything's going to change. I think their mentality can change overnight. I think their finances take a minute. And it's different for different industries. So there's two types of people that join the accelerator. Two types of people that I've coached directly. Type one are people that are knowledgeable and experienced in an industry and have let's say a book of business that they can call on and they're going off on their own or they're slightly changing what they've been offering. Maybe they were full time with the company and they're going to sell that company as their fractional CMO and then they're, then they can call on some friends and get some other work. There's people in an industry that know that and those people typically have a easy, easier time winning their first sale as you can imagine. And then there's other people who just don't have that benefit. So for them they're, they have a non compete that's a big one. So they can't compete directly in their industry. Therefore a lot of their relationships, uh, it's tough or they're limited in another way. Maybe they don't have a non compete but they have a full time job and they don't want their employer to know that they're picking up client work on the outside because the employer might not like it. Like that kind of stuff can happen. So you also have uh, a third type of person that, that fits in that second bucket which is someone that just wants to reinvent the industry that they're in. Like forever I've been in trucking and I'm sick of trucking and I want to be in health and wellness. I can think of a woman who worked for a tobacco company and made good money and said, okay, I don't actually want to work in tobacco anymore. Yeah, she could go and clean up and probably work with small vape companies and help them and make a bunch of money. But she was like, that's not where I want to be professionally. That's not how I want to identify anymore. I think she had a moment where she thought about health and the impact of the work that she was doing. Working for Philip Morris or one of these other tobacco companies is not great. Side story. In college, I went to the career fair at Michigan State my junior or senior year and there were two women that were just like incredibly attractive and bubbly and super fun that were there. Everyone else was just your normal person, but these two women really stood out. So I went and talked to them. I'm like, hey, who are you guys representing? And they were like, philip Morris. And I was like, oh, the tobacco company. They're like, yeah, it's a great place to work. I was like, awesome. Yeah, I bet. How does it feel to sell tobacco? They're like, it's soul sucking and awful. I just thought like, that was the perfect answer from them. You might be in an industry that you want to get out of, or maybe you're like in a morally neutral industry and you just don't have the desire to be in it or you think it's going to fail or whatever. And therefore you want to reinvent where you go, you want to move to a new industry, you want to choose a new industry that's better for you. Different types of people, as you can imagine, that first type of person, again, they want to stay in the industry that they know and they want to tap their relationships. They're just going to likely be more successful faster because they're probably one call away from their first client. That's a fact. And then for everybody else, it's just not like that, okay? No matter what, people give up too early. You might think the grass is greener for that person that I talked about first who is staying in their niche. But that person runs out of relationships quickly. They go work with a client. I see this, uh, too often. Someone comes in and they talk to my team and they're like, yeah, I don't really think I need cmox. I'm leaving my full time job and I've got some other work lined up and I'll be able to make my income probably even a little bit more with these referrals that I have from colleagues. And they can for three Months. And that six month contract prematurely ends. And they realize they have no pipeline and they're screwed. And they went from a steady paycheck to even more money, slightly more, 10, 20% more as an, uh, independent contractor to $0, no pipeline and they're screwed. And then they're freaking out. That happens often times. It just doesn't work. Sometimes to work with your colleagues, past colleagues, relationships, right, you have to be able to develop a pipeline. So don't think that someone has it better than you. You have it exactly as how you have it. And there's no reason to compare your experience and anything with anyone else. There's just the reality of it. And then the reality unfolds that most people give up before they reach the level of success that they're destined for. They just give up. They pick up small projects, they chase pennies and skip over the dollars. They just play half measures. They pick up a client because it's in front of them. And that client is exciting. You know what's exciting? Startups are exciting. They're fun. You feel important, you feel needed. A lot of you like to help people, so you feel like you're a great helper. You're like diving in and saving the day and working nights and working weekends and it's exhausting. And the client then struggles to pay you. And your contract that six months ends in four months. And they're like, we really want to pay you, but we don't have the money. And then you're like, what do I do? I thought this was a six month contract. They signed it. It's awful. Don't go there. Don't play that game. You got to play with more affluent clients that can afford you where you're needed. But the big idea here is that people give up too early. I think of that show Survivor. What's the tagline of it? It's like outwit, outlast and outplay. It's outlasting everyone else. How do you outlast? You don't strap yourself with a bazillion dollars in tools and hire a bunch of staff to work with you. You follow a, uh, predefined strategy to go win and serve clients that make you a lot of money. Where you're, where you keep 95% of the revenue that you make, 3% to credit card processing, 2% to Google Workspace and DocuSign. You want to keep as much of that money as possible. You want to outlast everyone. I just saw someone on Facebook today post about his AI, uh, tech stack to serve clients. And it's just. No. Do you know what I need to serve my clients? A phone. Slack. A, uh, notepad. That's it. That's how I serve my clients. Because I'm not delivering task completion. I'm identifying the tasks that need to be completed. I'm on the top of the mast of the sailboat, identifying where the marketing department has to sail us to. Right? Like I'm looking out. I'm not doing the labor. I'm not down there like paddling or moving the orders or whatever, moving the jib to move the sales. Like, I'm just on the top pointing in the right direction and rallying the team. That's where you want to be. Longevity is the secret here. Reducing your monthly nut as much as possible so that you can outlast everyone else. It's inevitable that you'll be successful because I'm just gonna tell you I'm right. Companies need fractional CMOs. I'm right. AI eats the bottom of everything. They're eating the bottom of the legal world with like, paralegals and interns and like the lower priced offshore people that do like, legal stuff. Those people, they're losing their job. AI's eating that. AI's eating marketing implementation. So if you want to stay in the role of implementation because it feels fun or you're busy or you feel rewarded emotionally, you won't be rewarded financially. As I record this, two days ago, Claude released a new skill called tag. Like tag, you're it. And it is a slack thing that you can just talk to Claude in slack. So you don't need air maze, you don't need claudebot. You don't need those things anymore. You can just use the native Claude tag function, the skill. And now Claude is someone that you can chat with and you can bring them into DMs and say, hey, Claude, will you take care of this? And they'll be like, aye, Captain. And it will just get the work done. So we're finding more and more implementation. Get pulled away from humans and done by AI. Humans need to move to the role of the cmo. You gotta stick to it. You gotta stick to this. You can't have wandering eyes. You can't go do 10 different things, do the one thing and be better than anybody else at it. What I'm asking you to do is to look inside yourself and be the greatest version of the CMO that gets it done in your niche. The good news is that the number of lazy people that are out there is staggering. You're probably smart enough already today to be the leader. Maybe you don't have the confidence, but you probably are smart enough and you're like, able to find the answer. Especially if you have these AI tools at your beck and call. If you have comfort with them, if you know how to use them well. But you got to stick to it. So you can't give up. What is giving up? Giving up is saying, okay, I'm going to do too many things at once. I'm going to chase too many outcomes. Someone I know who is in the fractional space, and he just shared with me that he's doing, I don't, I think five different offers, five different, like, radically different offers. He's gonna do this AI business transformation thing. He's gonna sell a fractional thing. He's gonna develop an app. He's also doing this other implementation thing. Maybe it's only four things. He's looking at doing that all at once. How do you do all that at once? How do you do it? You don't. You fail at all of it equally. And if you put all his focus in one thing and committed to it, and reduced his interruptions, context switching, he would get deeper, further and win much faster. So he's not going to be able to outlast. He's going to find himself in a tough position. I think maybe he'll prove me wrong. But I think the law of large numbers would say that people who do too many things become a master of none of them. You want to be a fractional CMO for a tight niche or industry, that's where you want to be. I think of Bruce Lee and his Jeep Kune do. I think that was his martial art. He had this. I guess it was a Taoist philosophy of be like water and be like water lands for me. Like, I'm the cmo, right? I'm the fractional cmo. That's the water. Like I am water. But like, I'm also. I can change my form and shape depending on the market, depending on the technology, depending on what happens with a the team or whatever. Like, I can be flexible and fluid among it. I'm still going to be the strategist and leader. But the stuff that maybe I would hire a human to do now I instruct an AI to do some of that stuff is true. I'm being fluid with it. I'm not being so rigid that says I only work with these people and this is the team, and therefore this is my agency. And I always bring them in. No, I'm going to be a little bit more fluid and figure out the right solution for the client. So I don't know what word you need for you. Keep going is that one. I see that one. I can think of a speech that a guy gave years ago. I don't know, 2008. 7. 8. Something around there. This guy had a, uh, things get better, Keep going. It's a pretty powerful speech that a guy gave. Maybe that rings true for you. Keep going, keep going. Things get better. In some ways they get harder. In some ways they get easier. Right. Like, the market will continue to shift, and it needs an intelligent person in an industry who's on the front end, who's learning and figuring out what to do. But just keep going because it gets easier, I think, because once you have the confidence of an industry, you can be the person that gets stuff done in that industry and people want to work with you. It's so fun. It's so exciting to be that person, to be wanted and also to be very effective and then also not to have to work as much because you're so effective. You can tell the problem. You're like the doctor. You go see a, uh, dermatologist after you googled something or chatgpt some skin tag that you've had, and they just walk in. They're like, oh, it's this. And we're just going to burn it off with this nitro. What is it? Nitrogen? They're just going to burn it off. Five minutes later. The thing that you've been worried about for months or whatever is gone. And they're like, yeah, you're fine. See ya. You, like, walk out and you go to your car and you check your watch. It's been like 40 minutes since you park the car. And this problem that plagued you for weeks or months or years is just over with. You pay a premium to that dermatologist for that. Similarly, someone should pay you a premium for your ability to solve problems very quickly. So I think that where we have to go as humans is we have to go to the top and we have to stay there, and we can't have wandering eyes. I talked to a member today who's like, vacillating between different niches, and it's like looking for, in some ways, the easiest niche for them to win business in, and other ones, like the right niche or the niche that I think they should be in. And in a lot of ways, niching is, um, critical, but also the niche matters less. It matters less the niche that you choose now. Yeah, there are some niches that are going to be better and I guide our clients, our CMOs on that. But there aren't very many bad niches. As I record this, I think of Claude's release of or Fable, the Fable 5 model, and that it got pulled. And without getting political. Was it pulled because of an anthropic OpenAI fight with the government or was it pulled because Fable 5 was radically superior to any defenses at the three letter, what do you call them, departments in the US like the CIA, FBI, and being able to break into like files and unearthed secrets and that kind of stuff. There's some claim on the Internet about that. I think cybersecurity is a scary place right now in the age of AI, like uh, a super, like I maintain, I think a healthy worry about infrastructure and security because these AI models are just growing so quickly. So I think that is an interesting space. In some ways the threat's bigger than ever, but in other ways, I don't know, it's like maybe the opportunity for great tools is bigger too. I don't know. But that feels like a weird one that I wouldn't want to be in and I wouldn't encourage someone to get in. There's a handful of industries like that. Next to those, most industries are good. It's about depth, it's about commitment. It's about not saying I'm going to be successful within 30 days. It's saying, okay, over the next X months or years, years. I'm going to build something real sustainable and even something that I could exit. If you think of someone who starts a franchise location, when do they break even? They usually are forking over. When you sign that franchise disclosure agreement. Excuse me, the franchise disclosure document. When you receive the FTD and you sign your agreement and you pay your fees and everything, maybe you're going to pay 100, 200, 300, 400, $500,000, then you're going to lease your place and then you're going to build it out and you're going to be a million dollars upside down before you make your first DOL. $300,000 upside down before you make your first dollar on a smaller concept, maybe 150. Right. It's a lot of money. Those companies aim to break even in 12 months. It's a fractional CMO. With your first client, you're going to be breaking even and being profitable by month two. Uh, so it's a wildly profitable place to be, but you Got to stick to it. And if you are aiming to run a 26.2 mile marathon and you run 26 miles and say I'm done, you'll never get it. For all the guys here, it's all those guys that went to Boy Scouts and got their star and their life and then they quit before they got their Eagle. No one cares that you're a Life Scout or a star to care if you got your eagle or not. Right. Like you gave up before. And maybe there's a condition for it, but what I'm suggesting is you need to develop in you a stick to it ness that says hell or high water. I'm going to be a successful fractional cmo. It's inevitable. I will be successful because I'm going to be simple minded and I'm going to commit to this and I'm going to build, grow, understand the industry, become the person to win. I see like this fractional CMO in a box stuff that people are selling these days and I laugh at it. You have to become the person. Like yes, the worksheets and process methodology that we have inside the CMOX accelerator will get you there faster, undoubtedly. But you got to be the person. This is like an internal transformation. You have to become the authoritative person. There's a study, I wish I had it in front of me to quote it, but the basic outcome of the study was that self belief costs you nothing. And it has the biggest potential to change your outcomes if you just believe that you're different, that you're cut from a different cloth. And I think you are and I think you can find it. And for some of you you're just like, yeah, I'm different. I'm built different, right? I'm built different. I have an ability to focus that other people don't have. I have a creativity, I have an experience. You're built different. You know, it's others of you listening. You're like, I don't know if I'm different. I want you to find how you're different. I think there's an interesting kind of method for this too. Uh, there's a guy named Chris Smith and he's got a company called Family Brand. And my wife and I went through it and it's about coming up with family values. What are the values of your family that you want to tell your kids? So they believe it. It's like our family believes we are whatever. And the Smiths encourage you to connect a value to someone historical in your lineage. So if one of you one of your values is we do hard things, you might say. I think of my mom's father who was born in Nova Scotia, who at the age of 12 went and got his birth certificate. Like literally at 12. He like signed his birth certificate. That was a valid way to have a birth certificate. And then he walked to the shipyard to get on a boat to Yardsmith. Uh, and on the way there was a pastor that was trying to block him at the bridge. And my grandfather pushed him off into the water, like a 10 foot bridge into the water. He got on the boat, he went to Yardsmith, and then he came to the United States with nothing, just as a 12 year old, landed in Boston and worked his way up into New York and then into Detroit and then into Northern Michigan, where my mom was raised. He did hard stuff. That's a story of him doing hard stuff. I think of my dad and him growing up in this small town of Clifton, Arizona. Talk about a one horse town. It's a company town. There's Morenci's right next to it. This is near the border with New Mexico on the far east side of Arizona. And my dad would go to the family ranch every summer when he wasn't in school in like the Tucson area or Scottsdale. And they did hard stuff. Like they had cattle and my dad was a cow poke and he moved the cows around and grazed them. And like they lived off grid. The closest phone was two miles away. The, uh, closest restaurant was probably an hour's drive. They did hard stuff. I like to think of myself in times of, like when I question, am I the right guy for this? I think they did it like I owe it to my heritage, right? Like I am born from that. What's that? There's the Shakespeare. Men of grosser blood. What is it? King Henry the I think. And he says something like, I see you, yeoman. Okay, I found it here. So this is King Henry. This is Henry, uh, Henry the. From Shakespeare. And this just gets me riled up. He says, once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a manned as modest stillness and humility. But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger. Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard favored rage, then lend the eye a terrible aspect. Let pry through the portage of the head like the brass cannon, let the brow o' erwhelm it, and fearfully doth a Galled rock or hang and juddy his confounded base, swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean. Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide. Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit to his full height. On, on, you noblest English, whose blood is fet from fathers of war. Proof. Fathers that like so many Alexanders have in these parts from morn till even fought and sheathed their swords for lack of argument. Dishonor not your mothers. Now attest that those whom you'd call fathers did beget you. Be copy now to men of grosser blood and teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman, whose limbs were made in England, show us here the mettle of your pasture. Let us swear that you are worth your breeding, which I doubt not. For there is none of you so mean and base that hath not noble lustre in your eyes. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start. The game is afoot. Follow your spirit and upon this charge cry, God for Harry, England and St. George. Damn right, damn. Um, these lines just, they're just like burned in my brain. On, on you noblest English, whose blood is fet from fathers of war. Proof. Come on. Dishonor not your mothers. Is that not the game here? I just think it's like, this is like a powerful reminder. Find the thing where you feel pulled in times of doubt to recommit yourself to the war of lethargy, of changing your mind, of being weak minded, of over consuming content. Content doesn't solve the problem, right? Focus action solves the problem. I just think that so many people give up because they lack a conviction and they're out of touch with their family, their heritage, their bloodline. It's their like wherever you find your confidence. I do things regularly that I've never done before. So I can't find my confidence in my past. I can't say I've done this before, therefore I can do it again. I'm saying I've never done this before. And frankly, maybe no one's ever done this before. I'm on the bleeding edge of it. If someone did it before, they did it last week and I just haven't heard about it, right? That's where we live right now in this hyper speed world. You have to find your confidence in your commitment, your conviction has to come from your intention. I think it's the story of who you are, the story that you tell yourself and you just can't be the person that gives up. So this idea that Russell Brunson sells, that you're one funnel away from all the money in the world. I think it's wrong. I think it's a ridiculous, uh, simplification. I think that you must be committed that there will be ebbs and flows of finances. You're going to have clients where something happens and you're going to lose one in the short term or whatever, these things are bound to happen. But you have to be the kind of person that gets back up and keeps going. So maybe your work is to figure out what your uh, you like have to have conviction. Maybe your conviction is because I'm doing it because no one's better than me and I'm here just to do it and I'm going to provide for myself and my family. That's great. Maybe, say I come from a long line of people that have done it. There's something to be said about someone who joins the accelerator who's like an immigrant, who has that work ethic taught to them and showcased to them by their family. It's a beautiful thing. Someone whose parent came over and worked a dead end job forever to make enough money so that their kid could go to college, to break a cycle and finally be in college. It's, that's an incredible thing. And some of you are wishing you had that story and you don't have it because you had a much nicer, easier upbringing. Find that, that through line, this idea that you can connect to this line whose blood is fed from fathers of warproof fathers that like so many Alexanders having these parts from morn till Eve fought and sheathe their swords for lack of argument, dishonor not your mothers. You gotta find that fight in you and you gotta just keep getting back to it. You can't let yourself get stuck in consumption. There's a guy that I like, his name's James and he defines a sovereign man, probably a sovereign woman too, as someone who creates more than they consumed. I like that line, you create more than you consume. Is that where you are? Are you a creator? Are you, are you a consumer? I want to be a creator and I want to create in a tight vertical and I want to keep going. And I want to enjoy the compound interest I receive from that focus. So I hope you leave this connecting. What I said about my grandfathers, we didn't even talk about my grandmother. Geez, right? I've got a story about how she moved from Detroit with three kids in her car to northern Michigan to the small house that they used to Have m like a distillery. Like moonshining out of the basement. She kicked everyone out. She raised 10 kids in that house. My grandmother was. My grandma was just a badass. She lived till she was like 96. She was. She's the kind of person that if someone was late to pick her up for church, she'd walk herself in her 90s, right? Grandma's. I can tap into that. You've got that story too. What's your story about your family? There's something there in your culture that you can tap into. Find it and commit to it. Put something up in your office that reminds you of your family. If you're watching the video here, you might see that behind me, I have a photograph. I took a, uh, like a training. I bought a camera, a Shenhou 6 by 17 field camera. It's the old school camera on medium format film, where you put a bag over your head. I went out to where my dad grew up in Arizona. This was actually shot at Tabletop in Clifton. And I spent probably 18 months at a couple thousand dollars to make that photo. That's one of the most meaningful photos in my life. It's behind me. I see it just out of view. Just below is the cemetery in Clifton where my grandparents are buried. That is a meaningful thing for me to see on a regular basis. It connects me to my heritage, to the people that they are, that they were right to. That story that threw a line of my family. Find yours. Connect to it. Know who you are. Know that you're the kind of person who can outwork people because you're committed, not because maybe you're the smartest person, because you might not be right. Someone might be smarter than you or have more experience. I'll eat both of those people because I'll out them, right? That's the thing that's going to make me different. Not that I'm smarter, not that I'm more experienced, but I'm willing to do more work than them, put in more reps until it becomes improbable that I won't be successful. All right, so that's it for today. Thanks for listening. I wish you a happy and safe 4th of July. If you're in the US, don't hold on to fireworks. If you blow your fingers off, I'm going to be really mad at you and I'll see you soon. If you want to see if my team can help you, just book in a call, go to CMOX Co call, you'll book in a short call with my team. And we'll see if we can help you if we, if you have the experience and if we think you've got what it takes to be a successful fractional cmo. So book the call. There's no risk and there's certainly no pressure on that call. All right, Good luck. Take care. Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners, but you've got to take action, um, on what you heard today. For more information in show notes, visit fractionalcmoshow.com if you'd like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode, you can share your question@fractionalcmoshow.com and last, please hit the like and subscribe button so that I know that this content is helpful to you. Alright, go get them.