Getting to Know A Brave New, with Polly Yakovich & Stephen Woessner

In this unique episode of A Brave New Podcast, show host Polly Yakovich is interviewed by Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and host of the Onward Nation podcast. They take a behind-the-scenes look at the founding of A Brave New and the work the team does to help B2B business owners more effectively market their companies and extend their reach.

Polly Yakovich’s Bio:

Polly Yakovich is co-founder and Chief Strategist at A Brave New, a Seattle digital marketing agency focused on helping businesses accelerate their growth through inbound marketing, branding, and web design. She specializes in working with clients to identify barriers to their growth and overcoming them with strategic content and marketing tactics. She has more than fifteen years of experience in digital marketing and branding.

Stephen Woessner’s Bio:

Stephen Woessner is the founder and CEO of Predictive ROI, a digital marketing agency, and the host of Onward Nation — a top-rated daily podcast for learning how today’s top business owners think, act, and achieve. Onward Nation is listened to in 120 countries around the world with over 28,000+ email subscribers.

Stephen served in the United States Air Force, spent six years at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse as a full-time academic staff member and taught digital marketing classes to small business owners throughout the state including the prestigious School of Business at UW-Madison, has owned five businesses, and is the author of three books, “The Small Business Owner’s Handbook to Search Engine Optimization”, “Increase Online Sales Through Viral Social Networking”, and “Profitable Podcasting.”

His digital marketing insights have been featured in Forbes.com, Entrepreneur.com, The Washington Post, and Inc. Magazine.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

• Why Polly and her business partner Josh decided to start A Brave New, and what areas of marketing they specialize in for their clients
• Why Polly and Josh decided to move away from nonprofit marketing and specialize in the B2B space when they founded A Brave New
• What early challenges the A Brave New team faced when making the jump to B2B, and how Polly and Josh learned to believe in the value they were offering
• How trial and error and experimentation helped Polly and Josh fine-tune their area of focus and helped them develop and grow the firm
• How mentorship and good advice became the foundation of A Brave New's direction, and why having mentors believe in them was a strong motivator
• Why Polly believes it is important to be intentional and focused on your strengths and on a clear plan for the future, even if you are busy with the day-to-day grind
• Why you shouldn't try to start from scratch but should learn from established business leaders who have already made the mistakes and learned the lessons
• How Polly and the team at A Brave New used their own company as an experimentation sandbox to develop new offerings for clients
• Why focusing on helping and adding value can help new clients discover your company, and why the A Brave New team developed a new level of discipline in decision-making

Resources:  

• Website: https://predictiveroi.com/ 
• Onward Nation Podcast: https://predictiveroi.com/onward-nation-podcast/
• LinkedIn: 
  • www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/ 
  • www.linkedin.com/company/predictive-roi/ 
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/PredictiveROI/ 
• Twitter: @stephenwoessner

Additional Resources: 

• Website: www.abravenew.com
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/polly-yakovich-5a5151b/

Show Transcription:

Intro:

Welcome to A Brave New Podcast, the podcast all about how brave entrepreneurial companies are unlocking their business potential using inbound marketing. Here is your marketing expert and host, Polly Yakovich.

Polly Yakovich:

Hi, welcome back to A Brave New Podcast. I am going to do something a little bit different this week. I was recently interviewed by Stephen Woessner for the Onward Nation Podcast. If you haven't heard of his podcast before, it's a really amazing business resource. He has almost 1,000 episodes and I was really fortunate to be interviewed by him. And we got to talk a lot about the A Brave New story. So we talked about Josh and my entrepreneurial journey. We talked about not learning from scratch, when to pivot, and we talked a lot about mentorship and advice and where to go for really good business inputs in your own life. So rather than talking about myself, I thought I would share this episode with you. So listen, and enjoy.

Stephen Woessner:

Without further ado, welcome to Onward Nation, Polly.

Polly Yakovich:

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here today.

Stephen Woessner:

Oh my gosh, I'm excited to have you here and super excited that you said yes. But before we dive into some of the questions that you know that I want to ask you, take us behind the curtain here and tell us more about you and your past and your journey and then we'll dive in.

Polly Yakovich:

I am a co-owner of a digital agency like you were talking about that I started with my partner, Josh, about, I think this is our sixth year actually. I'm so used to saying five years, but we're turning the corner. And we started our agency, we came from a big agency background. So your typical like 100 plus employees, and big agencies are awesome places to learn. They're so great. They're changing every second. They are really busy, long hours, high reward, lots of travel, fun stuff like that. And one of the things Josh and I worked our way up and we're leading big teams there in different areas. He more on the content side, I more on the strategy client service side.

And we just felt like things started to get really bureaucratic. It took us a really long time to get stuff done. We got really excited about new concepts and selling stuff to clients. And then we ended up passing it off to a junior team to execute, which sometimes I think disappointed clients a lot. And we just felt like we really wanted to be practitioners. We always wanted to be in the work to some degree. And we felt that our skills were slipping away when it came to actually working. We were becoming managers and sellers and we liked that too. But it bummed us out when clients had something happen and it took us 30 days to execute an email.

It just didn't feel like it fit into real life, real world problems or challenges for business owners. So we started our own agency sort of on a whim. I didn't know that I was an entrepreneur until I just ended up doing it and then realized like, oh, this is where I was meant to be. So we did everything like many people do. We took everything. We tried to do everything that anyone asked us to do, but now we're an agency that focuses on inbound marketing programs. We're a HubSpot partner, so we primarily practice there. And then we also do branding and web design because they compliment a full inbound marketing program very well and are often needed, and we have experience there as well.

So we've been doing that the last six years. I do mostly marketing and strategy for our clients and ourselves. Marketing for ourselves, like you said, has been poor and stop and start, and I know we'll dig into that more. On the personal side, I'm the mother of a two and a half year old little boy, and that's challenging with a small business and a young family. And also my husband is a chef and a butcher. And we recently just last month opened a butcher shop and restaurant in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle where we live. So we're very busy, but we're very happy. So that's good.

Stephen Woessner:

Well, congratulations on six years, and of course, I mean that in sincerity, because most businesses don't get to that point and you've gone through some of the refining. I'll use that word even though you didn't use that word, I'll use that word refining because we all, and my guess is that many Onward Nation business owners were nodding their heads when you said, "When we first started, we were doing everything for everybody." And then you started to narrow your focus down, take us inside that. Why did you and Josh start to narrow the focus down? What caused you to do that? Because it sounds like that was a process and now you're really gaining some traction.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah. It's really interesting because the agency we came from in our early experience was mostly doing nonprofit work. So we were doing marketing, communications, fundraising for nonprofits, which is a very, in some ways, a very similar thing to the B2B marketing that we're doing now, but in many ways feels like a totally different world. And so when we first started our agency, we really wanted to get away from nonprofit fundraising and communications for a couple reasons. As much as we love nonprofit organizations, they can be very challenging. They are slow to make decisions for really good reasons, but they are.

And one of the things I used to chaff against when I worked for nonprofits, but it is true is they're just a couple years behind the rest of the world when it comes to new tactics. I mean, really they have good reasons. Everything they do has to have an ROI. Everything they do has to be attributable, and those are really important. So they need other people to test stuff out first. But Josh and I just personally, we're more experimental and cutting edge. So in some ways we never really totally fit the mold for nonprofits and we are always pushing our clients ahead. So when we started our agency, one of our challenges was that most of our contacts and most of our referrals were on the nonprofit side.

At the same time, we didn't want to compete with our old agency. We really wanted to get into the B2B space. We just felt that there was more we personally could learn by being in that environment. And we were very confident that our skills would translate. Both of us had interim steps that were very affirming in between starting that and starting our own and leaving our old agency. So in the beginning, in the nicest possible way, a lot of our contacts that were referred to us were smaller nonprofits, particularly that our other agency couldn't handle. And then a lot of people wanted us to do little sayings that we just, we weren't sure anyone would pay us to do anything.

And we still [inaudible] prove ourselves on the B2B side because we have limited experience. And so we really just out of necessity, took it all. And we really saw we would carve out this niche doing something very different than what it turned out we were actually good at. Josh and I are strategists and big thinkers and Josh is a branding expert. We're all about content, but we really weren't confident people would pay us for that. So in some ways we didn't actually believe in ourselves enough to offer that right away, and we just thought, okay, what's easy that we can offer digital media, digital advertising. Everyone needs that. A lot of times [inaudible] a full program.

So we can maybe carve out some audience by starting improving ourselves in small ways. But then it was very difficult because people have small budgets for a reason and they're not going to take on a bigger program. And then we started getting hired for more of the kind of work that we actually were good at. And we started to really realize that we were doing ourselves and everyone else a disservice by not just sticking our ground at what we really wanted to do and what we were good at. And a couple of our mentors, we've been so fortunate to be surrounded by amazing mentors. And we've always really relied on other people for input.

And a couple of our mentors said, "You are just dying on the vine with this project to project kind of business model." We would sell even websites, even bigger websites, but that was just like one project at a time and it was really a slog. So it was like feast or famine. We'd have a couple of big projects a couple months and we'd be so busy working on them because it was really just us in the beginning that we wouldn't be doing new business and then we'd finish the project and launch a website or do what we were doing and then we'd have to restart our pipeline again. So with this retainer advice, a lot of decisions we made in the beginning too were a reaction to the agency we had left.

And then as we've grown, we've come around to realize like, oh, some of the things that they do and that happen there happen for a reason. They're just important for a consistent business model and keeping employees paid and all sorts of things like that. And we can talk more about that. We rejected so many things that we experienced there just because we were leaving and doing our own thing in a really different way, and the most different agency ever. And then we were like, oh, actually, we're smart now that we have 10 employees, I see why they do that. Now we have to circle back again and bring on some of those disciplines.

And so we did start selling retainers in a moment of like, we're never going to be able to do what we want to do and pivot the way we need to if we don't slough off some of these clients that are really taking up all our time. So we just really, I don't know how we got the courage to do this, but we really just felt we had no other choice. So Josh and I really just over a period of, I think two or three months, let more than half of our clients go. And we really, we wished them well, we found them new homes most of the time, but we just said, "We're not doing this work anymore." We were advised to do, and I know many of your listeners and I think probably you have read or done the book, Traction.

So we went through that and we were really emboldened that there was a system that we could rely on and we weren't crazy. And so we led ourselves through Traction, but in a disciplined way. And we just decided, this is what we're about. We're about inbound marketing retainers. We only do these two side projects, branding and websites at a certain threshold. And part of the reason we do that is because it compliments our main service. And then also it's often an entry into learning more about us and going through a full inbound program. A website's a good way to experiment with an agency, see if you like them for ongoing marketing work.

And so we just made a really big pivot about two years ago and we haven't looked back since. It was instantly rewarding. A really nice confirming message for any pivot is that immediately people grab it, they understand you better. They know how it works. They hire you most importantly. So yeah, long answer, that's how.

Stephen Woessner:

But a great one. Okay. So a few things, many things actually stuck out to me when you were sharing that story. And a couple of the words that, or actually three of the words that really stuck out where you mentioned courage, actually, I guess it's four words, courage, mentorship, and then disservice, and belief. So it seemed like early on in the business, you didn't have this belief in yourselves, whatever context you want to use, but it seemed like there was a lack of belief. So we're going to take everything we possibly can, but then you had some really smart people take you and Josh's side and say, "Wait a minute, you guys are actually doing a disservice to your clients by doing it that way."

And then through that, it sounds like, if I'm linking all this together, that through that mentorship is when the two of you really got the courage to say, "Yeah, we're going to make a pivot here." Am I linking all that stuff together?

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah, I think so. I think for us, mentorship has always been a massive part of my life at every level and every sort of personally and business and my career. And I've been really super privileged that I haven't really had to hunt them out. People have just popped into my life and I've always said, "I really admire you for that. Would you be willing to walk alongside me, whatever that looks like?" For some it's been more formal than others, but when we were first starting our business, we weren't sure that we were doing the right thing or that we had no experience doing it. Part of us was like, who's letting us do this?

We're just boldly doing this. Is that okay? Is that allowed? And those doubts come in. So I think for us having mentors who believed in us obviously pushed us as well, who believed in us when we weren't sure if we believed in ourselves really took us pretty far. They gave us often the confidence to do things that we were actually not sure we could do.

Stephen Woessner:

Well. Okay. Love that because it really illustrates the power of mentorship, but it also illustrates that you can have some really smart mentors around you, Onward Nation, but you have to do then what they suggest to you. Right? So the application of that knowledge is where the power really comes from because it's all around us, but you have to be willing enough to actually take it and apply. And clearly, Polly and Josh, her business partner, did that. So that's awesome. Let's go back to the retainer piece and then the monthly recurring revenue that resulted from that. So you mentioned that it was instantly rewarding.

Tell us a little bit more about that. Like instantly rewarding from a P and L perspective, instantly rewarding from staffing? Tell us a little bit more about that.

Polly Yakovich:

Yes. I would say in this pivot and every time we've made a pivot or an action like this, it really reinforces that. Without getting too woo about it, you really get what you focus on. So a lot of times, I think in my experience as a business owner, you're complaining that this or that isn't going well, you're complaining you're not getting enough of the right clients, but you're probably also doing a lot of things that keeps you from that. And this is again, when I think mentorship or anybody that you allow into your sphere and give power to speak to you honestly is so important because often you just can't see it.

Your head is down, you're working hard, you think that you're doing the right things. You're just grinding, and grinding has its place certainly. But sometimes it takes somebody who says, look, "Lift your eyes up a little bit. You say you want this thing, but you're not spending any time or energy on it. So you're not going to get it. It's not going to be a gift that's just handed to you from heaven." So your pipeline isn't full. You've done nothing to fill it. You're hoping that your efforts and grinding will somehow tangentially lead to a thing, but unless you put a plan into action and work it, you're just not going to get it.

And every time we've turned our eyes toward the thing that we actually either desperately needed or wanted, you get what you work hard at. You get what you do consistently. You get what you're disciplined about. And even though your intentions are very good, sometimes the things you're actually working hard and disciplined about aren't the things that are best for your business.

Stephen Woessner:

Well, when you said you get what you focus on, right, so if you're focused on more of the right fit clients coming into your pipeline, does that mean they're going to magically appear? No. Because I love the word that she used, hoping, it's not rubbing the magic rabbit foot and hoping that your pipeline is full. But if you get more of what you focus on, then maybe a mentor steps into your path. And are you smart enough to take the advice that he or she gives to you? Will that person make an introduction for you? And now there's a new prospective partner, but it's about taking action on the things that you're focused on, right?

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah. And sometimes I think when you, so for us, this was the case. I do think you have to be good at what you're doing and you have to have built relationships along the way. There has to be something there to mine. I couldn't have done it when I was like 21 right out of college even if I was well intentioned. But I think for us at the place in our business where we were, when we took our eyes and put them on the actual goal and the people we knew and pivoted what we were asking them about or looking for from them to what we actually wanted, then we found that we actually had enough to start building momentum. We just weren't, we weren't asking people the right things.

We weren't asking for referrals to the things we wanted to do. We were sort of, again, to use the word hoping, doing really good work and just hoping that it would go further. And this is where sometimes it is annoying but true. If we applied the principles that we talk about a lot now in other areas and we still talked about then, one of the big principles for direct response, it's sometimes a dirty word for marketers, but I'm super grateful to my nonprofit direct response background because it does keep me a lot more focused and disciplined. And one of the key aspects of direct response is just asking directly for what you want.

People can say, yes, people can say no, but often, particularly in new business, before you get a disciplined process, you are just hoping people refer you, hoping people hear about you here or there, hoping people come in. And if you don't ask people don't, they just don't think of it that way. Everyone's super well intentioned, but they're busy. They have their own things. They have their own lives. Sometimes they just don't think, oh yeah, I could actually refer you for a website. The pieces hadn't been put together for me unless you deliver them put together to somebody, everyone we're talking to is really busy.

Stephen Woessner:

Onward Nation, I'm sure you're seeing this, but I'm just going to highlight a couple of things here. This is exactly why I was super excited when Polly said yes. So there's nothing that's left to chance. She's working through her business alongside Josh with intentionality and making the ask in a very professional way. But then she also used the word momentum. So we're not hoping that the business grows. We're not hoping that we find a niche. We're not hoping that our pipeline is going to be full, that they're moving with intentionality in order to build the momentum, to build and scale.

This isn't about, again, sitting in the corner, rubbing a magic rabbit's foot and hoping that the future is going to be different. This is about taking action. Having really smart mentors, getting great advice from people who have done it before and then going out and doing it.

Polly Yakovich:

The other thing I'd add to that is that so much, particularly in the beginning, we were so busy proving ourselves that we had to create everything. We are rebuilding the wheel all the time and it was like, well, we're new. We have to come up with our pipeline generation strategies ourselves or it doesn't matter. And then as we've built that momentum, it's like, why are we wasting time? Smart people have gone before us and been doing this for years. And so that's the other thing that's been a big accelerator for us is just saying, people teach us for a reason. It doesn't mean we can't make it our own. It doesn't mean we can't jump off of what they created and learned and started and are sharing with us.

But for goodness sakes, don't start from scratch. Why would you do that? It just doesn't make any sense. And the more we gave ourselves permission to be like, we don't have to prove ourselves all the time. We can be compilers for other people. We have smart people that can add our own insights along the way. And then we can go so much more far. We can go further if we just leapfrog off other people who, by the way are saying, "Leapfrog off me." Everyone who's sharing this stuff is teaching it for a reason. They're not saying like, "This is a secret, now you have to go and start from scratch."

Stephen Woessner:

Right. Compressing the learning curve makes total sense, especially when you're working with people who want you to do it. Right? So let's now, I don't want to say shine a spotlight, let's now go behind the curtain of the content piece, because as you have shared with me before both in the beginning of this conversation in the green room before we were recording, as well as just in conversations we've had outside of this episode, there is a content system start and stop. And then every business owner goes through it. It's like, we know we should be creating consistent stuff, good meaty pieces of content and that we do it for a little bit and then we stop and then we do it for a little bit and then we stop.

So take us into the early days of the content strategy and why there was the start and stop.

Polly Yakovich:

I think for one, one of the things that was challenging for us in the very beginning is that we didn't know who we were or what we were doing. And that's a challenge that I know you've talked about before too, but it's sort of like, when you're doing everything for everyone, it's hard to know what content to create. And so part of the early peaks and valleys were also cyclical, because we'd have project work and we'd be busy and we'd do it, and then we'd have a little lull and we'd do some stuff for ourselves. And then we'd sell something and stop and focus all our energy on our clients because there were just a couple of us.

I would say as time went on, we started getting into the cobbler's kids have no shoes mentality. You're so busy. We create content for a living. That's what our product is. And we do it for everyone else and we build them beautiful content and strategies. And we tell them that they won't survive without it. I'm being dramatic, but you get it. And then we didn't do it for ourselves. So then it's where we did it stop and start. So then it becomes a little bit embarrassing actually, because you're just repeatedly saying your website has to have these features, don't look at ours. It just doesn't work. Over time, it's so funny because I meet people all the time.

It's like, I'm an architect. Don't look at my examples. I don't have any of that for myself, or any kind of business. So the cumulative effect of being embarrassed by saying, "Don't look at our blog. Oh, sorry, we haven't posted in four months," starts to build over time. I think that there's a coming together of several different things. The cumulative embarrassment of not doing anything and not having stuff to show clients, but saying like, "We can trust us, look at what we did for someone else," is hard. I also think one of the things that in our better moments of creating content that was really nice is we were able to experiment on ourselves in ways that clients don't always let you do.

And so when you have a consistent program and you can be disciplined about it, you can learn things in your own space that then you can bring to clients as more of a proven thing, or you figured out the wrinkles, or it took you 100 hours to produce the first one and you couldn't possibly charge a client for that but you can learn on your own back and then streamline from there. I think another thing that's always been a challenge for us with this is that we just get, even as we've grown, we're 12 people now, Josh and I get dragged back into the day to day a lot. And we've allowed ourselves to be dragged back into the day to day.

It's like that little business adage, every time somebody walks into our office with a monkey, we're like, "Oh yeah, let me take your monkey. Let me feed and care for it. We'll give it back to you when it's potty trained." I don't know why we do that. I mean, we're fixers. We're people who, nobody's going to care about our business like we do, we own it. We benefit from it. So we get that, but we just haven't been very disciplined about saying like, "You have terminal responsibility here. Bring me a couple of solutions and let's talk through them together and then you're going to implement them."

So I think it's a bunch of disciplines having to come together to even give us the time to do this. I would say the other thing about producing content that's been a little bit daunting for us is that there're so many smart people out there producing content that Josh and I have often felt like, what is a new thing we're adding to the conversation? We have to have some crazy new perspective or be absolutely brilliant to stand above the pack. And the thing that I always try and keep in mind when I have those thoughts is all the time, I'll be reading some article and they're like, this is a major influencer on Instagram with like 10 million followers.

And I'm like, "I've never heard of you before." There's just lots of people out there and they're going to find different people in different ways. And just because I know and follow 10 of the best marketing leaders doesn't mean my clients do, or their friends, or people who are looking for the help that we provide. And so I think the pressure of being brilliant is daunting. But if you can remove yourself from that and say, to borrow a phrase from HubSpot, I aim to help. I do have something to share that might help you or help clients or help potential clients who are looking for me. And I might say it in a different way or with a different personality that works for them.

And it doesn't have to be like Gary V. or Seth Godin or any of these other people who are brilliant, names that all of us who are marketers know and follow. And the other thing is that Josh and I often look at other content that people are producing and we're like, "Oh, that's simple. That seems easy. We know about that." And so really just getting in the game, it doesn't have to be for everyone. I would say from a discipline perspective, one of the reasons we're not stopping and starting right now, and this is boring and basic and something we tell our clients all the time. But we started paying for stuff. And so when we're spending money on it, we are more inclined to follow through because that's an investment that we're wasting if we don't.

And so we are, obviously we're content producers, we're producing a lot of content in house, but we're paying to have our podcast produced. We're paying for some speaking training. We're paying for a few other things that are then tangential enough that make us like, oh, we have to get some blog posts out because we're paying, we're making a big investment in these other areas. And so if we don't make the whole system work together in the right way, then we're throwing that money away and that's money that is still pretty precious to our business right now.

And so really, we just really had to sit down and talk with ourselves and said, "If we don't put our money where our mouth is, we're never going to do it." So we have to sort of like make this painful.

Stephen Woessner:

Holy bananas. Okay. I don't know if your goal when saying yes was to come on and be a mentor to Onward Nation, but that is exactly what you've just done. In all seriousness, that was so on point and there's so much discipline that runs through it. There's so much pointed decision-making that runs through it. You really took us behind the curtain to think about like, emotionally and then strategically and tactically for the business, how you and Josh navigated your way through a variety of decisions. Can I distill all of this down into maybe a couple of things?

And that is you recognized obviously the challenge of being pulled day to day, being inconsistent with the content and all of that, but then also it's like nobody's hiring, I know this is going to sound really bad. Nobody's hiring the 350 pound personal trainer who eats donuts in the gym. Nobody's hiring that person. And so you guys wanted to be the litmus test, the billboard of yes, we believe in this so much that we do it for ourselves. But it sounded like it was, maybe this is going to make it too trivial, but it was, you guys decided that we're just going to be different, that we're not going to accept what was in the past.

We're going to make a decision to be better and to be disciplined going forward. Is that too simple of a distillation?

Polly Yakovich:

I think it works. My hesitation is always like, it's not perfect. We're not doing it perfectly. It's not as easy as like here's the one, two, three step. I do think it's a decision, but it's also a repetitive decision. And I think there has to be a level again, not to get too woo about it, but there has to be a level of forgiveness where you're not beating yourself up. Because often we'd be like, oh, we haven't been doing this. And it's like, let it go. That was yesterday. All I can have is this moment in today. And so it's like consistently making decisions where if we missed our blog schedule last week, okay, last week's done. How are we going to get back on track this week?

And this is where truly for me too, I don't know how single owner entrepreneurs do it. I have so much admiration for them because having a partner is amazing because we give ourselves permission. I mean, we're like siblings now, we're maybe closer than siblings where he's like, "You missed your blog post last week." And it's not meant to be shaming, but it's like, we've made this commitment. So how can I help you get back on track? And also I'm going to ask you on Wednesday if you're on track for this week because we're doing this together and you're letting the system down in the nicest possible way putting that pressure on that's like, hey, we're paying the money. We're letting the system down.

Letting yourself have that accountability. Saying to somebody like, please, in a way that doesn't make me cry and feel bad about myself, I need you to shame me. I need you to pressure me. I'm allowing you to do that because I'm committing to this and I need help. So I think that that's part of it too. It is a decision, but it's a regular decision. And then you are actually going to fall off the wagon. You're going to miss deadlines. You're going to not get something executed. Clients do that too. So giving yourself the same forgiveness that you often give clients. Because stuff comes up. Life is life. So it's a process. It always is.

Stephen Woessner:

That was a great lesson in giving yourself grace, giving your business partner grace. We all give grace to our clients like you said, and at the same time, holding yourself accountable to a higher standard. This has been packed full of mentorship and lessons for Onward Nation business owners, Polly, and I'm grateful for that. So thank you very much. And I know that our time is running short. Before we close out and say goodbye, I just want to ask, any final advice that you want to share? Anything you think we might have missed? And then please do tell Onward Nation business owners the best way to connect with you.

Polly Yakovich:

I think my final advice is just like, make a plan, work the plan, have people along the way who know it and can ask you about it, and put their finger in it a bit. And like we just said, give yourself forgiveness, but keep pushing. There's a grit and a grinding that's just part of the process. But if you know where you're going and you can have people keep you on track, there's nothing magical about it. It's really just, it is hard work. There's fun, but it's like, there's a discipline there that sounds boring and not fun for us creative marketers, but you can't have the creativity and the fun without the discipline.

Outro:

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