: Good morning and welcome to the very first day of Amplify. I'm so excited that you're here. I'm so excited to be running this. This is only the second time I've run it. And I have so much more to say because even since, you know, the last few months, there's been changes, there's been progression, there's been so many exciting things that have happened, not just in my life and business, but in the... lives and the businesses of my clients as well. So if we haven't yet met, I wanna take a moment to say g'day. My name is Brooke McCarthy. There's no E on Brooke, if you remember that. I will love you forever. I have been in business for 16 years now, which makes me happily unemployable, hopefully for the rest of my life. I live in Sydney, Australia with my partner, who's also self-employed and our two daughters. He's just about to drop them at school at the moment. And I started my business 16 years ago as a digital marketing agency for values based business, for soloists, for small business owners who worked in the health and wellbeing space. Since then, I've had multiple pivots, multiple changes. And for the last 12 or so years, I've been training and coaching, business coaching. I've also been doing speaking and facilitation. are still with the same values-based business owners. So 95% of my clients are soloists, they're small business owners. They tend to be highly sensitive, creative, deep thinking, critical thinking folks. Sometimes they're cynical, but as we know, cynicism tends to be a cloak we build around ourselves because we've been hurt. Is that too much too early? So my ideal clients come from all kinds of industries, but roughly 30% are in health and wellbeing. 30 to 40% are in marketing and comms and creative industries. And 30 to 40% are thought leaders, consultants, coaches, strategists and the like. So let's kick off. I wanna start with a whole load of questions. So if you don't already have a pencil or pen in your hand, now might be the time to grab one. My questions to you today are firstly, why are you here? I'm sure that there are many, many different things you could be doing right now. I'm certain that your time and attention is being pulled in many different directions, but you are here and there's gotta be a reason for that, right? And it's your reason. It's not my reason, it's your reason. So I'd love to know what are you hoping to change? Asking yourself this question, what are you hoping to change? Yeah, these questions, the answers to these questions are for you to ponder. There's no right and wrong. But as we're gonna talk about, self-delusion is a bit of a waste of time and it's quite difficult to do as well. So you may as well just be honest with yourself. What are you hoping to change? Something has to change, right? Because change is the only constant, change is normal. It is very normal. It's as normal as the air we breathe. The next thing I want to ask you is what's your tipping point? Sometimes people call this trigger events. Some marketing people call these trigger events. I don't have formal training in marketing, which I think is a blessing. So I don't talk marketing. I teach marketing. I don't talk marketing. What's your tipping point? What in your life or business has to get to a certain point where all of a sudden you must change? And to follow that one, when is enough enough? And then finally, the big questions. What do you want? So long-term thinking is going to start today. Long-term thinking starts now. And this is not just in relation to yourself and your business, this is in relation to your clients and in relation to how you treat people. We need to treat people well for multiple reasons, not least of which is we will see them again. We will see them again. 16 years I've been in business and I know the reputation of certain people. Yeah, some people have a funky stink that precedes them. They've got a bad reputation. And if somebody is talking ill of somebody else in business, I don't tend to pay much attention because there's two sides to every story. The person telling me the story may well be the person that has the problem, but I do pay attention when I start to hear the same story about a particular person over and over and over again. Good stories and bad stories, right? If I am consistently hearing good things about somebody from different people, or consistently hearing bad things about somebody from different people, I'm paying attention. Your reputation is one of your biggest assets in business, and it's either losing your money or it's making you money. It's either drawing ideal clients to you who come prepped, ready to go, excited to work with you because you've come highly recommended, or They're very cautious because they've been hearing things. Yeah, and even though you're presenting well. They're, you know, softly, softly. So talking about clients today, talking about ideal clients, we can't talk about our ideal clients without talking about ourselves because we are the interplay between ourselves and our ideal clients. People don't exist in a vacuum. I don't believe personalities exist in a vacuum. It's my opinion that... Our personality is the interplay with different people and different personality types provoke different things in our personality type. So one of the things that we're trying for in ideal clients is we're trying to figure out who is the ideal client group, who is the personality type that brings out the best in my personality. And my ideal clients and me form together a mutual admiration society. And this is super important. You've probably heard this term before, ideal client or perhaps dream client. And I cannot overstate how important it is because the wrong clients will decimate your business. The wrong clients cost you time, money, they cost you peace of mind, which is the most expensive things. Clients that are a bad fit. will pay, but they will take an ounce of flesh. And some of them, of course, won't pay at all. So on the flip side of that, your ideal clients are an absolute pleasure to deal with and they become a self-perpetuating success because they are a pleasure to deal with, because they pay promptly and pay on time and they're grateful and they're happy and they're... fun to be around, they're a joy to be around, they provoke the best in you, they make you feel amazing, they inspire the best in you, they bring out the best in you. You do your best work, you now have the conditions in which to do your best work. Now, what we tend to do in life is we overestimate what we can control and we underestimate what we can't. And this is absolutely true of ideal clients. So we overestimate what we can control, which is we think we can control other people and we're diligently marketing ourselves on the internet, or perhaps we're in conversation with somebody we feel would be perfect to work with us. and we just don't get it. We don't understand why they haven't said yes, why they're taking their sweet ass time, why they keep, you know, not engaging us, right? Because we're under the delusion that we can control other people when we can't. And then we underestimate what we can control, which is ourselves, our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviors, our beliefs, our attitude, our opinions. All of these things can be changed, yeah? We are not needing to continue to believe everything we think as we age. One of the privileges of getting older is that we can choose our thoughts, we can choose our beliefs, we can choose our opinions. And if you're kind of scratching your head right now, thinking, what is this woman banging on about? I want you to think about the things, the stories you tell yourselves and others all the time, things such as, I'm not the kind of person who or the flip side of that, I'm the kind of person who, and there's things that you say over and over again. All your friends have heard you say it, something you repeat to yourself and others. Another way, another version of this is, I really like this or I really don't like that. All of these things are stories. All of these stories are made up. Some of them may even be true, who knows, but they are all open to change. So if you have a weird energy, if you have a sense of entitlement, a funky attitude, a feeling of resentment and annoyance and depression and stress, your clients are gonna smell it on you. You think you're doing a good job of hiding it, you're not. We can smell it on you and it's putting out a really bad stink. We don't wanna be around it. So even though you might be going through the motions and you might be saying the right things, you're inadvertently repelling the very people you're seeking to attract. I know this is perhaps a little harsh, but I'm not here to make friends. I'm here to be kind, not to be nice. So what I'd love for you, this is a big lesson, this is what my clients pay me excellent money for to coach them in, is that the more of yourself you put into your business, the better it will work. The more of yourself you put into your marketing, the better it will work. The more you turn up the volume on what makes you you, the better it will work to pull your ideal clients to you. And when we're talking about ideal clients in relation or target market, some people say target market in relation to marketing, there's two different approaches you can take here. One is not better or worse than the other. Both equally valid, but some approaches resonate more with some people and some approaches resonate more with others. The first approach is I know my ideal clients really, really well. So that was the case with my first brand. 16 years ago, I knew my ideal clients like the back of my hand. I knew them. I could see them. I spoke to them. I knew that person. Yeah. And so I focused on turning up the volume in how I spoke to them. I used words like you, and I described in vivid detail their particular situation, scenario, or circumstance. In vivid detail. And that works to draw people to you because you're showing that you know them. You're demonstrating that you're well familiar with their situation, which builds a lot of trust, a lot more than listing all your qualifications. Nobody cares. The next way or the other way of doing this is focusing on yourself. Again, one way is not better or worse than the other way. They're just... two sides of the same coin. So what we do then is we share our opinions, we share our backstory, we share our stories as much as we're comfortable sharing, always through the lens of how is this useful? How is this helpful? How is this relevant to my audience? We're not just getting on the internet and like sharing our life because that would be becoming an influencer, which is... totally fine, but it's not what I teach, it's not what I do. But the more of ourselves we put into our marketing, the better it works to pull the ideal client to us. And a quick caveat here, your ideal client may look nothing like you. Your ideal client does not have to look like you. They don't have to, you know, they don't have to have kind of fundamental similarities. There are definitely crossovers. There are definitely places that your stories interweave and interrelate, especially when it comes to values. You know, there needs to be that deep, sorry, let me start again. I don't know what word that is. That deep respect for each other, that deep kind of, you know, respect and admiration for each other between you and your ideal clients. But beyond that, they don't have to be your age. They don't have to be a democratic. demographic, they don't have to have the same taste as you. They just have to see you because you're allowing yourself to be seen. So one of my clients many years ago came to me and said, I saw you upside down in a handstand in the Sydney Morning Herald. And I thought you're the person that I wanna work with. Now, there's a lot more to say about that really, but I'm going to press pause on this because this voice note's getting pretty long. This lesson's getting pretty long. I wanna move on to boundaries and standards. Again, your ideal client has a lot to do with you. And if you're drawing people in who are not your ideal client, then you wanna look first at yourself, yeah? Stop. blaming other people and look first at yourself. What words are you using? What phrases are you using? What behaviors are you tolerating that's enabling those people to get to you? So boundaries and standards, if you are serious about doubling how much money you're earning, about tripling how much money you're taking home, and I'm not overstating things, I ask my clients, I do not overstate things, if you are serious about this, then you must focus on boundaries and standards. So the kinds of boundaries that I'm talking about, and I think I could have a PhD in the topic because I've had a long journey with boundaries. Yeah, I was the eldest of four daughters. My parents weren't great at boundaries. They were lovely parents, but they weren't traditional parents. And I was an extremely helpful child. You know, I was rewarded for being helpful. Any other eldest daughters listening to this, you'll know what I'm talking about. So it took me a long time. to learn how to create my own boundaries. And I certainly made a lot of mistakes in the early years of my business because I had no boundaries, because I tolerated behavior and encouraged behavior, which upon reflection was completely ridiculous. So what we tend to do when we're not great at boundaries, when we start life with not great boundaries is we tend to... go to the opposite extreme because we're not well versed in it because it's new territory to us, we tend to go from no boundaries to sky-high boundaries and then of course the pendulum has to swing back again and we need to learn how to make boundaries that are you know both respectful for both parties but aren't like a giant moat that's keeping people out. So here are some of the million dollar boundaries that I'd like you to consider. and to tuck into your brain to marinate on. By all means, never take anything I say at face value. Always, you know, tuck it into your brain to marinate on and decide whether or not it makes sense for you. Boundary number one, I'm allergic to drama. I like the theater. I like entertaining people, but entertaining people is very different to drama. I have absolutely no time for drama. because my energy has more important places it needs to be. Yeah. So if you are a people pleasing, helpful, energetic can do capable independent sort of person, because those kinds of people tend to start businesses, you'll do really well in the first 18 months and you'll be rewarded for that behavior. And then... you're likely to draw a lot of energy vampires to you because energy vampires love energetic independent capable can do people pleasing kind of people yeah and they suck them up and spit them out So the second thing to think about is boundaries mean no dwelling, no bitching, no ruminating, no going back over past incidences, no driving while looking in the rearview mirror. Yeah, what is the point of this? We all have shit that we wish weren't the case. We all have shit that is not. useful or helpful or in fact has perhaps caused us some grief, some trauma, has made us reactive or responsive. Yeah, and it is our responsibility that we continue moving forward, not looking in the rear view mirror. It is not just our responsibility, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our future clients. The next boundary is more concrete. Our terms and conditions and our contracts, these need to be reflective of our boundaries, reflective of the energy we're letting in and the energy we're not tolerating and the boundaries that we want in place with our clients. The processes is the next thing. So we want clarity for clients on boundaries, when, what, where, and why. And these processes need to be over communicated. We think people understand these processes, they don't. Yeah. We need to over communicate these processes. And then we need to repeat ourselves, repeat ourselves, repeat ourselves, repeat ourselves. So the next part, and you know, they kind of go hand in glove along with boundaries is standards. We decide what is reasonable and what is unreasonable because we are the boss. It is our business. We get to decide that. We don't need to canvas opinions on Facebook. We don't need to call out all our friends and family and get their opinions. We get to decide what is reasonable and unreasonable. Appreciating of course, that people won't know this, that our clients won't know this, if we don't communicate it. We have to communicate it. Yeah, they're looking to us for leadership. They're looking to us for guidance. We need to communicate what's reasonable and unreasonable. The next thing is our best expectations. So our standards are not just like what we don't tolerate or the worst of the behavior. It is also our highest expectations. So the conditions for success that we need and that our clients need in order for our best work to occur. And part and parcel of that, again, we have to communicate it because telepathy is not reliable. Part and parcel of that includes modeling the behavior that we're coaching our clients in. Yeah. And one part of this with my business is I don't want clients dependent on me. I am not oxygen. You do not need me to breathe. So whilst almost every course and program, every coaching relationship I have has accountability baked in, I'm not looking for dependency. I don't want clients that are dependent on me. Right. So I don't want clients that are looking for a mother figure. And I will actively repel people who are looking for a mother figure because I am not for them. If they want a mother figure, they can become their own mother figure. All right, so that is boundaries and standards, boundaries, standards, boundaries, standards. Write it down on a piece of paper, get it tattooed on your arm. If you're serious about leveling up, if you're serious about promoting yourself, these are critical, absolutely critical. So I wanted to finish this off today by telling a little bit of a story about how the last few... few years have gone for me. And I don't think that this is, you know, out of the ordinary. I think a lot of us have had a very up and down, rocky period. So 2020 was the busiest, biggest time of my business. It was like everybody needed me in 2020 because, you know, for obvious reasons. but also because I teach digital, right? I teach people how to turn bricks and mortar businesses into online businesses or to how to have a hybrid, how to use digital marketing effectively. So 2020, I was completely at capacity. 2021, I started really having fun and I gave myself permission to stop stopping myself because I knew how to have fun. but I had listened too long to various loud voices telling me, you know, stay the course, finish what you started, have one thing only, keep your eyes on your own paper, don't deviate, blah, blah. So I really started with paid live experiments in 2021. And I'd been experimenting in my business, all businesses experiment, but, you know, it was kind of gloves rank this up a few notches and I started selling live master classes which was great fun. I had a lot more clients than I've ever had in my whole life. I was dealing with a lot more people, a lot more people's energy. Beginning in 2022 I hit a wall and I started fantasizing about driving my car into a tree. not because I wanted to end things, but because I really desperately wanted a rest. I wanted sympathy. I wanted people to hug me and say, it's okay, you can rest, you can slow down, it's all good, you know, we'll look after things. So of course I took myself to a doctor, picked myself up, you know, and off we go. 2023, I had my biggest launch that I've ever had. and did really, really well selling my programs, selling my mastermind. I launched my first ever mastermind in late 2023 while I was overseas. This had been something that I've been trying to do for quite a while. And it was really exciting to be able to do that in Italy and then go and meet my family for lunch. I felt like I was winning at life. I'm like, yes, how good is this? And then 2024 is a completely different beast all over again. So what is working right now? What is working in 2024? People are taking more time to consider their purchase. People are still purchasing, and I have still had people that have found me through Google and within that afternoon or in other instances, a few days. They've gone ahead, they booked and paid upfront and in one instance without a sales call, you know, 6,600 bucks, here's the invoice, they paid it that afternoon, isn't that wonderful? But that is not typical. Most people in 2024, they're taking their time, they're considering things further, they need more information, they also need more invites, they need more pitches, more of you directly asking them to buy. And most business owners think they're being direct when they're not. They think they're being clear when they're not. People are also seeking more accessibility and more as you need it support. This is one of the reasons why we're doing this inside of WhatsApp, right? Because it's supposed to be accessible. It's supposed to be easy for you. It's supposed to be, being able to access this quickly and easily, despite all this argy-bargy that's going on by people saying. I don't understand how this works. So as you needed support means we don't wanna sit through hours and hours of Zoom calls and hours and hours of master classes if we can just ask a simple question and get the answer quickly. People pay more money to get something done in less time. Giving people more and taking more time does not mean you get to charge premium. It's actually the opposite. Yeah, if you wanna charge premium prices. You need to get quicker at giving people what they want because people that have more money, they value time more than they value money. They will pay more to get something in less time. So how can you make, how can you provide as you needed support? No. Any kind of change and if you're listening to me and you're thinking about all these things and you're like shit I do need to change this. I do need to you know tweak that I do need to consider, you know How i'm how i'm approaching stuff Please appreciate that. This is an emotional thing, right? This will bring Anger it'll bring grief. It'll bring frustration in some senses in some instances rather It'll bring self-loathing and many people will stop here Yeah, many people will stop here because it's too much emotion and it's easier to just continue, even when they're broke, even when they're annoyed, even when they're depressed, it's easier to stay depressed than it is, oftentimes, to make the big changes, such as having a shower, leaving the house, buying a nice outfit, than to just stay put. All of this is normal because change does bring grief. You know, even rebranding, you know, has brought grief. Anytime I look, I go back through old files and I look at things I did, whether they worked, whether they didn't work, whatever it is, you know, there's a sense of grief because there's a progress, a change, a sense that, you know, life is lifeing, time is passing, we're all dying, yeah? So how I wanna be perceived by others, how you wanna be perceived by others will stop many people from moving because change in progress means contradicting yourself. Change in progress means being embarrassed by your prior behavior, by the behavior of a year ago. And that is a sense of progress, right? That you are contradicting yourself, that you now believe something new. that you are a little bit embarrassed by what you put on the internet a year ago. That shows change, that demonstrates progression. All right, I'm going to wrap this up. I want to leave you with one last thing and that is today I want you your challenge should you choose to accept it because I cannot force you to do anything right only you can it's not my god that got uh long I'm going to keep this short this is your challenge today your challenge today you're going to post on the internet post either more of yourself or you're going to take more time to talk directly to your ideal clients, to paint the specific situation, to paint pictures in other people's minds, to talk directly using words such as you and to make people feel seen and heard. Now remember, We're talking about ideal clients. So the longer you've been in business for yourself, the more married to your ideal client you are, and you might have outgrown that ideal client. You might need to break up with that ideal client to stop creating marketing that attracts that ideal client. And that's gonna be harder to do if you've been talking to that ideal client on the internet for a long time now. So you're going to have to create new habits, new ways of calling in your ideal client group. And if you're listening to this going, yeah, I do that all the time. Yeah, yeah, that's not a thing. Yeah, you know, that's not no big deal. Go on then, impress me, impress yourself. Because if you're going, yeah, and you're a bit bored by marketing and bored by putting it, what you're putting out there, can you imagine how everybody else is feeling? If you're bored, then it's a good bet that everybody else is. you know, is two. Your marketing should be engaging and exciting to you. And if it's not, you wanna look at your, what you're doing and ask yourself some hard questions. Because you have to be the advocate and the hype girl for your own offerings. And you're not standing on stage or auditioning naked saying like me, like me, please like me, please like me. You're not doing that. You have fallen in love with your offers and you are so excited by the value of your work and by the transformation that your work potentially delivers to your ideal clients that you cannot shut up about it. You cannot shut up about it because you owe this to people. That's the challenge for today.