IAM1511 – Author Helps Small Businesses Thrive Through Customer-Centered Marketing

Judy has built and operated a wide variety of innovative businesses. Including retail, service, event management, and market research.

Currently, she runs ThriveableBiz®. Helping small businesses break through the clutter with customer-centered marketing. Headlined by her new book, Marketing = Customers + Heart – How to build your small business growth strategy.

• CEO Story: Always been passionate about how things work. Judy likes to analyze how things work – more into understanding how the human mind works. If you don’t understand people you can’t market to them. That is why she is working with 100s of small businesses and startups. Ensuring them a solid foundation. Judy owns a variety of innovative businesses.
• Business Service: Create and innovate new ideas. The process starts with mindfulness (why did that happen) and helping clients with their marketing strategy. Judy’s book is about understanding your customers and connecting with them.
• Secret Sauce: The ability to see opportunities. Ability to empathize with people.
• CEO Hack: Getting up every morning with a smile on her face, just smile at life. Journaling.
• CEO Nugget: Hang in there, and it’s all going to be fine.  Treat people as you want to be treated. Be careful with what you are communicating on social media.
• CEO Defined: It’s about what you can give and help others. Collaborative approach with the team and doing the same thing and same direction.

Website: thriveablebiz.com

Book: https://thriveablebiz.com/marketing-customers-heart-small-business-growth-strategy

LinkedIn: judycelmins-breakthrough-marketing

Facebook: thriveablebiz

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyDFI3Hii2i1G2meBWAlOLg

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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 Harker 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 Judy Sommons of Thriveable Biz. Judy, super excited to have you on the show.

01:04 – Judy Celmins

Oh, Breshtam, so am I. Actually, I don't even mind getting up early for you.

01:08 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, I always appreciate you getting up early. That always makes me feel very, very special, and I love and appreciate even more all the awesome things that you're doing. So, let me read a little bit more about you just talking here about some of those awesome things. Judy has built and operated a wide variety of innovative businesses, including retail, service, event management, and market research. Currently, she runs Thriveable Biz, helping small businesses break through the clutter with customer-centered marketing. And headlined by her new book, Marketing Equals Customers Plus Heart, How to Build Your Small Business Growth Strategy. Judy, I appreciate you so much for being on the show and waking up early. Are you ready to speak to the  I AM CEO community?

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01:46 – Judy Celmins

I am, let's rock this.

01:48 – Gresham Harkless

Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock here a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:55 – Judy Celmins

Oh my goodness, it actually starts quite early for me. I think I've always been passionate about how things work, but not in a mechanical sense, right? So if I took something apart, God help us, we would never get it back together. So, I like to analyze how things work and why does that not happen. And so I'm quite into people and understanding how the human mind works. So that really led me down a path of, you know, life takes you on lots of journeys, right? So I managed to get into media and then I actually met my wonderful partner and he is a market researcher and was also, so we would have these ridiculous, this sounds a bit pathetic really for a personal relationship, but we would have these long conversations over bottles of red about the way people's brains work and why would we buy something like that? How would you motivate that person to do that?

And then going, well, I think back, I think we really did have a sad life, But it really did stem everything that we've done together. So we continue to work together. We still do after 30 or 30 more years now and share the same sorts of enthusiasm for, 1, helping people, and 2, helping people actually understand other people. Because if you don't understand other people, you can't market to them and you can't run a business. And the other thing that I felt, yeah, so it really did that I guess I could ramble on forever Gresham because I'm a bit passionate about where I now see I work with hundreds of small businesses and startups in particular and without fail or you'll cock it up at the beginning.

So I'm a bit determined that we shift that focus because I believe that so much of the stress that's caused later in their business journey is because they didn't get the foundation solid. You can't build anything on shaky ground, doesn't work. So yeah, I started, my first most successful business was a pet shop many, many decades ago. I was in Sydney, Australia, became in 12 months, Sydney's busiest pet shop sold more animals and more pet food, I was told than anyone else.

And it was, but it was the branding that was to me, the critical element and what changed it. So, you know, I mean, a little bit of background on my story.

04:34 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I absolutely love that. And you're definitely in the right place to talk about all the aspects of your story. And all we need is the bottle of red too, because I dig out on all those things as well, too. And I think that that's phenomenal just to kind of hear. And I love how you talked about that foundation piece because I think that, you know, a lot of times you hear like the numbers of businesses that fail and why they fail and all those things. I think so many times it's because people just don't, it's like a different language. If you don't go, you go to a different country, you don't know the language. And of course, you're going to struggle in doing it. But if you start to be able to kind of understand that language, understand to do these things and those things, not only does it help you to get started, but I think it helps you to run that marathon, which business a lot of times.

05:16 – Judy Celmins

Gresham, 100%. And so the other challenging place I find is that sometimes you have a really good idea as a startup and you open your doors and a few people come in. And so you think, oh, you got this. Like, I don't need any of that bullshit background. What is all that crap? I don't need all that, right? So, I'm doing okay. My family's being fed. I've just bought a new car. You know, all those sorts of things are going on in life and then all of a sudden, something happens. Maybe a pandemic. Maybe something else is going to happen in our life and you don't know how to bring it back. So that's the point that I see so many people fall over is that they don't understand what got them there in the first place.

They don't understand that they probably instinctually understood their customer, but it's got lost in the translation or the customer has changed. And that is critically important. And that's where I, you know, the whole book is about, is about helping you understand your customer and really connect with them and it's not about saying you know the customer's always right just do as you're told you know It's got nothing to do with that at all. Yeah, which is why I appreciate the work that you, you know, you do in the book that you wrote.

06:37 – Gresham Harkless

So are those some of the things that you, you know, you cover in your book and the ways that you help serve clients is just helping them to really I want to say understand and look at things differently, but also to be able to execute that.

06:50 – Judy Celmins

Yeah, Gresham, thanks for the question. It's what we did in the book was, it was an interesting exercise actually. We thought so many times people have said to us, how do you do what you do? Like, you know, cause we create, we're constantly innovating and creating new ideas that we know customers will want. So how do we do that? And actually, to be honest, I couldn't answer it at first, 'cause I thought, oh, it's just natural, just comes instinctively. So we decided to map it out and go, what are all the elements of the whole process? And what we came up with was 7 steps to a, you know, to a thrivable biz basically.

And we ran around the heart, obviously, for obvious reasons given that we've called it marketing equals customers plus heart, but it literally is a process. And we start with mindfulness ironically, because I first realized that I had 2 businesses, 1 a great success that I loved and another 1 that was a complete dismal flop. And so firstly, I wanted to understand that. So as I said earlier, I like to question why that happened. And I could clearly take it back to the stress I was under at the time. Whereas in the business that I was successful in, I started it actually with a smile and really enjoyed my day.

So I've decided to go back to the smiley part. I prefer that as a life. So that's the first tip. And then it really is, it's, it's, we go through all the different processes of how to question, how to ask questions because so many times we actually don't know how to ask questions. We've forgotten to question. It's actually trained out of us almost in the school systems to question. So how do you question? How do you question a customer? How do you question a teammate? How do you get the answers and actually have an ear to listen and hear the answers we often block where we don't want to know because it might be not what we want to hear. If you do not understand that marketing is everything in your business, every single aspect of your business has a marketing influence.

So when my, you know, my years ago, my pet shop, everything to the color I painted the walls, every single, how the staff responded, how everything was designed for the customer. And if think about it this way, the role of a business is to have customers. Clearly we don't have a business if we don't have any customers. And the role of marketing is to get customers. So if you think about it, and then all the elements, I will even argue that your financial planning is a marketing function. If you don't know where your customers are coming from, how Can you budget where your future is going?

09:48 – Gresham Harkless

That makes so much sense. And I appreciate you sharing that so much. And I almost wonder if that's part of like, I was gonna ask you for your secrets. So it's gonna be for yourself or the business, but is the thing you feel kind of sets you apart or makes you unique?

09:59 – Judy Celmins

Yeah, Gresham, I do. I think it's our ability to, I also think it's our ability to see opportunities. So I can be sitting there watching a news story and I can go, my brain starts working on how to solve that problem. It's also our ability to empathize with people. But the most important thing I learned was to put myself in somebody else's shoes. And I do that now with everything I do. And you know life is difficult for many of us and that's including every single 1 of your customers and until you appreciate where they're coming from and their perspective, again, as I said at the beginning, it's not about them being right. In fact, they're quite possibly wrong.

That's irrelevant. It's empathizing with them and understanding their perspective, seeing it from their eyes and you have a different view on your product and what you can bring to the table. It just opens up and then you can sit there and go, okay, well if the majority of my customers have this problem, how can I fix it? That's what leads to opportunities. That's what leads to business growth. That's what leads to being in business beyond the five-year threshold where so many don't go past. It's just connecting with people and treating them.

11:34 – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that. And I wanted to us, which cares a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an Apple book a habit that you have or something from your book, but what's something that you feel makes you more effective and efficient?

11:47 – Judy Celmins

It's simple. Getting out of bed with a smile on my face. I journal every night now. It's getting out of bed with a smile and even if I go, oh I've got that on today bugger or whatever, I'll go, nah not now. Just smile at life. And quite honestly, it really, it's quite a miracle. It's quite significant, the change in everything that happens when you just smile at stuff.

12:11 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, and I think that speaks so much to, you know, controlling what you can control. And so what would you consider to be what I call a CEO nugget? You might've already touched on this, but it could be like a thing that you might tell your favorite client. Or if you happen to do a time machine, you might tell your young business self. I think it comes down to just hanging in there. It's all going to be fine. And I really do believe that if you treat, you know, my mother used to say to me, treat people as you want to be treated yourself.

It's you know, I think there's some good basics out here, you know. I'm I think, unfortunately, and I look, I'm going to sound like I'm a really old woman here, but social media has made it too easy for us to comment abruptly and not treat people with the respect that we would want to be treated with. I think it's to be just careful with what you're communicating out there. Just be mindful of that. That would be my whole thing if you remain customer-focused, if you remain considering their emotions and their needs, You can't lose.

13:19 -Gresham Harkless

Absolutely appreciate it. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have your different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Judy, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:30 – Judy Celmins

I don't actually ever look at it as being a CEO. I don't ever visualize myself as being a boss over people. I've always been, it's a collaborative approach to me. So it is very much about being a team thing and that we're all growing together. That really, so what's it like for me to be a CEO? Yeah, it doesn't mean anything really to me personally. It's about what I want to give and help others. And so the joy for me is when I communicate with my clients and my team and they get it and they're on board and we're all doing the same thing, going in the same direction.

14:17 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, I love that. I love that you use the word collaborative approach.

14:21 -Judy Celmins

Yeah, exactly. But you know, again, I keep saying this is not hard. Look, there are times you've got to be the boss. Yeah, I get that. But it's not about having that big head thing. Anyway, that's just my humble opinion. And it's reasonably kept me in reasonable states. So I'm somewhat gonna stick to it until I prove otherwise.

14:45 – Gresham Harkless

There you go, There you go. I absolutely love that 1. Judy, truly appreciate that definition and that perspective. 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 out of you and your team, get a copy of your book, and find out about all the awesome things that you all are working on.

15:06 – Judy Celmins

Okay, so well, marketing equals customers plus heart. To be honest, it doesn't matter what level of stage your business is, you can benefit from it. Look, I have lots of loads of free stuff on my YouTube channel and also on my website. I give it all away for free. I don't even take your email. I just want to help people. In the end, to me, this is about giving everyone the start that they all deserve and putting this down. It's really been a labor of love. I don't make anything out of the book because 100% of the profit also goes to Ukraine. So I'm I've just it's about helping people. It always has been for me. Possibly to my own detriment at times. But it's yeah that that's really all it all it is. So you know connect to the website. Get yourself a copy of the book. Not only will you help yourself, but you'll help a family in the Ukraine. So, but that's it.

16:07 – Gresham Harkless

There you go. You're out. Well, before you get, before you leave, I just want to make sure everybody gets the links and information that's going to be in the show notes and Make sure you get a copy of the book, YouTube, all the awesome things that you're working on. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:20 – Judy Celmins

Yeah, Gretchen, thank you so much for the opportunity. It's a real pleasure.

16:23 – 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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