Paula Ronan's Journey Through the Heart of Marketing and Connection

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Weisspreneur's podcast. My name is Nigel Rawlins and I work with a range of professionals in their field. They're often 50 to 60 years old who want to start their own business. In this podcast, I'll be interviewing a range of guests who will be able to tell you how they've done it themselves, and others who will give you hints and ideas and tips and maybe the confidence you need to go out and start your own business. I've been lucky enough to bring you some amazing guests on the show, with lots more to come. And here's another one that I want to introduce you to Paula Ronan, a warm and friendly marketing veteran with a wealth of experience who works as a marketing consultant and coach. Now, if you listen closely, she describes her marketing approach and how best to work as an independent consultant. It's all there to help you with your own expert business. So please listen in and you might like to take some notes. Paula, welcome to the Wise Pannerz podcast. Could you tell us something about yourself and where you're from?

Speaker 2: 1:04

Hi, nigel, it's so lovely of you to ask me on here. I'm delighted to be here. I'm a marketing consultant, trainer and coach and I'm based in the countryside outside New Ross and County Wexford in Ireland. I've been in marketing almost 28 years now. I started my career in marketing in the UK, working in London. A lot of big brands like Coca-Cola, bt, a lot of the big drink companies, big pub companies, a lot of media companies as well Carang Magazine, a brand not sure if you ever read that one KISS FM, etc. And I am Irish. I was born here in Wexford and I wanted to move back in 2000. 2005. So I took a big move back and it was a real adventure for me, let's say that, and quite different. So I had to really relearn everything I had learned up to that point. When I came back to Ireland the whole culture is so different and business is done very differently.

Speaker 1: 2:15

So are you saying that in London the business is very different to Ireland? Yet had the business culture changed in Ireland in that time, or it was just like that always?

Speaker 2: 2:26

I'd say it was like that always and it's probably me that had changed when I left Ireland when I was 17,. Like a lot of other people at that time Sorry, I left Ireland when I was 20. I left New Ross, the town where I'm from, when I was 17. And that time it was 1990 and there was an awful recession here. So, like thousands of other people, I got on a plane with a one-way ticket to London to seek my fortune and I got into the travel industry then and worked there for a few years, ended up working for a few years in Hong Kong and in Bangkok as well, before I came back to London and got into the marketing industry. So I think that it was actually me being out of this environment and I didn't realize. I learned how business worked in Asia and London and assumed that it was the same in Ireland. But that was a silly assumption to make on my part and I soon learned different.

Speaker 1: 3:30

So is it just quieter or takes more work? What is the difference?

Speaker 2: 3:36

Well, an example of it is in London. We had a way of getting business which was that, and actually our way of getting business was developed over years. I was lucky to be in an agency called Angel London with Trevor Rudder and I had a very small stakeholder in that agency and we used to make cold calls. We used to send out letters, we used to try and get on a pitch list, get a creds meeting, Get that meeting, try and get a pitch, do the pitch and try and compete for the business. And that was the way we did things. And when I came to Ireland I tried the same formula. But when I ran companies to say, oh hi, I'm Paula and at the time I had a little agency and I'd love to meet you and talk about your marketing and what you might need, I got loads of meetings and I thought I was great, because that's not the way it worked. In England it would be hard to get a face to face meeting with people, and if you got a face to face meeting, there'd be a good chance that there was a pitch there. But I got loads of meetings because people are friendlier, nicer, they're not going to tell you no or to get lost on the phone, and so I get loads of meetings and people would talk about oh yeah, sure, sure, yeah, come back to me sometime. But nothing would happen because in truth, they didn't want any marketing at that time and when I came back in 2005, it was the end of the boom, so a lot of people didn't need us and it took me time to understand that the way that business is done here is really on trust and that people needed to get to know you before they talk to you about their actual needs or before they would take a chance on working with you. So they want to know you, where you're based, what kind of a person you are, who you were working with before. A lot of my business comes through referrals from people who have worked with me and they're just chatting to others. So it's really getting to know people in a kind of deeper way here in Ireland. So that's just one of the examples, I think it's also. I suppose that marketing at that time was not part of the business culture Outside Dublin Dublin is the capital city here in Ireland and down in Wexford, in Waterford, where I live in Wexford, marketing just wasn't done. People did their business and depended on doing a good job for people, having a good product, and that's what determined how much business they got would you say that that culture is still there now, or has it shifted because the world's changed? It has definitely changed. Businesses in the southeast of Ireland are far more aware of what needs to be done and the opportunities that they're missing out on by not having a marketing strategy or marketing implementation, even marketing activities happening the whole time. I think that's a lot to do with the increase in social media usage Not just social media usage by their customers, but also Linked in, like people are sharing. They can see what people are sharing across the world About successes that they're having because of marketing campaigns, so they're far more up-to-date and aware of what can be done with the bit of marketing.

Speaker 1: 7:20

So when you went to London to get involved in marketing, did you have any qualifications in marketing? I'll be honest, I have none. I've just been self-taught over over 20 years.

Speaker 2: 7:31

Well, I actually went to the College of Marketing and Design when I was 17 College of Marketing Design in Dublin and I studied marketing there. I did a year of it and I Really did not like it and there was a lot of economics and things like that and I thought it was so boring and it was so complicated. I Failed a couple of the modules in the first year and I had to reset the exams and I I made a mess of it. I wasn't focused, I wasn't motivated, I just wasn't into it at all, so I ended up dropping out and so when I went to London I actually got into the travel industry and and Just worked my way up and I enjoyed that very hard work but a great gang of people and lots of great experiences. It was wholesale travel, so bringing people from all over the world to Europe for group tours. But when I came back to London, I got a job in Curtis High, a little sales promotion agency Well, not that little, and they were very innovative, very ahead of their time, and I got in on the ground floor there, which I'm hugely grateful for and my first job was phoning pubs To see if they got their promotional kit. They were giving a promotion kit to help them sell more booze, basically, and Finding out how the promotion went and what could be done better, etc, etc. I'm trying to get photos back from them and all that. And I absolutely loved it. I loved it so much. So I again just worked my way up and learned on the job and did some courses as I was going along. So that company very kindly put me through Sales promotion diploma I think it was, I can't really remember now but to learn the law of Promotions particularly, which is really important for us, along with some other great skills. But they taught me and my clients taught me, and my mistakes taught me as well as my Success, and so I put the hours in that way. Now I have to say that a year before last, I did the mini MBA in marketing with Mark Ritzen Professor Mark Ritzen, who currently resides in your fair country, there in Australia. He does it under marketing week and I absolutely loved it. That was all online. I loved it so much as the way it was taught and also, coincidentally, his philosophies I suppose you call them really chimed in with my own, because it really is not media led and About not getting up, caught up in trends. It's rather focusing on the strategy, on the foundation of a marketing strategy for each business, and doing the hard work there and then applying the relevant Media tactics, the marketing tactics, choosing your channels, etc. To do it. So I totally love that and I would recommend it to anybody. I went back again then last year and Did the mini MBA in brand management, which was also brilliant, and I'd recommend that as well. It's all online, on-demand learning, but it's done such way that I felt I could engage with it quite well and it kept me in line. I didn't just get fed up after a couple of weeks and not log into it. They're brilliant and they have really helped me to evolve in terms of my own Offer into clients and how I work with them.

Speaker 1: 11:17

Now that's interesting because you are a freelancer yourself since 2008. It must have been a bit of a shock coming back to Ireland and then finding it difficult to actually get work. So that's probably the scariest part of being a freelancer is where am I going to get work from? And that's what the marketing is for. And Another issue about being a freelancer is it tend to be pretty well up to date with theories and practices and all that which you're showing evidence of doing that. So let's go back to a little bit about 2005, how you survived. You got some revenue coming in and then we'll talk about how doing these mini MBAs and things like that Add some depth to your knowledge. So let's go back a bit in time. How did you survive when you found it so difficult to actually get people to start paying you to do work?

Speaker 2: 12:07

well, before I left London I actually approached National Radio Station here in Ireland, today FM, and I managed to get work from them. So I managed to get them as a client before I came over and that meant flying over to see them a couple of times before I made the big move and that was brilliant. I was going to say that was really lucky and it was really lucky. But it was down to the work that I had done with Angel London and with Curtis High in marketing for radio stations before that. So that actually kept me going for a couple of years. When I came over actually set up a tiny, tiny agency, which was another dumb idea of mine, because I learned years later that I should never have done that. I should have just been myself worked on my own From the beginning, but I had to go with what I had learned. I'm like a little duck just copying the mother duck what I'm behind. That's, that's me. So I had today FM and I found it really really difficult to get more business on top of that. To be honest with you, I made loads of phone calls and I had two people working with me at the time and they were on the new business hunt as well. I'm trying to remember back now what clients I did manage to get in the end, but as far as I remember, when they did come through, it was because of knowing people. I remember clearly one day I had heard this thing about not nepotism, but that it's far easier to get business if you knew people in there that could introduce you or whatever. I remember clearly one day ringing Wexford Creamery and I had a cousin who was the financial director there and I didn't ring him because I said I'm not going down that route, I'm not going to be that person that pulls strings because they know people. And I rang the switchboard and said, who should I talk to about marketing? And they put me through to the operations director at the time, john O'Connor, and I rang him and I said, oh, hello, it's Paula Ronan and I'm calling from blah blah, blah and wondering if I could come in and meet you. And he said Ronan, ronan, ronan, are you related to Frank Ronan? And I said, well, yes, I'm a first cousin. Oh, come in. Then come in, and that was it. Actually. I got to work with them over the years. Now, in fairness, I had to prove myself. It wasn't just get in the door and get the business, and we did great work with them for Wexford Cheddar, a really beautiful cheese produced here in County Wexford. Another client I got at the time was Dundee and that was due to cold calling not necessarily all cold calling, but emailing. I had a newsletter at the time called the Magpie, a newsletter called the Magpie, so it was a mix of cold calling and that newsletter. I got to have a meeting with a fella called Fred Carlson who's a Swedish guy living in Wexford and probably he had a different attitude to the other Irish guys who'd grown up here. He was better placed, I suppose, to meet up with somebody who he wasn't related to because he wasn't from here. But he was a fella that set up a brilliant business called Dundee that sells secondhand stuff, basically from one person to another. That was the first site like that that was set up in Ireland. He started it in his kitchen he was doing the meetings in his kitchen there down in Clarnard and he turned it into a very big business and sold it on and sold it on again. I think at the moment it's owned by the same people as Daft A, which is a massive property site in Ireland. So that was another example, I suppose, of the business I did, and I'll say, though, just remembering back, I did waste an incredible amount of time and energy doing pictures for our clients in the hopes of getting work that didn't come to anything. You know, people that ask you to do things for free are for very cheap and see how it goes. I stopped doing those after actually it must have been a few years, I think because I found that they were just a waste in a lot of cases, and I feel now that that's not a good way for a person to decide whether they're going to use you or not, and I think the client has to commit financially for work to, you know, be effective and for me to be effective, because it'll help them to actually implement and to be committed to that work and to make it happen. If it's just coming free, they don't feel the pressure to make sure that everybody in the organization is going to come on board and they're going to put their backs into it as well as you.

Speaker 1: 17:39

I guess that's one of the biggest issues. When people first start out as a freelancer is wondering whether they should do work for free or do the pitching. I never pitch. I just say, look, this is what's going to cost you and if you want to get started, let's get going. I've come across students in the past who've done really good work of being ripped off by businesses, and that's not fair either. It makes me get a bit angry. So let's talk about some of those jobs. What do you actually do when you work with a client?

Speaker 2: 18:08

With an ideal client, and I have several ideal clients and I'm delighted about that. I'm very grateful for their business. What I do initially is to set up a brand strategy, so I would usually do a workshop and this is something I've learned over the years as well to do these workshops so that the client is 100% involved from the beginning. When I started out here, I would feel that pressure that I would have to go away and develop a strategy, a campaign etc. On my own and deliver it to the client, and then they would say, oh, thank you, and users, and blah, blah, blah. And what I've learned is that the client needs to be involved from the beginning and they need to input. The client is the expert on their business and, as a marketing consultant or a fractional CMO or whatever name I'm using, but I have to learn from them everything about their business. So I do a workshop that interrogates every aspect of their business. I have a process that I developed myself, trying to figure out what their positioning is, what they deliver to customers and to me that is the most important bit of marketing work that any business can do ever and it's something that they need to stick to in all of the marketing communications that they do till the end of time. It can be reviewed now and again as the business changes, as customers change, as the marketplace changes, but by and large, it's something that you need to stick to in order for your marketing to be effective. So, whether you're positioned as the highest quality or whatever, you have a client and a state agent in Waterford here in Ireland and their position and statement. I'm sure they won't mind me sharing it. The name of the estate agents is Liberty Blue. Their position statement or customer proposition is that they deliver happiness customers by going the extra mile and through their straight talking advice and their positioning is as helpful experts and that's just that big sentence boiled down. So that gives them fantastic direction in everything that they do. So they know when they're thinking about doing an activity. Whether they should do it or not is based on whether that chimes in with them being helpful experts. Is this helpful? Is this showing our skills etc. And even their internal processes? Delivering happiness to customers means that they're really focused on upskilling their team in their customer service, bringing in new technologies and new face-to-face process or whatever it is to make the experience better for our customers, and that's something that has been a huge differentiator for them Over the last 10 years I've been working with them now, I think, and has changed the business profoundly. It's hard in a way to judge the impact of that, to measure the effect of it, because it seems to be intangible and actually the tactical things like Facebook posts or whatever down the line. You have to kind of draw a line between them and that original position statement to see what it has delivered to the company in terms of revenue and profits or whatever. But it really has and the owner of that business is very open about sharing how much the brand strategy has helped that whole company. So a lot of what I'm doing at the beginning for a business and it's hard work getting that positioning statement or that customer proposition down on paper in such a way that everybody agrees with it and agrees to commit to it. The following off from that are deciding and agreeing the brand values that the company has or the business has, and that might be that they value integrity or they value transparency or quality or whatever Brand values are. I find bandied about a lot. So if I ask any given company what their brand values are, they'll trot out something like service, customer service. However, when you interrogate how that shows up, it doesn't. So that's a total waste the waste of time, resources, money and in fact I think in a lot of cases it's detrimental to the brand because you don't believe that brand, you don't trust it. Having ads out there saying customer is number one and you phone up and you're put on hold forever and you're angry, you hate that company in the end and it could be detracting from that company Anyway. So it's about brand values and then we move on to a brand personality that we try and figure out the tone, the types of images, the type of activity, even the media channels, anything that's going to get a little personality across. That can make a huge difference, especially nowadays with ChatGPT, as we were briefly discussing before our interview the magic of ChatGPT and it is an amazing tool. Any AI is an amazing tool. But there's going to be a plethora of brands all talking the same with that kind of ChatGPT tone and those overblown adjectives everywhere. But if you have your own brand personality nailed down, the kind of language that your brand uses, you can feed that into an AI machine learning King and Me, bob and actually make it sound like you, but you need to police that yourself. It's hard work. It's hard work to make sure that you review everything and you tick it and measure it against what you set out at the beginning. So in brand personality. Then we move on to talking about brand messaging. So how does that customer proposition, positioning statement, brand values and that personality, what words do you use to get that across to the target market and to the people within your own organization? So that's the next big job. Then we look at and enough people do this what we look at is marketing funnel. So the marketing funnel is just figuring out where you need to focus your energies to grow your business. So it's trying to measure, and for a lot of small businesses this is a headwreck because they don't have the big budgets to go out and do a lot of research to find out what their awareness level is amongst a target market. But we need to put a finger in the air or make up a measurement just to give us direction at the beginning and then develop a culture of finding out, caring about the customer. Enough to find out. As we go through every year, we should be able to add on more information so as to find out, number one, what audience or market segment you're targeting and why, how many of them there are, what the value of them is and what common denominators they have versus other market segments. Then it's about thinking of all of that market segment that you're targeting. How many of them are already aware of your business? And of the number that are aware of your business, how many would actually give your brand or product or whatever any consideration, or would they just disregard it Like they have it? Oh, yeah, yeah, I know that brand or whatever, but no, no, I'm not interested. How many are actually interested? And the amount that are interested, how many actually go and find out something about it, like engage with the brand in any way, and then from there, how many would actually make an inquiry or do a bit of shopping and then leave the cart or whatever, or that type of thing, and then how many would buy? And then how many would buy again? And then how many would tell friends? And so the point of that is, for each level of that funnel, you have a conversion rate and that conversion rate should tell you what your marketing objectives are and they give you a little benchmark to revisit next year. So when you know what your objectives are, that's when we start looking at marketing activities, and so we may say if awareness is the biggest problem, then we may look at mass media, etc. Etc. And develop a campaign that is tailored to your target market segment and to your objectives.

Speaker 1: 27:32

That's all that's actually from the sound of it. You're actually disciplining the company to focus on their market and then you're giving them the frameworks and the structures to actually do it. But the other thing you've just explained very clearly that if they don't have any buy in, it's not going to really happen. And that's the biggest issue I know I used to work with a former Hillopaka marketing manager when I first started out. He was actually my mentor and there were times where we worked with a CEO or something for a little while and then we realized that he was never going to do anything, so we had to walk away because it would have been a waste of our time. We could have taken their money, but that's the issue. But what you're also saying is this is the same for every freelancer or small business they have to do the whole process and what you're also saying there is they've got to be disciplined, they've got to be clear about their positioning, who the target market is, before they actually do things. So maybe we should just have a look at. You mentioned you did those mini MBAs In doing those. How has that informed the work you do today?

Speaker 2: 28:39

Many MBAs allowed me, I think mostly to be able to articulate what I had been trying to get across to clients before. It gave me a structure, a much better structure and the words to say what I had meant before. It made me, I suppose, more confident about what I was doing and made me feel like that was more credible. Nigel, as a marketing consultant or CMO or freelancer over the years, I doubt myself sometimes, because there's so many marketers that focus on digital marketing, social media marketing, seo, whatever only. And that seems to be when people talk about oh, we need some marketing, that's what they mean, that's what they have in their head. For me, I've always thought because, maybe because I've just been in it so long, like I started before there were any mobile phones and actually before there were regular emails. So to me, marketing is not about a technology or whatever. It's actually about the customer and what they want, how you can deliver to them and how you can reach them. So it doesn't matter really what's trendy or anything. You have to think of my customer. Whatever you're selling, maybe my customer reads tractor magazines and that's what I should be doing there. So I've always believed that, I suppose because I've seen so many trends pass or get bigger or whatever, and people get caught up in things and go oh, this is the thing, this is the thing. But if it doesn't have that strong strategic foundation, it's only going to be sharp term, it's only going to give you a sales lift over the short term and you're going to look like everybody else, sound like everybody else and put yourself into a vulnerable position. So the Mini MBA because it chimed in with that really gave me a lot of confidence to say, yes, this is it, this is the way, and to allow me to present that to clients as a cohesive structure to base their marketing on.

Speaker 1: 31:06

That's the issue you've just mentioned, which I think is really important is, how do we articulate some of these things we do and I'm constantly reading to find the right words to use to explain what's in my head. And you actually found it. And that's the interesting thing that I'm seeing about freelancers they do go out and do courses and keep themselves up to date. So when you walk into an organization that's got employees, even marketing departments, how do you find your knowledge compared to theirs?

Speaker 2: 31:35

That is a great question. Now I'm trying to think across the clients that I've worked with. A lot of my clients are small family businesses at the moment and they don't have a marketing resource in-house, but a lot of them now are investing in their team and investing courses for them. I really love learning. I love finding out new things, but I'm putting those new things to use, framing them around the overarching big picture marketing strategy that I love and helping clients through those. So I think the onus is on me to continue my learning journey so I can bring it to clients. A lot of clients, as I was saying earlier, they're more aware of what's going on in the world and they understand about chat, gbt, they understand about AI now, which is brilliant, and they're able to do courses themselves in it. But sometimes a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing because if you look at the surface of it, you might go racing down a certain road and say, well, everybody is doing this, I've read this thing and we need to do this now. Sometimes that might be right, but from my point of view it needs to be interrogated against your marketing strategy, your brand strategy. That's the master of everything that we do. Marketing knowledge has gone up, up, up in the sky across the board, where most clients now are well able to do their own social media posts. That's brilliant. That is brilliant. That's a long way away from where it was Clients with the marketing department. I'm not really working with any client that has a full marketing department at the moment. The marketing courses that are available in the colleges in Ireland nowadays are brilliant and they're far more hands-on, I think, than they were, and they're far more scientific than they were, I think, in my day when I dropped out because I was bored, and that's fantastic. But I think that you have to keep on top of it the whole time and do you know what, even just for your own inspiration, you find things out or you remember things that you should be implementing, that you can't stop learning of whatever business that you're in, you're going to get something out of every course that you do or every seminar that you go to, even if it's oh. No, I don't like that. I don't agree with that. No, at least it makes you veer towards what you do believe in and you do understand the evidence, trying to get evidence for that as well.

Speaker 1: 34:31

Well, one of the things I think we spoke about before we started the podcast conversation is the thing about habits that every business needs to do. So I know you go in and you give them the strategy, but then they've actually got to implement it. And for me, every large business, every small business, has to do their marketing because they've got to bring in the revenue and the marketing is part. Their sales is part of that, but the marketing is to attract the customer in the first place. But if you're a one person business, what are the sort of habits do you think you should be in if you're doing your marketing?

Speaker 2: 35:07

Well, I heard a great statistics the other day in the network group that I was in and it was something like that. As a freelancer, we can only work about 150 days a year. I mean invoiciable days, so you have to figure out. Then that leaves you X amount of days, hours or whatever for your admin, for your upskilling and for your marketing. So it's a good idea to put aside and put a time block in your diary for your own marketing. Maybe a couple of hours on a Friday and a couple of hours on a Monday, something like that. Where you are and your business is the highest priority and that you can do those important things for your business away from the urgent things that come up then for the rest of the day and the rest of the week. Monday is probably a great time to do that because it's before you're inundated with other urgent tasks, and I think Friday is a great day as well because you're trying to get the head clear so you can leave the desk alone whatever time you're going to shoot off on a Friday. I would say that it's really important as a freelancer to do the work that's going to promote your brand, so that's going to be your blogs and newsletter and LinkedIn posts, things like that. What I have found over the years is that it's worth doing these things before you feel you have to, because it's way harder when you have to. So what I mean is you have plenty of business. At the moment, I actually have loads of clients. I don't need to do a blog, I don't need to do my newsletter. I can let it slide. That's grand, until it comes to a place where, oh my God, there's actually no business coming up in the books in three months time. What am I going to do To start doing it then? Not only are you trying to pick back up on the audience that you built up and all that engagement I really keep. People can smell the desperation off you, and that's true for every business as well. Whether you're selling calculators or tea or whatever. Doing marketing when it feels like you don't need to is always more powerful and effective than the marketing that you will do when you have your mortgage coming up and you have no money in the bank and you're desperate to get a bit of business. It's always better to do that. I have a home office now, and I've been working in my home office since 2012. That's 12 years now, and over the years I have really struggled with the discipline to keep focused on my work, especially with a home office, because there's hundreds of things that you can think of doing when you're supposed to be doing something else, things that you wouldn't do normally, like oh, I wonder, should I put on a wash now? Or start thinking about, oh, if I start making the dinner now, I'll have it. Blah, blah, blah, all these things. And so what do I do? I have a Excel time sheet that I keep for myself and for every client and I fill that in religiously and that's just through Havas, through going in and doing this every day. I have a to-do list. I used to have the to-do list on the Excel sheet and I kind of do still, but I also have it on a notebook. So this is two pages of this A5 notebook is filled with I think it's like I don't know 60-something things to do. But I do it in the notebook because writing it down helps it to stick in my brain a little bit more. And then, but I have that notebook and I have another diary and on the diary, on that page, I'll just write down three things from that list and those three because I don't want to feel overwhelmed. And when I do them I make sure I tick them off because you get that little dopamine hit when you do tick them off. Other things that I do I have an app on the phone that helps. It's called Forest and it turns off all the other apps on the phone while you're working and you can collect points and plant a real tree or something like that when you get to a certain number, and then part of a group called Work Buddies Online. So that means that there's a Zoom group of other freelancers and students or whoever that have a Zoom meeting and we all just work away and we set a timer for an hour or whatever and we have a very short break and then we go back to work. There's something about that that helps to focus as well. So, with all those bits and bobs have helped me to keep at it and to not get too distracted and not to say now I know it's kind of not trendy, but it's something that people are talking about more at the moment that having a bit of daydreaming time is good for you as well. And, nigel, I'm not sure if you have this experience as well. But I'm so diligent now with my time sheets and all that stuff for clients and it sometimes surprises me with clients that I have a particular client that I'm thinking of and they were in the insurance game and a couple of years ago and I used to go into their office for a meeting and I'd go there and there would be at least 20 minutes of chatting and just messing and having a bit of banter before the meeting would start and I would actually be coming out in a sweat thinking, oh my God, this is costing you money. In time, my head, I'm going to have to invoice you now for this chitchat or whatever. I'm trying to get them to focus and say come on, let's think about this or whatever. You know what. That's probably important too. I think when we're at home on our desk, in our office, at our desks, we need to have our own systems to keep us straight, and that works for me. But in an office situation, actually building up those relationships through having a bit of a laugh and getting to know each other is really important and it helps when your brainstorming ideas about a brand and what you can do next and whatever. That kind of relationship helps as well, so it is worthwhile.

Speaker 1: 41:46

No, I totally agree. I remember once one client asked my mentor and I to go out in the bush in Australia it was the countryside and it was an hour outside of our local city, which is Geelong for an hour meeting and we had to charge them for the whole day. And we said why are you asking us to come? We still have no idea why they want us to be there. But there was two of us and we both had to charge. And we said to them do you realize? But what you're saying in those meetings is the old 80-20 rule. The 20% of what we do brings in 80% of the results. So often in a meeting it's only about 10 minutes of that meeting where the most of the work actually gets done. And it's the same when you have a working day in an office, a person who works in an office. A lot of their day is taken up with meetings and other things, whereas the real work is just done in a tiny chunk sometimes. Now that's the problem when we work at home is the consultant. Working at home is a lot more efficient because when we know what we're doing and if we're really disciplined, an hour's worth of work on a client is probably worth a couple of days to somebody who's probably full time in that organization, or even a week. I know that my mentor he's passed away now when he was a marketing manager at Hewlett Packard, used to disappear for a few days because he did his work in three days. He was very efficient and very focused, and then just hid, just disappeared, because he couldn't explain to them everything's on track, everything's organized, everything's happening, and that's the case. That's wonderful. I just remember the other day, I've probably been working at home now for 20 years, I suppose. Yeah, I don't care, now I'll go and hang out the washing If I've done too much concentration. I'll go and pull out weeds in the garden, because we've got a big garden here and yesterday we were bottling peaches so I had to cut up the peaches. I didn't care, because it's a good way of clearing your head and using your diffuse mode of your brain to just drift off somewhere.

Speaker 2: 43:53

Yeah, and it's good for your health as well, I think, to stand up every I don't know half an hour or so. Just stand up and move a little bit and sit down again. I totally agree. I do a little bit of horse riding as well, and in Ireland in the all-women winter it's so dark, you know, it's only starting to get bright there now and it's past half eight in the morning and it'll be dark again at five o'clock, and so if I want to keep the horse going I have to run out at three o'clock or whatever. And that's a great thing as well, because you know you're sitting here, you're just going. Oh my God, I can't believe it. I'm in the middle of something, or this pressure is on and I need to do whatever. The horse makes me go out, because if I don't do it I'll be sorry the next time. I could get bucked off or anything. And when you do get out, it's brilliant for your head. You come back much more refreshed, better able to think, more creative and more energized. You're right, you know you have to have that balance there as well, but still in all, I'm the type of person that needs to account for that on my Excel sheet or whatever for myself and I'm afraid, if I let go, that I'll lose that discipline. You know, when I started years ago, jesus, I remember Nigel coming to the end of a week or whatever and going oh my God, oh my God, I forgot to do this. I could nearly forget a whole stream of work for a time just because I was getting used to managing myself and not having somebody in the office going oh, will we talk about this or whatever. You know it's a skill just managing yourself and discipline and yourself and minding yourself. Another thing, nigel, that occurs to me now and again with other clients that I'm talking to, but it's the same for us If we were to write a job spec and if we were to write a piece about managing a director or whatever to do our jobs, we wouldn't be half as hard on ourselves. No, we'd be kind of respecting our break time and say making sure that we get holidays and all that. Last year was the first time I took a two week holiday in 20 years. It's actually more than 20 years actually, but anyway, this year I'm hoping that I'll be able to do it again and mind myself again. We wouldn't expect that from an employee that we were paying to do this job. But that's the freelancer life.

Speaker 1: 46:26

Yes, I know I've gone and booked a cruise next year in February, late February, to go from Australia to the Philippines, hong Kong, and then end up in Japan. A total of three weeks for the cruise, but I'll pay for the internet, so hopefully it's high speed internet on the boat.

Speaker 2: 46:44

Oh my God. My advice to you is actually don't be working when you're on that boat.

Speaker 1: 46:50

Most of my work. If there's a problem, I just handball it to one of my contractors. I just keep an eye on things. I don't do all the work anymore.

Speaker 2: 46:58

Very good, that sounds marvelous.

Speaker 1: 47:01

It looks wonderful too.

Speaker 2: 47:02

It's my friend's dream holiday and she has always wanted to go to America and ride horses on a ranch. Oh, so we actually saved up for a couple of years together, me and two friends had a little kitty that we were putting money into for a couple of years, just so we'd be sure to make it happen. So it was out in Wyoming on the cattle ranch.

Speaker 1: 47:24

It was fantastic. That does sound good. So, yes, I think it's important that we advise all freelancers to make sure they do have holidays and not work all day and all night. And that's the difficulty. You're in an office. I get into trouble because I spend too much time in the office. But I said this is my job. I'm working. A client wants something done, but most of my time now is I'm organizing other people to do stuff, because, unless I can do it quickly and to subcontract work nowadays, it's a reasonable price compared to what you might be paid to self. So it's crazy to try and do everything.

Speaker 2: 48:01

Yeah, I forgot to mention actually the things that I use to keep myself straight. I also have a productivity coach that I use. She first came on board as a virtual assistant because somebody in a network told me that you need to try a virtual assistant. But I don't have a whole lot of work because I don't do a whole lot of implementation. I don't have a whole lot of work that I can delegate. So I actually ended up using her as a productivity coach and, funnily enough, that's what she does all the time now. She likes that. I used to call her my chief arse kicker, so she has my priorities. We have my list and these are the important things not the client urgent things which are really important as well for any clients listening. They are really important as well. They are things that are going to keep me in business and keep me financially and everything okay, and we have a meeting once a week where we go through where I'm up to with that stuff and how am I going to complete them. So, yeah, that was important when I was going to ask you with your subcontractors and things like that are they people that you deal with online? Are they kind of like virtual assistants as well?

Speaker 1: 49:19

Yeah, yeah, I've got to be honest, I rarely meet my clients and I have never met my subcontractors. It's all online, all by email or I might take a screenshot and recommend things. But I rarely see my clients too, and I've worked with some of them for 15 years. Some I haven't seen for months and months and months. So it's a bit weird my business. They just say, look, can you get this done? And I can get that done, but the problem with not meeting them, I can't explain to them. Well, we could work on your strategy to clarify what we're trying to do here, because sometimes I can be sent things from the same business that all contradict each other, and then I'll do it and then I'll get another one. I said, well, I want to go and strangle someone. Yeah, no, it. Look, it's interesting being in business. But I think you've hit it on the nail. You must always be marketing and the worst thing would happen is, if you're out of money, you stop marketing. But you know a lot of marketing can be free by getting on to LinkedIn and posting. It doesn't have to cost anything anymore.

Speaker 2: 50:28

I always say no, that's not free, that it's a misconception for people to think, oh yeah, social media marketing is free, whatever, it's actually not free. It's your time and your resource and as freelancers and for clients, you really have to value your time. You think how much your time is worth and don't waste it. You know it's a big deal. So if you're going on LinkedIn or whatever, just be wary of the time that you're investing and what you're going to get out of that. I don't know about you maybe it's only me but sometimes going on I'm not very good. I have to pull up my socks on LinkedIn Now since Christmas in damp Ireland here, nearly everybody I know has had a dose of the flu or something since then. So it's been a little bit of a funny start to the year, but I need to get back on that and get more active. But sometimes when you go on LinkedIn you just go down rabbit holes. You could be there for a couple of hours Sometimes you end up someplace. good, like signing up for a course that you hadn't intended to or going to an event that you hadn't intended to, and that's probably a great thing for your development. But you just have to be wary of us.

Speaker 1: 51:42

I'm trying to find out more and more about how LinkedIn works. So just the other day I put out a podcast with Tracy Enoz out of America, so she was explaining a bit more about how LinkedIn works, and I also interviewed Selena Jung a little while back about LinkedIn. So I'm going to try and find an Australian who can talk about LinkedIn, because I think it's something the professionals need to learn how to use. But when you go on there, you do see a lot of stuff just flowing at you that you go oh golly, why are they doing that? And there's techniques that people are using that are really annoying at the moment. You know just a couple of lines just trying to suck you into reading the next bit and you go they're all doing it.

Speaker 2: 52:23

Yeah, you're right, nigel, it has changed a little bit. That's my clickbait, and people are sharing things that don't seem to be business related. Anyway, it's getting to be a little bit of a time thief. In a lot of cases it's brilliant, but, as you say, you have to decide how you're going to manage it and you'll be the boss.

Speaker 1: 52:45

I agree. Well, we'll probably come to the end now. So who would you like to contact you and how would you like them to contact you?

Speaker 2: 52:53

Well, I love working with some wide range of businesses, but generally speaking, I work with small business owners that don't have senior marketing resource in house. So far, I work with businesses in Ireland and the UK Northern Ireland, scotland, england and Wales but I'm very open to working with other clients across Europe, australia, america. You can contact me at LinkedIn. My website is Ronanmarketingie, or you can email me at Paula at Ronanmarketingie, and I'd be delighted to hear from you. I forgot to mention I did another course last year and that was master's level in mentoring what's it called now? Senior Executive Coaching and Mentoring. Through the Help to Grow scheme in the UK, I was a volunteer mentor and I still am a volunteer mentor for businesses in the UK, and they put me through this master's as, I suppose, a thank you, and I really enjoyed it. It was so much work I had no idea, but it was worth it. I learned a lot and I've met amazing businesses. I offer that as well marketing coaching coaching for your business and I love doing it, so people can ask me about that as well.

Speaker 1: 54:16

That's fantastic. Thank you very much for joining me. It's been fabulous. Thank you again.

Speaker 2: 54:22

Well, it was lovely to meet you, Nigel. I hope we stay in touch now, Now that I've met you. I appreciate you having me on the show and I wish you all the best.

Speaker 1: 54:32

I'm looking forward to continuing to provide you with engaging and informative episodes to help you level up in your entrepreneurial journey. Thank you for joining me on the Wise Panoes podcast.