AMY PORTERFIELD: “I didn't go to Disneyland because I'm obsessed with Mickey Mouse. I took everyone to Disneyland because I wanted us to connect at a deeper level. I wanted to have deep conversations, which we did while we were walking around the park. I wanted to laugh with them. I wanted to have fun. And all of that happened. And I think that really showed up in how we showed up the next day in the actual retreat meeting.
“So here's the thing. I went all out on this Disney for this retreat, but this is not something I would have been doing or been able to do earlier on in my journey. Like, the first five years of building a business, this would not have even been an option. And so I say that because I don't want my VIP Disney experience, that was super bougie, to deter you from actually thinking about where you could use a little shake up in your business.”
INTRO: I’m Amy Porterfield, ex-corporate girl turned CEO of a multi-seven-figure business. But it wasn't all that long ago that I lacked the confidence, the budget, and the time to focus on growing my small-but-mighty business. Fast forward past many failed attempts and lessons learned, and you'll see the business I have today, one that changes lives and gives me more freedom than I ever thought possible, one that used to only exist as a daydream. I created the Online Marketing Made Easy podcast to give you simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies to help you do the same. If you're an ambitious entrepreneur, or one in the making, who's looking to create a business that makes an impact and a life you love, you're in the right place, friend. Let's get started.
AMY: If you love Online Marketing Made Easy, you’ve got to check out Entrepreneurs on Fire, hosted by my dear friend John Lee Dumas. He discusses things like how to live tax free as an entrepreneur—uh, yes, please—and shares inspiring stories like how a college sophomore turned twenty dollars, cell phone, and a dream into a cookie company valued at over five hundred million dollars. I mean, you got to love stories like that. He'll leave you with actionable steps and fired up. Be sure to check out Entrepreneurs on Fire wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, hey, there. Welcome back to Online Marketing Made Easy. I wanted to check in and see how you're doing. And specifically, how is your content calendar doing? Maybe you just thought, “What content calendar?” Or maybe you winced a little bit, like, “Oh, I don't have one.” Either way, it's okay. I've actually been noticing a pain point around creating and organizing content. I keep hearing my audience talk about this, and I get it. The struggle’s real. And so what I thought I would do is I created a free three-month plug-and-play content-calendar template so that mapping out all your upcoming content can be so much easier— and dare I say it?—fun.
Now, I created a content-calendar template years ago, and it was wildly popular, so I thought, “Well, it's high time to revamp it and make it better.” And I did. So you'll love this updated version because not only does it allow you to seamlessly plan out what content—like your podcast, your blog, your videos—that you're going to do and when, it also allows you to plan out your social content. And I think having everything in one place makes repurposing content even easier, which is another perk to this template.
So, here’s where I want you to go, and pay close attention to this URL. It's a little bit different than I've used in the past. It's amyporterfield.com/#contentcalendar. So the hashtag symbol contentcalendar. So when you go to amyporterfield.com/#contentcalendar, you will get this free updated three-month plug-and-play content-calendar template. And if you want to just go to it right away, go to the description wherever you're listening to this podcast, the description of the podcast. I added a link in there so you can just click right from there. If you are on mobile, that makes it way easier.
Okay. So on to today’s topic.
I've definitely been feeling like I want and need to shake things up on my team, to kind of get out of my comfort zone and do something different. And again, like, just kind of shake things up and quite honestly, have a little fun. Have you ever felt that way, that you're, like, things feel a little stagnant? Well, that's what I was feeling.
Now, don't get me wrong. Something that I love about being an entrepreneur is that for the most part, no day ever feels like it's the same. But as with any job, whether you're working for another company or you're running your own business, sometimes you just need a little change of pace, to get out of your usual routine, and do something fun. Because when I'm recording podcasts, like when I'm in a specific batch or reviewing a bunch of content or creating a webinar, sometimes every day feels like Groundhog Day. I'm like, okay, here we go again. And that is not going to be fun long term, right? So that's when I think, okay, I've got to shake things up and do something different.
So today I'm going to share some ways that I like to shake things up with my team when the day to day is getting the best of us or when we simply just need a break. Recently, I was driving to the Nashville airport on my way to California for my leadership retreat. For those that are new to the podcast, every single quarter, I meet with my leadership team, which is currently made up of four incredible individuals, who each own one department on the team. So we've got a director of operations, director of content, director of community, director of customer experience, and then me. Now we don't have a director of marketing, or in fact, I'm hiring a VP of marketing. That person's not hired yet. So that's why the marketing role wasn't there yet.
So this is my leadership team, and I meet with them every single quarter in person for three nights and two days. The only time we don't meet in person is when—because we try to do this quarterly, and in September, at the end of the quarter, we're just ending Digital Course Academy, the launch. So my team had already just traveled out for that, so then we do that one on Zoom so they don't have to travel again. But ideally, this is in person.
And we do a lot of brainstorming, deep diving, lots of troubleshooting. We're looking at the quarter we just went through and the quarter that's coming up. And when we leave, we take away all our quarterly rocks, which are essentially goals or priorities, and we are set up for the next quarter. But it's intense. Like, someone's inevitably going to cry, not from, like, being hurt, but just, like, there's lots of emotions in the room. There’s lots of stuff going on. I definitely cried at the last one. And there’s just lots of deep conversations. So it's heavy. It's designed that way, in fact. We encourage hard conversations, so they're always had in these meetings.
So, when I was in route to my leadership retreat, I realized that we as a leadership team haven't had any good old-fashioned fun in a long time. And I thought to myself, “It's been an intense quarter.” Heck, 2021 was intense. So going into 2022, it still felt like a heavy quarter. We worked extra hard in order to meet almost all of our revenue goals and did so without a head of marketing. So everyone was filling in where they needed to and wearing so many different hats. My entire team was incredible in quarter one. And it certainly wasn't a bad quarter, but it was an intense quarter, and I thought, “Okay, I need my team to be focused, but I also need them to feel creative and to laugh and to feel light going into this meeting. How am I going to do that?” And then I had this idea that I need to take them to Disneyland.
Now, I was born and raised in Orange County, California. I grew up with Disneyland in my backyard. A funny thing, my dad was a firefighter all my life, and one of his locations that they protected was the Disneyland Hotel, and then they got free passes to the park, so I got to go all the time. Now, I'm not a super, super fan, but I do think something’s kind of magical about Disneyland and Disney World.
So I had this idea, but then I had to check myself because let's be real. I'm too old to stand in line for hours and hours. I just can’t do it. I can't stand in the sun beating down on me, standing in line for hours, especially in the back of my mind when I think, should we be meeting right now? Should we be in our leadership retreat?
So I called up the VIP tour experience, and I had done this one time with my entire team. And so I thought, “Well, let's just see if I can get in.” And I called up the tour-guide office, and I asked for a VIP tour, and he instantly said, “Oh, no. Can't do that. We're booked at least for a few months, but we have a waiting list.” And something in me—tell me if you've ever had this experience—where I was thinking, “I'm going to get on that waiting list, and they're going to call me up. I just know it.” I just had so much, like, a gut feeling, like, I'm going to get this.
Now, if you don't know about a VIP tour, first, I'll say it's very expensive, thousands of dollars. But what it is is for a minimum of seven hours, you get a personal tour guide, and they're called plaid shirts because they wear these plaid shirts, and they, basically, take you around the entire park, and they make reservations for you at all the restaurants. They get you to the front of the line for most of the rides. They help you kind of navigate where to go first and where to go second so you have the optimal experience. But, really, we hire them to get us to the front of the lines for seven hours. It's like, incredible. It's something you don't do a lot. Very rare experience. But if you've got the cash to do it, it is kind of worth having that experience. So that’s what we did.
And just a side note. If I ever call it quits as an online marketer, I'm just going to go straight to Disney to become a tour guide because they have a really cool job. They usually get to show around celebrities. Funny enough, you guys might roll your eyes to this one, but, like, two days after we had the experience, all the Kardashians were there. They had, like, five tour guides. So of course, they went deep into this tour-guide experience. But I just kind of laugh, like, how lucky are we that we got to do that as well? Again, rare experience, totally worth it.
So after our epic day at Disney, we came back to the leadership retreat. We had to work a little bit harder the next day to get everything accomplished. But we did, and it was a great meeting. Everyone was present. We were in a good mood. We’re excited about what's to come. The hard conversations actually didn't feel as hard, and here's why I think that was. We had connected the day before. I didn't go to Disneyland because I'm obsessed with Mickey Mouse. I took everyone to Disneyland because I wanted us to connect at a deeper level. I wanted to have deep conversations, which we did while we were walking around the park. I wanted to laugh with them. I wanted to have fun. And all of that happened. And I think that really showed up in how we showed up the next day in the actual retreat meeting.
So here's the thing. I went all out on this Disney for this retreat, but this is not something I would have been doing or been able to do earlier on in my journey. Like, the first five years of building a business, this would not have even been an option. And so I say that because I don't want my VIP Disney experience, that was super bougie, to deter you from actually thinking about where you could use a little shake up in your business.
You definitely don't have to spend a ton of money in order to make this work. You can just get your team together in whatever way feels right for you. You could do a beach day, set up a cute picnic lunch outside, go hiking or a nature walk or even set up a volunteer day, which is something we are doing in June, which I'm really excited about. So a volunteer day is also great if you can get a few people together, your whole team together, and do something fun like that.
To be honest, I think that it was just most important that we spent time together. And like I said, we laughed, we joked, we talked a lot, and we created a connection.
So, if you are a solopreneur and you have a really small team, come back to me because I have a couple of ways that you can shake things up in your business as well.
So, my dear friend Tiffany Bymaster, she shared with me recently that she's going to Bali for a mastermind with Glo Atanmo, who's been on the show, and we love her, and she doesn't know anybody. So she's going solo. She's the entrepreneur. She's going solo, and she's going to get out of her comfort zone. And she said, “I'm excited, and I'm nervous,” but she wanted something different. And I thought that was a great idea.
Now, you might be saying, “Okay, Amy. That's expensive as well,” and so that might not be your jam. But, again, I gave you some ideas of going on a beach day or a hike or a picnic. Those are all fun, too. Connection is important. But if you're a solopreneur and you don't really have a team, or a super-small team, maybe you are the one that needs to shake things up, like, you personally. And I think Tiffany doing what she's doing is such a beautiful show of that. So take care of you. And if every day is Groundhog Day and it's not as fun as it used to be, we got to do something different, my friend.
So Hobie’s ex-wife—that's always funny when I say that, right? Her name is Tracy—Hobie’s ex-wife, who I'm good friends with, always says DSD. DSD, do something different. She has this matchmaking company, and she teaches the DSD model to her clients that are going out on dates to encourage them to try some things that are new and different and kind of scary. And of course, this works when it comes to your business or any aspect of your life. So, DSD, where does this need to show up in your life or your business?
Another thing that can shake things up is what I call a total-immersion weekend. I actually did a podcast about the total-immersion weekend that I used to do with Cho, who was my sidekick for seven years. Now she's a contractor for me. But I'll link up to it in the show notes. I'll link up to that episode. It's a very specific step-by-step episode of how we did a total-immersion weekend to focus on the business in a really creative way. And then a bunch of you did total-immersion weekends, and you sent me DMs all about them, and I literally lost my mind it was so cool. So let’s resurrect that episode. For those of you who need it, I’ll link to it in the show notes. Or you can just go to amyporterfield.com/222. It was episode 222, so you can get there easily by going to amyporterfield.com/222.
But, essentially, what we would do is we would go somewhere different just to get out of our usual environment. Like, we went to Palm Springs. We went to Laguna Beach. And at the time, I was in Carlsbad, so those places are driving distance and weren't too far.
But it was so fun. We would bring big poster boards and Sharpie pens, and we would make sure that we always went out to a fun dinner. But we would spend our time in the hotel room, or sometimes we'd go out by the pool, and we'd brainstorm, and we’d think of new funnels, and we'd think of different things to do for the business. This was before I had a leadership team, so this is when I had a really small company. Chloe was my only full-time employee, and we would just hash it out. So if you have a small team, you can DSD with just one other person.
All right, my friend. I hope this gives you some ideas or at least some inspiration how you can shake things up. If it does nothing else, I hope it at least proves to you that maybe, if you need it, it's time to DSD, do something different. Shake things up. Like, just having that realization after this podcast, I feel like I've done my work here. But if you wanted some inspiration, I gave you some ideas from expensive to extravagant to totally inexpensive that you could do this weekend.
So, I hope you love this Shorty episode and found it valuable. Thanks so much for hanging out with me. Join me on Instagram. Remember, I'm just @amyporterfield. Send me a DM if you're going to DSD.
Hope you have a great day, and I'll talk to you Thursday for more entrepreneurial goodness, same time, same place. Can't wait.
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