Behind the Scenes with Charlotte: A Candid Podcast Chat 🎙️

I’ve got something a little different for you this week! 🎧

I was recently a guest on The Startup Support Surgery podcast, hosted by the brilliant Dr. Jo Watkins. While her podcast primarily speaks to GPs and medics exploring entrepreneurship, this episode dives into so much more—and I think you’ll find it incredibly valuable, no matter your industry or business type.

Here’s why you should tune in:

1. A Rare Behind-the-Scenes Look: I rarely talk in-depth about my journey, but this interview gave me a chance to reflect on how I got here and how Kaffeen’s strategies resonate far beyond the creative world.
2. Cross-Industry Insights: Whether you’re in the creative field or not, you’ll learn how the approaches we use to help creative agencies can be applied to other industries—including yours or your clients’.
3. Practical Applications for Your Business: This episode is packed with actionable ideas and relatable moments that might just spark your next big idea.
4. A Unique Compare-and-Contrast: Working with Dr Jo has been a fascinating opportunity to contrast her medical-to-entrepreneurial journey with my own experience. It’s an insightful conversation that highlights the value of adapting strategies to fit different contexts.

I’d love to hear your thoughts after listening—feel free to share what resonated most with you!

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Join 3,000+ service providers and agency owners who’ve downloaded Client Magnet: 97 Proven Strategies and Tactics to Attract New Business and Scale Your Creative Agency Revenue.

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🎧 Tune into the podcast

Get honest advice, expert interviews, and actionable tips to grow your service business with more clarity and less noise.

👉 Follow here: https://open.spotify.com/show/7upjztW0B3hQi2YlHTVdNn

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Transcript

1:16

Hello and welcome to the podcast today. Today's going to be a little bit different. It's actually a episode where I'm interviewed by somebody who has kind of been a contemporary colleague and become a friend as well, I think I can say, Dr. Jo Watkins, who interviews me on her podcast, The Startup Support Surgery, which is primarily designed to target GPs and medics who are looking to venture out beyond their existing roles and into entrepreneurship. But honestly, I find this episode just It's a really interesting one to share, even if you don't identify with that job role, which you most likely don't if you're in this podcast audience. And I thought it gave a really unique look at what elements of what we do at Caffeine really work for other industries. It might be that you're listening and you're not a creative agency, which is my primary audience to date. Or it might be that you have clients that aren't most likely aren't creative agencies and you might listen to it and think, hmm, I can see how this would be helpful to my business or their business. So I really encourage you to give it a listen. I rarely really talk about myself, my experience and how I've arrived at this point and working with Jo over the past few months has offered me this really unique opportunity to contrast her. experience and knowledge and what she brings to the world and career so far with my own. And sometimes when we do that compare and contrast, it becomes all the more clearer where we really do add value. Which especially as somebody who works primarily alone is a really great, great opportunity to kind of get insight into. Getting a bit novel gaysy, but I really do recommend listening to this episode. I think regardless of what your business type is, you're going to find value and understand how elements of this can be applied to your business. Okay. Hope you enjoy it.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 3:15

Thank you. And I have to say, I'm really appreciating your backdrop for the people who are listening on audio and don't know. Joe is currently on a desert island, according to Zoom. And that really resonates with the fact I just gave you. So lovely to be here. I love it.

Dr Jo Watkins: 3:27

I know I'm on my desert island that I every time I switch on Zoom, I wish that I lived there but I was just saying it's a bit windy on my island. It is. I can see why you're wearing a jumper. Yeah, there's a lot of movement. And I'd love to say that Swansea Bay looks a little bit like that today, but it doesn't. Before we get into the nitty gritty, the citizenship of two where are those two countries? Britain and Italy. Oh, nice. Excellent. And the five of the Italians made

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 3:51

me work really hard to get that citizenship. It took me 14 years, but I won in the end.

Dr Jo Watkins: 3:57

Amazing. And what about the five that you've lived in?

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 4:01

Oh, okay. France. Italy, Cambodia, South Korea, and I'm going to include

Dr Jo Watkins: 4:07

the UK as well. Fabulous. And before we went live, we were just talking about talking about how we go about working and traveling, which is something we can touch on a little bit into in the sort of body of what we're going to talk about. So it is brilliant to have you here. I have had the absolute honor and pleasure of working with you recently quite a lot. So let's just go back a little bit. As I'm a doctor. You're in this world that us doctors look at and say, what does that actually mean? What does she actually do? I don't understand because we've been programmed to only understand one thing. So tell us a little bit about the kind of people you help, what you do, and maybe a little bit about how we ended up working together.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 4:48

Yeah, absolutely. Is it okay if I just go back a bit? Yeah, absolutely. So just before we hit record, Joe was telling me that she wasn't aware of what a brand was until relatively recently. And I think I think this is really key to the story because I think we're often, we're really aware of what we know and the track that we're sticking on. And we're not always aware of all the other opportunities and the ways of doing things in the world. So I have been obsessed with brand for as long as I can remember, I have known that I've wanted to work around the world of brand but I was shit at art at school and I was like that means I can't be a creative person. I, at school and they just put you into these, they just put labels, it's like, You're not creative. You're the humanities person. You're not a science person. You'll never be a doctor. It was like, you can't do all three sciences at GCSE. So those opportunities are off the table for you, which is something I've thought about a lot when we've been working together and the kind of the mindset of who you work with. So with that in mind I went to university to do marketing with a kind of communication and fashion slant at Leeds Uni. And then I I've worked with. Creative agencies for the most part during my time in companies as an employee as one of the only non fee earning people within the business, which is a really weird role to be in, in a service provider. So I have worked in raising the profile and winning new business for those agencies that's been the vast majority of my time in industry. And there was a bit of a. I left my last agency that I worked at full time and where I was head of marketing a new business and across three different continents. And we, I had an opportunity to go work with a tech startup, a very well funded tech startup in Silicon roundabout. It was the heyday of, of that world. And there was so much money going into it because of EIS funding, et cetera. And I came into this company who really they had no marketing function whatsoever. So it was completely blank slate. And this was so weird for me because I'd come from working in like really regimented kind of environment. Agencies are very precise. They're like perfection. Everything has to be done a certain way to tech startups, which, the mantra of the industry is. Move fast and break things. So I have this incredible opportunity to experiment a lot more. And over the period of about six months, I realized I'd learned more in that six months period. Then I had in the preceding 10 years. And if I could take my experience in with technology automation that I developed during that tech startup marketing role, and then bring it back to the agencies that I really loved and missed working with, frankly, then it would. We have the potential to really accelerate what they were capable of doing the reach that they had the new business opportunities that would come in. So I basically found it's the little bit, I don't know what it's called in the Venn diagram, like that plus that equals superpower. So then I started my own consultancy, Caffeine predominantly working with creative agencies from one person through to 250 people in multiple countries, helping to do exactly that. We raise their profile. help to draw new business into them rather than go and cold call or do ads or like just hammer people over the head with a message when they don't want to hear it. I really positioned them as an authority so that clients come to them and stay and they're visible in front of those prospective clients as well. And it was working really well, I've had caffeine for I think 10 years now, 10 years next year. And so I knew it was going really well. And over time I started getting more and more referrals and I realized that it didn't just appeal to creative agencies, even though that was my stronghold. It really pretty much what I was teaching them to do and what was implementing for them. It works for pretty much any service provider. The, we do a variety of things, but the mainstay involves LinkedIn. And basically, if your client's on LinkedIn, it works for you. That is the long

Dr Jo Watkins: 8:43

and short of it. What a great story. And I think a really good example of, like you say, combining. Everything combined, looking at what you love, what you're good at what the world needs and getting out there and actually providing it in your own agency, taking everything that you've learned along the way. And that story is something that you hear about quite often. In this sort of corporate marketing setting, but it's certainly not something we as medics do. We do the opposite. We just go down this very linear path of, escalating through the through the grades until we get to a point where we then stay in that job for the rest of our lives. And I remember somebody who I, who has helped me from early days, finding that quite obscure because he's in the, in, when you get to that point in business, you at least move company every four or five years. Every four or five years, keep it alive. Whereas we're just in this either GP or consultant position for a long time. So thank you for telling that. Cause I think it puts this in context and we talked a bit about brand right at the beginning. And I told you the story of when I first started my, with my granola company, 15 years ago, I knew that I wanted to make this. thing. And I knew what it was and I knew what I wanted to be called. And somebody said you can get a grant for branding. I was like what's branding? And they were like to make it look nice on the label. I was like, oh, I thought I just did that on, some, I don't know. I don't know how I thought that happened. And a branding consultant, Lucy Ali Hopper, who's still around. She's amazing. She came around to the kitchen table. And she was asking me what brands I liked. And I was like, I don't really even know what a brand is. And she was like, okay. We've got to start basic, go to the cupboard, get your beans. And she was brilliant. So we don't know this stuff. And I think sometimes we enter this world of business, we suddenly feel like a. literally a fish out of water. So learning from people like you is really important. And, but, branding is essentially, the look and the feel of your business, isn't it? And why somebody is going to come to you over somebody else. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And then the LinkedIn. thing I'd like to talk about a bit more. So in terms of the branding and how we market ourselves, can you just tell us a little bit about that as little people that are, people with a lot of knowledge that are going out there and feeling like little fish in a big pond?

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 10:58

Yeah, absolutely. I, predominantly, it's interesting you mentioned the two reference points behind, weren't they? I spent the majority of my in agency career. So when I was working within bigger agencies, they were predominantly brand and packaging design companies working with FMCG brands. Now, that is a whole lot of words, but basically it means things you find in the fridge, in the cupboard, things you find in the supermarket. There is such a phenomenal amount of money. And thought and psychology and, it's mind blowing how much how much energy is put into what the package looks like on the shelf. Honestly, I could spend three episodes talking about that. It's fascinating to me. But what I do predominantly now is is not on behalf of brands that are consumer facing. It's working with, so things that lay people by in their spare time. It's working with. service providers and businesses to shape their personal brand, their company brand through not necessarily what it looks like. We're not a in fact, not at all. We are not a, we're not really an agency. More consultants, to be honest, we. Very much have a teacher man to fish approach help you get things set up. And so you can continue to manage them internally rather than do it for you, because a lot of small to medium sized businesses don't, for various reasons, either financial or control reasons, don't want to be working with an external provider in the long term. And I certainly felt that way when I was in agency. So what we do, how we shape that brand from a business perspective and just thinking about what would be most useful to your audience. I think so. It's really interesting. I now serve a lot of branding and marketing agencies. I've mentioned they're not the only people that I serve, but it's fascinating how they can do this all day long for their clients. And they can't necessarily do it for themselves. And I just want to say that's universal, okay? If that feels familiar it's just It's like parenting. Oh yeah, for sure. You can

Dr Jo Watkins: 12:57

parent other people's children all the time.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 12:59

Yeah, and for example, most of my family works for the NHS. My group In my mom's house, she didn't own a thermometer and sent me to school for two weeks with glandular fever because she refused to believe I was sick. So it's I don't know what you're

Dr Jo Watkins: 13:10

talking about. No, but the,

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 13:12

the things that we practice at work don't necessarily apply, do they? When we're looking at our own world. So that's the point that I want to make with that. So often I'm taking them back to basics and thinking about, cause they are often So the exercise that we make anybody that we work with do right at the very start of working together is define who they is their target audience. And I hate the classic customer profile, like avatar. I hate going through that. It's to me, it's such a waste of time drawing a picture of what that person's face looks like, but we do it through LinkedIn, which really focuses the mind because that's ultimately what we're going to be using the long term. So we use a tool called Sales Navigator. It's a paid tool within LinkedIn. That is the main expense when, in terms of what we recommend clients to do. And it comes to, I think, around 800 pounds a year at the moment. Best money I spend in my business. And I'm sure we'll get onto that later on. But we use the filters within Sales Navigator to really define down who our target audience is. On behalf of the client. And then once we've defined that down, and trust me, that's not a scary process. It's actually really enjoyable if you like investigating things. It's a bit, it's like the Sherlock Holmes kind of part of the job, and I really love it. I'm actually in a spiral of doing that right now. Joe, we talked before we hit record about not being able to meet on another app. It's because I'm in Sherlock Holmes mode and I've got. 20, 30 tabs open on LinkedIn because I'm doing this for a client right now just ahead of our call. And once we've defined who the audience is, then we speak to that audience. And I promise I'm getting back to the point. So we do customer listening. And that basically is speaking with a list of questions to people who've either worked with you or are. Respectively would work with you in the future. They're your kind of target person. And we ask them a series of questions, which is designed to really get under the skin of what their hopes, dreams, fears, pain points, challenges are and more. We pull all of that together and then we analyze it and pull out key themes. And that is really what's at the heart of creating a a client led brand. And by that, I don't mean you're just like following behind them like a little sheep. It's making sure that your brand is consistently speaking to the challenges, hopes, fears that your your prospective client has. Otherwise, it's just going to fall on deaf ears. And if you do that, People think that you're psychic. They think that you understand them to their core. They're like, how do you know this stuff? That's exactly me. And it's really funny. It's because they've just told you and then you're repeating it back to them. So that is the foundations of how we help to develop what your brand personality would be like in terms of your marketing and your content as a service provider.

Dr Jo Watkins: 16:03

Brilliant. And I think this, everything you're saying I'm seeing the imprint on the stuff that I talk about within my program. And I, we, we, I suggest people get on calls, get on as many calls as they can with their ideal clients or the type of people that they think they want to work with. Yeah. Only when you get in front of those people and ask those people the right questions that you really understand. What their problems are and how they're feeling because otherwise you're creating quite often in, in my experience, for sure, you're creating a solution to a problem that you have potentially, but you haven't really gone out there and interviewed anyone else. So it's almost like you've got a case study of one, which is generally, quite often a problem that you've come across yourself and you've gone out there and created what you think is the solution to the problem without doing the interview. Getting in front of people and that's what you're doing on a much bigger scale by doing this.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 16:55

Yeah. I know. Do you mind if I just say a few more points about that? Cause there are a few tips that I think will be helpful. First of all, you would not believe how many people think that they can skip this se step and it's not relevant to them. It is the biggest mistake you're likely to make if you don't get this foundation level thing done. And I know it's a bit scary especially, and I have this complete fear around speaking to my own clients because I'm scared. What if I didn't perform or what, just classic. Self esteem, so I get an independent person to do this for the most part. I'm massively over delivering and it's not actually a concern, I'm not saying I'm immune to it is what I want to communicate there, but do not skip it. Just feel the fear and do it anyway, or get somebody else to do it for you or speak to people you haven't actually worked with. But all your prospective audience, because then you don't have to worry about what they say about the experience of working with you. A couple of points that I really recommend to encourage you to do this. We give our clients a list of questions to ask. Often the conversation becomes more organic, but they've got questions to come back to, to make sure that you're covering off the points that you need. And I really recommend going in with structure and doing these calls, not necessarily in person. But on Zoom, like we're speaking right now, I have this incredible tool plugged in it's from free, it's called Fathom, I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's it basically sits in the room with you and records what you're talking about, creates a transcript afterwards, you also have the option to click bookmarks if a point came up that you really want to remember, but basically you can focus on talking, not note making, and that's really crucial because This is the time to be curious and to really probe. You don't want to be thinking about formulating your next question, not really listening to the answer because probably there's kind of kernels within. It's the classic psychologist approach of, and what else? And what else, like you keep asking that you get to the really juicy stuff. So you want to be able to focus. So you can ask the what else at the right points. And Also, I recommend most of the people that I work with carry around a Moleskine notebook to all their meetings. I don't know if you've probably got one on the table, you can relate. I just recommend on the very back page jot down whenever a client, outside of a customer listening environment jot down when somebody complains about something, not just your kids, but somebody you'd like to work with, or they talk about what they'd hope to do, or a trend that they're concerned they're not focusing on, or just anything. And that is a really good resource when you're thinking about content creation, be it podcast episodes, lead magnet, website content social media posts, just that, that start with that. And then the final thing is. Once you've got all that, and you come in to analyze it, and you're looking at this huge document of transcripts, this is where it's really helpful to use something like ChatGPT. Again, from free, put in all of the gum from all the transcripts from the phone calls, all the notes you've got at the back of your Moleskine and ask it to analyze it and group it so that you've got key themes coming through, and then you've basically got the foundation of what you should be saying to your audience.

Dr Jo Watkins: 19:57

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Those are fantastic take homes guys and I'm going to link, link those things that you talked about. Fathom, I think, and the use of ChatGPT. Again, most medics come out in a visible rash when I mention ChatGPT because that's what's that all about? That's going to take over the world and it's really scary. Yeah. Getting through those idea blocks, generating content from what you've got already, signposting you breaking things down for you. It's just unbelievable, but I just, I want to come back to a couple of things that you have mentioned. And I love what you've just said. I think it's really helpful. I want to come back to this teach a man to fish concept you, that you talked about and. Again, when we go in, when we step into this entrepreneurial world as doctors, we often absorb a huge amount of information from huge numbers of experts. Generally, lots of very glossy people telling us how easy it is to make money while we sleep, how, you can get to 10k months within four months and then leave your corporate job and how life is so much better and glossier on the other side. And I find a lot of people come in. with a complete feeling of failure because they've not achieved that in a very short length of time. And I think some of this is put down to, I've got to be able to outsource everything, or I've got to learn to do everything, and I've had both of those extremes within my Business career. One, initially I did everything myself with the granola. I didn't outsource anything. I didn't really know what I was doing. The whole concept was alien to me through to the how people where we outsourced a lot and grew a team very quickly and that has its different challenges. So How important is it for us to do the things in business, for us to understand these things rather than just letting go of everything? Because surely there's a, there's something here about longevity, isn't there? Yeah, it's about podcasting, for example, and getting kids to help. And, can you speak a little bit about doing it all yourself versus outsourcing?

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 22:00

Yeah, I wrote a lot of points down as you're talking. It made. I was thinking about how my company has developed itself because I really relate to what you're talking about. 10k a month, six figure business reading Denise Duffield Thomas books, like looking at Marie Forleo, thinking course building is the solution. I don't know if any of these words I'm saying will resonate with your audience, but I know certainly if you're in the online business world, those are things that will likely pass through your mind at some point. It's really. I have shiny, massive shiny object syndrome, and it's so easy to get distracted. So I'm going to say a few things. They all relate back to each other. I think the center of what you talked about was this kind of idea of growing a team. So a lot of people think growing your revenue equals growing your team and enlarging things that way. I think it's so important. This is why we do the teacher benefit approach started. for a couple of reasons, because agencies have a really high level of need of control. When I was in my last agency role, I had a quarter of a million pound a year budget. Like it was not insignificant, but I ended up sacking all the external agencies and support we were using because we were redoing everything because we had such a high need for control and having it just. So I was like, this is the not necessarily me, but this is the reality of this work environment. So actually outsourcing doesn't necessarily work for a lot of audiences. So don't think that growing a team or getting extra support is necessarily going to be the key for you and is really kind of, tied in with this success and growth. The other thing about that is it's super important to have done it yourself first. If you don't know how to do it, you will not know how to outsource it in the most efficient way. You will end up wasting money, time, energy, you will write off that channel, whatever I'm thinking. If it was a marketing channel we were outsourcing, like podcast or social media, you will end up saying, oh, it doesn't work because you haven't briefed that person properly. It doesn't mean they weren't a good person. It doesn't mean it wouldn't work for you. So I think it's really important to try things for yourself first and understand what is important. Now that then is mind blowing to the average entrepreneur because that means that you've got to do. So you've got to do everything and you don't. So bringing it back again, I think it's really important to understand what are the essentials, what to focus on. And when you do have shiny object syndrome, or it's just overwhelming, you start entering this world and there are so many messages and you're like, Okay, I will focus, but tell me what to focus on. It's really hard to find somebody who's genuine and has walked the walk, much like you, Joe, and is able to say, no, I can tell you that's a dead end, but you, and, you should be focusing on this, you should be thinking about that. And that is what I offer to my clients as well. It's those things you're doing, I did those, we didn't see any return from it. this is what is offering return. So I recommend starting with that. So you are going to have to try a lot of stuff, but it's good to have a list of stuff that is appropriate to your type of business, your stage of business, your location, because so much of the resources we look at are from the U. S. where the audience type is very different, consumer Behavior is just very different. So it's not necessarily suited to your audience. I think there's a couple of other factors that come into this as well. I think it's really important to be self aware and understand who you are and what your personality is. So I, yeah, I am, not a therapy session, but it's there's so many, I now see as you're asking the question is oh yeah, that's why my business took that channel. So for example We've experimented with loads of different marketing techniques over the years. The reality is I love having conversations like this. So now all of our marketing waterfalls down, cascades down from the podcast, which is essentially just started with me recording conversations I was having anyhow. It wasn't like we went out there and said, we're going to start a podcast. I just hit record on a conversation that I thought would be useful to other people. And how it's evolved is now we're curating. So often it's, um, there's a lot of solo episodes there's a lot of interviews as well. We're interviewing our clients. We're interviewing our own clients. We're interviewing prospective clients who are at stage further on. We're interviewing other service providers who help our clients, so we can understand what is the kind of hybrid, where do things cross over. But they're all conversations that I should be having in my business for personal, what do you call it? Continuous professional development. I think my mom calls it. She's an occupational therapist. And it's that kind of thing. So you think of it as that for your non NHS role, if you have your own business.

Dr Jo Watkins: 26:33

that. So we have an appraisal system in the NHS and we do CPD, we do learning. Yeah. To get through our appraisal and it is the same. I love that analogy. I'm going to have to go and create some sort of feedback about it, but it's just so right. It is our continual professional development and it is our personal development and we cannot expect to outsource. I think you're totally spot on. Outsourcing stuff and not understanding means that you're not giving the information and people you outsource need information to be able to do a great job and however amazing they are. So I think that's brilliant. Can I add a couple of more things on that? Sorry. I

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 27:09

just wanted to say as well it's not just about your personality. It's about. the reality of your life. So the other thing was I was looking to a lot of people when I started my business who are single and don't have kids and don't plan to and have all this time to dedicate to their business. I have two small children. I work part time. Those things are not going to change. They're non negotiables for me. It's really important to me that I work, but I don't, I also need to spend time with my local people and be at certain pickups and drop offs. Not all of them. I need to be flexible so I can go read to my daughter's classroom when I'm invited to at 9am on a Wednesday morning. They never give us enough notice, I'd like to be able to participate in those things. So it's really important to me that I don't create in Marketing my own business, I don't create a a really rigid structure that doesn't have flex. Like I said, those conversations that we record for the podcast are ones we would have anyhow. They then become our podcast, they become our, the transcript is the starting point for our blog post it's the starting point for our email that goes out or multiple emails, and all of our social media content. Both posts and snippets are linked to newsletter. So it just, it's just one conversation and then everything flows down from that. So be realistic about your time, your personality, the things you should be doing anyhow, and how they can things can overlap,

Dr Jo Watkins: 28:34

yes, that's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And this, I think people that are established, they know who they want to help. They're out there. They're maybe they've got their first five paying clients. They're maybe looking towards how to introduce group programs, courses, that sort of thing. Once you know who you're talking to. This is fantastic advice. And I'm starting to see that myself in these conversations that I'm having collaborative of things that I'm doing it all links together. I think for those who are very early days, this is a conversation to listen back to as you go Through your your journey without reaching out to some of the shiny American opportunity, listen, podcasts that are out there. This is real life, two mums talking about how they grow their business around their family. And I'm as guilty. As anybody is occasionally thinking, God, I've created a business that, now I'm sitting in front of zoom all day where my daughter's doing her work on the kitchen table, and I'm popping in and out. And, I've got that flex to cancel for sure. But I've created quite a rigid day. And I think it's sometimes. You do create yourself a job that means that actually nobody else can actually do what you're doing anyway. So you've got to be mindful of what you're creating. And I really bang on about that personality type what you want your life to look like, what, what you're actually signing up to. Brilliant. Love that. So we are going to just touch on, before we wrap up, we're going to touch on this organic reach versus paid reach thing. This is how we came to work together. So I always say to my clients, your business and getting what you do out there is going to take time or money or both. And, you can stand with a loud hailer outside your house and shout, or you can use some of the tools that are now available, particularly for an online business. So I started off looking at Facebook ads and I've done some Facebook ads, but I very, I've done that for a couple of businesses and I've got some amazing people in my world that help with Facebook ads. But I've realized that my clients, entrepreneurial medics are not on Facebook. They're on LinkedIn. They might be on Facebook in their WhatsApp feeds, but they're on LinkedIn. I've been working with Gemma Gilbert, you and I met through Gemma and you put something as a suggestion to me. Do you want to tell. everybody what that was and how that's looked for us.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 30:49

Gosh, it was, I think we first started talking specifically about this in February and then lifelifed and we didn't really do anything about or rather I didn't really proactively do anything about it for quite a long period of time and then we were pivoting our business to more directly I guess target beyond agencies. Cause like I said, agencies were naturally we were targeting them, but naturally through referrals, we were getting different kinds of business. And I realized I was really enjoying working with individuals who have more kind of sovereignty in their business and ability to make decisions and are really clear about who they're serving. Cause they're probably working for a very specific niche, just like you are Joe. So what we worked. to set up is basically is what I would recommend anybody who works with somebody who is a professional or so service providers who work with professionals, whether they are employed or self employed or linkedIn is likely to be the place where they're hanging out. And LinkedIn is a massive, massively undertapped resource in terms of building your audience and finding clients without spending a fortune. So to give some context, the first five years. No more. Eight years of my business, we only use LinkedIn. We only use what I've set up for you in order to win clients. And it was enough. And then I got all ambitious after I came back from my second maternity leave. And I was like, we're going to grow, we're going to take over the world. And spanked a load of money on Facebook ads and lived the hard way. And now I'm redoing that. I've not given up. Yeah, it's not something to give up on, but it's a really easy way to waste a lot of money. Probably too early on in your business. And LinkedIn, I would say, think of it as a kind of sandbox to try things out that ultimately you'll be able to move across to and scale up on meta ads because there are caps in terms of what you can do on LinkedIn that don't exist on other platforms where you're actually paying for traffic. But it's a really good place to test things out. Test out theories without spending a fortune. And you know what? It might just work and you might not need to go to another platform. And in which case, amazing, because I mentioned before that Sales Navigator is 800 pounds a year. That could essentially be your marketing budget for finding your audience. And it was for us, like I said, for the vast proportion of time that we've that Caffeine has been in existence. Sorry, the original question was, what have we done, right?

Dr Jo Watkins: 33:13

Yeah, I think that's what we've done, isn't it? We've gone out there and tried to find entrepreneurial medics through us. We don't, I don't think we need to go into the full details, but it's it's getting that, like you say, service providers who are helping professionals having a system. To get good leads and lead, this whole leads word sometimes makes people uncomfortable, but if you've created a business and you're offering a service, you need to find the people that need the service. There are people out there that need your product.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 33:42

Yeah.

Dr Jo Watkins: 33:42

And it's about finding those individuals on LinkedIn as opposed to Google ads or meta ads.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 33:49

Yeah, absolutely. And there is so there's so much terminology around sales that makes it really scary for people who haven't necessarily had sales as part of their business before. But if you think of it as the people who Hopefully, you're targeting people who would likely work with you, and then you're hoping to engage and get on the radar of people who might work with you at some point in the next five years. And then there are the the kind of much smaller number of people who will be ready to reach to work with you right now. And I think this can be shocking for people who haven't done sales and marketing before. They just assume that they reach out, you create the thing and they will flock. Oh man, I can't tell you. I did marketing at university and I'm still constantly let down by the lack of flocking. So you just anticipate you're going to have to build a long runway in your business in terms of outreach. I was having a conversation the other day with somebody who said that they were strategists. They work with really huge companies. And they said. They believe after the many years in business that a founder should be sending spending 70 percent of their time on marketing and sales, which is petrifying, for the majority of those people that applies to the probably think that's not why I started a business. That's not why I'm in charge of this thing. And essentially what we've helped. You to set up on LinkedIn the way that we recommend to most people as a starting point in terms of marketing and outreach so you can start getting on the radar of those potential clients is has the ability to be automated, which is amazing, because it means that yes, you are like. effort wise, your business is spending 70 percent of its time doing outreach, but physically you're not doing any of it. You're responding to the people who are genuinely interested in what you're offering. It also makes it less scary because, even for somebody who's spent the whole career in marketing and sales, like I still get sweaty when I pick up the phone to make a cold call, like no one feels good about necessarily doing that kind of outreach. So we. There's a couple of things, not just automation, because the automation is doing it on your behalf and you're only responding to the people who are interested. But we also, and the part we haven't talked about here and we haven't necessarily done with your business, Joe, is we create something you're going to be reaching out with that you're really proud to reach out with because you know that it's genuinely something that serves the audience. Which brings us back to that client listening exercise at the beginning. If you've really listened, and it doesn't have to be hard, it's often called a lead magnet. I don't know if your audience is familiar with that term. could be a PDF. I actually have a book. Don't feel like you have to do a book. My very first lead magnet was a five email sequence, which was one tip a day for five days about how to attract clients to your marketing agency. It was just that it wasn't overwhelming and actually had a much better success rate than some of the like. Some of the much longer things that I've done since so create something based on what you did when you listened in and that will serve the audience and reach out to them and say, Hey, I created this thing. I thought based on, your profile, I thought it might be of interest. Would you like a copy? So you're not like hammering them with your work. You're offering something that is a value to them, which is another reason that our clients are proud to get in contact. And yeah, and I think that summarizes it. I think the majority of the people that we work with to give you some context, they serve their service providers, they serve professionals in some capacity, but the things that unify them is they have fear around sales and new business and marketing. They don't have a lot of time. They don't have a lot of money and they don't really have an idea about where to start. And that's ultimately who we serve. This is. This kind of LinkedIn practice that we're talking about when we take our clients through all of those stages, by the way, defining your audience, building your list, doing the client listening, building something that will be a value to them. So building a lead magnet and then reaching out to people and then automating it and then what you do after that point. So we take you through that whole process. So if you were in a position with your business where it might even be concept. You might not even actually have a product or an idea, you might be looking for evidence to leave your job then this would also apply for you, you can go through all those steps and do proof of concept basically.

Dr Jo Watkins: 37:59

Yeah, amazing, fantastic amazing. And I think there'll be various people at various points on that journey. And I think from the people that were within my program who have gone from that medic who's really struggling to see how they can do anything, through to us collating ideas and bringing together and getting out there and finding that proof of concept. They're often, at a position where they've got an audience that they want to help, and they've often got a lead magnet that they have put a lot of time and effort into it. And I think for those people then to get out and find their audience, but as I've experienced, I've been like, Oh, is my lead magnet exactly what I want? And you find yourself like, procrastinating a little bit and you've got to believe in yourself enough to get started with something, even though it might not be perfect. And you've mentioned a couple of things about, things like the numbers of people that you need to bring into your audience who might want to get a free thing, who then might want to get a paid thing and then a bigger paid thing. We could talk for hours, but I think. It's a conversation maybe for us to have a follow up conversation and in six months or so, once we've done this for a bit longer and seeing how it's going to feedback with some results maybe, because I think there's a lot in this episode. So I think, I know we've, I normally ask for advice at the end, but actually, I think we've done this the other way around. We've gone with advice at the

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 39:14

beginning. I think if I can offer one piece of advice and it just touching on what you said, seek completion, not perfection. You're never, it's never going to be perfect. There are so many things that you should see the Asana board between me and my assistants, which is like all the things that I want to fix in the business. And, or you make shinier or better. Yeah. But if you wait, nothing will happen. So in perfect action, start before you're ready. All of those adages, think less, do more. These are the keys to being like, to getting moving. A boss once said to me in my second day of a job, I was absolutely petrified. It was really scary. It wasn't what I'd anticipated. And he said, Charlotte, when do we learn to cycle? It was like, he wasn't. British native, and so his English was a bit unusual, but he was basically saying when do you, when can you actually begin to kind of cycle? And it's like, when you get your momentum up, when you start moving if you won't take your feet off the floor and you won't just continuously pedal, then you're not actually going to do the thing. And I, at the time, I was like, what the hell is this guy talking about? And then in my leaving speech, I actually said it back. And it was like, that was the best bit of advice I think I've had, because you need to do something in order to iterate and improve. So just start.

Dr Jo Watkins: 40:29

Brilliant. Amazing. I will link you up in the show notes, everything that you've talked about, website, LinkedIn, and people can just reach out and get in touch with you if they're interested in finding out more. Yeah. Absolutely. I'd love that. Okay. Thank you so much for your time. Bye bye.