Transcript:

00:00

In this episode, I’m talking just to the ladies. Women, you’re  listening to the podcast episode, this is for you. I’ve got some thoughts and ideas for you based on what I’ve seen from women who are successful as fractional CMOs.  For guys, you don’t get to watch this one. You don’t get to listen to this one. So turn it off and go listen to something else.  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?

00:29

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.

00:59

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.  All right, so I assume that it’s mostly women listening to this, but also probably some guys too, totally get it. But uh let’s talk about what it’s like to be a woman as a fractional CMO. I don’t know, because I’m a guy. uh But I have had the opportunity to have coached

01:29

about 200 women to become fractional CMOs.  And one thing that I think is so cool is uh regularly on calls,  the number of people on like a accelerated call with me, uh we do multiple calls a week, you know, some weeks I’m on four calls with folks.  And ah it’s like predominantly women 50%, 60, 70 % women, also women with glasses. I don’t know what that’s about. But uh sometimes I’m like the only person who’s a guy and doesn’t have glasses on. But that’s beside the point.

01:59

So I have a lot of experience of working with women who want to be fractional CMOs.  And  I think that the problems that women have with winning business or serving or charging rates or whatever, aren’t dissimilar to the problems that guys have, but guys might just look at it a little differently. And I’m not here to claim that I understand the female psyche and what it’s like to be a woman in business. I don’t know. So what I can share with you is data. What I can share with you is like the experience that I have  of

02:29

coaching and supporting women who go on and win great clients. So the first one is that it’s like the easy one for us to talk about is that women tend to undercharge early on. And guys do this too, but I would say predominantly, I’m, I experienced women coming in. And when I say the range for charging for engaged is 7,500 to 15,000. I see a lot of women saying like, Oh, I don’t even know if I can charge 7,500. I also have women that’ll come in and be like,

02:58

Yeah, I should charge at the top end of that. But people come in, women come in with this belief that they should charge less for some reason. And what is it? uh I think there’s a lot of different stories about what it is. I think that there’s a lot of meritocracy that women believe that I think guys have the opportunity to not believe. uh I think meritocracy still exists. But I think guys might have like a boldness to just jump from job to job and just say my price is going up. Okay. uh

03:27

And  I’m just guessing these things. I don’t know if that’s really what’s going on behind the scenes for all these guys. But man, I had a guy that came in  and uh he joined and we had a game plan call and I didn’t hear from him for five months despite like reaching out. And then finally I was just like, dude, are you alive? Like what happened? Where are you? And he replied back, he’s like, oh, I just listened to what you said. I charged $10,000 a month and I won three clients. I’ve just been working with him. He’s like, that’s amazing. Like congratulations.

03:53

And before that, he never had the confidence to charge 10k. So I just told him a number and he said, okay,  and he just went and did it. For women, I think it’s more common to have some questions around that.  To wonder like, how do I justify those fees? And I talked about this in a previous episode, kind of how you can justify fees if you want to play the game of justification, but also you can opt out of justification and just charge the fee you want to charge because that’s what you’re charging. It’s like,

04:21

If I’m going to sell lemonade,  we live next to a like a train station for regional rail.  If my kids wanted to have a lemonade stand, and they’d like, dad, what should we charge for the lemonade? And I’d like, okay, well, let’s do the economics. So if we have a lemonade stand, and we have to get the table, we have a table, we have chairs, we have a pitcher, but we don’t have cups, so we don’t have lemonade mix, we don’t have lemons, we don’t have whatever.

04:42

So if you go to the store and buy that, if I talk about the cost of gas, I talk about the cost of ingredients, I talk about time, and then I can factor that in and say like, okay, well, like our break even point is $1.50 a  cup. Okay, like that’s a game that I could play. Or I can just be like, mmm, five bucks a cup, that’ll cover our costs. Right? And it’s crazy to think that I’m going to charge four times more money for the same thing, but like,  if the price is five bucks, the price is five bucks, like that’s just what it is. You can declare these things.

05:11

And I think that guys get away with that declaration maybe more than women do. Guys are just like,  yeah, why wouldn’t I charge 10 grand for that? And women are like, well, like what are the component parts? How much time is this gonna take? If I think about how much I wanna make per year, what is it per month?  What is my insurance? What do have to pay for all these things? And then like breaking it down and saying like, this is my number. And you can do that. If you need to do that, do it. uh But also what is your number that you wanna make if you’re doing everything?

05:40

If you’ve got the nanny that you want, if you’ve got the housekeeper that you want, if you’ve got someone who picks up your clothes and washes them, if you’ve got the car that you want, if you go on the vacation that you want, if you eat out where you want, if you buy the things that you want.  I really love Dan Sullivan’s stuff. uh He has a kind of a model he says,  want what you want. Like you don’t need it. You don’t need those new shoes, the new handbag, you don’t need it. But if you want it, great, cool. That just like increase your prices and find people who are more affluent who can afford them and get paid them.

06:11

That’s it. I want you to remember that there’s no morality here. There’s no morality in money. If something costs $1.25 a cup and it costs $5 a cup for the same exact thing, is there anything morally right or wrong about the different prices? No, that pricing exists outside of morality. So this isn’t like an energetic thing. This isn’t like a woo-woo if you set the rates, they’ll come. It’s

06:38

establish a rate and find the person who has the problem that if solved ought to compensate the person who solves it at that rate. That’s really important. You’re going to charge lower rates because you’re working with people who need help and they can’t afford it. And you’ve got a big heart and you’re a caring person and you like to take care of people  and you want to just to support these great people because it feels good. I love that. I love that energy that you have.

07:06

But here’s what think you got to do. Put on your oxygen mask first before assisting others.  So go win that client that’s going to pay you  10k because you’re bold and you say, that’s my fee. And they’re like, that makes sense that that’s your fee.  After that, they might say, and we can’t afford that, which is fine. But it’s not reflective of you and your value. We were just talking about this in boardroom yesterday.  Someone was talking about like changing pricing or something.  And the conversation, one of our members  replied,

07:36

Like you set your fee, you don’t change your fee based on the client and their ability to pay. And I think of this as a car. If you go to the Porsche dealer and you want to go get this fancy car, and I don’t know cars, but I like Porsches because they look like frogs. So let’s say you’re like, I want a Porsche and I want a green one because it looks like a frog. uh They’re like, cool, that car is, I don’t know, $250,000.

07:58

You’re like, yeah, but I’m different. I’m special. I really need it. It’d be perfect for me because it matches my handbag. They’re like, it’s $250,000. Like that’s just what it is. It’s irrespective of who you are. Right? Like that’s where you have to be. You have to be in that position. You’re not going to change your price to work with a client. You’re going to establish your price and shop to find the client that is going to be your client, your partner in a lot of ways. That’s what you’re looking for here. Is that kind of like level of relationship with some

08:29

So you’re not going to change your price, you’re going to establish your price. uh I was talking with one of our members today, and he just  completed a half day consult.  And  he’s grown so much since his first half day consult. This is the second one that he’s run. And he just did a really great job. And we were just like chatting about it.  And I asked him, Hey, as you pitch ongoing services, what is it going to be? So I’ve been charging this amount for this client. So my next one has to be more. Like that is the answer, right? You have what you’ve charged.

08:59

And then the next one, it’s either easier for you because it’s really similar work and it’s in the niche and you’d like the client and it’s going to be like pretty simple. You might charge the same amount because it’s easier and you’re going to work less but still deliver a great work product. That’s one route. The other route is just to charge more irrespective of how easy or hard it is. But you never charge less. You never go win a $10,000 month client and then turn around to someone who can’t afford 10 grand and you’re like, I’ll do it for 3,500. I’ll do it for five grand. I’ll do it for seven grand.

09:28

You don’t play that game. You establish the cost structure. And then you find the clients that can afford to pay it. And the moment you fill your time with someone who can’t afford it, it’s it wastes your time. It fills your cup with something you don’t want. So I think of like the best clients  that I’ve had. They’re just like, can you send over the agreement? I sent it over like signed paid. Let’s get started on Monday.

09:53

And then the ones that aren’t the best clients are the ones that are like, Oh, this price is too high. Can we talk about it? Are you willing to move on the price and do this and that and yada, yada, yada. And then you get stuck in that melodrama of it all. There are absolutely companies that want to hire you someone with your expertise uh that are going to pay you what you ask for because they understand that the problem that you’re solving is worth that amount. Critical. You have to focus on solving bigger problems. And that’s the most important thing. You can’t get caught up on anything else.

10:23

And I use that word melodrama because I think that’s a lot of it. It’s like, oh, it’s fun. Oh, it’s a great product. Oh, it’s a great service. Oh, the team’s great. Oh, I really like the entrepreneur. Oh, I think this could open the door for yada yada. Like maybe those things are true. But also you have a price, you have to  sell it at that price, you have to get someone to buy that that price. That’s the goal. I would rather if let’s say my fee was 10k, not be walked down to 7k.

10:50

I’d rather go wait a month or two months and get that 10k. Because I would rather have 10k a month coming in than have 7k a month coming in because I’m going to put in the same amount of work. And realistically, like the relationship should last the same amount of time, although maybe the 7k one last less time, because they can’t afford you. They can’t afford the tools and the stuff you’re gonna get burnt out because you’re gonna start doing implementation work because they’re taking all their marketing budget and they’re hiring you and they think you’re some wizard that can do everything all at once. No.

11:18

to be a successful fractional CMO, you have to work with companies that can afford your rate and can afford marketing spend like on marketing technician on uh media buying on creative on website improvements on a CRM all that stuff. If they can’t, it’s not a good client for you. And it’s better not to work with them. Or if you’re going to work with them, just do like a 30 day thing with them a half day console, the 30 day strategy review, that kind of thing. That’s going to keep you out of the uh like

11:46

the grind of  a low budget client. Okay. um I also see women  struggle to ask for help professionally. I don’t know, like, as I was trying to think about, like, what is different between like men and women and the accelerator? I think that guys  are like, yeah, I’ll bring an expert into the thing. I see that.  Also, I do see some guys that don’t do that. They kind of get worried about it. They think they’re gonna look bad or something. But women I feel like

12:16

they’re just like not going to bring in an outside expert to help them. And what’s that outside expert? So I’ll give you an example. eh First of all, I don’t know much about AI development. But I have an idea of something that I want. And I’ve been like working on it and playing with it in my mind and watching YouTube videos. But if you’ve tried to watch any uh MCP videos  on YouTube,

12:42

And they’re more than I don’t know, an hour old, it feels like everything that they tell you no longer works, because there’s been new integrations, and they’ve hidden different drop downs and  what you’re using before, like, it no longer works today, whatever. So I just kept hitting roadblocks. And I’m like, okay, cool. That’s like enough of me hitting my head against the wall. I’m just gonna pull in a market, uh like an expert on this stuff. I go to Upwork, I find someone, I talked to them that day, I hire them, and they’re currently working on a project for me. Very cool.

13:10

Are you the kind of person that can do that too, that feels comfortable with that?  Or does that at some level feel like it is a threat to your role, to your title, to your authority? I want to share that I think you should do two things in the marketing department. There’s three things to do. The first one is marketing strategy. The next one is marketing  leadership. And the third one is marketing implementation. Don’t do the implementation. That’s not where your value is. Your value is in strategy and leadership.

13:39

But of those two, if you could only do one, it is leadership strategy, I’ll give that to somebody else. Like I will give that in totality to somebody else. You tell me what the best strategy is. Shoot. Like, oh, someone’s got a really great strategy to rank on next door or to like there’s a new strategy to optimize your meta ads to get more click throughs or higher leads or lower lead cost or whatever. I’m going to go listen to that person. I don’t have to invent that stuff.

14:07

my role is to aggregate all of the possible answers, choose which ones we’re going to focus on, rally the team, focus them and get that accomplished. That’s it. So if you’re the kind of person who feels at risk of someone else coming in and sharing their ideas, I really I really want you to uh find yourself centered in your value of leadership more than your value  of strategy, and certainly not in your value of implementation.

14:35

If you look at all the work that I do with my clients, how much time do I spend doing implementation? I don’t know. If I’m working 10 hours a week for the client, I’m probably spending an hour doing implementation a month. And that’s just cause I wanna do it. That’s because I’m like, hey, we gotta write an email. I’m just gonna write it out right now. I’m gonna write it right now on the call. Do you guys mind? boop, boop, boop, boop. They get to see how I write. Yeah, I’m doing implementation. I’m writing the thing, but I also am training them.

15:03

I’m also having fun. Sometimes I like to play, right? So if you’re doing that kind of stuff, it’s just like a great place to be. You’re only doing marketing leadership and strategy and maybe just a tiny slice of implementation only because it’s fun. Or maybe at its worst case, it’s like, it’s a stopgap because you’re hiring someone and they’re just not on board yet. Okay. But like generally speaking, you don’t do implementation. So feel confident in bringing people in.  Nothing is

15:32

better to me in my marketing departments and everyone learning everyone growing everyone doing better delivering a great work product and me working  less because someone else came in with a strategy. I was working with  a company years ago and we wanted to rank really well for SEO and we had some keywords that we laid out and I got us pretty far like I had I knew like the basics to do and everything. But then I wanted like a real expert to come in. So I found an expert and I found him on Upwork and

16:00

paid him 250 bucks for an hour, and they gave us all the answers. And I said, if we implement this stuff, can we come back and buy another hour with you and you give us the next thing? And they’re like, absolutely. So for 250 bucks, like a month, we got top level SEO strategy, and then the team did all the implementation. And I look like the rock star because  I get the result for the client, irrespective of me actually knowing how to get the result. Because I’m the catalyst to get the result. That’s what you can do here.

16:30

You do not have to be the expert on everything. I think that there’s a knock on effect for you having lower confidence in your ability to do the work. You say, Casey, I’ve only led teams. I’ve never actually done the implementation. Like that’s, that makes sense that you might have lower confidence. However, you can find people that can figure out what to do and tell the team.  You can find videos. You can spend some time looking at courses on this stuff. You know, there’s a lot of stuff that you can find that people are

17:00

productizing  on school.com, S-K-O-O-L.com. And you can go find like some really good cutting edge stuff like media buyers, AI implementation, all that kind of stuff. You can go join a couple schools, some are free, some are paid. If they’re paid, they’re at most 30 bucks a month or something. You can go get killer ideas for your client. And your time spent just like poking around, having fun, playing the game uh is way more valuable to the client than you sitting down and just trying to grind it out yourself. So we live in an era uh

17:29

of these micro experts all over everything.  I’ve got a woman that I used for my books when I did my two books, uh Find Your CMO and The Fractional CMO Method. These two books, I hired the same woman. Her name is Lakshmi. She’s on Upwork and she does exclusively book layout  and she creates PDFs for print and EPUBs for the mobile format. Like that’s her little corner of the internet. Do I have to know how it works? No.

17:58

do I have to pay some exorbitant fee to some agency that goes in contracts with Lakshmi? No, I went direct to the source and was able to do it. I didn’t know how to do it the first time. So I just went on Upwork and I was like, Google Doc to EPUB. She came up, she’s made, I think $200,000 doing this work. She’s in India, she’s got a team. They just do it. Like, you can find these experts and start to build your bench of talent.

18:27

it’s really, really helpful. There’s a friend of mine who’s working on a book and I was like, what’s your plan to get it made into an EPUB? He’s like, I don’t have one. How do you even do it? And I was like, I got a gal here. Here’s your contact info, right? I look like the expert, but I just gave him just a person to talk to and then she does all the work. That’s what you get to do as the CMO. You do not have to be the person who knows how to do everything. You just have to know how to get things done. It’s very different. All right.

18:56

And I want to talk about your confidence. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, your confidence.  You probably think that your confidence comes from your ability to do something. Like, you’re confident because you’ve done it before. You built a company, you did a go-to market strategy, you launched something for a client, for an employer. um And therefore you feel like, yeah, I could probably do that again. But also in the back of your mind, you’re saying to yourself, yeah, but I had this huge team, I had this massive budget, the economy was in a different place than it is now.

19:26

I have all of these other conditions that don’t exist today. And as a result, I’m actually not confident that I can deliver the same result today. So you live in this world of second guessing yourself. I’ve done it, therefore I should be confident, but things are different so I’m not. And also I’ve never done it. So how could I ever be confident? And why can I charge a rate uh that like a confident person could charge? If you live in this space, you’ll see that like there’s no way out.

19:54

There’s no way out of developing your confidence based on having done it and the conditions being the same today.

20:02

So where does your confidence come from? Where do you anchor yourself in confidence? Because I’ll tell you, I don’t ever want to hire anyone who isn’t confident. I want to hire confident people. So how do get your confidence? Your confidence comes from your intention. It comes from your commitment. It’s that like no one can outwork you. No one can like ask as many questions as you and be as curious as you and as hungry as you to see the client win.

20:30

when you align to that, your confidence grows. Because the answer isn’t, know what to do. The answer is, I’m going to figure it out. And there’s like anything you want to do today, you can figure out. I how many LLMs do you have access to right now? You can go on Grok, you can go on ChatGPD, you can go on Claude, you can go on Copan, you can go on Gemini, you can go on Perplexity, DeepSeek, uh Manus, whatever. You can go on all of these different tools  and figure out answers and then go chase them down and see if they’re the right answers or the wrong answers.

20:59

or take the shortcut and hire a uh up worker to tell you like whatever it is. And again, your client pays for this. You do not pay for this stuff. Your client pays for it. Because you’re helping their business grow. This isn’t like your personal development. This is your problem solving for the client. And instead of saying like, hey, we got to go hire this old time person that’s going to cost X, you say like, let’s go by like two hours of this person’s time. Let’s go buy this Udemy course. Let’s go buy this  school  enrollment, whatever. And get that information.

21:28

There’s incredible value that comes from that. Your intention is where your confidence comes from.

21:39

also where your pricing comes from. So hear this out. So I talking to one of our members today. Like I said, he finishes half day consult and we were just jamming on it and  because he wants to sell ongoing services after this first consult, the first consult was kind of cut and dry. It’s like, I did the work, I’m going to now deliver you a report in a couple days. And he has a meeting with the business owner.  And he didn’t get to ask the business owner before the half day consult, if the guy has intentions to sell if he has intentions to grow through M &A.

22:08

If he just wants to lifestyle it, what is real like financial goals are. So he’s going to go have that conversation. But before we could have got clear on that, the member was saying, Hey, you know, I’m thinking about doing is pitching at this rate. And it was disconnected completely with the guy’s future. It was all about the CMO making money.  And I don’t mean that like, he’s a bad guy. He’s not a bad guy. He’s like a super sweet, caring person.

22:35

But the position was like, hey, this is the rate I charge. And it’s like, yes, like I did say that, like you have the rates that you charge, you have to do that. But also we have to understand what the client can bear. And we have to know if even  what we want to charge for our rates or what our rate is, is even palatable. And if it’s not, how to compose  what we’re doing for the client in such a way that it becomes palatable. So example, the company does just easy numbers, a million dollars a year.

23:06

and EBITDA is 20%. So they make $200,000 and you want to charge 10 grand a month. That’s $120,000 a year. They have an EBITDA of 200,000 that’s left with an EBITDA of 80,000 afterwards. But that’s just not going to fly. Right? Like, generally speaking, that won’t fly for the client. What would fly? Well, it would fly for the client if you could build a bigger future for them that says,

23:34

We got to work for six months or 12 months together in this capacity to do this thing  so that you can go from a million to 50 million in three years. Like that path, if you could chart that and say like, this is the first, like we agree to this, like this is irrefutable that we have to have the CRM like this. We have to  have ads that perform like this. We have to have creative like this. We have to have landing pages like this. We have to have call center follow-up like this. We have to do all of these things and you’re there to help build that. Now your fee, which is, ah

24:04

60 % of EBITDA actually looks like a good investment. So it’s all about that positioning. Some clients can’t afford you at face value. And that’s because they’re thinking too small or too short term, they’re thinking end of year, end of quarter, end of month, whatever it is, can we afford that? Do we have the cash flow? And you want to get into conversations where it’s, hey, I think we both agree that this is absolutely irrefutably the best idea. Like show me any other idea. I think this one’s the best.

24:33

And I’ll die on that hill that it’s the best.  And I’m not cheap. Like sure, I’m not cheap. You can go find an AI agent that could claim to do all the stuff that I do. But obviously, we know it doesn’t. uh It’ll be much cheaper and also waste your time. But like if you pay me, we work together and we build this out, you really have a fighting chance for whatever their dream is, whatever their future is.  That’s where your confidence comes from. Your confidence comes from  getting the download of the big idea from the client. And then saying, hell yeah.

25:03

If you’re able to afford my rate and give me these other things like a budget for marketing and a team, I think I could do it. Yeah, I got a lot to learn, but I think I could do it. And you know what? I’m gonna have fun doing it. It’s gonna be hard. I’m gonna work my butt off, but I think we can do it. Like that’s just a different place to be. If I put a client in front of you  and uh like I gave you a client and uh you closed it and you’re working with them and on like the 31st  day,

25:30

They threw a tricky problem at you and they say, hey,  we’ve got this thing. We’re really struggling with like this uh form validation rule and it’s a regular expression thing and we’re having this thing. I need you to figure it out. And you say, man, regular expression. I don’t even know what that means. What’s a form validation rule? How do I know this stuff? Man, they found me out. I’m out. I’m so screwed. I’m an idiot. I’ll never figure this stuff out.  I’m just going to send them an email right now.

25:59

I resign. I’m so sorry. Here’s a refund for the last month. Would you do that? No, you wouldn’t. You’d probably say something like, whoof, I got to figure out what that means.  Reply back. um Give me till tomorrow, because I got to do some research. And then you stay up all night, you talk to people, you join the accelerator, we talk, you know, I help you figure this stuff out, whatever. And then you go back and like, Hey,

26:26

I think this is the right next step. But I want to bring in a developer because I need their opinion because of our code base. And I don’t really understand some of that technical stuff. Can we bring someone in? I found a couple people, you can we try them? They’re like, Yeah, let’s do it. And you figure out the answer. If that’s you, you’ll be successful. If that’s not you, and you’re just gonna quit. Well, I don’t know, like good luck in life. So your confidence comes from your commitment and your willingness to learn and work and try and grind. And there’s this

26:54

there’s this kind of feeling in business, uh kind of today like in like,  get rich quick, you know,  it’s a  don’t grind, it’s all lifestyle, it’s just like chill, you’ll never see photos of me and fancy cars and private jets and stuff. I don’t want to mislead you  on the lifestyle. I’ll tell you, I work hard when I work with my clients. I also don’t really work on Fridays.

27:19

work on the weekends, I have really great hours, I really enjoy the work, I get paid really well. All those things are true. But I’ll tell you when I work, I don’t think you could work harder than me. I think you personally can work as hard as me, right? Solve problems the way I solve problems. But I don’t think you can do it more or harder, right? Like I’m very efficient and effective. You can be very efficient and effective too. When I’m on with clients, they get 100 % of my attention, we solve the problems, like we figure out the right answer.

27:49

You’re the kind of person that can do it too. Maybe you haven’t done it, but your commitment to doing it is gonna make you the kind of person who will have done it. But it’s your commitment that generates your confidence. So confidence is huge. People want confidence. I’ve heard this. So for the women still listening,  just like have the confidence of a white guy. Just like pretend for a moment. Like, okay, what would a white guy that I know, what would he charge for this? And if you’re in the accelerator, just like ask me and I’ll just tell you what I would charge or what I think would be a good fee.

28:20

And then just try it. For your clients or your prospective clients, they’re never abreast to your thinking. So if your thinking is thinking through justification, to them, their experience is just a fee. To you, your experience is very different. That’s like, am I justifying it? Or am I just setting a price for fun? Like, what am I doing? I set a price, you when I move from one price to the next price for my work, I told my wife, I was like, hey, yeah, so

28:48

I’m increasing my fee for new clients from this to that. And she looked at me, she’s like, where’d that number come from? And I was like, I don’t know. I just kind of like it. She’s like, I like it too. And that’s it. Like that was the conversation. I like the number. I like it too. Like there’s no justification that’s required. The client still sees the number. And I’ve seen people say like, oh, I want to do like weird numbers because it looks mathematical and it looks like I really considered yada yada. No, like no way.

29:18

When you look at like what a company gets bought for, what does it get bought for? Like what’s the price? The price is typically things like $200 million.

29:29

The price is not like $2.139 million or you know, whatever, like it’s just 200 million. Oh, yeah, we had an M &A we got bought out for $40 million. Like it’s usually like that. It’s just like round easy numbers. And maybe there’s like uh a nuance to this stuff that I don’t appreciate. And you’re gonna say Casey, studied with Richard Bandler, and I’m an NLP expert. And I think that pricing should be in a certain way. Okay.

29:57

But I think  more important than the pricing that you’re going to propose is the confidence and conviction behind the pricing. That’s where you got to be. When you have that confidence and conviction, you’re going to make the close  more likely than not. You know, can the client afford you? That’s a different question, right? But if the client can afford you, they should be able to see in your conversation with them that you can help them and then you propose how to help them in a way that makes sense. Like, it’s up to them to be able to afford it or not. But uh

30:25

The litmus for me whenever I present price is I want someone to say, I’d love to work with you. I share the price. say that makes sense. To me, I’ve done all my work. The third step of and let’s get started  or and we can’t afford that. That’s a them thing. But I trust that you can help me. Your fee makes sense.  And we can work with you or not. That’s where you want to be. You want to be in that position.

30:54

If you’re not getting people that say, I trust it, you can help me. Then there’s work to do there.  If they think that your fee is outrageous, then there’s work to do there. But if those two things are covered and they agreed to them literally on the call, they say something like, yeah, okay, that makes sense.  Then, then you’re good. Like you’re doing it all right. And then you’re just kind of shopping for the right person. I think I was dating a woman in my twenties and she was like, I want to be married and have kids. I 30. I was like, I get it.

31:24

I totally understand. I’m not the guy for you. Right? So like we broke up. But I really appreciated her sense of absolute clarity. She knew what she wanted. And I didn’t want to have kids with her. So was like, cool, then we should probably think this won’t work out. So we broke up. um Think of that level of like binary. I still wish her well. You know, I still think fondly of her. I think she’s a nice person.  I hope her life is great. um

31:53

It’s not like I think she’s a bad person because she wanted those things. It’s just like, that’s just like how it is. Right. It’s just like,  our two desires didn’t match up. When I met my wife was a little bit older, you know, I was like, yeah, I do want to have kids  and be married. And this is the timeline that I also agree to. Okay, cool. Like, let’s let’s move forward on it. And, you know, now we’ve got two great kids and we’ve been married for a while. So that’s a thought for you.

32:21

is that that’s where you wanna go. You wanna get to a place where there’s no question of your fee. Your fee makes sense.

32:29

How does your fee get higher? I mean, one thing you can do is just  charge more. Like that’s kind of the easy thing to do, but that like reaches a limit.  Beyond that, you kind of have to be the person. So if you’re watching the video, you’re to see, just like share my two books. I keep them right here on my uh speaker,  on my desk. And I can just like flash them like that. I just show them and I set them down. I don’t flip through them. I don’t say how many pages they are. I don’t say how many copies they’ve I don’t say anything.

32:57

I say, Oh, yeah, I’m the author of two books, find your CMO and the fractional CMO method. And that establishes me as a level of authority. So these things are helpful. But don’t forget, I charged $7,500 for my first fractional CMO client, having no real process and not really knowing what I was doing. That was before I had any book or anything like that for even had a website or business. That was just me just like trying to sell something and it worked. So you do not need these things.

33:26

However, if you develop them over time, you will be able to increase your price. It’s kind of a weird way to do it. like,  what is the limit of your fee that you can charge before you become notable as the person who is the right person to do the job? I don’t know. Like there’s like a little bit of play that you can have there. Generally speaking, I think over time you should create things that establish you as the expert. um I’ve got a  great friend. uh We’ve been like in a…

33:55

mastermind together for years, I think, right, like seven years. It’s incredible. Like we’ve been through it all together. marriages, death, mean, businesses growing businesses, stalling, failing the whole thing. And one of my good buddies in it, he says, you know, I want to write a book, but I think I’m just going to do a podcast. I was like, dude, listen. No one introduces themselves and say, Hey, I’m Casey, and I have a podcast, you know, but like the book thing gets brought up.

34:23

And there’s like a perception of value there. So a book is a cool thing to do. It’s not the only thing, but it’s a cool thing to do. Being a columnist somewhere is a cool thing to do. Having smart content that you post regularly about the topic is a cool thing to do. Having a podcast is a cool thing to do. They’re all cool. You just choose the modality for you, but you have to start sharing what you’re doing. Working in public. Look on uh X and look at all of the developers that are working in public and just like see what they’re up to. It’s cool to like learn and watch and see that stuff.

34:53

you want to do that at some level, and that’s going to help you increase your rates. So I’ll get it also going to help you focus. When I wrote the fractional CMO method, it formalized my thoughts, like I had the thoughts. But then when I put them on paper, I realized I was missing thoughts. So then I had to kind of like connect these dots. So that was a really good exercise. And then when I wrote find your CMO, the same thing. It’s like when I was writing to the business owner, how do I do that? And I had to connect some dots, interview some folks, figure some stuff out, I got smarter as a result. So

35:23

I look more authoritative and I actually got smarter, which actually makes me better at my job. So those things have knock on effects. So consider that if you want to increase your fees over time, you need to become notable as the person who does the thing. Maybe that means you go to conferences. Maybe that means you work to get us  to like to be a speaker somewhere. That’s okay.  I think speaking is a lot of vanity.

35:51

And I think it’s really hard work.  And I think that the reward is often very small. You know, get the adoration of very few and they forget about you pretty quickly. I think speaking is not what it used to be. And maybe it’ll see a resurgence, but you know, I really wouldn’t do that. So just how are you creating content to create authority on an ongoing basis? That is a big thing in the accelerator. We do a training just about once a month to help you generate content regularly so that you can post them LinkedIn. If that’s your thing.

36:19

Some people do LinkedIn, some people do Facebook, some people do other modalities. It doesn’t matter to me which one you’re on. It just matters that you do it and that you start standing up, putting your flag in the ground saying I’m this person. I’m the fractional CMO who serves these types of businesses. All right. So for women, you might be hearing like, you don’t want to be a bitch. You don’t want to be bossy, whatever. I, I don’t know. I, I’m kind of a dick um to people because I just default to the data  and uh

36:49

Some folks find that to be a little, I don’t know, like, like, like there’s just tension sometimes. And I don’t, and I don’t care. It’s like, Hey, the bogey for generating appointments is $85. And for the last two weeks, the appointment cost has been 200. That can’t fly. I need you guys to fix that. I got to give you like a week to get that really fixed. So propose to me by tomorrow, all of your ideas to get it fixed.

37:17

It’s like, I don’t care really how I come across. And maybe I have this benefit, right? Maybe because I’m a white guy, I have this benefit, okay? But also I have the data. And if anyone says anything about how they don’t like my attitude, I’m just like, I’m really sorry if I came across em like Kurt, Short, whatever.

37:38

But the data shows this. And we just can’t live in a world where we miss our KPIs. I’m just like so data focused. um And I get this, like, I think that working with me can be difficult when things aren’t going well. When things are going well, I’m super um helpful and supportive.  And when things aren’t going well, I’m very direct and I tell people that I need them to work on specific things, at specific cadences. And if they fail to do it, you know, it’s just not good for them. It’s not good for their employment.

38:07

But I have to be that guy. I have to have that level of direct, um you know, clear, no bullshit conversation with folks.  And the best of them appreciate it. They say things to me like, Casey, when I come to you, you always tell me exactly what I need to do, like to hit our targets. And I think that feels good. like, cool, great. Because I only want the client to win, right? Above everything else. I want the client to win. And I literally mean I want the client to win more than I want to work with the client.

38:36

My intention is always to support the entrepreneur. Hear that clear.  No one supports the entrepreneur. They support the business or they keep a job. They do one of those two things. You have the opportunity to support exclusively the entrepreneur. And I’ll tell you, the moment you do that, that’s when you start kicking the CEO off calls. You’re like, hey dude, I don’t need you anymore in this call. You want a jet? They’re like, I would love to. And they used to be on daily calls. Now they’re on weekly calls. And then it scales to every other week. And then now it’s once a month.

39:05

or that it’s a 20 minute call, you know, every two weeks with you or something for you to catch them up. You’re buying back their time for them. They’re feeling better, more confident about having you around. Like if you’re helping the CEO be better, have more space,  and more space can mean a lot of things. More space means not working late, which means going home and having dinner with the spouse and kids, which might mean a better home life, which might mean a happier boss,  right? Which might mean a more spacious person who can then think through the next

39:36

problem that they want to solve. Like whatever you’re whatever they’re going to do with that extra time,  you’re one of the few catalysts in their life that’s actually helping them. And like you’re not their therapist. But you’re literally just like kicking them off calls that they don’t need to be on. You’re saying, dude, can we find you an assistant? Hey, why are you doing this stuff? Can we pull in someone from Upwork for this? Or can I find someone uh local to the office to come in and do that? Whatever you’re supporting the entrepreneur. When you do that. What happens is if the economy goes down, the entrepreneur looks around says,  What do we cut?

40:05

And they say, Well, we don’t cut you. Because, you know, you’re the one person that just like, makes everything better. Because you’re fighting for the entrepreneur. So you find that your contracts persist  much longer than if you were there just for you know, the dislike just for you just for the money. So really just aligned to the entrepreneur, how do I serve the entrepreneur? How do I help them exit? How do I help them make more money? How do I help them work less? How do I help them have more fun? Like if you’re creating that culture around

40:35

It really changes everything. Another big one is protecting their confidence. If an entrepreneur spends all their time hearing about the bad, then they’re never going to have like the relaxed nervous system to dream about the new next idea. They’re going to be fighting fires all the time. So even just like eating the bad news yourself and taking care of it and passing on just what’s required for the CEO to know, that’s way better. Instead of saying this is the problem, you say there was a problem this morning, here are the solutions that we rolled out.

41:05

things look to be on track. Very different, it’s very confidence  boosting for the entrepreneur. So the entrepreneur needs you to fight for them, which therefore fights for the business, which therefore fights for the data, which therefore means that it doesn’t matter how bitchy or bossy you are, if you’re getting the outcomes, that’s a good thing.

41:29

Now also you should probably like be a caring person and care about your team, but I don’t think that that’s an issue, right? I think you have like probably some level of empathy unless you had like a frontal lobe injury at some point in your life. You want your team to be happy. You want to create a culture of all of that stuff. But oftentimes people create a culture of feel good at the cost of do good, right? I don’t care if someone has a tough quarter with you.

41:58

I want to be really clear, I have no issue if someone is staying up late, working late and working a little bit on the weekends for a quarter. Because it’s a requirement. The next quarter if they do a great job, I’m gonna do my best to probably kind of back off work so they can kind of chill a little bit and get them back down to like a standard work. But I don’t I don’t care if people have to work late or they work overtime or what I don’t care. I don’t care. I care that we deliver the result. I said recently on a call  that we sacrifice ourselves before we sacrifice our raw.

42:28

Sounds crazy. But like I want to create systems in the business so that we deliver on quarterly outcomes. And I want us to be on track and I don’t want us anyone to have to work late. And I don’t want anyone to like sacrifice their time or their effort or you know, their holidays or their nights or their kid’s birthday party or whatever. I don’t want anyone to sacrifice itself. But you’re going to if you fail to hit the targets that we’ve set out all the support that I give you if you fail to hit it, you’re gonna have to work you’re gonna have to get this stuff figured out because we won’t go to the next quarter without completing the rocks of this quarter.

42:59

And when you have that level of like, focus, I just feel like these character judgments of who you are.  Maybe you have like, uh resting bitch face and people think you’re always pissed off at them. I should think it doesn’t matter. It’s just data, you know, you’re just managing by the data and not by the like how you’re feeling.

43:18

So fighting for your clients.  I wrote down here, it’s not about you. It’s about their win. And then you getting paid for what it should cost for them to have won. So this is a really cool one.  Your value is like the pricing that you establish is like the pricing that you establish. And also one way to look at it is you have to charge the fee at which the problem ought to cost to fix. uh

43:46

I don’t know, like 10 days or so I get a new boiler at my house. got this hundred year old house. We’ve got like a radiator system that they call here radiators. And I’ve got this steam boiler in the basement. It’s a big unit sits on a big cement block and it’s large. And when I moved in, I thought it looked brand new. Turns out boilers, no one touches. the exterior always looks new, but the interior, you know, got beat up for the last like 20 years.

44:17

We have this big manifold. It’s this big pipe that was custom made that plugs into all of the radiators and it’s like, it’s a thing, okay?

44:27

I had a company come and it’s just kind of like you’re running the mill one and they’re like, yeah, well, we’ll replace it with this kind of run of the mill thing and it’ll cost you 12 grand. It’s like, okay, that’s good to know. I’m going to get a second opinion. And I looked up the installer, the company’s still in business. And I reached out and I talked to the owner’s wife and she said, yeah, my son can come over. So now like the son is next in line, right? So I go there and he’s like, oh yeah, my uncle, he built that manifold. I can tell his work from anywhere.

44:55

And that guy goes and he like maps it all out. And his quote is over double what the initial quote was more than double. And I was like, dude, these quotes are wildly different. He’s like, Yeah, that makes sense. That one is this with all these problems. And they didn’t even take into account all of these things are gonna cut off the manifold, they’re gonna cut all this down, they’re gonna do all these things. And it’s not going to work for these reasons. Or you can work with me and I’m going to get it right.

45:24

And it became evident to me that like his cost was in fact the cost it should cost to do the job right. Yes, I can get the job done cheap. I want to get the job done right. I’m to go to the small shop where the guy did it. His son’s going to do it. His uncle made the manifold. Like it’s the whole family affair. Like that’s right. And it just  it just makes sense. So  if I was like a flipper, maybe I’d go and get the cheap one.

45:53

But because this is my house, and I want this last for another 20 years, like, I got to put the real money on it. So that’s a consideration here, like, there is the cost of what it should cost. And then your client is either willing to pay for it or not. So if you go help a company go from $1 million a year to  $1.1 million a year,  should you make $15,000 a month?  No, absolutely not. If you help a  $5 million a year company grow to $20 million over the next three years,

46:23

Could you charge 15 grand a month? Yes. I worked with a company and we grew from $600 million in assets, $500 million in assets, sorry, to 1.6 billion. So we added $1.1 billion in assets over the course of 26 months or so. Is 10 grand a fair fee for that? I think so. Is 15? Yeah, is 20? Sure. Right? Like those make sense in that.

46:51

because I’m solving a big enough problem. If I came and said, Hey, guys, yeah, I’ll do that work. I’ll do it for five grand. I’ve never done it before. I’ve never been in this industry before. So five grand, maybe like,  are you an idiot? No. Like, I know self respecting person who’s gonna actually do a good job would only charge five grand for this. This is a big problem to solve. So you know,  you’re out because you’re so cheap. Like they just don’t believe that you’re the right one.

47:18

know, I could find a guy on the street, like I could find a guy who works for an HVAC company. I could just like see him in a truck, holler at him, flag him down and say like, Hey, here’s I got photos.  I’d give you 10 grand to replace it. He’d be like, cool, take me like a couple days, I’ll do it for you. Right. But he’s not going to do the same job. He’s not going to be as good as my guy whose dad and uncle built uh everything before you know, like whatever it was 2025 years ago. So you got to charge that  that cost.

47:47

And then remember too, that you’re not working with fortune 500 companies. That’s not your target audience. You’re not going after fortune 500s. They don’t want a fractional CMO. Maybe a division does, but the company doesn’t like the big company doesn’t. You’re kind of going after those Inc 5000 different vibe. If you don’t know what Inc 5000 is just on your next walk, pick up your favorite, you know, AI tool and say, what’s the Inc 5000 list? How does someone qualify? What does it mean if someone’s on the Inc 5000 list three years in a row?

48:17

What’s difference between person 5000 and person one? Like ask those questions kind of understand what the list means. Those are the companies you want to work for companies that are growing quickly. And maybe they’re just before they’re about to grow quickly because I think that makes them grow quickly is marketing, and they’ve got a great product and now it’s time to bring you on board. Just like remember that your target is that type of company one that wants to grow quickly. The thing that I’ve been trying on that I’ve been encouraging our CMS trying to is just to

48:46

call within the client, their greatness. So fun. And you have a call with them and you’re kind of going through the process of getting to know them and everything. And then you say, you guys are currently, like really not on the not on the board for top companies in the space. Do you have any desire to be like the top in the city, the state, the country, the world? Why don’t you guys want to be number one in this space? When you ask questions like that,

49:16

instantly they start to see you as someone who thinks about the future in a bigger vision and wants for more for the company and not just for yourself. But obviously, you know, if you take that company from wherever they’re at to someplace much larger, because you helped expand that future that vision. It makes sense that you charge more money for

49:35

that’s where you got to go. There’s probably sexism in business.  I ran perplexity before this to see like, how the wage gap is for men versus women. And they say that it obviously still exists, though it may be closing.  And I don’t know, like, maybe that stuff’s true. I’ll tell you in the accelerator, women charge  no less than men. And I think sometimes they’re even more bold than men  on charging for for fees. I mean, I can think of one woman who uh recently landed a client.

50:05

And she sold it at $16,000 a month, which is nuts. That’s Mount Rushmore uh top fees for a fractional CMO. And you can do it like it’s it’s about being the right person for the job. And so consider that like if you’ve never

50:31

been in an industry, can you charge top dollar? No. If you don’t really know marketing, but you want to be a fractional CMO, can you charge top dollar? No, right. But if you spend more time in a niche and you have more experience, it makes sense that you can charge more money, because you get a result faster too. So you might say, case you’re speaking two sides out of both sides of your mouth, you’re saying more experience means I can charge more but also

50:58

like, why can’t I just like come up with a price just for fun? Why can’t I play and you can,  but you will notice within yourself that you start valuing yourself more and more as you solve more problems for more companies. So time under load time in the game time playing being a fractional CMO that is going to grow you faster in your abilities.

51:21

So it’s  ultimately kind of a game here. What comes first, the client that pays you well  or uh the first client? And ultimately that’s a choice you need to make. um Ryan Dice, great marketer, digitalmarketer.com, scalable. He said, ah don’t make price the reason people say no. And for your first sale, it. Just, I don’t care what your cost is. You want to go do fractional CMO work and you’re like, man, I’d really like to charge 10 grand and you go net a client for eight grand.

51:50

It’s your first one. I think that’s a huge win. You know, that’s like a hundred thousand dollar a year run rate, $96,000 a year run rate from your first client. That’s a huge win.

52:03

Everyone. Everyone this year, I can’t think of anyone this year who hasn’t said this. Everyone this year, who has won a client has told me either on a call or in our WhatsApp group or whatever they’ve said, Casey, I can’t believe I charged so little for this work. And instantly their price doubled, increased by 50%, whatever. So they got that first client. So I think there are industries where men are going to do better than women.

52:31

like  there’s roles where men are going to do better than women.  I think that that’s probably true statistically, we could probably find some of that stuff out. Women probably have the upper hand with some stuff too over men, maybe right? Who knows? Who knows if it’s fair? I don’t.  You might. However, I want to tell you that there are women that are absolutely killing it at being a fractional scene.

52:53

And  they’re not  spending time outside of their boundaries. Meaning they’re not doing unnecessary caretaking for the company. They’re not stepping in and helping with the operations thing or doing the finance thing or like working outside of their contract. They’re able to keep it based on the contract because they’re executing the contract as if it’s a like a smart contract.

53:17

like a like a in crypto like on solidity or something like a contract that just executes and the rules are true. And you can’t not follow the rules. You have to deliver the things you said you were going to deliver. And if you the contracts over and the other stuff is not in the scope. So therefore you don’t do it. Like women exist in that space just fine. And they don’t get pulled into the melodrama of the business. They stay in their role, they deliver a great work product to get paid well, and deliver an exceedingly like  strong  support for the team and therefore the company and therefore the entrepreneur.

53:46

everything works out. So you don’t have to live in this world where you’re caretaking for people, you’re taking lower rates, uh you feel like it’s a meritocracy, you have to earn your way to get your first client. None of that stuff’s true. None of that stuff’s true. The most true thing here is you come in with an intention to serve to be helpful, you focus exclusively on marketing, and you focus on data. And if those things are on your side, who can fight you? Who can fight you if you’ve got data on yourself?

54:17

we recently had a CMO that uh landed a client has been doing great work with them. He’s just doing an awesome job. Everything he’s telling me about it. It’s just, it’s all perfect. I’m very, very impressed with his work. And then his client says, Hey, I don’t think we’re gonna renew next month. I saw this guy and he does some branding work. think we’re go with him.

54:37

sit in the CMOs like, oh, shit, I’m gonna lose this huge client, I don’t want to lose them. So he flew down to see him.  They were going to meet the following week, but he flew down early so he could get extra time with him.  And ultimately, that conversation was a data conversation. It was like, look what we’ve done together and look where we’re at. And look what would happen if you went with a branding guy, we would stop doing all of this stuff, there’d be no oversight, like, dude, let me cook. And he ultimately kept that client. I think a lot of people would have just lost the gig, but he kept it.

55:07

Because you had data. So you supported with data means you’re going to be successful. You just with like intuition. That’s not it. Right. That’s not going to do it. Surround yourself with good data. And if you don’t know how to do data like you got to get good at it. You got to understand good data reporting. Come in the accelerator. Ask me questions. Go on. Go online. You know, you could probably become a basic marketing data expert uh over the course of like a month or two just watching great YouTube videos on how to set a bunch of stuff up.

55:36

throw that on your phone while you’re making dinner or you know, going for a walk or whatever. And ah like you’re gonna get to a level of confidence around that. uh Maybe not confidence, but like understanding the jargon that’s gonna make you like just a better person in that role. So again, I see  men have no upper hand to women. If there’s anything that men come into the accelerator with, it’s more of a boldness around fees than just saying I’m going to do it because why not? ah

56:05

And that is not  that boldness comes from maybe bravado. ah Just like they’re just going to do it. It’s just kind of like a commitment just to do it. uh I’ve seen women do the same thing and be very successful. So don’t feel like you have anything different for you. Generally speaking, I haven’t heard anyone lose a gig em in a way that came across as like a sexist reason. You know, we hired a guy because of this.

56:33

It like they hire this person because they have 10 more years of experience with me in the industry and they know all the players that are, you know, in this, in this space. Like sometimes that can happen. But I think you can fight just as hard as anybody else and oftentimes harder. I feel like women tend to like understand more of like the nuance of follow up  of conversation,  you know,  and guys like sometimes at their worst are just kind of like rehearse, reading a rehearsed script.

57:01

and just kind of glazed over and not connected with a person. So, I mean, these are all like unfair characteristics, right? So what you want? What I want you to take away from this? Like you can charge whatever amount you want. There is no moral uh authority stating that your fees are too high. It is simply, can you help the client? Are you willing to help the client? Will you commit to helping the client?  What is your fee and can they afford you?  Like if they want your help and they can’t afford you, that’s a win.

57:31

If they want your help, and they can’t afford you, that’s a win. If they don’t want your help, there’s work for you to do. That’s where I would focus. Don’t focus on anything else besides getting in front of the right people, finding the biggest problems that they have, and showing how you can support them. And that’s it. That’s the magic of it. Alright, thanks for being here. If you want to join the accelerator, I’d love to have you come in.  We just have such a great uh time  on these calls and just kind of get together and jamming and  laying around with marketing and learning and winning big clients and serving them and

58:00

getting renewals and charging more money and all that stuff. If you want help, if you want someone in your corner who’s rooting for you, like, that’s us.  Think about think about our incentive, our incentive is for you to be successful. Everyone else wants to share.  Nothing is more fun than like traveling to another city and being like, Oh, who from CMOX is here? Then you go and like hang out with them. And they get it. They’re like on your wavelength. They’re going and solving problems for clients to they have a whole world they can open you up to. It’s just like fun stuff. And everyone wants everyone else to win. There’s no

58:29

no competition inside the accelerator.  And I think that that’s like, that’s just such a special place. So if you want people that are really there in your back pocket, like on WhatsApp, if you get into boardroom, if you’re earning, earn your way in there,  by winning at least $10,000 a month in recurring business, as a fractional CMO, if you’re in boardroom, like, you got me on WhatsApp, and we just jam and chat and uh help  help you right before a call with a client, like get your head straight or whatever you got to do,  help you figure out how to do a follow up,  what to do if a client uh

58:57

no call no shows, you know, for two calls with you or something like that. Like we talk about all that stuff. So if you want to do that, book it a call, cmo x.com slash call, just book it in a 15 minute call and we’ll ask you some questions to see if we can even help you. All right. Thank you so much for being here. I’ll catch you guys soon.  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 fractional cmo show.com

59:27

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 em!