 It's a nothing. All right, I think we're live now, and I'm just gonna record just in case. So Lindsay, welcome, welcome. It's so nice to meet you. So Lindsay and I, well, I met Lindsay because we were doing a series. We were both speaker on a series with Rebecca Tracy. I just interviewed Rebecca in my last, my previous YouTube live. So you all can check that out if you want to. And I just, there were several people in that series of speakers. I'm like, oh, you know, I'd love to connect with them, meet them and have them share with my people. So Lindsay, here you are. And thank you for saying yes. Yeah. Yeah, I'm super excited to be here. I loved that email that you said. I'm like, let's do it. Yeah, I, you know, actually that's one of the things just, you know, that I feel like people don't do enough when they are speaking in a summit or a conference or something like that. I'm usually one of the only people who reach out. And I'm like, this is, I think the most valuable part of being in a summit or whatever is the other people who are speaking. Like these are amazing people. Like the summit coordinator or host brought together, you know, some of their favorite people. So anyway, when I heard your session in the series, I was like, you know, I really like your energy and I like the generosity of how you were sharing. So I, you could say however you want to intro yourself, given that that's one of the things you teach people is how do you say, what's the, what do you do? What do you do? And I, but I heard somewhere that you've been, you've been working, even helping people with, you know, sales and marketing for 20 years, something like that. So that's really impressive. Cause I thought, I thought I've been around for a while for 14 years or 20 years. That's, that's awesome. It's actually hard to find people in our industry or any industry that like, so, you know, solopreneurs or soft listens owners who's, who are able to have that kind of staying power. Do you agree? One, yeah. This is what I teach. Yeah. It's a hundred percent. I see entrepreneurs with the best intentions, the biggest dreams, the coolest, you know, products and services that just crash and burn cause they can't sustain it. Yeah. So it's, it's great that we're both here. You seem more energized and passionate than ever. And so anyway, I want to start with this question. And by the way, when you're answering, you can feel free to say anything about your background, but I just want to start with this question of, with these years of teaching and coaching and consulting, what are three things that you love telling clients or that they need to hear from you the most? Now I know there's probably 300 things, but whatever three things come to mind is great. And you could just say one at a time, and we'll then have a conversation around it. Well, I feel like I want to give a bit of a quick background, like a quick 30 second background for folks to know who I am, right? Because I've been, I have been doing what I've been doing for over 20 years. My business itself, I've had as a business owner, 10 years. But really for me, I grew up around entrepreneurs, my family, like my parents, my uncles, man's everybody had businesses. And so like I'm an entrepreneurship nerd, like nerd. And especially I love marketing and sales. I love the way that we connect with our clientele, our customers, right? And then like I'm a big believer in co-creating the sales journey, whether that's online or it face to face. But like when I was in my 20s and I'm really now getting into, you know, understanding how marketing works, how sales work, taking courses, going to conferences, reading books, working with people. I just noticed this thread of manipulation and coercion and sell at any cost that really I found quite disgusting. And in my 20s, you know, I'm young and I'm doing the things that I'm told to do and they work, but I don't feel good about it. And so it was in my very early 20s where I started to develop my own consent-based sales process. How do we find the people who are already looking for us, not just need what we've got, but want what we've got and then co-create that sales journey? I think that's one of the biggest reliefs that people get when they're working with me is I teach, can I swear, are we allowed to swear on here or no? Yeah, yeah, please, be authentic here. Like you don't have to sell like an ash hole, you know? Like you don't have to use, and we see them everywhere. You know, you'll find some kind of guru when you're signing up for their online program and you think they're just the best things to slice bread, and then as you start to become aware of the way that they played with you and manipulated you, played with your emotions to get you to buy, when you become aware of it, you see it everywhere, right? To people all the time, if you feel bad before making a purchase, you're being manipulated, right? Same with if you're being like the equivalent of love bombed, you know, into a purchase, you're being manipulated, right? So I think that's one of the first things when I work with entrepreneurs and I teach them that they don't have to market and sell that way, they can do it in a way that feels good because one of the reasons that entrepreneurs don't make it in their business is that they are not selling because selling feels icky, right? Yeah, this is really good. I have an audience that really is fully on board with non-icky sales as you like to call it and it is, you know, we're everybody watching this, I assume everybody watching this is sensitive to those feelings and to not doing those things. It's interesting, I wanna touch on this love bombing situation though, because that is something that a lot of us are not as aware of because we're like, oh, I'm being treated so nicely. Tell us why that's something you don't like. Well, okay, being treated nicely and with respect, I like it. Oh, okay, good, I'm glad. We're on the same page on there. That I'd agree with, but when you think of the act of love bombing, like in a relationship, for example, right, it is this like, it's a form of manipulation where someone's like, let me tell you all these amazing things, then why you're the best and all these like, oh, I'll shower you with emotion, but there is an ulterior motive, right? And so we need to be aware of that in the sales process and marketing process as well. There's a difference between somebody who is present and listening to you and understanding you and having the respect to be like transparent with you and real with you versus the, you see this a lot in like mass produced like online courses and masterminds and groups like that where the lead person will just be showering generally their audience, their social media audience, their email audience, their Facebook groups, whatever, showering them with all these niceties, but they don't know you, right? And they don't know your business. They don't know why you're doing what you're doing. They're not knowing what you're struggling with. And so there's this like, let me just tell you why you're so great and you're worth so much money and you got to raise your prices and you got to charge more and you can do it, but there's no actual connection. They don't know you, right? And so I see a lot of entrepreneurs get caught up in that and the biggest telltale sign I know when someone's being loved bomb in an organization is when they jack up their rates, when they jack up their prices because they bought into girl, you're worth it, you deserve it, charge your worth and then add tax, raise those rates, charge more. And a lot of times I see inexperienced entrepreneurs price themselves so far out of their market because they were loved bombed into doing it, right? So it's just this awareness. It's like a marketing literacy. It's just an awareness of, is this person actually speaking to me? Do they see me? Or are they just saying what they got to say to get me to buy into whatever it is that they're selling? Oh man, this is so good. That's a really interesting, I guess, symptom that you mentioned of people jacking up the price. And then I mean, I've had people come to me over the years that says, happened to me, George, I started selling high ticket, high ticket, high ticket this, high ticket that. And now I feel like I want to charge less. I feel like it's more sustainable to charge less on different levels, it's more sustainable to charge less. And yet it feels embarrassing to now lower my rates. Like it's somehow going backwards where I'm believing in myself less or whatever. And it's, yeah, so it happens. And I'm grateful that you're calling that out. And that's very interesting. Yeah. So there's, of course, a lot we can talk about there, but what's that? I got two more things, yeah. Yeah, what's another one? Let's bring on the second one. The other one, this is based on my dream career as beach bum philosophy. And that is my work, let's play more mindset or system. And I talk about this a lot with entrepreneurs because again, I would say when people come into my world, relief is usually the number one thing they feel. And around this, this relief of you are doing so much busy work that literally doesn't matter. It's just burning you out. You don't need to do it. It doesn't matter. And so I usually take a new entrepreneur and we strip away about 80% of their to-do list. Doesn't matter. It's not building your business. Why are you doing it? And I think that's really important for entrepreneurs to understand. First of all, there is this mix up in the online world, especially when it comes to social media marketing or content marketing, where entrepreneurs see content creators and influencers and think that that's what they're supposed to do. And they don't realize that there's a difference between those people create content professionally because brands pay them to create it and you're creating content as a way to support what you're selling, your own products and services. You're not hawking someone else's wares. You're trying to let the world know about what you're selling, right? And so we see this like, push, I gotta create content. It's gotta be curated. It's gotta be perfect. And the reality is social media is a way more powerful tool for connecting, for networking, for building out your own village, for moving and shaking and making things happen. It's way more important to be connecting on social media using as a tool that could reach the right people than to create content. And so that's an example of like, oh my gosh, another one I'm thinking of. This person recorded four podcasts, recorded, published, edited, four podcasts a month. Michael, are they generating revenue? No, are they driving emailless subscribers? No, are they bringing in new business? No, what are you doing? Make one a month, repurpose the heck out of that content and get out there and do the activities that actually bring in business. So that's the biggest thing is understanding that you're all doing way too much and most of it isn't actually building your business. So why do it? Go to the beach, go out brunch with your friends, go have a nap, go take up the ukulele. My ukulele is over there. I'm doing ukulele lessons right now. Like go do anything but work. Yeah, I love this so much. Yeah, I call it, you know, joyful productivity or I have a blog post called the productive to do list versus the to drop list. Give these examples of like, yeah, you're tweaking your website again. It's like, really? How much traffic have you had to your website? Like, did anyone even going? Did anyone ask you to tweak your website or you just felt like you, oh, it's no longer representing me. Well, do you know what happens with Georgia? The reason is, and this is why I teach what I teach because entrepreneurs don't know what to do. So they just go back and tweak the website and they go create a social media post and they go make a blog. They don't know what to do, right? So let's talk about that a little bit actually. Given that your tagline is the radical connector. So you're using social media to connect with others. Tell us about that more because I agree. Most people when they think social media or when they're untrained about it, they think, oh, I'm just gonna put content out there and then somehow it spreads, doesn't it? I use hashtags and it's supposed to get to the right people, right? So tell us about how you like to use it differently then. Yes, like you're gonna give me a migraine. So if, funny enough, point number three is build your village. And that is one of the ways that you can use social media, right? Cause it isn't, listen, I'm not gonna say we don't need social media. This is the world today, especially if you know that you wanna write a book one day or get on stages. Like if you know that you wanna build up a brand that's much bigger than your day-to-day work in your business, you do need a social media presence. There is that expectation there, right? So I'm not saying don't have one and don't start building up your audience. But social media is a far more powerful tool for connecting, right? Whether you are connecting with potential customers and clients, whether you are connecting with collaborators or just professionals that you wanna know. Like you guys wanna have a professional relationship. You will open doors for each other. You will send referrals to each other. Like it's a professional relationship or you just wanna find business besties, right? I have made so many amazing online friends. We see each other maybe every couple of years but just friends through connecting on TikTok, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, right? And so how can you use these apps whose algorithms are going to naturally show you like-minded people, right? Or who you can go into your friends and go see who they're following or where they're commenting, right? You've got the whole world of aligned people right at your fingertips and you're making another flipping carousel. Like who cares? Go out and say, hi, I love your content. Would love to connect. Are you making new friends these days? Would you like to hang out? Yeah. Now I will say in terms of using social media for getting clients and customers, that's a different strategy. It wouldn't be that sort of laissez-faire. That would be something where I'd be like, okay, let's talk about that, let's book a session. But yeah, in terms of using it to connect, to grow your village, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, and growing the village is growing a bunch of supporters, right? And sort of like fellow sort of like you're bouncing ideas with each other, you're supporting each other and it's like when you need to, for example, do some market research and getting ideas on getting feedback about an offer that you're trying to make. Now you've got a bunch of people who are much more likely to say yes, let me give you some feedback or oh my gosh, this thing is really good for people that I know or something like that and they might be able to bring you. So I think that's just even building a supportive village of colleagues and Mrs. Besties, like you said, is really valuable. And it goes deeper than that. Like, hey, this organization is looking for someone to come in and speak and I know this is your specialty. Do you want me to put your name forward, right? Or there's this cool event, have you heard about it? No, okay, well, there's three tickets left here. Let me get you on the list, right? Like it is building up your community of Mrs. Besties for the support, the camaraderie, the people who understand how hard it is to build a business and the loneliness and the frustration that are speaking the same language. But then there's your professional connections, right? The people who will open doors for you and who you will open doors for, the people who will refer business to you and who you will refer business to, the people you will be in summits with and collaborate on things with. I think that when we think of building our village, like I said, there's three types of people. We want the Mrs. Besties, the collaborators, right? And then the clients, the customers. It takes all of it. And it's not something that's just like, oh, like you're really cool. Like it's like we're in business together and the rising tide lifts all ships. Like let's grow together. These are relationships that you will have for years. Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about the collaboration. Like if you were guiding someone to reach out to collaborators, potential collaborators, for example, people to exchange interviews with or people, or let's say, oh, I would love to get in front of that person's audience kind of thing. Like what is your way of connecting in that way? Like what's, yeah, what would be your guidance there? So it would depend on if you know this person or not, or if you have a common, you know, somebody in common. Like if this person is a straight up stranger to you, see if you have somebody in common and ask them to make an introduction, right? If they don't, just reach out. And so a big part of the consent-based sales process is understanding that we're always, not always, but we are selling more than just our products, right? We're also selling ourselves and ideas, right? And so in this case, you are selling yourself, right? And this idea that you have for this collaboration. So understand that you cannot sell to somebody who doesn't want it, right? So you have to first find out if they want it, right? And so I think this is where a lot of entrepreneurs, they get clumsy and they start pitching to a stranger. You gotta warm that stranger up, right? You gotta get to know them first. And so add them on social, you know, go through. I mean, you can do the whole likes and posts, comments and posts, sure, you can do that, right? That's like whatever, follow for follow thing. But I'm more interested in go through their posts and reference what resonates for you. This is, you know, hi, I'm Lindsay. I came across this post and this is why it resonated with me. This is what I do. Are you open to hopping on a Zoom someday soon? Cause I'd love to talk about a potential collaboration where we can do this. So again, it's about being transparent. It's about having a reference point, telling them who you are and are you open to, right? That are you open to is such a powerful question. Yeah, I like that. And it's what I like, especially that you said, you know, you can't sell them what they don't want. So it's like, it's like most people, I mean, you and I, I'm sure we both get DMs, you know, direct messages from cold people who- All the time. Yeah, and we can tell this person has not looked at my stuff at all, has no resonance with it. Even if they say, oh, I really liked your video on XYZ, I'm like, you just copy paste. That's just AI taking my recent, you know, video title and then pasting it in. And it's like, you have no heart. There's no heart. There's no, there's no organic human there. You know, it's just you sending this out to how many people, how many hundreds of people there. And that's like, it's like, so getting an actual human organic, heart-based message is strangely rare. It's strangely rare because like it's social media is mostly not social, you know, when it comes to the direct messages. So I love that. It's like, what do they actually want? It's like, even if we actually go through their profile and look at some posts, we might be able to suss out, oh, this person might be, you know, maybe this person is trying to lean into this area and or maybe they need this kind of support or whatever. It's like, it's like just even going through and letting your intuition guide you on that. It's like, you might, you might have a very heart-based reason to reach out to them. So can I add it to that a little bit? Because I wanna just tweak that a little tiny bit of how I would approach that. Because I think it's really important that we don't use people's content against them. And so I don't know that it's a good idea to be like, let me suss out what you might want. When I say what you want, I mean, you have to ask, right? And so I would rather, because here's the thing, if you say that to somebody, now we're gonna feel like we're getting manipulative. We're gonna feel like we have an agenda. And I would rather you say to your clients, to your audience, I'd rather you say, are you resonating with this person? You know, are you, would you go for dinner with them? Do you wanna pick the brain? Would you love to, you know, go on a, you know, like just spend time with them? If so, then reach out and say, this is why I think, you know, you're cool, right? Would you like to get to know each other? Would you like to connect on this thing that I'm thinking about? So just being mindful of not using someone's contact against them, but instead using it as a litmus test for you for going, do I like this person? I do. No, I appreciate you saying, you clarifying that, because yeah, that's really what I meant was when we look at someone's content, our hearts naturally enact in ways that resonate with us and we also naturally sense like, oh, this is maybe where I could support them if this is something they want, this is something I open with, but it's like, but yeah, it's like, that's the thing we don't do is most people don't actually look at other people's content with that kind of mindfulness and with that kind of heart. So anyway, I love that you're recommending the connection and the really like, you know, biz besties type of, potential biz besties type of way of doing it. So I know you have a hard stop at the top of the hour. So anything else you want to say as we complete this conversation here? So much. I'm like, where did we take that? You know, I guess, what is the rhyme and reason of our talk here? I guess if I were to summarize it, you know, my entire existence, that sounds intense, my entire professional existence is based on helping entrepreneurs really ignite their business. How to stop being the world's best kept secret. How to be on the lips of everyone that you need to be on the lips of. That sounded weird, right? And so, you know, and so to have that level of putting yourself out there, right? It takes a certain amount of courage, right? It takes a lot of heart and it also takes the right activities. And so be mindful of how you spend your time and ask yourself, is this putting me in touch with, you know, biz besties, potential customers and clients or people I'd love to collaborate with? And if it's not, then you need to ask yourself, does it really matter? And if it doesn't, go to the beach, pick up a book, because you're not working. So don't worry about it, go do something fun and then come back and go, okay, what is the thing that's gonna actually connect me with the right people and help me ignite my business? Yeah, that's awesome. Well, it's been great to connect. I know it's so short, but it's really nice to kind of hear how you approach non-icky selling and doing things with more play and I really appreciate it. So I will be sure to put the links after we finish recording, I'll go back and edit the video and put the links below the video, but people can basically find you by searching Lindsay Johnson, the radical connector and you come up on the various socials and you have your website, of course, which looks great. So thank you, thank you so much Lindsay, I really appreciate you showing up for this. Amazing, and if I could say one thing, follow me on YouTube because this is where I'm gonna be coming and living, my new home away from home, it's gonna be YouTube. So come and connect with me there, I've got some fun stuff planned for us for this year. I will for sure put that link below.