Businesses across the country have been closing due to the pandemic, but there is a small percentage that have grown!
In this series we take you behind the scenes in those businesses to empower you to apply the same strategies to your business, whether you’re in growth mode, or recovering!
We’re asking three questions to bring out a few different kinds of answers from our interviewees:
What do you do?
What contributed to your growth?
What are you doing to ensure you continue growing?
This Week’s Interview Guest:
M. Shannon Hernandez of Joyful Marketing
Shannon attended the Grow2020 Retreat in January of this year, and her knowledge of business marketing, understanding of what brings joy in business, and extreme business growth this year prompted Stephanie to reach out for an interview. Shannon’s business has nearly doubled this year, against all odds and in the face of a struggle that most people weren’t dealing with atop the pandemic of 2020. And she’s sharing some of what she did to grow against the odds.
If you prefer to watch or listen, check out the youtube interview here.
Behind the Scenes
Question 1: What do you do?
Shannon:
My business uses the Joyful Marketing Method to help coaches and consultants (from around the globe) grow their business through their online presence. The Joyful Marketing Method keys in on the fact that when you’re working in joy, more money comes to you: joy and money come together in one place and you get paid for your brilliance.
Our mantra is “If it ain’t joyful, we ain’t doing that shit.” In other words, if things start feeling not joyful, we immediately pivot towards the joy. Because joy and money come together.
Two or three years ago we kept finding that people were saying (and still do say) “I hate marketing.” So my thought was, “what if we could flip that around and help people connect to their joy to find their clients?” The energy you put into marketing through a computer is infused into the world, so if you want joyful clients you create joyful marketing.
That’s where Joyful Marketing started.
Question 2:
What contributed to your growth?
Shannon:
So what not everyone knows is that I had more going on than just the pandemic.
I actually had a hellacious March, and I don’t say that lightly.
March 5th I went in for a standard hysterectomy, which I was excited about because I hadn’t been feeling the best for years and this was going to fix it. I remember thinking “Yes, I’m going to come out of this!”
But I actually almost died. After the surgery, I started feeling horrible and my spouse was just trying to keep me alive with the things we knew to do because we thought it was a surgery complication. I felt horrible to the point that we didn’t even know the pandemic was going on because we were just trying to keep me alive. We finally got back into the hospital and discovered that my kidneys were actually in full stage failure, which was making me insanely sick.
I spent the next week in the hospital, and I remember laying in the hospital bed thinking “I’m not going out this way. I have more work to do and help to bring to people.” That was the turning point for me. The doctors had been trying to clear it up all week, and the doctor came in after that and said that I looked so much better that they were going to send me home.
Well I got excited because we were planning to go to Hawaii, and the doctor said “You’re not going anywhere, there’s a pandemic going on.” That was when I first heard about the pandemic.
And in the middle of all of that, I have to say I am so thankful that I have a team! Because no matter what was happening to me, they kept things going. And having a strong team is really what enabled us to continue on and grow in the middle of my sickness, and recovery, and a pandemic.
The true health of a business is in whether or not a team can keep things running when the owner is out!
The biggest key to our growth has been the team!
The fact that it wasn’t just me.
When I was sick, my team was able to reach out to clients and reschedule things because I was in the hospital. I was able to rely on my team to get back into the swing of things. And I knew I had to push myself a little (not that I pushed my health, but I pushed so that I could be the encouragement people needed) because people needed help, but having a team made the difference!
Because of them, I was able to clear my schedule around a launch we had planned so that the launch was the only thing I had to focus on.
Because of them, most people (including Stephanie, who was working with me on sales training at the time) didn’t even know how sick I had gotten.
Another key factor is the approach we took to the pandemic.
I didn’t realize when I was in the hospital just how much people needed Joyful Marketing...
But that was the approach we took to the pandemic. Instead of shrinking away, we knew people needed us and we fought to set ourselves up for success and to help others do the same. We formed a rallying cry of “Yes, we’re in a pandemic. But people need you now more than ever! Now is not the time to shrink back. You can change your future in business during this time!”
I had actually planned a Live Launch (where I go live and teach for 5-6 days) prior to the surgery for what ended up being the week after I got out of the hospital, and was debating canceling it. But instead, we cleared my schedule and ran the launch because I knew it was what people needed. People needed a cheerleader when things were shutting down, and I decided to step up and be that cheerleader.
Because of my team, because we didn’t shrink back, because we created that rallying cry, we had a $65,000 launch week in March.
Question 3:
What are you doing to ensure you continue growing?
Shannon:
We’re adding a few new programs to the list for 2021.
We’ve realized that we attract a whole different kind of client from before, so now we have two kinds of clients. And the new kind of client is six and seven figure coaches who have the business but don’t have the joy. So I kept capping out at one-on-one clients, which resulted in this beautiful solution called the Joyful CEO retreat.
It’s a retreat we host now that is a hybrid blend of mastermind events like our Joy Money retreat and one-on-one time with me. So we’re gearing up to add this program to our offers, in addition to things like the Confident Expert Program which is for our original kind of client and is designed for people who are established and want to grow but aren’t making six figures yet.
The exciting things for me about this is that we’ve got a whole new demographic of people we can help because we’ve been able to create two pathways to reach and help them where they are!
Because that ties strongly into our brand, and our brand value is that we never sell someone something they’re not ready for or don’t need. So I’m really excited to be creating new pathways to help people!
If there are two things that I would say for business owners to do going into 2021, I would say this:
Be all about helping others
Model what you Teach
Be all about helping others
This is incredibly important for success. For the longest time it was about money for me, and that just doesn’t work.
But when you come from a heart space of service, you will never want for clients. When you come from a heart space of service, people book calls with you, they get inspired by you, they reach out to you, and they send referrals to you because you have their best interest at heart. People can sense when you’re coming from a “I’ve got to get calls on my calendar and make money!” space, and it’s off-putting. So make sure you’re coming from a heart space of service to help people.
For me, one of the big assets that gives me is the ability to call people out on stuff that is hurting them. Because I’m coming from a space of looking for their best interest, I can say “hey, you’re doing this and it’s hurting you.”
Model What You Teach
Modeling what you teach is what you have to do if you want to create a strong brand.
For me, that means I’m a student of my own work. I have to know my vision inside and out, so that the vision inspires me. When I know my vision, I become unstoppable. So I sit down and reconnect with my vision, and I did that earlier this week. I took Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday to sit down and reconnect with and hone my vision: to think about what is coming next.
So you must connect with your vision and model what you teach. When you do that, you become unstoppable!
Action Item: Take five minutes to reconnect to your life and the reason you’re in business to make you unstoppable next year!
Shannon is absolutely amazing, and I can’t wait to see her in January! If you’d like the opportunity to get to know Shannon and spend a couple days with her, book your interview for Grow2021 -- Shannon is bringing her content and joyful attitude to the Grow Retreat as a speaker and activity facilitator and we couldn’t be more excited to have her come!
If you know a business owner that you think should get on this interview series, shoot me an email with their contact information and I’ll work on getting them on the show!