John Michael Perry 0:04
And it's all about that perspective within it so that we can recognize that we don't have to settle to be starving artists, we can find those clients whose values and pocketbooks align with what our value is worth, I could charge $50 an hour, I could charge $500 an hour, I could charge $5,000 An hour and I would find the right client to align with that. You have to have confidence in yourself and your ability. You got to be able to say these kinds of numbers without flinching.
Monica Pitts 0:34
You're on mission, and you just need more people to know about it. And whether you're brand new to marketing or a seasoned pro. We are all looking for answers to make marketing decisions with purpose. I'm Monica Pitts, a techie crafty business owner, mom and aerial dancer who solves communication challenges through technology. This podcast is all about digging in and going digital. I'll share my marketing know how and business experience from almost 20 years of misadventures. I'll be your backup dancer. So you can stop doubting and get moving towards marketing with purpose. Hello, again, and welcome back to marketing with purpose. My name is Monica Pitts and I am the lucky lady and host today that gets to interview our guest, John Michael Perry. Now I sent out an email you if you're on my email list, you might remember it probably the best email I've sent in a long time. And I said, Hey, does anybody out there have a story to tell or something that they want to talk about on the marketing with purpose podcast, and John emailed me back with some great ideas, some ones that I like, feel in my very soul, and so I am so excited to have these discussions with him. So we're gonna cover not understanding your own worth. And I think this is a challenge that a lot of small business owners and nonprofits really, really face. I think that people though even experienced business owners face it sometimes. So John, introduce yourself. And tell us a little bit about your business imaginary friends design studios.
John Michael Perry 2:08
Good morning, Monica. Thanks for having me on today. I am John Michael Perry. I am I founded imaginary friends design studios 21 years ago. We are a specialty marketing firm that emphasizes brand identity, digital footprint and strategic engagement. And we help small to medium businesses with those endeavors to make sure that they have a common voice, a common vision and a common communication point to their customer base.
Monica Pitts 2:40
So how did you wander into this business? Like what is your story?
John Michael Perry 2:43
I started my senior year in high school I stole the family's computer, duck in my room, dialed into AOL at 2400 baud, and right click and read the scripting language HTML and figured out how to make my own websites. At the age of 1718. I went off to college I initially wanted to make video games for LucasArts. So I went into computer systems engineering. When I hit discrete mathematics and thermodynamics, I realized that wasn't quite my bag. I transferred out to architecture for a couple of years, and then eventually wanted to just wrap it up. And I got a degree in business in art history, all the while working as a graphic designer for this company, a web designer for that company, wherever it made sense. And then when I did graduate, it was in 2001, in the middle of the.com, bust. So I just freelanced for those that I could I joined a BNI chapter and kicked off with that and was doing really well for about a year and then I got really sick was in the hospital for about three months and got out and had to move home with mom and dad. Their small business needed some management at help at the time. So I helped with that and decided that I would just regroup and hang a shingle and start imaginary friends back in 2022 or 2002.
Monica Pitts 4:10
That's awesome. I too started my, my HTML adventure back in I started in 1996 Because my mom convinced me to take a class at the Career Center in our in our community. And I honestly HTML is cool. Like it's like It's like learning another language that's based in English. So it was really really fun and I I enjoyed learning it. Then when I like it endeavored into learning XML I was like I cannot I my brain just exploded. I don't know what's going on with this stuff. Because it's not. I don't know, but there have been so many trends through the years, right. So tell me like, What is your like, least favorite design trend? What's the one that you're like if this comes back AP, I'm quitting. What's that design trend,
John Michael Perry 5:03
I truly feel that the blink tag was the greatest contribution of the HTML consorted in the W three C consortium made to this. You know, for those who are too young and ever known the blink tag was basically taking any sort of text and just making it blink, incessantly. This is very much a 18 to 25 year old thing, it was done ridiculously all the time. And so I am so thankful that that is gone. And most people won't even be aware that it even was a thing.
Monica Pitts 5:35
I am thankful that I don't do work for realtors anymore. So I don't have to add Starbursts to anything. No Starburst, please don't. So I'm happy that that has retired from my design vocabulary. I mean, like, I have to ask you, so you've been at this for a while. And so you have figured out, like what your own worth is, hopefully, as a designer, I mean, I'm looking at your beautiful office right now. So clearly, you you figured out how to do this. How did you discover that like, tell me a little bit about that journey,
John Michael Perry 6:09
tried to explain creatives to someone who isn't creative, is a very challenging thing, try to manage creatives and explain that to people who manage non creatives is a very challenging thing. I was diagnosed with depression when I was at college, it's something I've carried through my life, I know it's not the most glamorous of mental illnesses, it is still a mental illness, it gives me a certain level of empathy, because most creatives do have some touch of mental illness across the board. I think that's one of our, you know, superpowers and also equally our kryptonite all at the same time. And so having that revelation and being able to understand and wear it and own it helps part of that process. However, the shame of that, until I owned, it accounted for some of my devaluation of self, because I'm broken, you know, I'm not quite there that I am not normal, there's something off about me. And growing up in a rural community. That's, that's not exactly embraced, you know. So I think that that is part of it. And then also, you know, having certain instructors growing up, when I was showing a flair for something, they had to add their mark to it did not help it devalue that artistic sense. And what I could bring to the table. At one point in time, in college, I discovered swing dancing, and I loved it, and I got really good at it. I traveled a lot. I competed. It was a great, great time. And I loved it. And I own the space that I was in now. I'm an introvert by nature, I know you may not believe me by my intro, I can speak to an audience of 60,000 people, no problem, but I cannot work a room to save my life. Very few instances, do I feel comfortable doing that swing dancing is one of those places where I learned how to own my space. A lot of that went away, though, when I got ill. So as I started my business, I valued it initially, like I think most people value their skill set and $1. Now people get into business because of the trait and skill to excel, not because they're great at business. And I was no exception to that rule, even freelancing. You know, it's a difference between freelancing actually hanging a shingle. And, you know, when you jump from solopreneur, to entrepreneur, when you jump from just managing yourself to having people work underneath you, there's a huge leap that you won't ever understand until you they're not as severe as when you have your first kid, yet, equally is just daunting, because you are responsible to an extent for somebody else's life, and their well being and what they can do with it. You know, this is just financially as opposed to, you know, completely, wholly sufficient. And with that, we had to figure out how I could, you know, manage those things. And, you know, we can make a profit, we could pay for the overhead, we could do all those things. And at some point in time, we were playing the commodity game. And when you play the commodity game, it's a race to the bottom. I don't know anybody who wakes up in the morning and goes, I want to be a small market Walmart, I want to offer the lowest prices as cheap as possible, do as much as I can for that lowest price and burn myself out. Especially in service industry. We're not selling products, we're selling our time, which is a finite resource. It's not infinite. So once we get out of 24 hours in the day, we can't sell any more that time. So I had to take a step back and see what we really were doing. I read a great story once where a cellular phone salesman went into a place and tried to sell all this list of stuff. And you saw the gloss over the eyes and how they kind of zoned out. And he asked him What do you think it's like, it sounds nice, not today. And then he walked into another place and that guy said, Well, how does it work? And instead of going through the list goes, it works good. Right? That's all I want to hear. You know, we are people who use our services don't necessarily want to know every single nuance and detail of our service, they just want to know, well, it worked for them. And when we stand behind it should something go wrong. Some people do want to know the basic understandings. If they know how to change the oil in the car, that's great. Most people don't want to change the oil in their car. Yeah, it's good to know that, how it gets done. So you know, you're not getting ripped off. And I
Monica Pitts 10:17
found too, especially pricing my services, when I started my company back in 2005, I would be trying to sell a website for like, $300. And nobody wanted to buy it, you know, and I was going out trying to convince people that they needed a website, they saw that price tag, and they thought, cheap, cheap, so it must be cheap. And then I realized that when I started selling things, for 1000s of dollars, people saw, that must be better. And then when I started finding clients that had the same values as I had, and they wanted something that was as good as I wanted it to be, then I could charge what I was worth, because to them, it was a very, very valuable thing that I was doing for them. But you can't solve the problem of the person who has no value for your service. Like if they don't value it, then you can't even price it cheap enough. And if you price it too cheap, then nobody buys it. Because the people who have value think you're a pile of crap. And so you have to be like, the right spot.
John Michael Perry 11:21
I think that you just hammered the nail on the head with what is the value we bring to the table now what is just not our expertise on what we do. It's our efficiency of getting it done. Because we know we know what we're doing. We know how to do it. We know how to troubleshoot those issues. We know how to craft that message. We know how to create that visual, we know how to create that engagement. We know how to track it going back those three $500 websites? Did we include Google Analytics in those? No? Did we think about keep mapping them to track how user interactions now did we think about a B split testing? No. But this value point is that we got to understand what our value is. And we got to communicate value to our clients. Now what is value? It is expertise and impact. I can have all that I could have all the expertise in the world. If it's not going to cause an impact for my clients, it's worthless to them. We need to craft it in such a manner to explain to them why we're valuable. You know, have you heard the term The Godfather offer? No, it's an offer too good to refuse. Okay, if I was telling you right now, you know, with over 20 years of experience and visual identity and everything that you know, we can do your logo and your website that has functionality and your lead magnets and your automations and your social media, put it all together and have three months of content and everything for $100, you would think That's unreal. Yeah. So that's what we were doing. 20 years ago, when we were starting out, we were giving away too much. But we would have done that for $100. Because we want to show our worth. Now, if I said all that for somewhere between two and $5,000. real business professionals think that's a good deal. Because if they had to do it themselves, at the hourly rate that they would charge, there's no way it would compete. And that's where Godfather offer comes in. If we can make it work for in that ballpark, they're gonna love it. We see these agencies out of Manhattan that charge 20 3050 $100,000 for that kind of package. And their target audience is millionaires and billion dollar corporation. $30,000 is a drop in the bucket when you're bringing in a billion dollars a year.
Monica Pitts 13:24
And that is one of the tricky things too, like, as we have redefined and redefined our target market at may create, we have to understand the way that the businesses make decisions. We work a lot with commercial construction, and also asphalt paving companies, they need a website, they don't want to touch it, they just want somebody else to build it, they never want to touch it. They don't even have time, they don't even want to update it. They're just like, Oh, I just want to send stuff to my, to my friend over it may create and have it done. And we come to them with a price that they look at. Because when they put a bid in with the state to repave a highway, it's like a billion dollars. When they go buy one new piece of equipment. It's like $500,000. And so they look at this website cost and they're like, Well, yeah, this is a no brainer, right like, and we actually really love. We love working for paving companies, and it's totally dorky, but we love them so hard because they're such amazing clients, but don't steal them, don't steal them from us. But knowing that that sale for them is all about the customer service and the fact that they don't have to worry about anything, and it's not as much about the price tag, it means that our values are aligned, because that's what we want to do for them is make an awesome website, backed by great service that they don't have to stress out about, and they're going to pay us and we're gonna get to feed our families and it's going to be awesome, so everybody gets what they want.
John Michael Perry 14:47
And there's plenty of opportunity like that out there. And it's all about that perspective within it so that we can recognize that we don't have to settle to be starving artists. We can find those clients whose values and pocketbooks align with what our value is worth, I could charge $50 an hour, I could charge $500 an hour, I could charge $5,000 An hour and I would find the right client to align with that you have to have confidence in yourself and your ability, you got to be able to say these kinds of numbers without flinching, there was a period of time where I went through the whole proposal process. And then it's like, now we're coming to the unfortunate part where we have to talk about business, and this is gonna be expensive, it's gonna be $1,900. Which wouldn't even cover a month mortgage on my building right now. If I'm questioning it, I'm giving them reasons to question me. Yeah, if I'm making it a big deal, even if they don't think it's a big deal. If you went to that company that spent $500,000 on a piece of equipment and said, Oh, this is gonna be the, this is gonna be $49,000. They will be like, really? Do I need a second guesses? Can I get the significantly less expensive? We're putting thoughts in their head because of our own imposter syndrome, our own insecurity? Are we worth this amount? Are we worth what we charge? Are we willing to do that there's a great story about the expert on the Hoover Dam, building the Hoover Dam, everything's going great. One day, all this equipment shuts down. They don't know what's going on. They can't figure out what machinery in the line of it is going wrong. They call up the expert engineer. He comes down to fix them. 30 minutes drive over there goes in looks at the whole blueprint of the plan walks around for about 30 minutes and says here, you got to fix this here XYZ they do it. And he goes, Do you want us to give you the invoice now? Yeah, just give it now writes up a receipt because this is again back in the 1950s 600? Some $100,000 You're only here for 40 minutes. Okay, you want me to itemize it? Yeah, itemize it rewrites it out handed over Labor $10. Knowing where to look 999,909. So it's understanding what my worth is, what my company's value is, and how to present it so that we make an impact on the client. And having the confidence to wear that and not be ashamed of what makes you you I am. I've been told I'm clever. My clients want me to be clever for them. Not clever in describing myself not clever in describing the services we do. They want it to be direct, because they want to seem clever to their target audience, they get that I'm clever. They just don't want to waste a time weeding through my cleverness so that I can help them quicker, those little tips and tricks that I had to figure out my worth, knowing that they value it, just not in the way that I valued it. And so I had to reposition it and put it together to be impactful for them.
Monica Pitts 17:38
And I think that it's all about that perspective. And that's one of the things that I feel like a lot of our nonprofit clients get stuck in, they're like, Well, I'm, I'm asking people for money, it's like, no, you're giving people an opportunity to make a difference, you're giving people an opportunity to invest in making a change, that is an opportunity, you are not asking them for money, because you are going to take their money and you are going to invest it in the future of your mission that is thinking about it completely differently. And as I started selling at may create, it was hard. Like I started a forever ago, and I had a person who was with me and she was a salesperson. And then when she left I had to learn how to sell. And I wouldn't even call myself a salesperson. I had I enrolled myself in sales training. And I love teachers. The first thing that my sales trainer made me do was just refer to myself as a sales person. Like if you can't call yourself a salesperson, Monica, nobody's ever gonna buy crap from you just put on the jacket and wear it, do it. And so that was a huge thing for me is just being like, it's okay. I can talk about money, I can sell the things I do, because they're great, and you're going to benefit from them. And
John Michael Perry 18:54
I agree with you completely. I mean, speaking of nonprofits, I was working with a nonprofit, just the other week, they do a benefit concert. And we have these, you know, tiered levels. And with that some of the feedback from last year was that this tiered level, the top tiered level, it's just way too high. Just way too high. It's too much money. And so I said, so you're willing to take that out of your package? Yeah. And I looked at my eye and said, Why are you being so selfish? And he said, What? It took him back from it. It's like what, like, why are you being selfish? He's like, I don't understand. I mean, you're taking this out because it makes it uncomfortable to talk about a large sum of money. What could we do with this large sum of money? You may not get this sponsorship every year if it didn't randomly come into your lap though this year if someone stepped up to the plate and did it what would it do? It would do x y&z It would help this many people it would help this many kids. So why are you willing to take that opportunity away? Why you want to take away that chance just because it's a large number. Why you being so selfish to make yourself comfortable? If we got into business to make ourselves comfortable, we are idiot. uncomfortable about being in business, there's a certain level of comfort in working in a business. There's nothing comfortable about owning a business because there's things you love, and that's comfort. And then there's things you don't like. And that is such a level of discovery. That's an area for growth. So I asked him, Why are you being so selfish because you want to be comfortable? How many kids has to go without because you want to be comfortable? It had a really, really great effect through a very awkward conversation. So we kept that level in. And then the next time he saw his colleagues, he explained it in that frame is like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Because last year, for the concert we had in their sponsored program, we didn't get the sponsor level. Yet one of the people who did sponsor said, Oh, you need this amount? Yeah. So he called the three of his buddies and the between the four of them, they each got a slightly smaller level, but at total that amount, whereas he might have only had that one sponsor at that one level, had we not asked for more in a very direct manner, with with reasons behind it. And yeah, would that tear run the whole concert? Yeah, that that means that any other dollars that come in, can go straight towards the, it's a fundraiser, you got to cover the fundraiser in and of itself before you can actually create revenue, anything created helps goes to that ultimate goal. And so I feel like a lot of nonprofits because they're asking for money. And because it's awkward, they don't want to ask for what they're worth or what they do. They don't pick the time to analyze what $1 means, what $100 means, what $1,000 mean, they don't put that into a story or word. If I donate $1,000 to the food bank, that sounds good. If I said that $1,000 to the food bank would buy a pallet of peanut butter, which would generate 5000 meals for for 500 families, that's a lot more of an interest impact. So would it be selfish to not ask for that? $1,000? Yes, it's selfish, because that's awkward. Would it be insightful with intent to explain through a story of why that $1,000 is so meaningful? So it's not just a one with three zeros? Yeah.
Monica Pitts 22:16
And that can like feed your worth behind it as well, right? Because you're quantifying the worth of this contribution, and you're showing people that you really are going to do good things with the money that they give you. And it's the same thing for businesses, you have to believe that you're really going to do good things with the money that people give you. And that's why you can charge them for it. And I, I had somebody asked me the other day, they were like, Why does it cost so much to build a website? And I was like, well, that is a loaded question. Because it can cost not very much to build a website, if you want to do it yourself. So I guess I could ask you why you don't want to do it yourself. But then too, I'm like, if you want a $300 website done, and you want to have an amazing website, because that's what people expect these days, right? They don't expect the second rate pile, right? They want something great. You're asking me to ask Tyler, my senior year level developer who has worked for me for like 11 years, who has a wife and a life, and he is really good at his job, you're asking him to dedicate over a week of his life to you for $300? Is that actually going to feed him? No, no, because Tyler is actually a powerlifter. So it really would not feed Tyler. But like it won't pay his mortgage like it will buy his dog food. But like, that's not that doesn't work. Because I have value of Tyler, I can't sell you this thing for under value. It just it doesn't work when we gift clients time, because we do have clients that they need help with something. And we're like, you know what we love you, we want to take care of you, we're going to give you your time. So we've had to work into our scripting, that when we give clients time, we tell them that we did it, we have to say we worked for two hours on this, that is the equivalent of you know, $220, and we're giving this to you. But if I did not tell you that I just gave you $220 You would just assume that I just did it and that it was worth nothing. So it's like even when you do some them a favor, you have to let them know that this is happening. There's a value to it, there's a value because otherwise they just expect you to do everything for free and that doesn't really work. So
John Michael Perry 24:34
there's a valuation and they understand that you did something great for them. Jumping back to what you just said at the beginning of that where how why is it what why is the website expensive? I've recently started to equivalent WordPress to people and asked that question to car chassis is a Volvo model car shares a chassis with a Lamborghini. So you could have a Volvo or a Lamborghini. You could have a 50,000 car or a $500,000 car They still have the same underpinnings, they still have the same basic level underneath it all. It's what you do with it. And how you craft it. Why do you want different cars? Why did cars cost so much, I wanted to do some that are still just under 10. They're rare, but I want to say that they're out there $2 million cars website, they're the same thing. It's what you do with it. It's how much performance you put on it. It's what kind of bells and whistles you attach to it. And some of them have the same underpinnings.
Monica Pitts 25:26
I really like the chassis idea. Because it's like when you build a website on WordPress, you're putting a chassis on it that you can do about anything with at any given time. And you but there's other types of products that you can build a website on that. They don't allow you that type of extensibility and flexibility, you know, and so that's a it's a tricky thing. It's a tricky thing. And I know that WordPress isn't for everybody. But my office is a WordPress love fest, and everybody is invited to attend
John Michael Perry 25:58
40% of the web for a reason. Yeah,
Monica Pitts 26:00
there's that one thing too. It's like insurance. So this is back to knowing your worth. So we build things on WordPress, it's a powerful system. I understand the worth of that, because I encounter websites all the time that can't do the things that they're supposed to do for the people because they just can't like there's no way to do it. And I'm like, Well, if you had a WordPress site, it wouldn't be a problem. We could make it happen. But I can't do it in this proprietary space over here that you've got. But I know my worth, and I know the worth of having a WordPress site. So I want to work with people who have the same worth of WordPress.
John Michael Perry 26:35
So that's an analogy I like so I appreciate you liking that.
Monica Pitts 26:38
Now, do you have any advice for people who are maybe experiencing impostor syndrome? Because that's the buzz phrase that everybody uses now, and I didn't understand what it meant forever. It basically means that you don't feel like you're good enough.
John Michael Perry 26:51
Yeah, like you're faking it and you haven't made it yet. Yeah, feel internally, like you're faking it. I'm a big reader. I like books, mostly big listener, I listen to a lot of audiobooks. And so there's some really great ones out there. I like introverts edge by Matthew Pollard. I think that's a great one for business and sales. I really like Russell Brunson him and his team created click funnels, and they have this whole value ladder thing. And, you know, there's Dan Kennedy, who has the whole no BS series. He's been doing copywriting services for 4050 years. He charges $188,000 a day. It's amazing. He has people he doesn't answer the phone. You if you want to talk to him, you have to fax him and he'll only read faxes on certain days, his assistant lives across the country, so that they don't interrupt each other during the day. This is but you know, like, he knows his worth. Yeah, he gets he gets paid a flat amount. And then he gets residuals on top of it because it's expected to make money. He knows his worth.
Monica Pitts 27:50
I like it, though. And I and I do feel like there's a powerful thing with he's like, and I'm not even gonna be interrupted by my assistant, I'm putting him across the country, right? He's like, he's figured out time is worth this much.
John Michael Perry 28:03
Yeah, not and it doesn't just break down when you're being productive. If someone is scheduled to come and meet him, they have to stay at a hotel within eight minutes of where he lives. Because that commute time, you know, he's not going to wait for someone if they get caught up in traffic that affects him. He's factored everything into it. It's just really, really interesting. So I'd say I think it was like 20 bucks. If you go through them all. I mean, he has one called ruthless timekeeping of profits and people, and it just kind of really breaks down, putting a dollars and cents, but to everything and how to optimize that efficiency. So. So those are resources, I like books. And so I like using those resources and kind of going back to them and figuring some stuff out. There's a lot of knowledge out there in those $30 tunes that college education doesn't quite cover today in a practical sense. So I like to go back to them. And that's been a huge thing that has helped me. The other thing is, you know, like you did with your sales trainer, and I've done too with other people hire a mentor. You want to find out what's going on, hire someone not to be your friend, just to tell you the truth and get you to the next place you need to be. I meant you mentioned the book by Matthew Pollard earlier called introverts edge. I hired him to be my mentor. It was some of the best money I spent, was it cheap? No. If I was only looking at dollars and cents, would I have done it? No, because it was like in 2021 when I put the bill in that we're coming out of a very 2020 chaos.
Monica Pitts 29:23
I went to therapy when my kids were young, because I was I mean, I had two little kids and I I'm the business owner, and it was a lot like I didn't expect it to be that much. And I had postpartum depression was a hot mess. So like after each kid, my husband was like, call up the therapist get in their girlfriend because we got to get you back and run. And it was it was intense. And I had to have that person and one of my clients is a therapist, and he said, Monica, you're doing a good thing for yourself and you're doing a good thing for your kids in your family. Because the fact that you're in therapy now, me They don't have to go to therapy later, we weren't raised with the tools that we need to live in the universe that we live in today. It's not easy. Our parents didn't have the the stresses and the stuff on them that we have on us, or that we have on our kids, like, I don't know, I just don't know, I don't know how to keep them safe and keep them right. But I do know how to help them think, and be aware and make decisions. And, and I think that communication training, or whatever kind of training you're going to go through will help you just be open minded and understand that we just really weren't equipped, as humans are raised to be able to do these things that we're now expected to do every day. I mean, my grandma was blind. When she was 27. I build websites, when she passed away, she had never seen a website, she didn't even know what I was talking about. She didn't even understand what I did. Imagine how far that went from just one generation. So I love the idea of training, I think it's powerful, and it helps people get themselves through and motivated. Right. So now that you know your worth, so you know where you're at and your value as a human, but also your value of your services. Tell me how is it on the other side? How do you know that you arrived? Well,
John Michael Perry 31:18
I do have imaginary friends design studios, that is the marketing design company, I have another company called Print zoom, which is a print company, because when can lead to the other Yes. And in a rural community, you don't always have the best of options. So over the last year I've been working on this is how I know I've arrived, I'm working on my own personal brand for consulting, so that I can go out and help people so that they don't have to spend 20 plus years trying to figure this out on their own, so that they don't have to jump through these hoops. So they can take advantage of certain technology that is around today. That wasn't around 20 years ago, as a bootstrap starting business, my office phone was my cell phone. And that created boundary issues with some clients boundary issues with me trying to please a please those clients. You know, we're now it's like, there are some really amazing apps that do second line service on a phone. So you don't have to have a separate cell phone for the business, you can create rules within that app, so that you can have office hours, you can have voice to text in case it's an emergency, you could have other things. And you can have like, if he has the three person office, but they're all remote, they can all turn on the app at the same time. And it's like they're in one office, the rings on all three phones simultaneously,
Monica Pitts 32:31
which, again, goes back to knowing your worth, because you are setting the boundary that you will not work 24/7 Because your values as a person, it's free time or flexibility, or whatever it is, you have to create a business and systems that support those things. And when they're not being supported. You're not it's not just about money, you literally, I've got a client that has my cell phone number, and I gave it to her and I was like, never use it ever again. Let's be clear, and she did call me one day on it. And she's like, I just first want to apologize for calling you on the cell phone. And I was like, okay, and she goes, but I wanted to tell you that you are so amazing. And you helped me solve an amazing problem today. And you didn't even talk to me. And that's all I wanted to say, and I'm gonna get off the phone. I love you. But I was like, okay, so you can use my cell phone for that Melanie. So she abused her cell phone privileges to tell me that she loved me. So I forgave her.
John Michael Perry 33:31
That's a good, that's a good one. That's a dream
Monica Pitts 33:34
it is she's just the best compliment giver. So any final thoughts, any final thoughts that people need to know to walk away with so that way they know their own worth, or know that they are not valuing themselves enough? I
John Michael Perry 33:47
think that you you kind of touched on something that could be a whole nother topic. And that's just managing expectation, managing yourself, you have to have that conversation with yourself, you have to manage your own expectations of yourself, as well as managing expectations of meeting your clients. And so having processes and systems in place, having scripts to cover scenarios, having a workflow process that you can explain to your clients manage the expectations of them. And you'll find that when they'll respect you more or into you will weed out those who had never had respect for you from from the beginning. And therefore, we're taking advantage of you. I
Monica Pitts 34:21
love it. So, friends, you just heard from two human beings who have been in business for a long time. And we did not know our own worth when we started and there were probably times in the middle where we didn't know our own worth either. But by continually re examining what was going on externally and internally, we could break the ship and keep ourselves moving forward. So some people are born with confidence. Some people just have it coming out of the womb. It's the darndest thing right? And then other people they don't and it's okay it's okay because everyone is still worth it and everybody is unique and awesome and Hopefully you heard that in our stories today, before I close this, John, tell us where people can connect with you. Where can they meet you out online?
John Michael Perry 35:08
My company's website is number c.me. I'm tossing up the landing page this week for the reach architect, which is the moniker I'm going under for my consulting.com. So if you find reach architect, or they'll reach architect on most platforms, that's me personally.
Monica Pitts 35:24
Awesome. Okay, well, we'll include all of those links in the show notes. That way everybody can get out and meet you. And if you do need help with consulting, or it's
John Michael Perry 35:34
a little bit of business startup and marketing advice, there's things that being in business I'm sure you can relate to. There's things I wish I knew 20 years ago, that would have made a trajectory of difference. And I'm not just talking about the confidence in selling their systems and technologies that are in place. And then from that, how do you pitch it? How do you find your market? How do you find your niche? How do you narrow it down? You know, what kind of extra value do you need to add to the table? Well, John,
Monica Pitts 35:58
it has been a pleasure having you on the podcast today. And everybody else, thank you for hanging out with us. And until next time, go forth and mark it with purpose. To get a copy of the show notes, and all those links that we just heard from our guests, head on over to May create.com, ma
[email protected]. And of course, I have to tell you, the things that all podcasters are supposed to tell you at the end of your episode, like if you thought this was awesome, you could subscribe. And then I would like get to tell you when I have new stuff for you to learn and new episodes and new people to meet new stories to tell. Oh, and of course, I would really love it if you left your review. So head on over to May create.com. For those show notes, ma y ECREA t.com. Or maybe even contact my team about building that next website. We can do it for you. And we even have our better than DIY website program that teaches you to plan and build your own website. So head on over to May create.com ma yecreat.com. I'll meet you over there.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
