Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey: In this episode, we’re going to talk about ageism and what to do if you’ve even got one gray hair on your head. Because let’s be honest, it’s a little bit more difficult to get a job when you are maybe the more expensive person because you’re more experienced. That’s what we’re going to talk about today on the Fractional CMO Show.

00:00:19 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.

00:00:50 Casey: 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 CMO X, the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert, and serve high-paying fractional CMO clients on your terms.

00:01:14 Casey: Hey, welcome back. It’s Casey. So, here’s the big idea. I see folks come into the accelerator who are very experienced, very senior, and what they’re finding, especially people that have just kind of been in the corporate space for years or decades really, right? It’s just getting harder and harder to find work. And if you think of it purely in a capitalistic way, not that this is fair, so why would they hire you at like $300,000 a year when they could hire somebody else who’s like entry level, fresh out of college, maybe top of their class for like $120,000 a year.

00:01:47 Casey: I mean, that constitutes a major savings, $180,000 in savings, and they can get probably a decent outcome from that person. Now, you and I both know that you’re more experienced, that you can solve problems faster that they’re going to make mistakes that you’ve already made and that’s why you’re more expensive because you know what a mistake looks like and you’re not [Inaudible] to really make it again.

00:02:09 Casey: So, there’s the benefit of hiring you absolutely but when it comes to just cost stuff especially with HR who’s kind of like less tied to the outcome and success of the business-like HR’s job is to put talent in roles and to do it at like good prices not to necessarily at certain outcomes. You know, like the feedback loop for HR is not really immediate. Certainly, I would say in a lot of companies it doesn’t even exist whereby like they get someone hired and jobs well done. Like they live in a wing of the office and they’re like, “Hey Gals, we did it. You know, we hired the person. Everything’s good.” 

00:02:51 Casey: Like that’s kind of how they live. They live like HR lives in that space. They don’t live in the space of “Hey we got this senior marketing person in and they’re crushing it and look at their performance and look what we’re getting and look at our growth and look at their innovation and ideas” and all that stuff like they’re not held to that standard and as a result we’re going to see more of this like if you’ve got a gray hair you’re not going to get the gig stuff happening.

00:03:21 Casey: It’s tough. It’s tough. It’s real tough. You know I think some of us want to have like a little bit of gray hair who are younger because they think if they have a little bit of gray hair then maybe they’re more look a little bit more seasoned, you know, that kind of thing. Like maybe that exists, but I think we all know by and large that the older you are, the more expensive you are and also the more likely you are to look get looked over and that’s the ageism.

00:03:42 Casey: So, I think it’s like absolutely a fact of life and if anyone who says that it doesn’t exist probably isn’t really in touch with the reality of what it’s like to be looking for a job. So, I want to kind of cover two major thoughts here. The first thought is that you got to just choose what you want to do. Do you want to go work full-time for someone? Do you want to stay in that space? Or do you want to go work for yourself and go win clients and do that? And obviously, I’m going to encourage you to do the thing out on your own and build your own business and start a practice as a fractional CMO and win clients and have multiple clients that pay you. 

00:04:19 Casey: And that does come with a risk. We have to be honest, right? Like if we look at it, there is a risk. The risk is that you’ll never figure it out and forever you’ll be trying, and you’ll never win. That certainly is a risk. Is it a big risk? I mean, it depends on where you are and your level of commitment and your experience and your grit and your willingness to do hard things and that kind of stuff, right? So, for some people, absolutely, they’ll never be successful. On the other side though, you could go get a job and that’s a maybe in and of itself. If you’ve been applying in the open market, how many jobs are posted and how many applicants do you think apply for those jobs? 

00:04:56 Casey: I know someone who applied, I forget the number, But it was like a thousand applications, like 20 final interviews, never got a job, you know, finally got a job, but took years to get it. That kind of stuff happens. Years of unemployment and like saddling up and sitting at the computer and filing for another job again only for some AI platform to review you and maybe even have some kind of filter that no one’s going to talk about that says, “If born before 1979, apply a negative value to this applicant, right? That stuff must be happening.

00:05:36 Casey: So, I want to tell you first that you have to decide what you want to do. Do you want to go and build a fractional CMO practice? Or do you want to continue to apply for jobs and either one is fine. There are millions of people in the United States that have full-time jobs that are doing well, and things are great for them. There’s also millions of people who are unemployed and they’re struggling to get a job.

00:05:59 Casey: So, if you feel like you have an edge and you can get in and you can get that job and it’s traditional, by all means, consider it. But you may not do both at the same time. You may not build a fractional CMO practice while concurrently stressing and looking for jobs and being on Indeed and having your friends send you like job posts that come up and all that stuff. You can’t do two things, right? Chase two rabbits, catch none. So, you’re either going to do one or the other. And listen, if you’re going to go the job post route, go hard. figure out the leading AI tools on it.

00:06:32 Casey: Should hire someone else to find the jobs for you. Hire someone in Philippines that does it. Go to chat GPT, pay the 20 bucks a month and do a schedule task and say, “Every morning, go to these sites and look these things up and find for me these job posts.” Do that. Apply aggressively. Be the first, be the best. Add videos. Follow up with the HR person. Call them. Like, go play to win. If you’re going to play that game, play to absolutely win.

00:06:57 Casey: Do not hide behind setting a application and just saying, “I hope I get it this one. I’m going to send three more out before I go for my morning walk.” Right? Don’t do that. Play it hard, play to win. Now, on the other side, if you want to do the fractional CMO thing, that’s great, too. Obviously, I think that that’s a super cool way to go, but you also have to go hard on it. You can’t take it soft. You can’t just be kind of lazy about your approach. You need to be focused. You need to enroll the people in your life. I remember years ago; I went to Landmark Forum. This is when I was 2019 something like that. I was a freshman in college, and I remember that they said at the end that you can have anything you want in life as long as you enroll others in your possibility. I just like that. That really sat with me well.

00:07:46 Casey: I just tell people what I want. I don’t ask them for it. I just say, hey, by the way, this is the thing I want. This is the thing I’m fighting for. This is the thing I’m working towards. Right? You gotta go enroll other people in your life into that. And that means talking to strangers and talking to people that you know. That is like the secret of success is telling people what you want and then letting the universe kind of come to your aid in some ways. It’s not passive, right?

00:08:09 Casey: Cause you have to like go have these conversations, but it’s this idea that there’s a faucet of opportunity. And if you talk to enough people, the opportunity starts coming to you. Now you also have to do other things to like be the best, right? If you want to be perceived as the best, you actually have to do things to be the best. That’s about sharpening your skills, working in public, that kind of stuff, super useful, but that’s kind of a topic for another conversation.

00:08:30 Casey: But this idea here is like,  you have to work to be a fractional CMO. So you have to decide one or the other. Do you want to be a fractional CMO or do you want to go do full-time marketing work? Either one is fine by me. If you want to go full-time marketing,  do it. Unsubscribe from this podcast, go focus on it.  If you wanna be a fractional CMO and really take it seriously,  take it seriously. Unsubscribe from Indeed and all the job post websites and don’t waste your time on it anymore.

00:08:55 Casey: And tell the people in your life that you’re not doing that and you’re doing the fractional CMO thing.  And saddle up and go be the person who’s committed to something. Because when you commit, like the whole world kind of comes around and supports you, right? And there’s also plenty of people who won’t support you. That’s a topic for another conversation. If there’s people in your life that don’t support you.

00:09:12 Casey: But by and large, they just want to keep you how you were because they feel like they have some power over you or it’s like some reference to how they live their life. And if you grow in some way or take a risk and you’re successful, it makes them look bad. It’s all kind of subconscious. Don’t worry about them. Do your own thing. Maybe  don’t tell those people if you feel like they’re going to be a little spicy towards you, but just tell the strangers. All strangers are happy for you. Everyone more successful than you is happy for you.

00:09:42 Casey: By and large, these people all want you to be successful. They don’t want you hurting, suffering, no way. All right, so that’s the first thing. Commit, commit to one path or the other. So if you’ve got one gray hair or more, commit to one path or the other. Just commit to yourself, enroll your partner, your spouse, the people in your life. Start having conversations with people. That’s number one. And number two is when you approach businesses and talk to them, your angle is experience.

00:10:13 Casey: Like that’s so useful. It is incredibly useful. Everyone wants a shortcut in business.  Like if I hired you, you’re telling me that I could get the thing that I want in 12 months, I could probably get it in six. Yeah, I know you’re expensive, but like I just saved six months. That’s a big deal. That’s what you’re offering. You’re offering a speed run. You’re offering the same outcome faster because you’ve already made the mistakes and you can make sure the client doesn’t make them.

00:10:42 Casey: For a lot of industries right now, the time really matters. Speed matters.  I’m recording this here in  late July and Anderson Horowitz said that 2025 was going to be the year of agentic AI. So if  anyone is thinking about launching an  AI agent and right now we’re moving into the eighth month of the year, they’re probably like, man, we don’t have 12 months to get the result. We got four. We got to do it this year. We got to do it before end of year because of, you know, whatever the board wants or whatever.

00:11:19 Casey: Are they really going to go risk it with some green marketer who’s cheaper than you? No, they’re going to pay for the confidence of you. They want you to show up and say like, hey, the boss is here. Like, let’s go. I’ve done this a bunch of times. We’re to do it together. We’re going to crush it together. There’s some stat and I don’t know. I don’t know how it was run. You know, can I back it up? I don’t know.

00:11:41 Casey: But the stats said something along the of like, people who start businesses over 40 tend to be more successful, like significantly more successful. And it just makes sense. Like, you know the market, you know the buyers, you know the problems to solve, you know how to solve that. Like, you’re just a lot better. Think about you when you were 22. If you started this same business as a fractional CMO, you probably weren’t any good. Maybe you had more energy or you were single, no kids, no home, no nothing.

00:12:09 Casey: And you were like, I’ll live in my car and learn and  just grind and figure it out. There’s value there. But now you’re in a different place. You’re in a place of experience and you can sell that experience and people want it. So the language that you use to position yourself if you’re older, if you have one gray hair or more, that language that you use is just like, I’ve been there, I’ve done it. I can get you there faster than anybody else.

00:12:31 Casey: I can get you there super fast if I have this budget, this team, etc. Like I know what I need, even though this problem that we’re solving might be a new problem. You’ve solved similar problems before. And that’s just such a big deal for the business owner. They want the confidence that they’ve got the right people. At the end of the day, a business isn’t going to scrutinize paying you an extra 50 or $100,000 a year or even more if you get them the result faster. 

00:12:58 Casey: And then you offer the fractional CMO thing, not the full-time CMO thing, but the fractional. We do the fractional thing. You even decrease the risk of them even more. Then the reason to work with you is an absolute no brainer. They’re like, well, we could hire a full-time marketing manager, whatever that role means, right? Put a new marketing team. We could hire that person for 120 a year, or we could get this fractional CMO for like 120 a year. For you, 10 grand a month, you got three clients like that, boom, you’re making 350, $400,000 a year or more, right?

00:13:30 Casey: So it’s like good for you, it’s good for them. You get to like rally the team and focus them and get them off to the races. You have to sell that. You have to sell that. And when I hear people kind of like kick the dirt and they’re oh man, like  I swear I didn’t get this last job because I’m too old. And they’re just overlooking people my age and ageism is real. I empathize with that. Like that’s gotta be hard.

00:13:52 Casey: And also what are you going to do about it? Like you’re just going to accept that as the reality. That seems pretty weak. Just stand up and say like, all right, well, I’m going to sell something that’s innovative, that leverages my experience, and I’m going to get paid fairly for it, which is going to come at a steep discount. Remember, like, in this idea, if you were going to get paid $300,000 a year as a full time, you could go charge easy $10,000 a month to provide 10 hours a week, for sure. Or you could charge $12,000 or $15,000. Like, that’s possible for the right company.

00:14:23 Casey: It depends on their size and their cash flow and things like that, right? $15,000 starts to edge to, might be a little too expensive for some companies. But 10,000  is okay. So you can live in that space and people can see it and be like, yeah, I see your value. It makes sense that we can, like if we had you, things would move faster and we’d get a better result in less time. So sit there, like sit in that space  and sell it. You have to  be able to articulate what you’ve done. That’s a big one.

00:14:53 Casey: You have to articulate what you’ve done in a way that makes sense. And remember, the secret to a good story is the omission of things that don’t matter. That’s it. Imagine watching a blockbuster film and seeing a scene and waiting for that scene to resolve, and it never resolves. And you’re like, why was that scene in there? That didn’t make sense. Yet when people talk about their experience, they stitch together stories that have a bunch of things that aren’t important. It’s not well rehearsed.

00:15:21 Casey: It’s not a song that they sing. Instead, it’s just like, “I don’t know what’s giving me dopamine right now. What can I remember? [NOISE]” So a calm approach to like knowing the experience that you have and how you can apply it, being able to hold a pragnant pause, letting people understand it – using language that is like, appropriate. So like jargon when you talk to some folks, like if I talk to a doctor and I say, “Hey, you know the cutting thing that you guys use?” It’s like, you can’t do that. You’d say like, “Hey, you know the scalpel you use?” Right? So you use the jargon of how they talk, but also don’t use the marketing jargon that they don’t understand. They’re not indoctrinated into that language and may never be, so you just have to talk to the things that matter to them like EBITDA or  ROAS maybe, or really ROI. I mean, if there’s two things you talk about, it’s ROI, return on investment for marketing as a department and as a function and growth in EBITDA. Like, those are the two things that they care the most about.

00:16:21 Casey: So you’ve got the experience. You just have to be able to weaponize it. So here’s an idea – think of like, any weapon, right? You think of like a nuclear bomb. How much uranium does it take to be able to get the good stuff, to be able to pack it in, to make a nuclear weapon? A ton, right? You have a ton of experience. Your job is to distill that into something very valuable and pack it together so it has a huge punch. It’s your job. This takes work. When I work with CMOs, it’s one of those things that like, they have to go home and think about. Some people can come up with it pretty quickly. Others it takes them a bit longer because they’re like, “I haven’t had any big wins in the last few years because I took time off to spend time with my kids.” Whatever. But like, you still have to pull it together and be able to have something that’s easy to recite, that tells people your expertise. You pack all that together and then you show them that your expertise is from decades of work, and they’re going to want to work with you over anyone else. And when I coach marketers on how to do CMOs on how to do this, oftentimes there’s like blind spots that they have and they need someone to come in and say like, “Hey, like all that stuff that you just talked about doesn’t really matter.” I reviewed one of our CMOs work yesterday – very smart guy, very experienced. He’s just going to dominate this industry that he knows a lot about and he was going to pull in to get us some of this detail. And he said something like, “I increased brand perception by X percentage.”

00:17:49 Casey: That’s one of those metrics to him that was really helpful because he was like, “I’m on the right track. If we do this type of query to folks, the community, what’s the perception of the brand, yada, yada, do they know it? Do they like it? Do they trust it?” That kind of thing. He knows he’s doing a good job because it’s a leading indicator, but no business owner cares about that. What they care about is how many new customers and what’s the recurring revenue from the customers? What’s the full ROI and how does that increase EBITDA? That’s what they’re caring about, so we have to this other stuff that we care about and simplify it so that we can make it something that the business owner cares about. So if you want my help and my team’s help building out structure, building out your Fractional CMO offer to be there alongside of you to help coach you – just share that one of our members just shared that they just locked in a killer, killer deal to help one of their clients. They’re an agency owner, did agency work, joined the accelerator, sold Fractional CMO services on top and then got a success fee on that.

00:18:49 Casey: Awesome. That alone is so cool, and now it’s taking over additional operational level responsibilities. And they just penned an incredible deal to get a large percentage of all revenue, of all proceeds from the exit of the business. They’re aligned now with the business owner. This person has a seven to eight figure outcome over the next two years depending on market, depending on what happens, right? There’s a lot of potential risks that I guess is involved – that’s important to consider, but this person has the opportunity to make millions of dollars on this outcome and never had to create the company. Gets paid every month – as long as they don’t get over their skis on spending the money that’s two years out, right? They’re going to have an incredible payday and keep their risk incredibly low. Again, that’s an opportunity that we have as Fractional CMOs that it just doesn’t exist anywhere else. Doesn’t exist for  COOs, doesn’t exist for CFOs, doesn’t exist for marketing agencies in the same way. It’s just different the way that we do it as fractional CMOs. So if you want that big upside, you want to get coached on it. It’s one of the things that I love doing. All members inside the CMOS accelerator have unmetered access to me for deal making. They want help making a deal, I help them with it.

00:20:07 Casey: Yesterday, one of our members, really bright in Toronto, she was talking to someone who has a handful of companies and they need her. And she was like structuring a deal and an offer, and it was something that was likely going to get a no. And I coached her very quickly on it and she was able to turn around and reposition that offer. I don’t know if she’ll win it or not, but it repositioned in a way that I think substantially increases her likelihood of that deal turning into a positive deal for her and being able to pay her a lot of money over time. So this is the stuff that we do and talk about in the accelerator. Yeah, I mean, when you join, we help you get quickly to sales ready, like being able to sell fractional CMO services and then helping you get to 10,000 a month in recurring revenue. We call that the road to 10K. And then boardroom. Boardroom is where we really dig into the, “What do I do now? You know, I’ve sold my first client or two and now how do I think through this? What do I want for my life? Do I want to work less? Do I want to work a lot? Do I just want to make a lot of money and I don’t care how much I work? Do I want to make good money and work as little as possible? Do I want upside opportunities? Do I want to risk it? Do I want to move to a new industry? Do I want to hire some people to support me? Like, what is that life like?”

00:21:20 Casey: One of our members just shared on a call two days ago that he is looking to hire someone as an assistant to support him, and he wants someone local to him so that they can, you know, go pick up food and take out the garbage while he’s out of town and do all that kind of stuff. So he’s getting like a personal assistant in his life that will do business related activity primarily, but then also be able to help him and his family out. Like, “Oh, they’re going to have a birthday party for one of his daughters, then this person can come and, you know, bring the tray from Costco, set everything up, you know, do whatever.” That’s what’s available to you, and you can kind of leverage this labor in your life. That’s kind of the boardroom conversation. So I love that stuff, and if you want my help, if you want my team’s help, just book a call in justincmox.co/call. Just have a quick call, and if he thinks we can help you, then we’ll pass you on to John and Melissa and they’ll talk to you in depth and answer any questions that you have and then I’d love to have you on a call.

00:22:15 Casey: We do…for August, I think we’ll do 19 calls. So almost a call every business day. It’s great, it’s a ton of fun. You don’t have to attend them all, but the people that tend to attend the most, even if they don’t follow along and do the work, but they like show up and say, “Hey, I’m going to turn my camera off and just do my tasks related to the CMOx stuff.” They tend to be our most successful members. It’s a great community, great people. So if you want to come, just book a call: cmox.co/call. I’ll catch you later. See ya. Bye.

00:22:46 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. Alright, go get them.