Ep #132: When You Say This Phrase, It All Changes

Transcript:

00:00:01 Casey: 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 as 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, the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert and serve high paying fractional CMO clients on your terms.

00:00:58 Casey: In this episode, I’m going to tell you about a line that I heard one of our CMOs say on boardroom that just got me fired up. And I want to share why this is a line that I want you to utter because everything changes when you do. Hey, it’s Casey. So here’s the line. I just wrapped a boardroom call and boardroom is our most successful members. These are our members inside of the CMOx Accelerator who are producing the most. They’re generating the big bucks. You know, some of them are at 10K, but a lot of them are at 20, 30, 50K. Some of them way past that. And we get together and we talk about the stuff that is working and the stuff that isn’t working. We’re all there to help each other. It’s a really good group. Really fires me up to be around them. Just a bunch of players, just a bunch of people who are hungry, that love the game. 

00:01:42 Casey: And one of our members said something today. And man, it just got me. Just like, I froze for a second. I was like, that’s it. That’s it. Here’s what it was. They said, I’m never going back. In 2025, they joined the accelerator. They got to a level of success. They won their first client, their second client. They see how the games played and they said, I’m never going back. I’m never going back to the W2, the… I worked for someone else full time. Someone else commands my time and my effort every single day. They’re never going back to that. What a declaration of independence. What a declaration of like manifest destiny. Like I’m going to do what I’m going to do. I’m not going back to this game. 

00:02:23 Casey: And my goodness. Do I think that it is like the most powerful thing I’ve heard all year? So I wrote down some of the reasons why this kind of hit me. And I want to share some of these like individual points because I think they really matter and there’s nuance to them. So the first one is why would you never go back after you were a fractional CMO and you won your first client? The first thing that comes to me up to me is you see how the world works, how the world actually works, not how you were told the world works.

00:02:53 Casey: I don’t know about you, but like when I was in college, I had a guidance counselor or whatever. And I mean, he quit, he retired like a semester before I was set to graduate. Like he dropped the ball on me, right? There were these people that were like supposed to be there that said like, oh, you’re going to Michigan state. That means that you’re going to get a job. But when it came to actually like getting the support to like find a job out of college, like nothing was there. And I was like kind of told a lie. But I was told like, you go get your MBA, you go get like your next level of education, and then these things will actually come true. And that’s not how the world works. 

00:03:30 Casey: That may have been how the world used to work, like back when our parents went to college, or maybe they didn’t go to college. Maybe you’re the first generation that went to college, or maybe you didn’t go to college, it doesn’t matter. You see how the world fundamentally works. Now what we’re told works, but how it actually works. So what is it? How does the world work? Well, the world is a meritocracy. I would say generally. Maybe there’s an argument to be made that it’s a bureaucracy. Well, I don’t know, kleptocracy. I don’t know. But for the work that we do, I see it as a meritocracy. 

00:04:03 Casey: When you see that if you are able to identify a big problem and solve a big problem, you have a fighting chance to get a big reward for it assuming that you’re positioned in a good position and there’s not middle men, middle women, whatever, taking that value that you ought to receive. Example of that is I was working at a marketing agency, I’d go prospect, win, close, serve a client. I did everything and I would make 45% of the fee because the agency would take the rest and the finance person and you know, like all of the other stuff and like the tool cost and whatever. 

00:04:36 Casey: When I went off on my own, I fundamentally saw differently how the world actually worked. I remember when I was leaving that company, the agency owner said to me, he’s like, Casey, you’re gonna have to go figure out all this stuff with like insurance and taxes and yada, yada, yada. Trying to scare me. Can I tell you what like insurance costs? You go to the website, Hiscox, H-I-S-C-O-X.com, Hiscox, and you can go get like a quote for insurance there. Go, I mean, go check that out. I’m not gonna give you insurance advice, but like there are these self-service portals to go get insurance. Done, easy peasy. You want errors in emissions insurance? Go, go get it, done. Right? These, like you can get a policy for insurance that’s like really affordable. 

00:05:19 Casey: How do you do taxes? I don’t know. I just know that I have a really good CPA that I pay every year to file them for me. And he does a good job. Like when you go off on your own, you see how the world works and no longer do you feel like you’re getting controlled by other people that are manipulating the environment to force you to exist in a place out of a form of scarcity. It’s also like this thought of like, how does marketing work? You know, it’s like, it’s fun to say that marketing’s a black box and it’s a mystery and everything changes and it’s like always different and whatever. 

00:05:51 Casey: There are fundamentals of marketing and if you know the fundamentals, you can weather pretty much any storm, any new social media, any new media buying function, the way people consume content, whatever. If you understand the fundamentals of marketing, which haven’t changed since the 1800s, you know, go read your Claude Hopkins, right? Go find that Ogilvy stuff, like go find those classics and understand that, you understand how marketing works. And it doesn’t matter what happens. 

00:06:16 Casey: Like, oh, are TikTok shops big now? Oh, what about advertising on Threads? It doesn’t matter because you understand fundamentally, do I have a customer? Are they there? You know, is my prospective customer on that platform? What are they consuming? How do I join the conversation in their mind? Just like Robert Collier said, you think that way, you know how the world works. You don’t go back. You never want to go back to this old world where you felt like these support structures that existed were actually like providing you a sense of security that I think in a lot of ways is false. 

00:06:49 Casey: You see how the world works in such a way that… like you see that businesses have to fire people and oftentimes it’s just a decision that’s made, you know, without much emotion. And you have a lot of emotion for the client and your identity and like you’re fully employed and you’re, you know, W2 you’ve been there for 15 years and you get fired with a five minute meeting on your calendar on a Friday. You see how the world works, right? You’re not getting lost in… like, my dad was at IBM for 26 years and had a pension. That’s nuts. That doesn’t exist today. Show me a job that I can get where I can get a pension. You know, it’s like how the world works right now is very different. 

0007:28 Casey: And it’s not a lie. I will pay money to learn how the world works. So I don’t have to learn the hard way. I’d rather learn upfront, I’d rather learn from someone who’s done it before. So when you become a fractional CMO and you win that first client, and honestly, like that first client, that second client, boom, you see how the world really works. You see how companies deliberate on fees. When you think of like, how any acquisition happens at a company, a company got acquired for $11 billion, let’s say, they got acquired for 11 billion, not $11,256,523,201.52. They didn’t do that. It was like 11 billion, right? It’s like these numbers come up, they’re clear, they’re round. 

00:08:13 Casey: You understand how the world works. It’s just fundamentally different once you start playing that game. Once you play the game of like, I’m gonna help a client and to do that, we’re gonna build a sales team. We’re gonna build a marketing department or I’m gonna help them lead a rebrand. You see how these things really work. You see someone is just gonna put Helvetica on a nice colored background with the client’s business name on it, and they’re going to charge 20 grand for that brand. You see how the world works. You also start to appreciate the simplicity and kind of how it’s done, you know, and that it’s complete. And maybe it’s worth the 20 grand. Maybe it’s not. 

00:08:49 Casey: You really start to understand how the world works because you’re playing at a higher level. You’re kind of like among the puppeteers watching how they operate instead of being a puppet controlled by the puppeteer. So when you become a fractional CMO, you win your first second client, you see how the world works. 

00:09:02 Casey: The second thing is you understand your value. Like where you fit into that equation. What is your inherent value? Your value is predicated on your ability to identify and solve big problems bar none, that’s it. Identify and solve big problems. You’re not identifying a problem and complaining. You’re not identifying a problem and saying, I wish I had an answer. You’re identifying a problem and you’re taking the ownership of it and you’re solving it. And the value of that is substantial. Like it is so much more than you probably made before. 

00:09:36 Casey: I’ve got a direct report on a project who doesn’t… who misunderstands their value, who thinks that they’re worth more than they are, and they’re underperforming despite constant conversations. So they’re being cycled out, right? These things have to happen. You understand your value is in identifying and solving big problems. Other people think that their value is in just being there, their insights, their… Like how conversational they are, how fun they are to be around. None of that stuff matters. 

00:10:08 Casey: When I left the agency, I was like, man, they’re going to miss me. Things are going to not go as well without me. I was the, you know, linchpin that held things together. This is going to be a real bummer for them. I feel bad for them. They didn’t miss a beat. They went on without me and never looked back. Right. I thought, oh, they’re going to come back to me and they’re going to say, Casey, we do these like one-off projects. So I was like counting that revenue. It’s like, never happened. They just kept going. 

00:10:35 Casey: My value to that agency, not very big. Like at the time, you know, my billable hour or whatever, but it’s not like I left and I left a huge gap. They just filled it in with somebody else. It’s fine. Right. Like there’s a big lesson there. My value is in constantly being able to identify and solve big problems. And I want to solve bigger and bigger problems so that my value increases. And you probably want to do that too. 

00:10:57 Casey: Right. Okay. The next thing, what changes? Here’s a line. I like this line. Take a permutation of it, whatever you’d like. It comes from like the anarchist or labor movement. And it’s written as like, no gods, no masters. Or I’ve also seen it written as no gods, no masters, no kings, or maybe no bosses, no masters, something like that. There’s a feeling that I get around that. No bosses, no masters. I show up to work and it’s for me and my family, not for some, you know, Jeff Bezos billionaire who doesn’t care about me. Like I’m doing it for us. Like I’m attuned to my family to provide for them. And I want to provide for my clients too, because I like respect them. But really I do it for me and my family. 

00:11:46 Casey: So it’s not like I do it because there’s some boss telling me I must or some master controlling me. No, I do it. I do it for me. And when you like leave that and I don’t want to like make a claim that working full time is anything like, you know, being enslaved, right? But there’s this feeling of your time being controlled. Like, I gotta get to work on time. And if I’m not there on time, I’m gonna get written up. And if I get three write-ups in a quarter, I’m gonna lose my job. Every morning you have that feeling and it feels tense and the world seems to work against you with like cars, the traffic delays and your key fob not working when you get in or whatever. Like, oh, you got a flat tire, right? Like these things that happen.

00:12:29 Casey: I want you to live in a world where you show up to support your family and yourself. You show up to support yourself primarily to do a better job than you did before, to grow professionally, to grow in your skills, to grow in your ability to identify big problems and lead. That’s where I want you to be. If you’re doing that, you’re doing something that so few people do, like fleetingly few people do. The masses don’t do that. They’re not self-directed. They’re not self-authoring. They’re saying, well, I can’t because I got to work and I don’t have any extra vacation days because I got sick the start of the year with that flu that was going around and just don’t have any vacation days. I got to save the ones that I have because I’m going on a trip to the Bahamas for a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday in the fall. Right? 

00:13:18 Casey: Like you don’t live that world. You say, yeah, sure. I can do it. Let me just like move some calls around and I’m there. You’re available in your life to do what you want, to live the lifestyle that you want. Where do you want to go? What do you want to see? What do you want to do? I’ve got a trip coming up. And I would say like, it’s a trip coming up and I’m going to go see a client. And I’ll say like the biggest tax of it, like the hardest thing for me is like, man, I’m going all the way out there. What do I want to do when I’m out there? Like I’ll do the client stuff. You know, it’ll take a day and a half. But then what am I going to do? I don’t know. 

00:13:48 Casey: You know, I talk about ham radio. One of the things in ham radio is to go to these state parks. They’re called parks on the air. There’s certain parks across the country. I’m like mapping out the cool POTA spots to go out with my radio and maybe do a little activation and have some fun and go explore like a beautiful place I’ve never been to. That’s like the effort that I have to put in right now because it’s like, why would I hurry back? Why wouldn’t I just take a full extra half day and go play and explore and see something I’ve never seen before just for me? 

00:14:13 Casey: You can do these things as a fractional CMO because no one’s like owning your time. I’m just flying back when I’m flying back. It’s not like I’m going to charge the like a different like a ticket fee for my flight, you know, like, they’re paying for my flight. It doesn’t matter what flight I take, I could take it in the morning, I could take it in the afternoon, I could take it in the evening, I could take in the next day. It doesn’t matter, right? I wouldn’t bill them the hotel, I’d bill them the flight. It’s ethical. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I’m in control of my time. How do I want to spend it? Do I want to go see family while I’m out there? You know, I’ll be in an area where there isn’t really family nearby, so I won’t. But I think I’ll go and explore and have a little fun time just by myself. Just go explore. I want to see what’s up. It’s going to be in… I’m going be in Texas in an area that I’ve never been to before. And I just find the landscape really interesting. So I just kind of want to go hang out, check it out. 

00:15:02 Casey: That’s what you can do. You can go play and explore and have fun and not feel the constraint and the pressure of being to work on time. You got to get back. None of that stuff. No, like I have to take a day off. No, that stuff. You just go do it. You go live your life and your client work still happens because you have teams that are doing the implementation. Right.

00:15:22 Casey: Next is you’re wholly responsible for your own success. Hey, this is a big one. You know, this is thought like, no one’s coming to save you. There’s no one that’s like waking up every morning thinking, how do I make you successful, healthy, you know, sexy, rich, you know, like no one wakes up really thinking about that for you. If you want those things, you have to come up with them yourself. You got to make the plan, you got to do the work, you got to grind it out. There’s effort that is involved. No one’s coming to save you. So you’re wholly responsible for your own success, but also you get to be responsible for your own success. 

00:15:57 Casey: It’s a beautiful thing to think, what do I want? What am I building? Why am I building it? Who is it for? What does it look like when I’m there? All along the way, the amount of personal development that you go through is significant. I would say the people that are the most successful as fractional CMOs tend to be the people that are the most introspective, that consider things, consider themselves, understand the value of saying things the right way to a client. 

00:16:23 Casey: I might only say to a client, I don’t know, a thousand words in a week. Those better be really good words, right? Like they better be predicated on a belief structure that is like smart, that’s gonna help the client move in the right direction. I’m not like wasting time talking to them. Those words really, really matter. If you’re the kind of person who considers those things and you’re considerate, like it’s really, you’re the kind of person who can build a long term practice to get you where you want to be. You got to think about what that destination is. And the destination isn’t one more client this week, or this month or this quarter. 

00:16:57 Casey: The destination is having a flourishing fractional CMO practice, where you have the freedom and flexibility that you want and make the money that you want. And maybe this is the kind of thing that you could then bring other fractional CMOs in and they can operate underneath your business brand. You can do that if you wanted to dominate a niche. Like you say, Casey, I want to be in uh medical device sales, selling into hospitals, because you have experience in that. So go do it. It’s a great market. And then maybe you start building some deep relationships and you get oversubscribed and there’s too much business for you. So then you let another junior CMO underneath you and you kind of oversee them. They had another one or another one. And before you know it, you know, you’re cash flowing big time. Then you’re paying out those CMOs underneath you and you have a real functioning business that if you choose to, you could sell. 

00:17:41 Casey: Other people, they don’t want that other people just want to be a single Pringle work with three clients, max. Charge top dollar, charge more and more for each client, make really good money and keep their complexity as low as possible. I don’t care what you do. You choose the one that’s right for you. So being wholly responsible for your own success, I think just like opens you up to just a lot of fun. You get to play the game that you wanna play. 

00:18:05 Casey: And that goes into my next point, which is you get to write the rules, not let anyone tell you how the game is played. When I graduated Michigan State, I had a rule book that was outdated that was for somebody else. I think it was probably for like the, you know, top students graduating in my class. Like a senior year roommate, he got a job in package engineering, Michigan State’s big in package engineering. And he went to work for a company. And you know, he was like some lowly intern kind of thing to get started. And now he like manages the place. He’s been at the same company this whole time. He followed a rule book that worked for him. 

00:18:47 Casey: That rule book did not work for me. He had a package engineering degree. I had an environmental policy degree. Just doesn’t work for me in that same way. It’s not like I’m unlucky or he’s lucky. It’s none of that stuff. It’s just he had a rule book that worked for him. And I had a rule book that didn’t work for me. I had to find the rule book that did work for me. And I got to write rules that were way more fun. Rules that said, I get to go with my wife to appointments when she was pregnant with our two kids. I’d go to all the appointments. I wouldn’t just like sit in the car, like I was there for him. I was there for like the Oh, whoops, like, it’s your first appointment, Nina, now that she’s pregnant, let’s say and surprised we have a ultrasound machine. I do want to do this like little pocket ultrasound, I wouldn’t have missed that for the world. 

00:19:31 Casey: But if I played the old game, which was, well, honey, like, I can’t go to the hospital because I got to be at the job. That’s to me, that’s kind of a losing game. So I got to write the rules that let me be at all those appointments, that let me take my kids to their doctor’s appointments, let me take my son to school. Those things are important. You know, when my dad’s health turned, I got to go home. When he had the heart surgery, I got to be there with mom in the hospital while dad got wheeled away into the OR to get his heart valve replaced. I got to be there for that. I didn’t have to tell clients anything. I did say like, hey, I’ve got a medical thing going on. I can’t talk today.

00:20:10 Casey: But you know, I’ve taken a couple emails here and there. It’s not like I was talking to people on the phone, but I was able to run my whole business, keep all of my income flowing while traveling. When my father passed away about a month later, I got to be there. I got to be there fully present. It wasn’t. It’s not like I was like out having phone calls with anybody. It’s not like I was like doing emails in the hospital room with him. No way. Write the rules to allow you to have the level of presence that you want. Then I hope you don’t have to go through those things but inevitably, that is one thing that we have to go through in life is the passing of our parents. 

00:20:44 Casey: So write rules that allow you to be present, write rules that allow you to be present to go to all of your kids, games or recitals or whatever the thing is, that’s all possible. And it’s possible to make a lot of money at the same time. I remember when my wife was pregnant with our first kid, our son August, a friend of mine said to me, Casey, somehow, you’re gonna make more money once you have a kid, even though you’ll have less time to work. It was true. I mean, it’s Parkinson’s law. 

00:21:14 Casey: Work fills the time allotted. I found that I had the opportunity to make more money because I put myself in a better and better position as a CMO, attracting better clients, even if I had a kid and another kid. Right? So creating that pressure in my life of having less time meant that I had to use my time wisely. Write the rules that allow you to win. Don’t adopt other people’s rules This is like the self authorship that you have the opportunity to do today. You’re not too old. Right? That’s some baggage people have. Oh, I’m like on the, you know, the end of my career, and I’m too old. And people think I’m too expensive, or whatever, too disconnected, or whatever, whatever the thing is, bullshit. That’s all that it is. It’s bullshit. 

00:22:00 Casey: Too young. I always felt like I was a little too young. And I’m on the precipice of my 40th birthday. And I’ve had a beard, if I shaved my beard, I look about 13 years old. That’s kind of how I hid from the too young part. But I found that the too young stuff was just in my head. No one ever said to me, you look like a kid, you’re too young. Right? They never said that to me. It’s all in my head. Or maybe they say you don’t have enough experience in this industry. Like you’re an outsider to this industry. Listen, I’m an outsider to a lot of industries. But give me a weekend. you know, a couple shots of espresso, ChatGPT and Claude, Google, yeah, Google Notebook LM to do that little podcast feature, man, I’ll be pretty sharp, pretty smart. I’ll know the lingo, I’ll know the jargon, I’ll know all that stuff pretty quickly. Give me a week in and out. I’ll be able to hang out with most people. 

0:22:57 Casey: No, I won’t be an industry expert overnight. Man, I can get pretty close pretty quick, right? I can get… I don’t know, 60% of the way in a weekend. And I know it’s different than actually being an expert. And I’m not saying that there’s a shortcut to being an expert. Like to be an expert, you have to see things multiple times and multiple angles, probably in different, you know, economic cycles. However, we can all agree that your ability to ask AI questions will get you smart answers faster. This is the kind of thing that we used to just ask our experienced friends for help for and we can now ask in AI, as long as we have our own discernment when we get the results back and we see what we think is real or not. 

00:23:40 Casey: So you don’t have enough experience? Bullshit, right? You write the rules. You’re… you forever been in medical device and now you want to get into women’s health? Awesome. You have a personal story about why you want to be in women’s health? Great. You don’t have a personal story about why you want to be in women’s health? Great. Doesn’t matter. Go play the game. Right. It’s like, there’s no arbiter, there’s no person who’s like standing there saying like, well, I need to see like a personal experience that you had that makes you want to leave so that it makes sense to me that you wanted to leave this other, you know, medical device space and now you want to be in women’s health. Like, did you have a medical event that made you change your mind? Like no one says that stuff. 

00:24:18 Casey: You might believe that you have to, uh you know, pass go, collect your 200 bucks, you know, earn your stripes. You don’t though, just jump into it. Do whatever you want. That’s the game to play. Say, I want to be in this industry because it’s interesting. Because I sat down and had the foresight that I think that this is where the puck is going. That’s where you want to be. You want to choose based on that, not based on what your experience is. And maybe there’s a way to find the middle ground of those two. But you get to write the rules to let you win. Maybe you had some medical event that was significant. Maybe you had cancer. And you’re like, man, now I’m the cancer girl. Right? Now I’m the cancer girl. And people are going to know me as the cancer girl.

00:24:59 Casey: Okay, like, did you ever go to school, and like, grade school, middle school, high school, and like transfer schools, and you had this beautiful opportunity to be the new person. And with the new person, you got to reinvent yourself. It is awesome. There’s some time in your life where you got to show up at a new place and reinvent yourself, I bet. Like, it doesn’t matter what, what experience you have that might have been negative that people perceive as negative. It’s none of their damn business. You don’t talk about it. Just keep moving on. Right? Just like you can operate in such a way that you don’t have to like share your card to say, well, I was at all these jobs, I got fired from these two, I got cancer, yada, yada. Doesn’t matter. 

00:25:39 Casey: What matters is you’re in front of people today offering to solve a problem for them. That’s why people say, I’m never going back. Because they can craft the version of them, omitting maybe their failures, omitting some of the things they don’t want other people to know about, or they don’t want to like spend time on. And just packaging it up into a version of themselves that is absolutely true. And they can pierce the world with that version of themselves. It’s just so different. 

00:26:05 Casey: When I was at my agency years ago, there’s no way I was ever going to get out of the shadow of the CEO. I liken it to like a big brother, little brother dynamic. I was the little brother, didn’t matter, you know, how good I got at marketing or the results I got or how good I got at sales or whatever. I was always the little brother. I was never going to be seen as an equal. So I left and I left and I created the business, CMOx, for me and for my family, clearly with the idea that I wanted to work with few clients, solve big problems, have a lot of fun and get paid really well. You might also not have the MBA. You think like, oh, I need a different degree. I don’t have the PhD. I don’t have the MBA. 

00:26:44 Casey: I think that there is an upper hand that some folks have if they have like a MD in a medical field. Or, you know, if you’re a financial advisor, if you want to work with financial advisors and you were formerly a financial advisor and have your certifications and like a certified financial planner. Like that’s cool. That might make you more valuable in the market. But that’s to assume that you’re going head to head against someone else who might lack that credential. So often the best deals are off market deals. Right? 

00:27:17 Casey: Like think about this. You want to buy a house? Well, where do you buy the house on the auction where everyone’s bidding up the price of it, you know, on Zillow or Redfin or you know, whatever? Or do you want to find the off-market deal where you can have the conversation with the owner and be like, hey, let me buy this house for this amount of money. The off-market deal is going to be better. When you are reaching out to people to offer to be their fractional CMO, it’s oftentimes better to go off-market, to go with folks that don’t have a job listing out. 

00:27:47 Casey: You might have to educate them on what a fractional CMO is because they hadn’t heard of it before. But when you do this kind of off-market offer, what does that give you? Well, it gives you a huge upper hand. Probably the biggest one is that you’re in front of them and no one else is. So it doesn’t matter if you don’t have the MBA, because they’re not talking to someone with an MBA. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have 20 years of direct experience in their industry, because it’s not against you and someone with 20 years of direct experience in their industry. You get to go talk to them, you could have that conversation. And it’s like, I’m the person in front of you right now. 

00:28:20 Casey: I mean, think of it like dating. You know, like it’s very different to meet someone that’s a friend of a friend, like, Hey, like, do you know anyone that’s single? They’re like, Oh, I should hook you up with my friend, you should meet each other. That’s a very different relationship than I’m going to get on Tinder, and I’m going to swipe left on 500 profiles and see who I’m matched with. Right? It’s just like a very different game. So it doesn’t matter if you’re too old, too young, if you’ve got a story that’s negative, you know, I mean, people that were part of Theranos are probably still very successful. Now, they’re not going to hopefully work for someone like Elizabeth Holmes again, but they have a pedigree and they got to keep their chin up and they got to go back and fight because they got to support themselves and their family. All those things are fine. 

00:29:06 Casey: The last thing I want to share with you is vacations. There’s this formula that it is work hard, take a vacation to recover. Right? Vacations are the recovery from hard work. And I think that it’s fundamentally upside down. It’s backwards. It’s just wrong. Vacations aren’t the reward for hard work. They precede hard work. Ask anyone who had a baby, and the baby’s three months old, and he asked that person, like, hey, let’s work really hard on a work project, and at the end of this in two months, we’ll take a vacation. They don’t have the capacity to get started and focus, right? Underslept, kids up all night, house is a mess, all their clothes have milk stains on it. They don’t have the capacity. 

00:29:53 Casey: To get that capacity, they first need a vacation. They first need time, they need space, they need spaciousness. So if you treat vacations as the thing that you get as a reward for all of your hard work, it’s like having dessert, you know what I mean? To just have dessert for breakfast if you want it. That’s my take. Just flip it around. Don’t create these weird constructs where like you have to perform perfectly in order to reward yourself with rest. I mean, forever we’ve been resting. You have pets in your life soon. I have a kitten, she sleeps all the time. Right? She sleeps as a precursor to play. 

00:30:32 Casey: You should rest as well and your rest should come baked into your calendar every single quarter, your time off. When are you off? When are you relaxing? When are you playing? That precedes effort. When you are a fractional CMO, you create those dates every quarter. You pencil that in your calendar with me. We do a training and I make sure it’s in your calendar and hold you to it. We share all the cool stuff that we’re doing. Sometimes it’s a staycation because you don’t want to spend money. It’s fine. Sometimes it’s going to Jamaica. Sometimes it’s just, you know, driving across town and go into a campground. It doesn’t matter what you do. What matters is that you’re doing it and you’re creating spaciousness and molding a lifestyle that supports you and what you want. 

00:31:14 Casey: So here’s the thing I want you to say, I’m never going back. And you can’t say that until you’ve experienced what it’s like to have a fractional CMO client in the CMOx way, in the way that it’s in the engaged or the advisor capacity, where they’re paying you monthly, where you have long-term commitments with them, where you’re doing marketing strategy and marketing leadership and not implementation, where you solve bigger problems, delegate everything except leadership, and then practice predicting the future. 

00:31:43 Casey: If you are selling that and not selling a high-priced gig that’s 35 hours a week, right? Like that feels nice because you got the income, but you don’t have the freedom. You don’t have the flexibility. I want you to have three clients, four clients. If you need it, five clients. And they’re paying you between three and fifteen thousand dollars a month or more. You’re making all the money that you need. And you’re like baking in all of this time for the freedom and the fun that you desire in life. That’s it. When you get there, when you have that first, second client, you taste it, you know what it’s like, you get it. It’s like someone who went to New Orleans for a night, they don’t get it. Someone who went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and then they stuck around for St. Patrick’s Day and they stuck around on a boring Tuesday and they still love it, they get it, right? It’s just different. 

00:32:30 Casey: I want you to get it. I want you to get there. And I want you to say, I’m never going back. I’ll tell you, on this side, there is a sense of freedom. Yeah, there’s a sense of pressure, but you’ve forgotten that pressure. You’ve let go of that pressure by having a full-time job. You’ve let go of it by having a business that you own that isn’t a fractional CMO, it’s an agency and you’re doing a bunch of labor. You’ve let go of that pressure. It still exists, but you’ve kind of forgotten about it. I want to bring you back and yeah, you’re going to take on and shoulder the burden of supporting yourself, your family. It’s a big one. Right? 

00:33:01 Casey: So one of the things we talk about in boardroom, it’s just like, what do you do if your spouse doesn’t get it? I get it. But I’ll tell you everyone, everyone in boardroom that’s gotten to two clients, paying them in the CMOx way, following that righteous path, they have a sense of freedom enough to say, I’m never going back. So that’s it. That’s my hope for you. This is the year that you declare I’m never going back. And you do it, you do what’s necessary to build the fractional CMO practice. And you can do it on your own. 

00:33:32 Casey: If you want to be in a community of other like, people who are crushing it, check out the accelerator, book in a call with our team. We’ll have a conversation with you. We’ll ask you some questions to see if we can even help you. And if we can, then book in another call. And you can ask us any questions you want. Who we’ve helped, if we can help you, if you have the right experience, how it all works, how much time you get, all that stuff. But I’ll tell you, on the boardroom call today, I stuck around for an extra hour, and we just goofed off on AI tools. And a couple of us were doing a little show and tell, playing with AI stuff, and just showing like, what’s working? What’s interesting? What’s kind of at the cutting edge? 

00:34:11 Casey: You know, this isn’t theory, this is actual people doing the work that are getting the results. And, you know, we’ve got one member, she’s sitting at 35,000 for the monthly collections, and she thinks she’ll be at 50,000 by the end of the month, if a couple contracts close. It’s crazy. It’s a crazy amount of money. 50 grand US a month in recurring business. Right? Is that everybody? No. Is that going to be you no matter what? No. Is it going to require your effort? Yeah, but it can be skillful effort focused in the right place at the right time, with the right tools, talking to clients in the right way. And if you do that, you’re going to get there faster. That’s what I think I’m going to be able to help you with. That’s why we call it an accelerator, because I help you get there faster. 

00:34:57 Casey: So if you’re interested, just book in a call, cmox.co/call. You’ll talk to Justin on my team. He’s great. He’s been with me for a couple of years. And then you’ll talk to John or Melissa, and you go from there. All right. I hope to see you on a call soon. Take care. So long. 

00:35:11 Casey: Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners, but you’ve got to take action on what you heard today. For more information and show notes, visit fractionalcmoshow.com. If you’d like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode, you can share your question at fractionalcmoshow.com. And last, please hit the like and subscribe button so that I know that this content is helpful to you. All right, go get them.