Marketing Hacks that Work! With Special Guest Sally Mildren

Almost every business is looking for a way to increase revenue.  Marketing is an effective tool to grow sales when done properly.  But how do you know what to do to maximize your efforts?

In this episode of Books & The Biz, Sally Mildren fills in for Dan Paulson to talk about marketing and what's needed to succeffully grow your business.

About Sally:

Sallty serves human-centered businesses and nonprofits, helping them increase their impact, grow their revenue and better tell their story. "Let's find what makes you extraordinary and use that as a competitive advantage. We help human-centric businesses, nonprofits and rural health reach more people, grow their revenue and better tell their story through powerful integrated marketing, branding and aligned messaging."

[00:00:33.09] - Alice

Hello. Welcome to Books in the Biz, a podcast that looks at both the financial and operational sides of success. Please welcome our hosts, Dan Paulson and Richard Veltre. Dan is the CEO of InVision Development International, and he works with leaders to increase sales and profits through great cultures with solid operations. Rich is CEO of the Veltre Group and a financial strategist working with companies to manage their money more effectively. Now on with the podcast.

[00:01:09.28] - Rich Veltre

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Books and the Biz. But I think AI Alice got it a little bit wrong this week because on the books, but biz is missing. So as a nice, graceful co-host, I brought on Sally Mildrin. How are you doing, Sally?

[00:01:30.06] - Sally Mildren

I'm well. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:32.14] - Rich Veltre

So it's great to have you. And I think with Dan gone, we'll find a way to bring some different energy and bring a different topic to the podcast for the week. But I think Sally. I think I know you really, really well, so I'll take a second, give you a minute to just say, who are you? Let's tell the readers or the listeners who we are.

[00:01:55.07] - Sally Mildren

Well, I am the CEO and founder of a marketing agency, Lady Consulting, and we focus on helping nonprofits, rural health, and small businesses really do smart marketing so that they can increase their impact, grow their reach, and better tell their story. Our theory is that most small businesses are doing too much. They've overcomplicated their marketing, and so our goal is really to help them do less, better, and really grow their impact with the investment in marketing.

[00:02:31.22] - Rich Veltre

That's awesome. Do you have a particular focus?

[00:02:35.19] - Sally Mildren

We do love strategy, is huge branding. We really believe also with our clients, we see how integral brand and your messaging is with the culture and your customer experience. So working with us isn't just a put this post on. It's here's holistically how you can better serve your clients, how you can engage your employees to love the work they're doing. And that magic synergy really is what causes growth and loyalty with customers.

[00:03:11.02] - Rich Veltre

Very cool. It's interesting because I guess I dive right into it. But Dan and I try really hard on the podcast not to go too political, but it feels like small business, not for profits. The people that you just mentioned, you're very much in tune with. There's a big amount of changes going on. Political, funding, everybody's in that position where you have to figure out what do we think is going to happen so that we can pivot. Are you feeling the same way? Are you seeing the same change in your clients or in your prospects, the people that you're talking to?

[00:03:59.27] - Sally Mildren

Well, it is. Politics aside, the reality is that some of the broad changes that are taking place with freezes on funding or on research or elimination of huge bodies of workers in the federal government, certainly, is impacting across everything. Some nonprofits, although the announcement was made that they were freezing all of that funding, and they did, and then put it back, there are still a lot of nonprofits that never got the funding restored. So we're not just talking about anything. We're talking about crisis hotlines, food banks, community services that are providing for the health and wellness of whole communities. And so regardless of your political position, that is a big impact. The other thing we're really seeing with our rural health clients is many rural hospitals or or that critical health care connection is funded by Medicaid. And so the current conversations around cuts to Medicaid has the risk to impact a lot of communities. I mean, even just in America, for context, about 60 % of the births in the US are paid for by Medicaid. So it's not a small thing, And rather you agree with it or not, a massive shift in that regard.

[00:05:35.17] - Sally Mildren

Some rural hospitals rely almost 80 % on Medicaid funding. So there's a whole entire strategic shift that's needing to take place among nonprofits, among health care, among small businesses as well. Your supply chain may be changing as well. Depending on how the relations and conversations go about various tariffs or supply chain, that has potential to impact contractors. The price of lumber, 46% of our lumber comes from Canada. If that thing isn't resolved effectively, then that has potential to increase the price of lumber, which there's always a trickle effect to any action of any administration. I think now is the time to really pay attention strategically to what you can control and where are the contingencies that we need to prepare for in our organization.

[00:06:42.09] - Rich Veltre

Okay. And do you I come from a numbers background, right? So every time that I've seen things like this that are really large, challenging policy shifts, the natural reaction for companies tends It tends to be, well, what can I cut? And one of the things that winds up being almost immediately on the block is marketing. And so larger companies automatically marketing becomes the chopping block. And interesting Interestingly enough, I mean, from my standpoint, what I've seen just watching social media, et cetera, there's a lot of people who have been affected already. People starting to cut the marketing budgets. What would you say to the companies that are doing And are you seeing the same thing?

[00:07:35.09] - Sally Mildren

I definitely am seeing people hunker. They're hunkering down. They're taking a wait and see approach. That happens with every national election. Every four years, there's a little stealing for what's going to happen. And regardless of who's in power now, we have a history of, okay, next time it's them, next time it's them. I mean, regardless of where you stand, literally, there will be change pretty much guaranteed every four or eight years. So we, as Americans, have become very predictable in that way. But the thing that I would say is, first of all, for corporate elimination of marketing budgets. I have two views on that. One is marketers have not done a good enough job at establishing the essential value they bring to the organization or even tying their work to the business goals and the revenue goals. At the end of the day, money is what talks. And if you're a marketer in any world and you can't demonstrate how your work is moving the needle for bringing more donations or more revenue or supporting greater loyalty among customers, so it's filling the leaks in the bucket, if you will, then you automatically We are at risk.

[00:09:01.03] - Sally Mildren

And that has been a platform I have preached in my entire career and the way that we have tried to develop leaders of marketing. We just rolled out a new Leadership Cafe, which is a free community for marketers. And part of it is wanting to help teach people. You got to demonstrate you aren't just a cost center. If you cannot demonstrate that you are a value center, bringing results to the bottom line then you always will be at risk, administration policy agnostic. You always will be at risk. And so that's my first response to that. But the other thing is that even back hundreds and hundreds of years, back to the Great Depression. The Proctor and Gamble was the soap. They had soap. And this is actually where the soap opera came from. During the Great Depression, they were like, Everybody's hunkering, pulling back. They're not spending, but they still need to be clean. So how can we make sure that when they choose soap, they're picking our soap? So they started a radio show of women talking about cleaning and all of that, the very first soap opera, was literally a reality radio show about cleaning, and it morphed from there.

[00:10:33.02] - Sally Mildren

But the bottom line is, if you look at lessons throughout history, whether it is economic depression or political or whatever, the companies that withdraw with only a focus on short term are the ones that in the long term are limited. Covid is another example. The people who shut doors and shut down didn't come back by and large. The small businesses, they didn't come back because they disappeared rather than assessing strategically, okay, we need to pivot. What can we do? All right, we're going to do curbside pickup. All right, we're going to do delivery. All right, we've got to shift to an online model. And the people who did that survived and even grew afterwards rather than shrinking to a place where you're only looking at risk aversion that doesn't play for a long term growth strategy. There may be opportunities during this chaos that you haven't considered. And that's the importance of really strategically pausing and taking a smart look at what you have and what you need to do.

[00:11:52.29] - Rich Veltre

I think that's great. I think it makes total sense. And I love the reference to the soap operares, because I I hadn't really thought about that. Curious, do you think, because, again, most of my focus is on numbers. So I love talking to people who aren't just talking numbers because it gives me a little bit of a different perspective. I've been very focused on the fact that this is a time where if you're going to cut, it's an option at that point to say, I have to look strategically at who I have working for me, looking at my team, and knowing still that I can't cut so far just to solve everything. I can't cut so far as to not pay attention to having some degree of balance and having someone in doing certain tasks. So if I was to say that my focus would be push into the opportunity to use fractional leadership, how do you feel about that statement if I was to say that in a marketing standpoint? I think it makes sense from a financial standpoint, but how do you feel about it from a marketing standpoint?

[00:13:04.02] - Sally Mildren

I would first caution that you don't start with cutting people. You have to know, where are we at? What do we have? What is the chaos? What is the strategy? Who are we serving? Where do we need to pivot as an organization? And then that will guide your layoffs. I feel like often, particularly smaller media businesses, they panic and think, I got to get people off the deck and just cut. But then how many times have you seen on LinkedIn where people are like, they just did a mass layoff, and now they have job postings for social media help? I feel like you have to pause for a minute. And this is exceptionally where I feel like strategic fractional leadership is vital because they haven't just been inside your four walls. They have deep industry experience from small to Fortune 500, to complex, to simple, to small teams, big teams. And they have been around the block a little bit to have seen a lot of transition in organizations. In terms of taking a minute to strategically assess, where are you? Who are you serving? Where are lost leaders? Where are Where are the real money drains?

[00:14:32.05] - Sally Mildren

Where are the vital services we can't touch? That intelligent analysis and audit of the organization is vital, whether that's fractional ops or fractional finance. Fractional marketing is also really effective at helping you identify what is our mission? Who are we serving? What has to stay. And an executive level marketing leader is going to be able to do that objectively without the emotional favorites that you have when you've been inside of an organization. And so for me, I feel like the deep experience and the objectivity that a fractional leader brings to an organization can get in, they can assess, they can help you guide on a pathway that that considers both short term revenue needs and the long term brand and organizational play, which I think we lose sight of when we're inside the walls. I can speak for myself, having been a corporate officer for a long time, it's a lot easier to see it when it's not your baby. So I feel like in these moments of just total uncertainty on a lot of levels, Sometimes the fractional play to come in, help assess, get a strategy and a pathway is smart. That may be as short as just building a strategy, which we've done with clients as well, assess the whole scenario and identify these are your marching orders, or sometimes you bring them in and they help implement that and get on the team and the team up to speed and then pull them out, then you can get way further down the road than trying to draw that out of a marketing specialist or a social media person.

[00:16:38.03] - Sally Mildren

Most small and medium businesses have very tactical, very niche marketing talent hired. Many of them do not have a strategic leader that can help assess everything from internal, external comms PR, marketing, the pressures, the market, the competitors, all of that. Most of them, in my experience, don't have that body of experience. And so that's where leveraging a fractional would be really helpful. And I think that hunkering down and cutting back all your marketing right now when, particularly if you're a human service organization or you're serving humans directly, everybody's unsure. If you disappear, they might assume you're gone or closed. So there is a value to remaining present and being with them in the storm and not just disappearing until things settle.

[00:17:53.06] - Rich Veltre

Agreed. Curious, as I was listening to what you were saying, which I totally agree with. I Do you feel there's a difference? I was reading somewhere the other day that the actual definition, or the definition assigned, I believe, by the US SBA of what a small business is, is anyone that has an organization with fewer than 500 employees. And I don't have any clients with near 500 employees. So does your opinion change if we were to change that definition a little bit? If I was to make it a bit smaller, because I think of the small business as the mom and pop that's taking care of their family, looking to grow something as almost a secondary objective, their first objective being feed their family. So would it change if we change that definition and made that a little bit smaller? I have a presumption, but I won't say. I want your opinion.

[00:18:56.25] - Sally Mildren

Well, I have heard primarily the definitions of small business to be up to seven to $10 million and below, which is everybody I serve as well. So I feel like it depends is the answer. Again, it comes back to not knee-jerk panic, which with the art of social media and 24/7 news, everything feels so dramatic, and it's panic-inducing, and the media feeds on that, and click baity titles and all of that. I saw a headline yesterday that just, What? And when I looked at it, it was from four years ago. Talking about current leaders in administration, but it's four years old, and it was designed just to get that reaction, get people all in a flurry. So I think, first of all, you My advice to leaders are to glance at what's going on, but do not stare deeply into it. There's a certain element of the media cycle and even part of the personality of what's going on right now that is about shock and awe. And that's what feeds. That's what sells, people say, is the drama. And so it's best that you remain aware, but don't stare too deeply in it. Remove believe yourself and take a look at your business.

[00:20:34.25] - Sally Mildren

What do we have? Are we profitable? If we're not profitable and we get a huge market cut, now we've got big issues that might mean you have to pull out, to be honest. But if you are doing well and you hone in on who your niche is, we've been marketing to all these with other people, but 90 % of our business is from this group. Okay, now you have an easy way to reduce, narrow, be one thing to one group rather than trying to be something to everybody. To me, in marketing, that's where most businesses waste money, is they don't niche enough. It feels scary. I can be for everybody. But in today's world, if you're for everybody, you're for So I feel like you've got to, whether you have one employee, whether you're it, whether you make 500,000 or 12 million, you got to take a look at where your sales coming from. How are they getting to you? Are they coming back? Hone in to the basics of business planning, and honestly, looking at your finances, your revenue, and make sure you know, this is where my business is coming How can we reach them?

[00:22:02.01] - Sally Mildren

How can we make sure they keep coming back? I agree with- And focus on that. Don't try to get new people right now.

[00:22:10.00] - Rich Veltre

Yeah. To add to what you said, okay, I had one client that was on a larger size. It was $100 million in revenue. Nice. Still only had 600 employees.

[00:22:23.07] - Sally Mildren

So they're medium. They're a medium business. I want to be a medium business. Yeah.

[00:22:30.18] - Rich Veltre

By the definition, they failed being considered a small business. But even at 600 employees, mass layoffs was not what was going on at 600 employees. So if you're talking about listening to the media and the media is talking about mass layoffs, those companies are so much bigger than what you are. So I'm trying to tell my clients somewhat the same thing. Don't just listen to the media and assume this is the way you have to go because the media says there was this mass layoff at a company that's not your competitor or not even a competitive size. So pay attention to the perspective of the actual news that you're getting. Don't necessarily just assume that because they did it, you now have to do something similar because otherwise it's going to have the same effect on you. No, I don't think so. I think be aware there's an economic shift or something that could your decision making. But I agree with you, jump into the fractional role, get into talking to someone to actually come in and help you assess the company based on their wealth of knowledge, again, like you said, from being in other people's businesses, not being in just one.

[00:23:51.22] - Rich Veltre

Because you can't just compare yourself to one and make a strategic decision. Right.

[00:23:59.09] - Sally Mildren

Yeah. And I I feel like at the same time you're doing that, you need to look for the opportunities. This morning, I saw a headline that as many as 13,000 IRS employees are going to be laid off in the small business and self-employed division. Okay, so Rich, over the books, what is an opportunity there for you in your business? Is there a message? Is there something that you can identify that will be... Maybe there won't be as many audits for small businesses, but I'm going to be able to help you ensure there isn't one when they come back. I mean, And I don't know what the play is for you, but I feel like in all of these shifts, we have to keep... That's why we can't hunker and hide our face. We've got to keep our eye open to the opportunity For me, we're looking at opportunities for how can we convene nonprofits or smaller health care entities. How can we convene them in a conversation to begin to ideate? How do we do this? How do we leverage our partnerships or our community or other sources of revenue? How do we leverage the health insurers?

[00:25:22.12] - Sally Mildren

How can they help support us in this time? And finding ways, new ways to innovate and Honestly, that's where a lot of these community solutions came out of initially. Community health was from really hard times. The community had to pull together and make something happen. And I feel like that's the horizon that we're on as a nation, again, is, All right, so if I can only get local lumber, what do I need to change about how I'm marketing or what my focus is or whatever. And it may be that there are even new opportunities that will make you even better after the fact. Happened in COVID, happened in the Great Depression. Proctor and Gamble came out of the Great Depression 300 % revenue group because they sold their soap, knowing that people still needed soap when no one had money.

[00:26:23.23] - Rich Veltre

Understood?

[00:26:24.27] - Sally Mildren

Yeah.

[00:26:26.08] - Rich Veltre

I agree. I think it's time to stop looking Look at the negative, look at the positive, find the positive. If you don't see it yet, look for it because it's around. There's got to be pieces of this that will wind up being a positive. And once you figure out that and you have the positive frame of reference, then you can move forward and figure out what you need. And I think that's one of the things that Dan and I have put together when we put together XEXO. We're looking to bring in the fractional leadership because we know not everybody can afford to bring in a large board of a whole bunch of people that are requiring salaries and other things that they have to make, which they should make. I'm not saying they're not. But smaller businesses don't necessarily have the budget to be able to bring in those people on a full-time basis. So we're trying to bring this to the table so that someone can look to us and we can break someone like yourself in and say, let's get involved in a company that needs somebody on a fractional basis, needs a marketing leader.

[00:27:28.06] - Rich Veltre

So marketing is one, finance another, operations another. We want to bring this to the table and have people understand that you can get that leadership and expertise that you need, and you don't need to spend the world in order to get it.

[00:27:45.29] - Sally Mildren

Right. I've had a few small businesses approach us that wanted a fractional leader to come in and transition their whole organization, expand their service offerings and footprint for pennies. And that's not realistic either. But it's affordable when you think about the long term impact. And I also want to just say that it is tough times. There's a lot of people freaking out, and there's no judgment about that. It's uncertain. So yes, we want to keep a look to the opportunities. We want to acknowledge the humanity of our own teams, our own clients, and empathize and have compassion on them. But then I'm in a place where I want to find, how can I create a moment of hope or a moment of joy or whatever of my business and not just be part of the collective negative swirl. And I feel like, especially if you're feeling that negative swirl in your whole organization, an external point of view is going to be really helpful to not be toxic positivity, but to be realistic approaches to... It's not amazing, but there is possible. It is possible. There is a way, but it's not as dire as maybe we believe in our own little world.

[00:29:22.23] - Rich Veltre

I agree. I think that's a great message to lead that lead us out of our podcast, that find the positive, don't get involved in the Tasmanian swirl.

[00:29:40.14] - Sally Mildren

You'll make yourself sick.

[00:29:42.07] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, exactly. So Sally, if anybody wants to reach out to you and get a hold of you, what's the best way that they can get a hold of you?

[00:29:52.04] - Sally Mildren

Well, they can find us on LinkedIn. Boss Lady Consult is our handle on all the social platforms. It's also our URL, bossladyconsult. Com. So I would love to chat, or if you just need ideas or resources, let us know. I'll be happy to connect you with any of our things that can be helpful.

[00:30:14.09] - Rich Veltre

Okay. And you can always reach me at rich@exexo. Com. Sorry, exexo. Net, and I tend to do that. So I appreciate everybody's time. Thank you, Sally, for joining me and taking over for Dan, who's traveling. So I appreciate your time and your expertise.

[00:30:34.00] - Sally Mildren

Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity.

[00:30:37.24] - Rich Veltre

Okay. I will roll us out now, and we'll go from there.

[00:30:42.21] - Bob

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