- CEO Story: Started during the pandemic creating Tiktoks and reels that started to develop into a community. So companies started reaching out to her for sponsorships and fell in love with entrepreneurship, she wanted to legalize everything. Making great content for her clients on her own schedule is what she loves the most. Started as a side hustle, now doing it full time.
- Business Service: Social Media and writing SEO. Strong brand story on every content.
- Secret Sauce: Cohesive story and branding aspect. And how to communicate it in the most effective way.
- CEO Hack: Setting artificial deadlines for yourself helps you be more productive. Making systems or templated tasks to make the job easy.
- CEO Nugget: Expand your network. Minding your network and your community as the driving force to your successful driving business.
- CEO Defined: Control over your day. Setting the standards for yourself. Strategic long-term thinking.
Website: angelamyerscreative.com
For book lovers: www.instagram.com/angela_anne_reads
To connect professionally: www.linkedin.com/in/angela-myers-creative
For travel lovers: www.youtube.com/channel/UCfU04u-x6h-ax5DcdbPYcaw
Check out one of our favorite CEO Hack’s Audible. Get your free audiobook and check out more of our favorite CEO Hacks HERE
Transcription
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00:26 – Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.
00:54 – Gresham Harkless
Hello, Hello, Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Angela Myers of Angela Myers Creative. Angela, super excited to have you on.
01:04 – Angela Myers
Yeah, I'm super excited to be on the show today.
01:06 – Gresham Harkless
Yes, this would definitely be fun. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Angela so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's working on. Angela is the CEO of Angela Myers Creative, a digital marketing agency focused on writing SEO and social media for companies in the health and lifestyle spaces. She also posts about her love of books for an audience of over 20,000 book lovers on Instagram and TikTok. And when she's not working, you can find her scouring the best coffee shops in whatever country she's living in as a digital nomad. And currently, she's with us from Amsterdam. Angela, super excited to have you on. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
[restrict paid=”true”]
01:41 – Angela Myers
Yes, I am.
01:42 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Let's make it happen. So to kind of kick everything off, I won't ask you about the coffee in Amsterdam. I actually want to hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.
01:50 – Angela Myers
Yeah, so I actually got started mostly with the influencer work that I do for the book community. So I kind of accidentally fell into entrepreneurship. It was like during COVID and I was just creating TikToks and Instagram Reels and they really started to develop a little bit of a community. And some different companies reached out to me, such as Simon and Schuster Book of the Month about doing some sponsorships and that was kind of the moment I realized that I should probably set up an LLC to make everything completely legal. Also, I loved being able to control my own schedule, to be able to work with clients to create great content for them, and I could do that in more of a business capacity.
Obviously being a content creator is still a business, but I really wanted to set up something that had a pretty steady stream of clients and really help them amplify their own brands in a similar way to how I created my own bookish brand. And that's really how Angela Meyers Creative was born. It started off as just kind of a side hustle on the side of a full-time job, but eventually I just really fell in love with the entrepreneur lifestyle and with how much more quickly I was learning from the entrepreneur side of things. And I just really wanted to dive full-time into that business.
03:09 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love, love, love kind of hearing that journey and the organic aspect of it. I think one of the things that I listened to like this YouTube video, was like very motivational when we were trying to figure out what was happening and what was going to happen with the pandemic. But I remember one of the things that it said was that some of the most remarkable things will come out of this time. And sometimes while it's. Well, it's definitely a chaotic time and we're not sure what's going to happen, sometimes they're going to be really, really creative things that come about, and sounds like everything you've been working on has been a result of that too.
03:38 – Angela Myers
Yeah, yeah. And I definitely think it was definitely a process of falling into it. And I don't think if you had asked me back in like 2019 if I thought this was what I was going to be doing, I don't think I would have said this is what I was going to do, but it just seemed like the natural progression of things.
03:53 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. But you know, it's a funny way that business and life, you know, ends up happening, that it ends up being that journey. And as much as we try to script in and say we're going to do this in five years and this in 10 years, sometimes it's just a flow of things happening. There's disruption and things just sometimes fall along the way.
04:11 – Angela Myers
Yeah.
04:11 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more. So I know you touched on a little bit more about how you work with clients. Could you take us through a little bit more on what you're doing with clients your content creation and all the things that you're helping to make an impact?
04:23 – Angela Myers
Yeah. So I currently help my clients with kind of an overarching marketing strategy. So my clients like that. I have a pretty holistic background in both social media and writing an SEO, so I can really become the master of their brand and then kind of plug it in everywhere. So on some of the teams, some of the people I work for, like the clients, I'll assemble a team of different people to do social media. And then a lot of times I do the writing because I really enjoy the writing work and then I also look at the overarching strategy. So because my background is as a professional writer.
I think I'm very attuned to this brand story and making sure that there is a strong brand story weaving between every single piece of content that my clients put out, whether it's a TikTok or a long-form blog post. And when I say brand story, I'm really talking about kind of this idea of like how the brands that I work with kind of position either their patients because I work a lot with like healthcare clients or like actual like their customers, how their customers or patients are at the heart of the brand. So how can we make your patient or your customer the hero of their own story with you being the guide to them as they go on that story?
05:42 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love that. What would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce? You might have already session on this, but what do you feel either sets you or your brand apart and makes it unique?
05:52 – Angela Myers
Yeah, I really think it's having that cohesive story and branding aspect throughout. So I'm really good at identifying what the, I guess you could say the secret sauce for my clients are and then how to communicate that in the most effective way across mediums. So I really do like, I do think once you can master one social media platform or like SEO, for example, obviously, there are small differences between LinkedIn or TikTok or doing SEO. But at the end of the day, it's really about the same thing of figuring out one, what keywords are people searching for on that platform, Two, what medium or genre do people like on that platform?
And then three, plugging your story into those keywords and into that medium or genre. So obviously this is a very simplified version of it. But I think, I really do think that there are more similarities between them. And when you focus on the higher level marketing, the lower level stuff such as quote unquote, hacking algorithms, as some people like to say, gets a lot easier. And I think that that's. Angela Meyers Creative does really well.
06:57 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love that. And I'm a big believer of that too because it almost sounds like what you're saying is that it's all about that foundational element of understanding your story, your brand promise, your story, you know, your branding, and all those things become that foundation. And that foundation, obviously, is going to look differently from the back of the house than it does in the front of the house or the top versus the bottom. But when you start to look at it, you realize that each of these social media platforms or ways you can market your business become a kind of product of your foundation. If you have that in place and you understand that.
07:30 – Angela Myers
Yeah, I think that's a really good way to put it.
07:32 – Gresham Harkless
So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
07:44 – Angela Myers
Yeah, so something I've been doing recently, and before I was in Amsterdam, I was in Portugal, which is very sunny. So this might not be as applicable if you don't live in a sunny environment, but I would go outside on my balcony and just set a timer for. For one hour and say, however much work I can get done in this hour is good. And this is a really great hack if you're kind of having one of those days where you just feel very off and like you don't want to do anything. I've just found that challenging myself of, like, how much of my to-do list can I get done in one hour?
Is really. It's almost fun and it makes it almost like a game or a challenge. And I'm usually very productive because I think a lot of times as entrepreneurs, one of the biggest pitfalls that we fall into is that one, we love our work and two, we have basically unlimited time. But that doesn't always mean that you are taking unlimited, like, paid, unpaid time off or just vacation time. It usually means that you're working, at least for me, like, extremely long hours. So setting artificial deadlines for myself when it comes to my work really helps me actually be more productive. Because sometimes it's like, oh, I have like these five tasks and it doesn't matter. I could work until 10 pm and then I'm just not productive at finishing those tasks.
08:54 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense, and I appreciate you for sharing that. I think it's such a great hack because a lot of times I think there's something that says that work will expand as much time as you allow it. But if you say like, okay, I'm going to get as much done within an hour as I can, not only does it allow you to sometimes get more done than sometimes you can in those five, or 10 hours, but you also get creative about how you can effectively do it sometimes. And sometimes that might be delegation, sometimes it might be, oh, I don't actually have to really do that now, but you start to get really, I guess, priority focused about the things that are on your plate.
09:31 – Angela Myers
Yeah. And I think too, at least for me, I always, whenever I sit down, like give myself a time-like frame. I also create a lot of systems around what I'm doing. So a lot of times a lot of the tasks you do can be like implemented or there's like a system to make it super easy and you just kind of can plug and play. So that's been a really big hack for me to save time as well.
09:50 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense. I think someone said to me once that if you want to give something, give it to like either a truly busy person or a lazy person because they're going to try to do it as effectively as they can and they're not going to try to work more than they have to. Or if you have somebody that has their hands so full, they're going to get it done in the most effective way because they don't have enough time to kind of spare.
10:13 – Angela Myers
Yeah.
10:15 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. So I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.
10:29 – Angela Myers
Yeah. So I think a CEO nugget, and I think this can apply across industries, not just to marketing, is definitely to expand your network and to do so in a way where you're building a community around yourself instead of like going into it, like a what's in it for me sort of networking style, which I don't think is as effective. But especially when I was younger, I wish I had taken more time just to reach out to people who were doing interesting things that I wanted to do and just to set up informational interviews or virtual coffee chats with them just to learn more and just to have them in my network.
And then also kind of Going off that even when I did that when I was younger, I didn't always follow up with those people. And that's kind of where the community aspect comes in, is like, you should be thinking about your network as a community around you and people that you follow up with every quarter or every month just to see and like check in what's going on with their business and their life. So I really do think that networking and community should be at the heart of a successful and thriving business. And I mean, honestly, at the heart of successful and thriving marketing strategies too.
11:33 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. In life, you even find out that the people who are the most successful and happier a lot of times are those people who are always reaching out and connecting with people and developing that engagement. But I love that you mentioned that because really looking at it from a different perspective of that, all the people that you know are within the community that you have and really making sure that you are connecting with them and having ways to develop that initial relationship. But like you said, so. Well, sometimes, very rarely, I should say, people actually follow up or try to check in and just see like, hey, what are you working on? What are you doing? And those things really kind of resonate and stand the test of time.
12:12 – Angela Myers
Yeah, I agree.
12:15 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping our different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Angela, what does being a CEO mean to you?
12:27 – Angela Myers
Yeah, I think for me personally it really means one, having kind of control over your day and that you are kind of setting the standards for everything, whether it's like how much time you spend when you do your work, but also the quality of your work. So you're really setting those standards for yourself. And then two, I think it really means something that at least for me, was difficult to kind of think through and process, but has really been instrumental to becoming more of a CEO versus an employee is really, really being able to do that strategic long-term thinking.
So if you're a CEO, I think that you should always be thinking like one step ahead or even two steps ahead if you can. And so learning how to think not just about the here and now and like instant gratification, but also thinking about what is your business going to look like one year down the line or two years down the line is really important to being a CEO. Beyond that, I think as you said, there are so many different versions of how a CEO can manifest and so many different personality traits they can have. And so I think that those two things are really what sets a CEO apart.
13:33 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love that definition.
13:35 – Angela Myers
Yeah. And to any listeners right now who are listening to that and feel a little overwhelmed, my biggest hack around that would be to again set up systems. So long-term thinking doesn't have to be super overwhelming if you can think of a system. So for me, for example, with my network, I have like a network tracker where I have people's names and it gives me an alert if I haven't reached out to them every quarter, just to reach out and see what they're doing. So there are ways and technologies and systems you can put in place to make all of this super easy in time efficient.
14:05 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love that you shared that because I think, you know, sometimes people are thinking as I imagine that you hear, you know, around social media, it's like, I have to learn another social media platform. I have to do another thing. But that's the beauty of hacks and even nuggets to some degree is they allow you to be more effective and efficient so you can spend time on the things that you do best.
14:25 – Angela Myers
Yeah.
14:26 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Well, Angela, truly appreciate that definition and of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best people can get ahold of you, find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.
14:43 – Angela Myers
Thank you so much for having me on the show. If anyone wants to connect with me, I'm available on LinkedIn under Angela Meyers. And I think if you type in Angela Meyers Creative, it's a little bit easier to find because there's a lot of Angela Meyers out there in the world and then on Instagram @Angelaannreads and that's my Bookstagram account. So if you like to read, that's a really great place. And it's the same on TikTok and Pinterest if you are a reader on those platforms. I will say, that I read this in a book, it was called Never Eat Alone by Keef Farazzi, about networking. It's a great book.
But he says if you ever listen to a podcast episode or you ever had a guest speak, guest speaking event, and someone just sounds really interesting to you, like always reach out because you never know where that connection could go. So I always just like to say if I or anyone else who's on Gresham's show really stands out to you. Like definitely reach out to them because you never know. Most of the time people will always respond, almost always respond back to any sort of informational interview. Reach out.
15:46 – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. I would definitely echo that. And to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that you can get a hold of Angela hearing about all the awesome things that you're doing. But I love, you know, that last point and you know, everything that you working on. And sometimes we forget that these are tools, all these digital marketing tools, the software, and all those things are tools for us to be able to kind of develop and create that deeper connection, to tell our story, to really, you know, connect as a brand and whatever that might be and however it manifests itself. So I love that you do that, love that you reminded us of that. And I hope you have a phenomenal.
16:20 – Angela Myers
Yep, I hope you do too.
16:22 – Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
00:26 - Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.
00:54 - Gresham Harkless
Hello, Hello, Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Angela Myers of Angela Myers Creative. Angela, super excited to have you on.
01:04 - Angela Myers
Yeah, I'm super excited to be on the show today.
01:06 - Gresham Harkless
Yes, this would definitely be fun. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Angela so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's working on. Angela is the CEO of Angela Myers Creative, a digital marketing agency focused on writing SEO and social media for companies in the health and lifestyle spaces. She also posts about her love of books for an audience of over 20,000 book lovers on Instagram and TikTok. And when she's not working, you can find her scouring the best coffee shops in whatever country she's living in as a digital nomad. And currently, she's with us from Amsterdam. Angela, super excited to have you on. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
01:41 - Angela Myers
Yes, I am.
01:42 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Let's make it happen. So to kind of kick everything off, I won't ask you about the coffee in Amsterdam. I actually want to hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.
01:50 - Angela Myers
Yeah, so I actually got started mostly with the influencer work that I do for the book community. So I kind of accidentally fell into entrepreneurship. It was like during COVID and I was just creating TikToks and Instagram Reels and they really started to develop a little bit of a community. And some different companies reached out to me, such as Simon and Schuster Book of the Month about doing some sponsorships and that was kind of the moment I realized that I should probably set up an LLC to make everything completely legal. Also, I loved being able to control my own schedule, to be able to work with clients to create great content for them, and I could do that in more of a business capacity.
Obviously being a content creator is still a business, but I really wanted to set up something that had a pretty steady stream of clients and really help them amplify their own brands in a similar way to how I created my own bookish brand. And that's really how Angela Meyers Creative was born. It started off as just kind of a side hustle on the side of a full-time job, but eventually I just really fell in love with the entrepreneur lifestyle and with how much more quickly I was learning from the entrepreneur side of things. And I just really wanted to dive full-time into that business.
03:09 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love, love, love kind of hearing that journey and the organic aspect of it. I think one of the things that I listened to like this YouTube video, was like very motivational when we were trying to figure out what was happening and what was going to happen with the pandemic. But I remember one of the things that it said was that some of the most remarkable things will come out of this time. And sometimes while it's. Well, it's definitely a chaotic time and we're not sure what's going to happen, sometimes they're going to be really, really creative things that come about, and sounds like everything you've been working on has been a result of that too.
03:38 - Angela Myers
Yeah, yeah. And I definitely think it was definitely a process of falling into it. And I don't think if you had asked me back in like 2019 if I thought this was what I was going to be doing, I don't think I would have said this is what I was going to do, but it just seemed like the natural progression of things.
03:53 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. But you know, it's a funny way that business and life, you know, ends up happening, that it ends up being that journey. And as much as we try to script in and say we're going to do this in five years and this in 10 years, sometimes it's just a flow of things happening. There's disruption and things just sometimes fall along the way.
04:11 - Angela Myers
Yeah.
04:11 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more. So I know you touched on a little bit more about how you work with clients. Could you take us through a little bit more on what you're doing with clients your content creation and all the things that you're helping to make an impact?
04:23 - Angela Myers
Yeah. So I currently help my clients with kind of an overarching marketing strategy. So my clients like that. I have a pretty holistic background in both social media and writing an SEO, so I can really become the master of their brand and then kind of plug it in everywhere. So on some of the teams, some of the people I work for, like the clients, I'll assemble a team of different people to do social media. And then a lot of times I do the writing because I really enjoy the writing work and then I also look at the overarching strategy. So because my background is as a professional writer.
I think I'm very attuned to this brand story and making sure that there is a strong brand story weaving between every single piece of content that my clients put out, whether it's a TikTok or a long-form blog post. And when I say brand story, I'm really talking about kind of this idea of like how the brands that I work with kind of position either their patients because I work a lot with like healthcare clients or like actual like their customers, how their customers or patients are at the heart of the brand. So how can we make your patient or your customer the hero of their own story with you being the guide to them as they go on that story?
05:42 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love that. What would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce? You might have already session on this, but what do you feel either sets you or your brand apart and makes it unique?
05:52 - Angela Myers
Yeah, I really think it's having that cohesive story and branding aspect throughout. So I'm really good at identifying what the, I guess you could say the secret sauce for my clients are and then how to communicate that in the most effective way across mediums. So I really do like, I do think once you can master one social media platform or like SEO, for example, obviously, there are small differences between LinkedIn or TikTok or doing SEO. But at the end of the day, it's really about the same thing of figuring out one, what keywords are people searching for on that platform, Two, what medium or genre do people like on that platform?
And then three, plugging your story into those keywords and into that medium or genre. So obviously this is a very simplified version of it. But I think, I really do think that there are more similarities between them. And when you focus on the higher level marketing, the lower level stuff such as quote unquote, hacking algorithms, as some people like to say, gets a lot easier. And I think that that's. Angela Meyers Creative does really well.
06:57 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love that. And I'm a big believer of that too because it almost sounds like what you're saying is that it's all about that foundational element of understanding your story, your brand promise, your story, you know, your branding, and all those things become that foundation. And that foundation, obviously, is going to look differently from the back of the house than it does in the front of the house or the top versus the bottom. But when you start to look at it, you realize that each of these social media platforms or ways you can market your business become a kind of product of your foundation. If you have that in place and you understand that.
07:30 - Angela Myers
Yeah, I think that's a really good way to put it.
07:32 - Gresham Harkless
So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
07:44 - Angela Myers
Yeah, so something I've been doing recently, and before I was in Amsterdam, I was in Portugal, which is very sunny. So this might not be as applicable if you don't live in a sunny environment, but I would go outside on my balcony and just set a timer for. For one hour and say, however much work I can get done in this hour is good. And this is a really great hack if you're kind of having one of those days where you just feel very off and like you don't want to do anything. I've just found that challenging myself of, like, how much of my to-do list can I get done in one hour?
Is really. It's almost fun and it makes it almost like a game or a challenge. And I'm usually very productive because I think a lot of times as entrepreneurs, one of the biggest pitfalls that we fall into is that one, we love our work and two, we have basically unlimited time. But that doesn't always mean that you are taking unlimited, like, paid, unpaid time off or just vacation time. It usually means that you're working, at least for me, like, extremely long hours. So setting artificial deadlines for myself when it comes to my work really helps me actually be more productive. Because sometimes it's like, oh, I have like these five tasks and it doesn't matter. I could work until 10 pm and then I'm just not productive at finishing those tasks.
08:54 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense, and I appreciate you for sharing that. I think it's such a great hack because a lot of times I think there's something that says that work will expand as much time as you allow it. But if you say like, okay, I'm going to get as much done within an hour as I can, not only does it allow you to sometimes get more done than sometimes you can in those five, or 10 hours, but you also get creative about how you can effectively do it sometimes. And sometimes that might be delegation, sometimes it might be, oh, I don't actually have to really do that now, but you start to get really, I guess, priority focused about the things that are on your plate.
09:31 - Angela Myers
Yeah. And I think too, at least for me, I always, whenever I sit down, like give myself a time-like frame. I also create a lot of systems around what I'm doing. So a lot of times a lot of the tasks you do can be like implemented or there's like a system to make it super easy and you just kind of can plug and play. So that's been a really big hack for me to save time as well.
09:50 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense. I think someone said to me once that if you want to give something, give it to like either a truly busy person or a lazy person because they're going to try to do it as effectively as they can and they're not going to try to work more than they have to. Or if you have somebody that has their hands so full, they're going to get it done in the most effective way because they don't have enough time to kind of spare.
10:13 - Angela Myers
Yeah.
10:15 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. So I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.
10:29 - Angela Myers
Yeah. So I think a CEO nugget, and I think this can apply across industries, not just to marketing, is definitely to expand your network and to do so in a way where you're building a community around yourself instead of like going into it, like a what's in it for me sort of networking style, which I don't think is as effective. But especially when I was younger, I wish I had taken more time just to reach out to people who were doing interesting things that I wanted to do and just to set up informational interviews or virtual coffee chats with them just to learn more and just to have them in my network.
And then also kind of Going off that even when I did that when I was younger, I didn't always follow up with those people. And that's kind of where the community aspect comes in, is like, you should be thinking about your network as a community around you and people that you follow up with every quarter or every month just to see and like check in what's going on with their business and their life. So I really do think that networking and community should be at the heart of a successful and thriving business. And I mean, honestly, at the heart of successful and thriving marketing strategies too.
11:33 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. In life, you even find out that the people who are the most successful and happier a lot of times are those people who are always reaching out and connecting with people and developing that engagement. But I love that you mentioned that because really looking at it from a different perspective of that, all the people that you know are within the community that you have and really making sure that you are connecting with them and having ways to develop that initial relationship. But like you said, so. Well, sometimes, very rarely, I should say, people actually follow up or try to check in and just see like, hey, what are you working on? What are you doing? And those things really kind of resonate and stand the test of time.
12:12 - Angela Myers
Yeah, I agree.
12:15 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping our different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Angela, what does being a CEO mean to you?
12:27 - Angela Myers
Yeah, I think for me personally it really means one, having kind of control over your day and that you are kind of setting the standards for everything, whether it's like how much time you spend when you do your work, but also the quality of your work. So you're really setting those standards for yourself. And then two, I think it really means something that at least for me, was difficult to kind of think through and process, but has really been instrumental to becoming more of a CEO versus an employee is really, really being able to do that strategic long-term thinking.
So if you're a CEO, I think that you should always be thinking like one step ahead or even two steps ahead if you can. And so learning how to think not just about the here and now and like instant gratification, but also thinking about what is your business going to look like one year down the line or two years down the line is really important to being a CEO. Beyond that, I think as you said, there are so many different versions of how a CEO can manifest and so many different personality traits they can have. And so I think that those two things are really what sets a CEO apart.
13:33 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love that definition.
13:35 - Angela Myers
Yeah. And to any listeners right now who are listening to that and feel a little overwhelmed, my biggest hack around that would be to again set up systems. So long-term thinking doesn't have to be super overwhelming if you can think of a system. So for me, for example, with my network, I have like a network tracker where I have people's names and it gives me an alert if I haven't reached out to them every quarter, just to reach out and see what they're doing. So there are ways and technologies and systems you can put in place to make all of this super easy in time efficient.
14:05 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love that you shared that because I think, you know, sometimes people are thinking as I imagine that you hear, you know, around social media, it's like, I have to learn another social media platform. I have to do another thing. But that's the beauty of hacks and even nuggets to some degree is they allow you to be more effective and efficient so you can spend time on the things that you do best.
14:25 - Angela Myers
Yeah.
14:26 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Well, Angela, truly appreciate that definition and of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best people can get ahold of you, find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.
14:43 - Angela Myers
Thank you so much for having me on the show. If anyone wants to connect with me, I'm available on LinkedIn under Angela Meyers. And I think if you type in Angela Meyers Creative, it's a little bit easier to find because there's a lot of Angela Meyers out there in the world and then on Instagram @Angelaannreads and that's my Bookstagram account. So if you like to read, that's a really great place. And it's the same on TikTok and Pinterest if you are a reader on those platforms. I will say, that I read this in a book, it was called Never Eat Alone by Keef Farazzi, about networking. It's a great book.
But he says if you ever listen to a podcast episode or you ever had a guest speak, guest speaking event, and someone just sounds really interesting to you, like always reach out because you never know where that connection could go. So I always just like to say if I or anyone else who's on Gresham's show really stands out to you. Like definitely reach out to them because you never know. Most of the time people will always respond, almost always respond back to any sort of informational interview. Reach out.
15:46 - Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. I would definitely echo that. And to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that you can get a hold of Angela hearing about all the awesome things that you're doing. But I love, you know, that last point and you know, everything that you working on. And sometimes we forget that these are tools, all these digital marketing tools, the software, and all those things are tools for us to be able to kind of develop and create that deeper connection, to tell our story, to really, you know, connect as a brand and whatever that might be and however it manifests itself. So I love that you do that, love that you reminded us of that. And I hope you have a phenomenal.
16:20 - Angela Myers
Yep, I hope you do too.
16:22 - Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
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