Ep #147: Finding Your Villain

Transcript

[00:00:00] . In this episode, I’m gonna get into why you’re not making as much money as you want and who the true enemy of yours is. I’m gonna help you define who that enemy is so that you can battle up like David and take on Goliath, so that you can finally get to the level that you wanna be at

[00:00:14] 

[00:01:12] Hey, it’s Casey. Let’s talk about your villain. Who is this person? And I wanna suggest for a moment that you have to have a villain. You have to have something that you’re fighting against. In, in some ways I love the work of Marshall Rosenberg who wrote Nonviolent Communication, and I remember really diving into his stuff and just loving all the stuff that he has.

[00:01:30] I’m, a huge fan of Marshall Rosenberg’s work. And, he has this thing in communication, we shouldn’t use terms of war because when we use terms of war we don’t need to communicate it’s a war. I get that, right? I fundamentally get that. With my children, I don’t wanna say “We’re in a battle.”

[00:01:45] That’s not the words. It’s “Oh, we have misaligned expectations,” whatever, right? A little more, I don’t know the term for that. It’s gentle parenting, but I don’t know. It’s empathetic parenting, whatever that is. So I don’t wanna use terms of battle in communication, but for me it is helpful to land where I am using terms of war sometimes.

[00:02:02] I want an enemy that I want to seek and destroy. There’s something about that kind of gets me deep in my belly and makes me wanna do something. So I wanna talk to you about a villain for you and an enemy that you can take on. And for – most entrepreneurial people that enemy is just a lack of drive or a lack of just doing work.

[00:02:24] These people struggle to sit down and just do work. I remember someone asked me a while ago a few years ago, they’re “How have you been so successful as a fractional CMO?” And it’s I just go to my office at 9:10 in the morning, and I start working, and I finish when I’m done.

[00:02:38] That, that’s a major part of it, is I’m just disciplined. , But you are too. You’re listening to this podcast not because you’re not disciplined. You are disciplined. So the issue isn’t a lack of discipline, you work. I guarantee you’re a worker. You’re learning about this stuff.

[00:02:51] You’re listening to a podcast about being a fractional CMO. There’s something about you already that you’re different than most people. You love marketing, so your enemy isn’t lethargy. Do you know the book ” Turning Pro” by Steven Pressfield? It’s a great book. It’s a bunch of short, I don’t know, stories.

[00:03:06] It’s almost poetry the way that he writes. It’s one of those books that I don’t think you should get the audiobook of, and I don’t think you should get the e-book of. I think you should get the print book of it because it reads poetry and there’s a way that kind of things are laid out.

[00:03:20] It’s lovely. But he has a quote in there, and his quote is, ” The amateur tweets, the pro works.” Which there was a time in my life when I needed that, when I needed to be “Oh yeah, I’m just tweeting about it and I’m not doing the thing.” But you’re doing the thing, so your enemy isn’t lack of effort, right?

[00:03:36] I bet this morning you saddled up and got to work, and you did something. Or if you’re listening on the weekend, maybe you’re taking the time off, but you’re still listening to a podcast on being a fractional CTO, you’re plugged in. So what is your enemy? I’ll just cut to the chase.

[00:03:47] Your enemy is that you continue to fall down to small problems, and you solve them. Hell, most of you listening to this are solving problems for clients right now that are just gonna be swooped away by this wave of AI. As more companies adopt AI, and really as more enterprise-level tools add AI in a useful way we’ll find that a lot of the work that you’re doing just is no longer useful.

[00:04:11] This is especially true for you, marketers for hire who wanna do strategy and leadership, but really just do implementation. You’re finding that you’re using AI to get a lot more done, so why wouldn’t your client at some point soon, in the next year or two, just replace you in totality with AI?

[00:04:25] And again, the reason is because of your discernment and your experience and your taste and your ability to be the person who takes the fall in case things go wrong, and some companies do need that. So these are all good things that you can do. You can put yourself in a position where you’re useful, but most of you are just solving too small of problems, and these problems will be wiped out by AI.

[00:04:43] I was watching a video this morning from Andrew Yang. Do you remember him? He ran for president. a goofy techie guy, right? But Andrew Yang stood on this principle that technology’s gonna fundamentally change the workforce, and he stated that… He just got back from an AI conference.

[00:04:56] I don’t know which one. But he said that 50% of entry-level jobs in the technology space are gonna be gone over the next few years because the easiest firing happens from not hiring. I thought that line was really interesting. it’s easier to effectively fire people by just never hiring them in the first place.

[00:05:12] So take 50% of the workforce you’re gonna bring in as entry-level folks, just don’t bring them in, ‘ cause AI’s gonna do it for you. And over timeI don’t know how long it’s gonna take, but it’s probable that AI will do most of the stuff that we do as humans. So our job is to be incredibly useful and to stay elevated on the big problems.

[00:05:29] So let me tell you what a small problem is. A small problem is you reviewing a Google Ad campaign saying this Performance Max campaign could be improved by us doing X, Y, and Z.” Yeah, valuable, but some people then take it further and they’re “Oh, specifically these keywords let’s add, and let’s change this bidding structure.

[00:05:45] And this creative has a blue background. Let’s swap it to a red background, and let’s do some new stuff with collab design and see what we can get. And let’s go hire some UGC creators.” And they’re going through that process, okay? Which is not an unimportant problem But what’s the level above it?

[00:06:00] Hey Pmax isn’t performing as well as it can. Let’s go find an expert. Let’s bring them in. Let’s let them get to work. I’m gonna move on to the next thing. That’s solving a bigger problem. So by you taking it on, you’re strapping yourself down with more and more labor. And for some of you, that feels like dopamine, right?

[00:06:15] You’re doing a good job. You’re excited. You’re learning a new tool. You’re playing. The world is a play place for you. Didn’t I say play in AI tools? Yeah, but You play with your remnant time. That’s your dessert again, right? It’s not your main course. Your main course is solving the big problems.

[00:06:29] So your problem is that you’re not solving big enough problems, and you allow yourself to feel the comfort and the ease and the excitement of working on things that are marginally bigger than what you worked on before. You went from a client that’s doing three million a year to one that’s doing four million, one that’s spending five grand a month to one that’s spending 10 grand a month on ads, right?

[00:06:51] it’s just not the jump that you need to be making. What is the next meta level up for you? If there was a ceiling above you, what’s on the top of that ceiling? What’s the floor that your ceiling currently is? So for some of you, it’s you go from the easiest model here is if you work with dentists and you work with one dentist, and that dentist can’t afford to pay your rates to fractional CMO, so you charge them implementer rates.

[00:07:11] If you break through that ceiling, you go up to a dental service organization that has a dozen or 25 dentists at maybe a dozen locations across the Northeast. Now they can pay you top dollar, and you can help them build the marketing strategy for everything and run the entire marketing department.

[00:07:27] That’s a big problem. What’s the problem past that? It’s private equity. It’s getting bigger and deeper in these different places. It’s building pipeline. It’s having confidence where revenue’s coming from again and again. That’s solving big problems. Solving small problems is going through your email and “Woo-hoo, I answered all the emails in my inbox.”

[00:07:44] Who cares? Get shit done that actually matters, right? Ooh, I was playing with Mul- CloudCode or Claude Bot or Hermes or whatever you’re playing with, is it actually getting you to the next level? Or is it just you staying abreast to new ideas and having fun? I’ll be honest. I spent the weekend and I got Hermes set up and having fun with it, and I find it to be interesting.

[00:08:04] I just had CloudCode set it up and it worked. And it’s been fun to play with it and learn stuff. And as I’m getting into it, I’m “Okay, how does this help me solve a big problem? I don’t know yet,” right? I don’t know how this helps me solve a problem that the other AI tools in my life aren’t solving.

[00:08:18] So my job is to kinda keep it alive and check in with it. But really it’s I gotta just step back and go for a walk and think through all the stuff I’m working on and what’s my next big level. What’s the next big move? What’s the next big project to work on? That’s where I want you to be is thinking through that stuff.

[00:08:33] So your secret to success is not that you just need to work more, because it’s not that. It’s just that you have to choose the things to work on so here’s a quick example. So many CMOs, they’ll come into the accelerator and they’ll work on a project with a client. Client will hire them, and they’ll be “All these things are wrong, and we’re gonna work on branding and these other things first.”

[00:08:52] So they spend two months working on branding, and then the client two months in says, “Where’s the results?” And they say, ” We now have the foundation for results.” CMO says we’re gonna end this contract because we don’t have any results.” “But I did the branding thing.” They’re we needed the lead thing, though.”

[00:09:05] So you have to be focused on the thing that actually matters, that pushes the business forward. Ask questions What can we do to double profit in the business? What are the things that we can do that would double profit in the business? What are the things that we could do that would make people come to me every week to want to hire me?

[00:09:20] What’s something that I could do that would help me 5X my income over the next two years?” Those are the real questions you should be asking. Not is Hermes the right AI agent for me, or should I use a different harness Claude Bot?” It’s not that. It’s should I vibe code this thing out?”

[00:09:39] Or “What should I…” No. What’s the big problem to solve? Now, if you have time left over, which I hope you don’t need to do all this stuff 100 hours a week. You have some leftover time and you wanna play, go ahead and play. I watched a great video from the CTX, my CTX co-founder, Lior Weinstein.

[00:09:53] Lior said “There’s two phases in life. There’s the phase where you collect the dots, and there’s the phase where you connect the dots.” And I like that idea, right? Connecting the dots is the thing that actually creates change, but collecting the dots learning how these tools work, learning what GitHub is, learning what a repository is, learning how to set up Claude Code, getting comfortable with command line building out a creative pipeline so that you can get new creative generated without having to go to these other agencies that are just slower.

[00:10:20] And it’s faster for you just to prompt your AI than it is to find someone, hire them, and have them do it for your client. that kind of stuff, right? Which is this line, very weird line around implementation and leadership, right? It blurs a little bit when the implementation is done by AI, but we lead the AI, and we’re responsible for the output of the AI, something we talk about a lot inside the accelerator.

[00:10:38] So you can – collect dots Though I think most of you aren’t focused on something big enough, exciting enough, or really appreciating where we are in this great kind of upheaval into the workforce as AI becomes more and more prevalent. So that’s the thing I want you to focus on. I want you to think to yourself and have one thing, one big problem you wanna solve next.

[00:10:58] Not for every client, not for every project, – not for everything. Just choose one thing to focus on and say for my business, I wanna solve one problem.” What is that one problem? Is it justifying high fees? Is it attracting new clients? Is it getting better at selling? Is it servicing clients for long term?

[00:11:14] What is your thing? That’s what I want you to work on. All right. If you want my help, hop into the accelerator. Go to cmox.co/call and just book in a call with my team. In 15 minutes, we’ll tell you if you’ve got what it takes to be a successful in-demand fractional CMO. All right. I’ll see you soon.

[00:11:27] Take care. Bye.