#392 Celia Polkinghorne – Transcript

James Wrigley
Hello, welcome back to another episode I’m James Wrigley. And today I’ve got the pleasure of talking to the CEO of Polkinghorne bonsai digital marketing Celia sent to you off, off offline or whatever you want to say before we started recording and I see face popping up on Tik Tok all the time. So I wanted to get you on and have a chat. Thanks. Thanks for joining me.

Celia Polkinghorne
I’m so pleased to be here. It’s a total pleasure. Thanks for asking me.

James Wrigley
So, bonsai digital marketing route just actually would have been a good soundbite to grab the the history of of your business and how you how you got into what you’re doing. But maybe, maybe let’s start about what is your business? Who you tend to be working with? how that how that evolved?

Celia Polkinghorne
Yeah, I think the most important thing to get across about one’s eye is the positioning my positioning in the market, right. So I think when you’re just a regular business owner out there in the world, you know, you don’t specialize in marketing, you don’t have a particularly strong understanding of marketing. Typically, you think, when you think, you know, outsource marketing service, you think marketing agency, right. And then the marketing agency does like graphic design and branding work and website work and maybe you know, running some Facebook ads or something like that paid advertising. Or you might think of something like an online content agency, or a LinkedIn lead generation agency, something like that. But no one really thinks of my type of business, because it’s not an obvious type of business to understand, right. But the important part about my business is I help people build their organic marketing foundation, right. So it’s the, it’s the organic marketing foundation that you have to have in place before you ever use, like an agency service, essentially. So it’s not that you don’t use agencies, of course you can, but there’s certain things that you’ve got to have in place, in your, in your business, before agency work will really generate really good results for you. And that’s what I help people build. So organic just means without using paid advertising, and just doing things, you know, just as you do James on Tick, tock, organically, you know, just get on and you talk and you be yourself and you build up your personal brand, and just generate an understanding in the world of who you are first, so that when we you know pay for traffic, we pay to send traffic to your online presence, there’s actually something for people there when when they get there, because it’s not the ad that makes money for you. It’s what happens on the other end of the ad that makes money for you. Right? And that’s up to the business owner at the end of the day. So that’s what I help people with.

James Wrigley
Gotcha. Right. And so the history of it. So your work would say, as I was saying before, press record that your work with a lot of financial advisors and others in kind of service based businesses, how how did that come about? How did that evolve? Yeah, so

Celia Polkinghorne
it’s a bit of a story. But um, I was actually living in Japan for 10 years. So two years ago, during COVID, I finally was able to get a flight back to Australia, but But prior to that, I’d been living in Japan for 10 years. And I’d been working as a, you know, a content creator, copywriter and editor, you know, a freelance writer, a curriculum writer, just all sorts of copywriting jobs, and, you know, essentially just using the written word to get an outcome, which is what marketing is right. And leading up to coming back to Australia, I knew I was coming back to Australia, you know, within the next one, two or three years before I came back. And I was sort of wondering about the job search, right, and I, you know, was going to be probably a bit of a jump or a bit of a gap, you know, before I got a job, so I thought, I know, I’ll start a business to carry me over in case it’s difficult or something for me for the first few months to get a job. So at least I’ll have some, you know, I’ll have some income coming in, right. And I decided to start a marketing service a done for you marketing service, which at the time was a LinkedIn lead generation service. And as part of starting that service, I wanted to just try the methods that I’d been creating on a service business, you know, for free, right, just to make sure that it works. But I realized I didn’t actually really know very many at that time, I didn’t know very many directors or owners of service based businesses, and I wasn’t quite sure who to ask, which sounds so funny now, because I feel like everyone I talked to now as a service based business owner, I don’t think I’d talk to anyone who isn’t, but at that time, I really didn’t know. So I asked my family’s financial advisor, I said, Hey, you know, can I borrow your LinkedIn account? Essentially, I’ll try to some money. And heat, you know, luckily, he’s quite a forward thinking person. And he’s like, Yeah, sure, you know, didn’t mind taking the risk and you know, trusted me because he knew that I, you know, was a strong writer, and he knew I’d look after issues, his connections. So he did let me do it. And four days into the process, we actually were able to land him at 20k per year client recurring. So I was like, Okay, this is actually working, you know, it’s working really, really well. And so of course, you know, after that I didn’t want to reinvent The way we like it’s working for financial advisors, I think it would work for others. But I just want to, you know, I want to stay focused on financial advisors and not reinvent the wheel since it’s going well. And then just naturally, what happened after that use my financial advisor clients would ask me, Can you do this for our clients? Can you help our clients be more profitable? So that’s when it sort of branched out into not just financial advisors, but also any any anyone in an advisory consulting or coaching role? Yeah, right. Yes.

James Wrigley
So how long ago was that you’re doing the LinkedIn, lead?

Celia Polkinghorne
Sorry, yeah, the business was started three and a half years ago. So it was October 2019. So I spent that first year the business doing done for you services. And you know, the done for you services, they have a, they have only a degree of success, right, they have a degree of success. And the degree of success depends wildly on the business owner and the situation that the business is in. And so that’s ultimately why I evolved the service into a done wiki service, not a done for you service. Because when you have a done for you service, you’re sort of at the mercy of, you know, advisors, sales systems, delivery systems, their own sort of like mindset around their own marketing, you know, you’re at the mercy of so many different elements, and therefore, the success varies wildly, you know, I was very, very lucky with the first person that I did it with, he happened to really have your act together, right. So that’s why we were able to generate quite a lot of profit, but not everybody is that has their ducks in a row in such a row, right? As I discovered the hard way, as I continued to serve people try to serve people in the same capacity. So that’s when I developed it into a done with you service where actually what I do is I incorporate I bring in the business owner, and show them exactly what they need to understand, to get their marketing working such as that sort of situation of instead of trying to catch a fish for the man, you teach the man to fish and you know, he can feed his village for a lifetime. It’s that sort of mentality.

James Wrigley
Can you explain what you mean by a done for you service? What does that actually

Celia Polkinghorne
sorry, though? Sorry, yes, three, please do call me out every time I use a marketing job. Is that unconscious bias, isn’t it that unconscious competence, so done for you is, you know, as a, as a financial adviser, they potentially, at some point throughout your business, you might have thought, let’s hire an agency to do something for us. Let’s hire an agency to run our Facebook ads, or let’s hire an agency to create content for us or let’s hire an agency to book meetings for us, right, that’s an example of a done for you service, an outside service comes in, and they take over an aspect of your marketing, and they just do it for you. Without very all that were all that much input from you. There might be some input, it depends on the service. But the idea is that you just get to outsource it. And you don’t have to think about it and leads coming to your business, right. It’s the dream that everyone wants. But unfortunately, those types of services are limited. And it’s like I said before, because you’re you’re wildly at the mercy of all the different other elements in people’s businesses. So when someone has a done with you service, it doesn’t mean that they don’t do anything for you, we definitely still do, for example, like mobile copywriting for business when we work with them, we don’t expect them to do their own copywriting. So you know, all the copywriting for the LinkedIn profiles, the websites, that kind of thing is done. But what we actually do is teach them how to create content in a way that’s going to serve them for the rest of the life of their business. And we also teach them for example, how to hire an internal marketing coordinator to help them with the mental load of that to help them with the use the copywriting. The copywriting can be difficult for people if you’re not naturally a copywriter, you know, which most people aren’t, it’s really like, because good marketing, it’s very copywriting heavy. But yeah, teaching them to hire an internal marketing coordinator that can take on that mental load, take on the mental load of the strategy. And who can take a cheap everyone accountable for doing the right thing like James, please post, you know, once a day on tick tock sort of thing, you know, and just help with ideas generation and just, you know, eventually ultimately, they’re going to be executing a cross platform marketing strategy for the business. So it’s just helping a business instead of helping a business with a band aid solution, which is generally what a done for you solution is, especially at the small or medium sized business level, things really changed at the big business level. But the small or medium sized business level, it’s just a band aid solution, whereas what we want is we want the solution that’s going to serve you for the life of your business, right? You know, it’s the same as financial advisors. So instead of a band aid solution of like, let’s pick some stocks and see how they go. It’s like no, we want to look at your whole situation or we want to create something for you where you can reverse engineer you know, however many dollars you want, when you when you retire and the time that you retire and all that kind of thing. We want something that’s really actually going to move the needle for you long term.

James Wrigley
Yep. Gotcha. So what is your experience with with with financial advisors? When you talk about marketing? Is that a receptive conversation? Or is it a maybe you’re dealing with people that are actually looking to do something in the marketing space anyway, but I would have thought that by and large, financial advisors would shy away from this idea of marketing, you would that yeah, what’s your experience,

Celia Polkinghorne
I’ve experienced everything from from each end of the scale, you know, if I’ve experienced talking to people who, you know, they’re really gung ho and really excited about it, and they know that there’s potential, there’s just got no idea how to go about navigating it, which is totally, of course, understandable. And then there’s the other end of the scale where people have come to me and they said, Listen, I know I need to market my service. But I really don’t want to show up on camera. I don’t want to do personal branding, you know, basically hate the idea of marketing, but I just know, I have to do it, you know, so I’ve had all of those conversations and everything in between.

James Wrigley
So what do you say if someone that’s at that extreme that you just mentioned that I want to show up on camera that I want to do the personal branding of where to someone like that even start with?

Celia Polkinghorne
Yeah, if it’s always, it’s always a really, very, very fascinating and also honest conversation that I ended up having with those people, because this, this could turn into a long answer. And I’ll try and keep it brief. But yeah, the thing about marketing, right, is all it is, at the end of the day, is it is exactly the same as talking to your clients, it’s exactly the same as what you do with your clients, you’re just bringing it forward, and you’re just there just happens to be like a video camera recording, you know, or like, it just happens to be you writing something on on LinkedIn. And so instead of you writing your meeting notes for your, for your client, after they finished the meeting, and your review, meeting or whatever, let’s just say you’re writing a version of the meeting notes on LinkedIn and sharing them sharing it publicly. Like it’s, it’s really, it’s just no different. It’s no different from what you do every single day. But people because there’s that that little tiny element of the camera, or the little tiny element of that’s going out publicly, people turn it into this whole different thing. And it’s an and, you know, this is what I try and say I’m like, I get it because even myself, like I’m, you know, like, I don’t like using the label introvert because I don’t think people really understand what it means. But I am an introvert, I’m not someone that like wants to be out there and like, you know, Lottie doll, I get it. I didn’t want to go on camera, either. When I started my marketing business, and for my first year in business, I didn’t thought I could get away with it. And like I could, I could, if I It depends, like what results you’re happy with in your business. But it’s like, ultimately, you’ve been hypocrites earlier, and you’re going to have to do it, I’m going to have to set an example. All right. Otherwise, I’m limiting my capacity to help other people as well. But, you know, let’s just say a financial advisor is in that situation, like, you know, let’s say they are really, really good with their clients behind closed doors, they’re really, really good. But there’s just this block or limiting belief around showing up on video or, you know, posting publicly. In an organic marketing strategy, there’s sort of three levers you can pull, right, there’s outreach, there’s content, and this referrals. So there are plenty of successful businesses have been built in the world only on the referrals and networking element, we’ve no untapped with no outreach. But of course, you know, you’re you’re shutting off two opportunities for yourself. And you’re, you’re relying on only one. And you also have to work so so hard on your referrals and networks if you’ve got no organic marketing presence to send people to because a lot of those people that you network with will bow to your website or your LinkedIn profile, or your YouTube channel or whatever looking for is this person actually good at what they do looking for evidence, right. And a lot of the time, they’re not going to proceed with you, if they can’t see anything, I’m certainly that person, if I can’t see if I in my head, I’m saying I can’t see him, I can’t see her, I can’t see them. I don’t know who they are, I don’t know what they’re about, I’m not going to proceed with them. So in my view, it’s very, very important to also be doing the outreach on the content side of things. But, you know, what I say to people is, at least if you can get the least if you can get things happening every day in writing, if you absolutely can’t show up on video, at least you will make progress, it’s just going to take such a lot more time. You know, if you’re willing to show up on video, you’ll be making progress in you know, as little as like four weeks to six months kind of thing. But if you’re relying on only writing, you can definitely do it and there are definitely people who have done it, it’s just going to take its potential that you just have to expect that it’s going to take longer a year or two or three and you just have to keep persisting and just keep being okay and happy with that. And if you are you can you can definitely do it.

James Wrigley
Yep. So if I’m starting out today, and I’ve decided okay, I’ve got more clients, as you said, and I get the referral that comes through are now a couple of accountants or whatever that send me some work. And, and business has been okay. But But I, I hear of these stories of people using social media and all the rest of it and I like, where should I start with with? What should I do first?

Celia Polkinghorne
Yeah, so the very first thing is to just pick a platform, that obvious platform really, I think, is LinkedIn. If you’re, if you’re a service based business, you know, obviously, if you’re a product based business, ecommerce, or whatever, the story is going to be different, you know, Instagram, whatever. But so if you’re a service based business, and that’s who I work with, it’s going to be LinkedIn, because it’s just, it’s just, it’s the no brainer platform to do it on. And what you just want to do is just start finding ways to show up look, ideally every day on LinkedIn, but even if you’re showing up, for the very first time ever, you know, posting once a week, it’s going to feel like a lot for you. So if you just start with that, like just post once a week, and then post twice a week, and then post three times a week, and then get yourself up to posting every day. And what you what you’ve got to make sure you do if you do do that is just make sure you you post in an optimized way. So that what does that mean? Well, it means it’s very, very simple. It’s very, very, very, very, very, very simple. But nobody does it. All it means posting an optimized way is making sure the structure of any post, whether it’s a written post or video posts is just hook story call to action or hook story call to think you don’t have to call someone to take action to DM every single time. But it’s just hook like so it’s like telling a story, right? As human, we speak in stories every day, when we come home to our husband or wife at the end of the day and say what happened during the day we tell a story. When we’re talking to our kids about something we tell a story, even when we’re talking to our dog or tell a story. You know, everything’s a story. Otherwise, if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t make sense. Right? And everything has a beginning, middle and end. It’s just that when we are talking out in the world, freestyling we’re not conscious of that. And so then, like when we sit down to write something on LinkedIn, often we’re like, oh, how should I write this? And like the big the big interruption, the big, like, unfortunate interruption in that process is like, the way we’ve been trained to write academically at school, and uni is is like anti, everything’s successful in marketing, right? where you’re at, remember, at uni, doing all your, all your kind of assignments and stuff, you would just you would write these big long areas, or you’d find the biggest fluffiest words you possibly could to sound smart and sound academic and try and get a distinction, right? And like, that’s how you think people think they, you know, like, if I write like that, they’ll view me as smart. And they’ll view me as credible, and they’ll want to work with me. But the opposite happens, right? That people look at it, they’ll laugh what does that mean? You know, because when we go on social media, right? We go on social media for distraction. We don’t go on social media to get educated. We don’t so like when we see that we’re like, Wow, no idea what that means. Or like, oh my god, that person sounds so like up themselves because they’re so long winded and using these big like fluffy words. So the big the big role in copywriting right is right for a 12 year old. That’s the big number one role, right for a 12 year old, right simply one sentence paragraphs, one sentence paragraphs, it’s everything you didn’t learn in UT write one sentence paragraphs, lots of whitespace speak, simply speak to the point, you know, don’t try and sound smart, like just try and help, right? Just try and help. So it’s just a simple climb to catch people’s attention, provide the value you want to provide in a succinct way. And then end with a line, you know, asking people to engage with the post or to reach out if you want them to reach out or whatever you want them to do. After the post, just remember to ask them to do something. If you just did that every single day on on LinkedIn, you’d have, you’d have a basic organic marketing strategy in place and you could build from there. It’s

James Wrigley
interesting. You mentioned about the long words and the in these posts. There’s is a particular person not in financial advice circles, but I happen to be connected to on on LinkedIn and every now and then this person posts and I read them to just try and understand what is this guy even saying because it’s just a block of text. And it’s talking about all of this stuff, that I have no idea what he’s actually saying and his own words in there to just try and sound like he’s the smartest guy on the planet. But then there’s these people underneath going Yeah, that’s amazing. I agree with you. But what does he even say? I got no idea.

Celia Polkinghorne
And that’s my thing

James Wrigley
thing that’s counter to and he’s trying to sound like the smartest guy in the room but that’s completely counter to marketing activities.

Celia Polkinghorne
That’s right. And this is where marketing is just such a gaslighting chamber, you know This is where marking can get really gaslighting. Because like, you could, you could see a guy like that you could see him writing in this long winded way. And you couldn’t see all these people 60 people have liked it, and a whole bunch of people are commenting on the post, right? And you think, oh, that must be good marketing. That must be the way. But the problem is, this is where context comes into play. Right? So those 60 people that might have liked on his on his post, they might be all his employees. Yeah. Or they might have been like, industry peers, you know, they’re people that aren’t going to buy from him. You know, they’re people that are that are sucking up to him for some reason, or, you know, just genuinely appreciate him for some reason. But they’re not buyers, you know, so you look at it, and you think, Oh, good, that’s getting lots of engagement, that must be the right thing. But it’s like, no, but that’s not the type of engagement that you want. And like, I often like, I tell my clients all the time, my posts actually don’t get all that much engagement. Because the style of posts that I often posting is problem aware, I posted what I call a problem aware style. So I’m often making people aware of what their problems are. And people don’t always like that, you know that and they don’t want to like the post because I don’t want to like the post, because then that’s going to look like I have the problem. But then, you know, two days later, I’ll have to DM in my, my LinkedIn, my LinkedIn, you know, account and it’s like, yeah, well, that is it speaking to people, it’s not what people enjoy reading sometimes, or it’s not necessarily what they want to hear, but it is what they need to hear. And, you know, because someone has actually come out and just said, said, how do you that it’s caused them to reach out because they know, well, that person really understands the problem, because they’ve actually come out and said it, and they probably understand that solution, too. Right?

James Wrigley
So let’s take all video, the big scary video. So I do a few videos and people here that I do and others who like it. Are my voice mode. Bytes? I don’t know, I’m not a good looking person, whatever. Where do you start with video? Where do people start with video?

Celia Polkinghorne
Yeah, so there’s a few things to sort of keep in mind isn’t there? I guess I was lucky in the sense that, like, I’m a train, I’m a trained journalist, I worked for the ABC, that was my first job where I worked for the country hour for the for the ABC. And so I had all you know, all day, every day, I was listening to my own voice. And when I was initially doing that, obviously, I had the same thing as oh my god, my voice does not sound like that what is going on what’s wrong with these microphones, you know, but what you learn is like actually, the way you sound inside your head sounds different to the way you sound on the outside. And at first it’s really jarring. You’re like what like, oh my gosh, I hate the way I sound right. But then what happens is as you just just just just push through that discomfort, push through, push through, push through, what happens is it comes into I don’t know what the word is. But it comes into like an equilibrium where the way you sound when you hear yourself on video or on audio, then is the same as the way you hear yourself in your head. So that doesn’t last forever. And you get over that. And the other thing is like, Oh, I’m not good looking or whatever, it really doesn’t matter. It really does not matter at all. Because like, you know, at the end of the day, your clients love you, right, and your clients know what you look like and they’re not not working with you because of what you look like, right? They’re working with you because of what you know, they’re working with you because of your system. They’re working with you because of how you can help you know, and how you can help people get the outcome or transformation that they’re looking for. So if someone did want to start on video, I definitely definitely agree with the way you started. If that’s the way you started on Tik Tok, I’m not sure if you were doing videos before that, but I definitely definitely advocate starting on tick tock and the big reason for that is, or the first reason has been this is sort of diminishing a little bit now but it has been that you know, previously the organic reach on tick tock has just been so good. You could post a really terrible video and they’ll still send it out to 500 people you know, that sort of diminishing a little bit now but the effect is still there. So like it’s a really great testing ground for like, Okay, what’s actually speaking what’s speaking to people here like what are people watching? What are people viewing? What do people seem to need help with? And it’s just like got this really easy mechanism for people to comment and you can use like, you know, videos to reply to their comments and that kind of thing. So you can get really quick feedback from your you know, ideal audience on tick tock so that was the first reason. The second reason is the Tick Tock Video Creator makes life so easy, like it makes it so easy to create, like punchy, watchable videos, just the way the record button works. You know, yeah, you know, James, like, obviously, like, it’s very easy to just sort of record one sentence at a time. And it’s like, you know, comes out as like quite a punchy video that’s very, very watchable with You know, if you tried to create that on your own, using like recording on your own, and using a video editor, it’d take forever, you’d never do it. But you can just record and get things out so quickly on tick tock, and it doesn’t take your entire day, you know, you can spend one hour shooting seven videos every week, and then just post one a day, let’s save it in the drafts folder, I just post one day and you’re showing up every day on tick tock, it’s pretty easy. It’s pretty, pretty easy, really using Tiktok to at least be showing up once a day on one platform. So that’s how I would get started.

James Wrigley
What What about the technology that I need for recording the video? Like, do you offer much assistance to your clients about? Do you need the lights? Do you need the microphone? Do you need the SD? Like, in my experience, people worry about everything being getting in the way of actually just doing something?

Celia Polkinghorne
That’s so right. Yes. So Right.

James Wrigley
Can you share any anything on that?

Celia Polkinghorne
Yeah, 100%. Basically, you don’t have to worry about all that stuff. The only thing that I actually have, like a video checklist that I can give it to you, you notice and to people if you want, it’s very, very straightforward. Just like, you know, six or seven things to make sure of every time you’re shooting, but none of them require, you know, crazy extra crazy extra technology, you just need to use your phone. And like the, the thing I use, I’m just looking for I can’t see it here. But it’s just a really, really simple plugin lapel mic, like $50 thing, you know. And the other thing to say like once you’ve got the audio sorted, which is the most important, believe it or not more important than vision, because it’s very hard to listen to bad audio. Once you’ve got a little lapel mic to sort your audio, or if you find that does happen to have a really good microphone, then great. The only other thing to take into consideration really, is to just make sure you’re nicely lit, you know, so you’re not sitting in a dark room or you know, you don’t have shadows over your face or you know, you don’t have like you know your dirty laundry behind your whatever. Like just as long as your your outside is great. As long as there’s not too sunny and casting shadows everywhere outside is fantastic, beautiful, natural light or otherwise, just in your house, like standing in front of a window. You’re honestly you don’t need any ring lights, you don’t need any fancy cameras. You don’t need fancy microphones, you don’t need anything fancy. You honestly don’t. As long as you’ve got that lapel mic and a window with natural light coming onto your face. Yep, that’s it. That’s all you need.

James Wrigley
And you commented before about No, we, as financial advisors, we do our meetings, and then we do our file notes afterwards. And we’re kind of typing that up, you could go a step to creating a version of that as a written post. For LinkedIn, you could create a version of that as a video to

Celia Polkinghorne
exactly. So I really encourage people, once they get out of any meeting, like whether it’s a strategy session, a discovery call, an annual review, meeting, whatever it is an emergency phone call, visit clients around rang in a panic, whatever it is, after you get off that call with someone, just use the I don’t know, if you you probably are familiar with the otter.ai app? Oh, yes. Yeah, it’s a voice to text app. So like, I really encourage all my clients every time you get off a phone call with a client who doesn’t or a prospect or whoever, it doesn’t matter what you were talking about, just get onto otter, press the record button and just give a summary. Just say a summary. Okay, I was talking to Dave, today he had this concern about XY and Z, what we did to solve that was X, Y and Z. Right. And that will immediately translate your voice to text. And you will have that there as a sort of like draft post essentially. And like what, yeah, what you can do is just like take that text, put it in the LinkedIn, you know, in the LinkedIn post creator, edit it. So it’s an it’s written for a 12 year old and it’s hook story call to action, right? Post it, and then you get your Tik Tok video creator up and you can literally read, if you’ve written up properly, you can read a sentence for sentence into the in the Tick Tock creator and press posts and then you’ve got a tick tock post, you never have to sit there with a blank page creating content ever. You just document what happens during during your day.

James Wrigley
What What about it? So at the end of this, can you talk of talk about maybe some some success that clients are having with with their organic marketing? Who can Yep. Can you talk through anything like that?

Celia Polkinghorne
100% Yeah, so yeah, I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of like, you know, real real go getters, or you can see them on my website, the ones that really do take the strategy and run with it. I try and do a video case study with some so that you can see, you can get a sense of like, how things were before we started working together what we did together and how things are now that things you know, been they’ve sort of got the strategy in place and they’ve run with it. So, you know, a really awesome kind of young New Zealand financial advisor I worked with, he was able to like literally, we just put the organic strategy in place. I finished dun dun like a dinner. And within that year, after that he was he doubled his whole workforce. And they had to look for a whole new bigger office. Right. So like, he really, really understood it. And really Tito Hi Quickstart. And he just took it and ran with it, and just just well just really, really excelled. You know, there’s another firm that I’ve been working with, who’s leading up to listing on the stock exchange, which is really exciting. You know, like, just like they’ve been able to, you know, like, what happens is a lead generation problem turns into a hiring problem. That’s what happens, right? So all of a sudden, it’s like, oh, Celia, could you actually help us to write more attractive job ads, so that we can start attracting the right people, right. And that’s what we want to happen. Because at the end of the day, when you’re doing marketing properly, it’s especially at the small and medium sized business over half distress. I’m talking about small and medium sized businesses here, not, you know, Nike or whatever, not big businesses, at the small and medium sized business level with an organic marketing strategy. If you do, you know, just the few fundamentals properly, it is so easy to over subscribe yourself, it’s so easy to oversubscribe yourself with leads. And really what you’re just trying to do is like, what, what 10 What thought You thought was a marketing problem is now actually sort of like a sales and delivery systems problem and a hiring problem, you know, the marketing problem, if you do marketing, just those fundamentals, right, the marketing problem doesn’t last for very long. It’s, it then turns into sales systems and business systems, you know, and that’s, you know, ultimately, a lot of the time what I end up working with people on as well, because the success of the sales systems and the business systems data, then feed back into the success of the marketing to, like, all works together organically and a holistic system. But yeah, like typically, you know, like, for example, like a personal branding photographer I worked with recently, she really wanted to start doing retreats, but she’s like, I don’t know how to fill these retreats, you know, I’ve been paying for ads hasn’t really been working kind of thing. And it’s like, All right, well, let’s put an organic system in place where you can actually reach out to people who you know, are really going to benefit from this retreat. And you can fill all those spots organically. So like it really whatever, whatever target you want to reverse engineer, you know, within reason, it’s totally possible. But what you just have to make sure that you do is understand what activity and what volume of activity you need to do in order to achieve that. That reverse engineer target that you want.

James Wrigley
Got it. Yep. Yeah, it’s all exciting. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about. So thanks for joining me today. Celia, where can people find you if anyone’s interested? Where? Website where can people find it?

Celia Polkinghorne
Yeah, so you can definitely find me on LinkedIn, just type in Celia Polkinghorne onto LinkedIn. Probably you won’t be able to spell my last name. So go to the website, which is Bonzai Digital marketing.com. And if you’re on Tik Tok, my username is Celia Polkinghorne, as well.

James Wrigley
Thank you. Thanks for joining me. I’ve even picked up a few tips there too. So thanks for joining and hope that there’s some value for anyone that that’s listening along.

Celia Polkinghorne
Thanks so much for your questions. They were great. Thanks.