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