Ep #157: Your Experience is Expiring

Transcript

In this episode, we’re gonna talk about are you actually getting paid what you’re worth? Or worse, are you actually worth what you’re getting paid? Let me help you figure out how to create more value in less time so that you can demand the prices that you want.

Hey, welcome back. I’m thinking about full-time folks who make a lot of money.

I’m talking about the people that are making 300, $400,000 a year, $500,000 a year. This is a message for those folks. Maybe 250, 200, like a lot of money, a quarter of a million dollars. When you reference your income based on what fraction of a million dollars it is, right? That’s a lot of money.

Those folks, as you’re listening, and those that are curious are you actually worth it? I get the levels. It’s start off at this level, then move my way up, and move my way up, and then de facto I get paid more until I’m the CMO or VP of marketing or VP of brand or whatever, and you are then paid a ransom.

Are you worth it, though? Are you worth it? That’s the question. And I think for a lot of people, they’re not worth it. They’re just not. They don’t have the skills to actually drive the business forward, and they’re resting on their experience from yesteryear. Here’s the line: Your experience is expiring.

Professionally, your experience is expiring. The things that you did five years ago are expired. 10 years ago for sure. 15, 20 years ago they don’t even matter. The fact that you went to business school, who cares? What is the stuff that you’re doing now that actually matters, and can you justify your fees based on that?

There is the joy of the work that we do, which is to find ourselves in a place of marketing strategy and leadership, and stay there and master the slow to change principles of marketing. What’s a slow to change principle of marketing? Like how you lay out an ad so that the headline is really clear.

That’s a classic thing you could learn from Ogilvy, from Halbert, from Bencivenga, from Carlton, from whoever you want. But there’s a way to view the world as a marketer, and that’s a slow to change principle. And I love that stuff, and I hope you love it too, ’cause that’s what’s gonna keep you reasonably safe.

But these slow to change principles that we’ve mastered are now in like the spotlight against what’s working today. And what we know what, what’s working today. It’s fundamentally different than what was working a few years ago. More content personality not being so milquetoast in everything, having some fun.

These things actually matter in brands. Brands that kind of are a little bit different. The one that we all love to talk about is Wendy’s. We love Wendy’s and how snotty they are on Twitter. That’s fun. But more than that, like we need to figure out what’s working today and then take our history, our historic understanding of marketing, and apply it.

I wanna tell you about like I’m a tinkerer. You know that about me. I like playing with stuff. On my desk right now, if you’re watching the video, I’ve got a ESP32 that I’ve been playing with and like 3D printing stuff, and I’m like having a ton of fun, right? I’m like learning and playing and doing stuff.

And someone asked me a question today, and it was around like technical development, okay? I certainly shouldn’t talk about it, but we were having a conversation, and I was laying out a process for them on how I would think about it. And I said, “Oh my God. You know what? I think I’m wrong.” Because as of two weeks ago, everything changed.

Maybe you noticed that too. What happened two weeks ago? I feel I don’t know the date of it but Claude has been pushing artifacts. If you’re a heavy Claude user, you’ve experienced it. You know what the artifact is. The artifact is like a webpage that can do stuff. It’s like JavaScript on a webpage that can like do stuff.

You could make a calculator and build it as an artifact, and then share that link with people, and people can use it. It’s Claude’s approach to a custom GPT. And Chad is doing some weird stuff with custom GPTs right now. If you’re not familiar they’re not allowing you to create new custom GPTs.

They’re not allow- allowing you to share them. It’s like they’re doing something goofy with custom GPTs. We don’t know. I haven’t read anything that kinda gives me a sense of what it is. But it’s changing, and like that fundamentally changes how we approach the marketing that we do if the tool that we’re using is getting sunset or transformed or whatever.

So with Claude, I was working on a project and I gave Claude a big like task. It’s probably, I don’t know, two hours of it thinking to build something for me. It was based on like developing a report for me. And I expected to get in Claude Code like a window of it or maybe a markdown file that I’d open in VS Code or whatever.

And what I ended up getting was Claude just opened up a browser window, and it was a new artifact. And it was beautiful and well laid out. And I got to play with the artifact instead of playing with a markdown file, which for me is way better. It’s like a better user experience But that like changes what’s happening for marketers.

For us marketers, if we’re not abreast to this stuff, that’s stuff that I used to do two, three, four weeks ago, it’s like no longer the process. The process now is artifacts. Or maybe you say, “Yeah, custom GPD,” and then it’s like you can’t do a custom GPD because everything’s changing. There’s like a fundamental shift that’s happening, and it’s happening so rapidly that if you’re not pacing with it, someone else is, and they’re gonna be younger, less experienced, but more like adept and able to get you a result faster.

I think in a lot of ways that the fractional CMO market is gonna start turning a bit to bring in younger folks with less experience who wanna be in this position. It’s interesting, right? Like forever, we’ve wanted CMOs to be deeply experienced and tenured. But you’re gonna get pressure from younger people who like can just do it faster and better.

They say, “Oh, you like read all those books and all that stuff. Cool. I’m just gonna dump that in and build a skill in Claude,” and they’re gonna do something that’s like maybe not as good as yours, but like certainly a whole lot faster, and they’re gonna deliver it to the client before like you can even get a manually written proposal out.

So that’s the pressure that you’re facing right now, and the question that you need to ask yourself is, am I worth what I’m getting paid, and how do I increase my rate of understanding of how the world works, how to use agents, how to get better results faster? That’s where you gotta be. And then there’s all these folks that are like playing with AI, and I love it, and I want you to play, and I want you to play and have fun.

Like there’s no point in doing this work and feel like we’re not having a good time. But on the other hand if you’re just like playing and not developing anything that has like merit or value and it’s I’m gonna stand up this little SaaS thing, and then I’m gonna abandon it, and then the next one and the next one, and like you never lock into something that actually has value, at least for you, like lasting value for you or your clients, you’re playing a, kind of a silly game.

Yes, go and play, go build a thing, go try it out, but then just come back to reality. My wife and I were talking about this today, like what do we call this thing? It’s like the Dunning-Kruger effect, right? When you’re developing stuff.

In the Dunning-Kruger effect it’s like your competence versus your confidence. And when you get started with AI tools and you have a taste for like what you want you just come up with the idea and you ask the AI, like Claude or Chat or whatever, and it builds it for you. So your confidence is through the roof, but your competence is incredibly low.

This is like the I know everything stage, the peak of ignorance, and so many people are there. They’re like living in this world of they don’t even know how ignorant they are because the thing that they built looks good. I remember seeing a YouTube video of Lizzo sitting on a couch, and the couch was made out of cake, and how funny that is, right?

But it looked like a couch, right? These marketers are like building stuff that looks like the thing, but it’s actually cake. It’s not an actual couch. It’s not robust. It won’t last. That’s the problem here with AI tools, and folks are at this peak of ignorance, and then they fall down that valley of despair, and what they realize is that they know nothing.

They know nothing about how data gets organized. Like what is the difference between an SQLite database and a vector database and a traditional database? Does this even matter to the marketer? Maybe not. But if you’re gonna vibe stuff out, you gotta understand some of these basics.

Where does the website live? Does it live in Cloudflare Pages? Does it live on a WordPress site? Does it live in a server somewhere? Like they have to understand some of this like context to be able to do their job well. And over time, you’ll find yourself on that slope of enlightenment, and maybe you’re there.

Maybe I’m there, though I feel like the moment I reach that slope of enlightenment and I have like true expert knowledge, I actually realize that I know nothing and I fall back down that valley of despair. Because the level of complexity that we’re facing with AI tools is greater and greater. So what do we do with this stuff?

Like what do we do with this- Desire to be on the cutting edge that things are, like, advancing quickly that your experience is expiring. Like, how do you internalize this? What do you do? And I think more than ever, the answer is just simple. It’s just solve a big problem. It’s to just solve a big problem.

Don’t be the polyglot that knows 10 languages. That’s not gonna serve you. These people who wanna learn Esperanto, like, how often are you gonna use that? Solve a specific problem. Figure out the most likely problem that you’re gonna encounter that companies want solved. Find that niche, drill into it, and solve it, and become an expert there.

And become satisfactorily ignorant in other things. You don’t have to have an opinion on how databases work. You don’t have to have an opinion on how web pages get hosted. You don’t have to have an opinion on any of this stuff. But you gotta be a damn expert in the niche that you’re in. So niching is less about precluding yourself from doing work, and more about making you better than everybody else.

Don’t you want that? Don’t you wanna be the person who is the number one, the expert the truest expert at the thing, where you’re just like a deadly weapon to get brought in? Someone’s like, “Ooh, we’re gonna bring her in because she’s the one,” and you roll in, and your fees are commiserate with your experience.

People happily pay the highest prices of any fractional CMO to you because you’re the expert. This is where you can ascend to. I’ll be honest with you, a lot of people are just scared of doing that. They’re scared of ascending. They’re scared of being the person. But the opportunity’s there. It’s wide open if they’re willing to take it.

So my take on this whole kind of thought around your experience is expiring is you need to be less broad. Don’t come to me and say, “Hey, Casey, I wanna serve clients that are in direct to consumer goods. No way. Because women buy different than men, and moms buy different than anyone else.

And, moms that have at least one child and are expecting a different- another one like they buy even differently. Choose the niche very tightly and become an expert in understanding that behavior. When you do, you will deliver a better work product. The knockout effect is you’ll be able to charge more.

Great. The work that you do with a client will be very similar to the work that you do with another client, which means that you’re not context switching rapidly, which is fun. I get that you like context switching, but it’s not a good way to make a living. Context switch all you want in your hobbies.

Don’t do it professionally. Do the boring stuff. Stay with a niche for the long haul and become the number one. That’s how you get out of this loop of like second guessing and reinventing and changing and never being good enough. Like you will never be good enough if you try to be the m- the best for everybody.

I’d rather you be pretty mediocre for everybody, except for a small group of people where you’re the most ascended person, where you’re the most expert. That’s the place to be. So as you think through Dunning-Kruger, as you think through how things are changing, you don’t have to care about this custom GPT thing or the Claude artifact thing.

It doesn’t m- if it doesn’t matter to you, it doesn’t matter But if it helps you move faster with your clients, be an expert in these few tools. Lock in on it and own the space. Be the person that people want, not the person that they settle for. You wanna be the person that people fight over, right?

You wanna be the supermodel of your niche. You wanna be wanted, and you’re never gonna be wanted if you lean on a decade-old experience and your time at business school and, blah, blah, blah. No one cares. No one cares what position you played in the high school football team. What they care about is what you’re doing today and how you can help them today with the unique problems that exist today.

So this is the stuff that we get into deeply inside the accelerator, specifically in boardroom. I really think it’s what takes you from getting your first client to really getting past that 10K a month line. And our boardroom, as we talk about this regularly what actually matters? Like where’s the signal?

Where’s the noise? Where’s the stuff that if I do it, I’ll help my clients to be more successful or I’ll work less or whatever, so that I can charge more and have better clients and yada. So that’s the opportunity that’s in front of you. If you want my help building your fractional CMO practice we we’re pretty strict about who we let in.

We’ve really changed things recently to really get strict about it so that we know if we can help you or not. And one of the really cool things is that we’ve been running data, and we find that on average, it takes about 91 days for someone, once they join the accelerator to win their first client.

That’s the, the general average. For full-time employees, it’s a little bit longer. It’s 100 to 110 days. And that’s just because they have less time, ’cause they’re working a full-time job. But folks like agency owners are, folks that are already fractional CMOs, folks that are consultants, they tend to win a client faster than a full-time employee does.

But I think that makes sense. We’ve changed really who we let in, and we’re a lot more strict about it because we wanna make sure that the people that come in are able to win quickly. So what I’d like to offer you is just a call with my team to see if you’re the type of person who has the experience and the runway to be able to be an in-demand fractional CMO.

If you wanna book a time with my team, just do it at cmox.co/show, and you can get 15 minutes on the calendar. It’s super quick. We just ask you a couple questions and see if you’ve got what it takes. Then we give you an honest answer, and if we think we can help you we invite you to another call where we give you a three-step action plan and exactly what you have to focus on.

It’s super valuable. We’ve been working really hard to make it awesome for you, so you leave that call knowing clearly what your next steps are. All right yeah. Book a call right now. All right, see you later. Bye.

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