Welcome to episode 10 of Creative Collaboration: Conversations with Veronica and Jillian. Veronica and Jillian talk about the importance of experimentation in business, particularly in adapting to online platforms. They mention the need for tools to facilitate experimentation and emphasize that cultivating a culture of experimentation is crucial, especially within leadership teams. They touch upon how startups are often more agile in their ability to experiment compared to larger corporations. The conversation ends with a discussion on defining what experimentation means in their context.
Jillian Vorce asks Veronica Guguian about her perspective on experimentation and how she incorporates it into her work. Veronica explains that experimentation is like playing, but there are different approaches when experimenting with one's own business versus working for a client. She gives examples of projects she has experimented with, such as the space conference and online networking during the pandemic. Veronica emphasizes the importance of celebrating successes and learning from failures in experimentation. Jillian also shares examples of other companies, like Booking.com and Impactiv8, that have successfully used experimentation to grow their businesses.
Both Jillian and Veronica agree that having a flexible mindset and willingness to try new things is crucial for successful experimentation.
Veronica Guguian emphasizes the importance of asking yourself different scenarios and coming up with solutions to overcome fear and negative thoughts. She believes in understanding both sides of a situation before making informed decisions.
Jillian Vorce discusses the need for a culture of experimentation and curiosity, even in smaller businesses. She suggests using tools like A/B testing to improve customer experience and streamline internal processes. Both speakers highlight the resistance to change due to fear or comfort in existing practices.
Veronica Guguian emphasizes that she is a consultant and marketeer, not a coach. However, sometimes she finds it necessary to guide clients through their challenges and help them understand what needs to change. She believes that rediscovering the initial passion for one's business is crucial for growth and success. Veronica encourages businesses to reassess their values, mission, communication strategies, target audience, services offered, and overall approach to doing business.
Jillian Vorce adds that change can be difficult because of fear and complacency but stresses the importance of clarity to prioritize and effectively communicate with stakeholders.
Both Veronica and Jillian agree on the significance of providing clarity as consultants by helping clients simplify their approaches and clean up any clutter hindering progress. They conclude by encouraging listeners to share their current experiments in the comments or private messages.
People & Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
1) https://support.google.com/optimize/answer/11417589?hl=en
3) https://www.clickfunnels.com/
5) https://www.optimizely.com/
6) https://www.mailerlite.com/
7) Booking.com example: https://hbr.org/2020/03/building-a-culture-of-experimentation
8) Impactiv* example:
https://thejilliangroup.com/change-management-impacts-sustainable-growth/#impactiv8
9) https://baseconference.amsterdam
10) https://jamesaltucher.com/
About Veronica Guguian
- Website: https://spinideas.nl/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/veronica-guguian
About Jillian Vorce
- Website: https://thejilliangroup.com/better
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jillianvorce
Credits
- Music Composed by BeeLa Music
- Voiceover by Amanda Balagur
Jillian Vorce: Hello, and welcome to episode ten. Can you believe it? Double digits ten of creative collaboration conversations with Veronica and Jillian. And I am Jillian, and this is Veronica.
Veronica Guguian: I’m Veronica
Jillian Vorce: Hi.
Veronica Guguian: Hi. Can you believe it’s already ten?
Jillian Vorce: I know. I feel like we should have a cake. Ten episodes.
Veronica Guguian: I love that. I don't have a kettle here, but that will be nice. We need to start celebrating. I know we kept on discussing meeting face to face and doing the idea, and then actually it happened. And I'm enjoying it. Me too. I'm enjoying it. And I'm very grateful for the feedback that we get from the people that they are listening to. I know they are taking something useful from our conversations, and that's the whole point of this. And I hope today's episode is going to bring even more value to our listeners and help us grow even more because it's a very fun topic. We're going to talk about experimentation and how to pivot your business or do you need to do it? What do you do to just change it?
Veronica Guguian: And let me share this very related to experimentation because I feel last week I joined a conference, a two-day conference that I haven't been to in ages. And what I realized, speaking with people, I don't know if you had the same thing, but we had a very busy networking life and business life before the pandemic, and then everything came to a stop and everything moved online. And now people are slowly going back to meeting. And these past weeks I met people I haven't seen face to face in ages and it was such a different feeling and different energy. And I have to admit it kind of exhausted me because meeting face-to-face is so different.
Veronica Guguian: And oh my, being in a conference hall with presentations and people and exhibitors and all of that takes a toll on your energy, but not necessarily in a bad way. We are discussing pivoting and experimentation here. And sure, for me, the past years were a big chunk of that. And I'm very curious if you had the same.
Jillian Vorce: So I'm a little bit like I feel validated listening to you. And it's quite funny because it's a topic that my wife and I chat about pretty regularly, like kind of checking in with each other. Like, I'm having this experience. Are you having this? And we both feel similarly, exactly what you just said that now going out, whether it's even socially in groups or attending a conference or being around a lot of people physically, it's exhausting. And so we always wonder, are we getting old? And I always think, is this me? My new life? Now that I'm a mom? I'm just really tired. Is it like I just don't have the stamina anymore? And I try to think back like a million years ago, pre-COVID days, and I used to get paid to shake hands at events.
Jillian Vorce: That was my jam. Like big crowds, lots of people being able to kind of surf, as I always thought of as like surfing the crowds, to be able to make introductions. And that was what fed me. And now I feel like, oh my gosh, it's draining. Not in a bad way, as you said, but it takes a different degree of I'm not sure what if it's preparation or maybe it's just building up, like the muscle memory.
Veronica Guguian: I don't know what I felt actually, the need to just go and sleep, take a nap. So this is what I felt and what I did. Just attending a session or chatting with people and just then finding a quiet corner. Sometimes I take my phone out, not because I have to sort out something, but just to say I'm not available.
Jillian Vorce: To the outside world because it's the universal message like this.
Veronica Guguian: Yeah, funny. Yeah, maybe it's a good thing because we are learning how to take that moment for ourselves and just ground and check in with ourselves about what we need at that point, don't get me wrong, I did get energy from the people and I was so grateful to see you were paid to shake hands. I was not paid to shake hands, but one of my businesses or one of the things that I'm doing is to put people in contact and to be in that environment and to make those connections. And that brings me joy and I'm very good at it and brings me money as well. So what's funny, because this conference, an amazing conference by the way the Things conference, has a lot of techie people, very professional but very technical and specialists in their area.
Veronica Guguian: It was very nice to speak with them and my brain to already be able to make the connection. So we didn't lose what we were good at. We are doing it's coming back and I feel it's renewed and I want to do that even more and more. I'm very happy about it. But I do feel we do need to readapt or to be more aware of our energy level. And maybe this pandemic forced us to experiment and to do things differently, to bring it back to our discussion. Actually.
Jillian Vorce: Yeah, I think we're quite clever.
Veronica Guguian: I think we are in a moment where we need to experiment again. Because if you think 2019, right, 2019, how we used to do business, and then we had to move everything online. So I do know for my business to move my clients' meetings and what we did online wasn't so hard because honestly, what I need for my business is my brain, a laptop, and a good internet connection, right? And then something beautiful like the world behind you has been very useful. I just got flip charts and things like that. So it's not that hard. We are quite lucky from that point of view, the two of us, in terms of our business. Because what we need is our brains and creativity to be able to do it.
Veronica Guguian: And that's actually what was harder was to help the clients pivot and to help them switch what they are doing. For example, I have a client doing personal training. How do you do that online? And she became much more successful doing it online and switching a couple of things. But until you do that switch and you find out how can I still make it personal, how can I make it interesting? In her case was just sending those elastic bands for free to her clients so they could do the exercises and switching and make it more accessible to them or you can do something very small that has such a big impact on your business.
Jillian Vorce: Sure. Just figuring out which small thing. So I love your segue, by the way. To go from being in a conference - in the flesh at a conference and then pivoting that into experimentation with clients is stellar on your part. So kudos for that very seamless segue.
Veronica Guguian: Thank you.
Jillian Vorce: Yeah, I think in general we first chatted about this topic. I sat with it for a while and kind of had a bunch of ideas about it. But the two things that come to mind for me, which I guess are similar to any other topic really, think it comes down to two things: it's fun and I love to talk about tools to help facilitate experimentation, which is key, so we could certainly dive into some of that. But the other part that I think is more important and foundational is the culture piece. And that often really speaks to leadership in how agile or flexible, the degree of self-awareness, all of these things that are, I guess, either present or not, or maybe they need to be cultivated a bit more.
Jillian Vorce: So I think definitely in terms of kind of having a culture of experimentation or thinking about experimentation, really ideally it's about instilling that mindset with the leaders, the management team, the founders, owners whomever you're working with to ideally try to incorporate that unilaterally across the company. It's the greatest challenge, but really where the most opportunity lies as well.
Veronica Guguian: I agree. And I think that's the main reason for which in the past, I don't know how many 20 years the Silicon Valley, the startup movement picked up because they are so small and they are so agile, they can play with ideas that switch quickly compared to corporates or the traditional type of companies, where there are so many layers from the person with an idea to the one that approves the budget or allows you to start playing. And you do see them trying to switch and change and having different labs inside.
Veronica Guguian: Like I'm thinking about the big banks or big corporates that they do try to implement this experimentation culture, but makes me wonder what's the degree of freedom and experimentation they allow because they're still incorporated, they are still very strict when it comes to the scope and what they want and how much do they control that. And you do see a lot of one of the methods they go for is like scouting and finding out small startups with amazing ideas, get them inside their labs, let's call them playgrounds or however you want to call them, and funding them. However, the majority are dying. And are they dying because they don't have the space to really experiment or just because the idea is not good?
Veronica Guguian: Then we do know the statistics, like right a lot of startups are going to die in the first years.
Jillian Vorce: First five years. Yeah, for sure. Majority. Yeah, it makes sense.
Veronica Guguian: But maybe it will be interesting to define what we understand by experimentation. Actually? Well, how about it?
Jillian Vorce: I was just going to ask you, maybe you can kind of respond to that coupled with my attempt to reframe because you started to share a little bit about an example. So I was curious, maybe kind of how you see experimentation. I just offered my perspective on it. So how do you see experimentation and then maybe a little bit more about how you're incorporating it? You mentioned a client example, so perhaps another client example or something with your own business, or whichever you'd like, you have a blank canvas.
Veronica Guguian: We never know where the conversation takes us.
Jillian Vorce: Yeah.
Veronica Guguian: For me, experimentation is playing. So there are two ways because you do have the one that you do with your own company, with Spin Ideas, and the one that you do for your clients. And there are two different things because different decision-makers are different. It's one thing when you play with your own company and you're the one deciding and executing and taking all the risk.
Jillian Vorce: Right.
Veronica Guguian: You're responsible. And it's different when you are working for a client that everyone has a different comfort zone and how much they are willing to let go of that control and security. Definitely with Spin Ideas. We love playing and I prefer the word playing and trying things. I think it's more fun and we do that. And the best example is the space conference that started. Can we do that? We are in this phase, how can we arrange it? Honestly, with no experience in organizing conferences, I just got some people around me with similar ideas and we started putting things together and I had no clue what would happen. It was amazing. The moment you apply like what do I want, who am I targeting? What's the shape I want you to give to this project?
Veronica Guguian: And then you just invite people to join while respecting like this is the framework we need you to be. So you do need to give some guidelines. You never know what will happen. And I'm a big believer in B plan C plan and D plan because let me tell you, always contingencies for sure. I think we did use plans B, C, and D because a lot of things didn't go according to the original plan, but that was part of the playing around and experimentation because we were able to create better than that. And I think it's very important not just to do it, but also to celebrate and also to learn, okay, what went wrong, why, how can I improve that? But also what went well.
Veronica Guguian: And as business people, or at least me, I don't know about others, let me speak from my perspective. I tend to forget to celebrate because I'm always going to the next thing.
Jillian Vorce: And what do I need to do, I see that I can identify.
Veronica Guguian: So I think it's very important to celebrate because those are big learnings. This is working and it's working because of ABCD and you can take and build and experiment even more on that. So these are something like projects that we had fun with but they are also for experimentation. Other examples from Spin Ideas were pandemic hits and what to do. Like a lot of my clients said they used to get business from networking or being present there or just meeting people and that didn't happen. So we launched two projects at that point and honestly, they were launched overnight. I'm a big fan of Mailerlite. Mailerlite created a landing page and placed it out there to see what was happening. So one project was online networking with the Spin.
Veronica Guguian: That was a response, my response to the pandemic and the fact that we couldn't meet and we couldn't network. This is how it started and I said the fact that we can't meet that doesn't mean we can't do business and we can't network and I refuse to accept that. So what can I do about it? And what's very simple, I looked at my network and I looked at the tools that I had at my disposal and I said how about we meet online and we find a way to recreate those one-on-one discussions that usually you have when you are at the networking event. And that was the basic idea. I launched the invitation, invited my network and we started meeting once a month online.
Veronica Guguian: And of course a lot of mistakes were made, a lot of learnings and it grew and now we are in a pause because everyone is asking no, we didn't kill it, we are improving it. We are pivoting again because we are switching everything to the next growth phase. But it did serve a purpose and it was like I had no clue what would happen. It was an experiment. And another thing that we did there was launching the Spinners program that was again, like amazing people that need business or amazing people that because of the ons of the online networking with the Spin. They are based abroad, like, not in the Netherlands, but they are targeting this market, but they can't meet it. And the other way around, like people that they need those services, but it's harder to do.
Veronica Guguian: So I created a platform of people that I veto so I know they're producing quality results, they are serious, they do fit some criteria, and just promoted them. So it basically acted as a media company but was very niched and again that experiment wasn't the best. I have to say because the purpose wasn't to make money then I realized it cost me a lot of money and how can I balance that? But I did play with it and I learned things from it.
Jillian Vorce: So that's four super good examples. I think the first one you shared was about your client during the pandemic who is a personal trainer and was able to experiment and then ultimately find success through moving by the way, she's.
Veronica Guguian: Predominantly some online classes.
Jillian Vorce: There you go. So there's that one. And then you had the example about the BASE Conference which personally speaking I'm thrilled that you created because that's how I first found you in the first place. Right. So BASE Conference and then you had the example about your ONS and so it seems like those three all clicked and have gone through or are undergoing further iterations. And then your fourth example with the spinner sounds like one that you have the idea to put together but maybe realize not so much it needs to go back, kind of go back to the drawing board kind of thing.
Veronica Guguian: Exactly. And then you think if that's correct and I still see a potential but the question is does it make sense for my business? And at this point, the answer is no. Yes.
Jillian Vorce: One of my favorite quotes is “Just because you can doesn't mean you should.”
Veronica Guguian: I love that. Right.
Jillian Vorce: And it's like it's I think an art and a science or a skill to learn or to hire the ability to edit and when to know what goes on the chopping block and what gets put on the shelf for later or not.
Veronica Guguian: Exactly.
Jillian Vorce: I think those are some good examples. A couple of other examples that I can share. One, I feel like just using a third-party example that could be well-known, I'm not sure it's a bigger company but I think there is the small business angle that's of interest to me is Booking.com, right? So booking.com is known to be running upwards of 25,000 different tests per year and through this approach, they were able to kind of expand or just explode from being a small business to being the largest or one of the largest destination booking sites, period, just by iterating.
Jillian Vorce: And having first the willingness from leadership to allow for this testing to happen, to change everything that they had invested in, all the optimizations and all of these things to test a different approach, and lo and behold that was the winner and it just exploded. Their company began as a small business. So I like the great looking.com as a good example.
Veronica Guguian: It is a good example. But what I want to make a differentiation here, this applies to bigger companies because their daily advertisement and experimentation budget is over 1 million. So not everyone can allocate that.
Jillian Vorce: But they were a small business when they started.
Veronica Guguian: That's true, that's true.
Jillian Vorce: And so some tools can be used for small businesses. So we'll go there in a second. So I have another quick example, another third-party example. There's a marketing agency, I think they would be called, they're a digital agency called Impactivate. And they were starting a new kind of division, I suppose, of their company that was co-working spaces for entrepreneurs. And so they invested quite a bit and they built beautiful spaces, were all set to go, and literally just before they were ready to open COVID hit and they had lockdown and so suddenly all that they had invested and their whole kind of business plan was like up in smoke.
Jillian Vorce: And so they were able to because of, I think it's because of the leadership and the culture that they had, they were able to kind of step back and kind of expand their vision and identify a different approach, a different opportunity and they were able to pivot rather quickly. And then instead of providing a physical space for entrepreneurs to work and to get together, they moved it all online and then were able to work through their, I believe it was through their municipality, through a program. And then we're able to kind of connect the dots and ultimately educate over 1100 businesses. So they provided somewhere around 7000 hours of digital training and consulting and coaching and such to help many hundreds or thousands of small businesses weather the pandemic storm.
Jillian Vorce: And they helped some companies to scale to the tune of over six-figure months. So a phenomenal example. I think it's a great experiment. Yeah, it's experimentation. It's the ability and the willingness to try something to pivot. And to me, it also underscores what I mentioned earlier, how critical it is to have the leadership have kind of a flexible mind and have a culture that allows for this kind of thing to happen. Because with experimentation it can be a failure. Failure is going to happen and if it's not happening, you're not experimenting correctly or enough and it also can be costly. And so we have to always be cognizant of how much we are allocating and the business case forward, et cetera. But anyway, I love the example of Impactivate.
Veronica Guguian: I do like that. It's true. Everything is about mindset and the willingness to just play. And let's be honest, you'll have so many things that we're going to go wrong because that's life. But if you think even following the recipe, let's say, or the old way, things still are going wrong. So it's what they have to do there. I think Marie Furlough, I heard it from her, was always asking herself what could go wrong. So in any situation that you have, I'm a big fan of this exercise because the moment you ask yourself that and you identify different scenarios you come up with a solution. For each of the scenarios, you realize probably 80% of the problem. It's actually in your mind and your fear of doing or trying something.
Veronica Guguian: And I love what a lot of people are saying, and not a lot of a specific mindset will say, don't do that because then you'll be negative and you're putting negative thoughts and you don't go with the right vibe. However, I disagree with that because if you're asking yourself this question and you're thinking about this, I find it more strategic. I don't know if I've been on the debate team when I was in high school. So what I loved about that because that's the topic we are discussing. And then you need to come up with arguments for the cause and again, be the devil's advocate. And actually, I love this thing because it's not that I'm going to be mean or things like that, but will help me properly understand the situation.
Veronica Guguian: And always when it comes to everything like politics or religion or everything, my advice or cultures, always, you need to understand both sides, because if you're just sticking to one, it's impossible to have a complete understanding. And I find the same with this situation, the business one, you have an idea, okay, what can we gain out of this? What can go wrong, why, and what are the solutions? And then you will be able to make a proper decision, like a well-informed decision, and if you're able to find a solution to the things that scare you or the negative part of whatever it is, then you know you're on the right track. Because we know life, like life is not perfect. Always something we're going to go wrong, right? Yes, always. But how do you respond to that?
Veronica Guguian: How well prepared are you to take on board those difficulties, solve them, and continue experimenting? And I do like what you said, like the quote that you gave. You can do a lot of things, but that doesn't mean you should.
Jillian Vorce: Right?
Veronica Guguian: And I think that's the hardest part, like go and play. But it's very important to know when you need to stop. And I'm curious. I want to bring it back to you, especially for the booking.com example. When is that moment when you say like 25,000 experiments per day or however, or when is that moment when you need to say, that's it, I need to take a step back?
Jillian Vorce: Yeah, to me, there's two things here. I think the culture and the mentality of experimentation should continue and should continue to be nurtured and developed. And that should become, like I said, a foundational piece. But then individual experimentations are like campaigns.
Veronica Guguian: So I think you have to.
Jillian Vorce: Can have the flexibility, but it's thinking of it in terms of, okay, what do we want to experiment with and why is there a business case for it? And to start to lay out some of the parameters, which you mentioned earlier with some guidelines. So I think that's important. I think of experimentations, kind of like campaigns. But just to dial back for one moment as you were talking it made me think about when you were talking about what could go wrong and how that can be, I think construed as being a negative viewpoint, which I don't think it is. I agree with what you were saying. It made me recall a conversation I had in kind of a perspective I learned at a conference many years ago through Seth Godin. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Seth Godin.
Veronica Guguian: Yeah, yeah.
Jillian Vorce: So I had an amazing time with him years ago that was like an unreal experience. But in any case when he was doing what was called, Icarus sessions, I believe his whole vibe, the whole talk was about this might not work. And it was really helpful to me to kind of bring myself mentally from the result phase and feeling so rigid like this has to work and try to produce and whatnot to really kind of shift over to being more open and fluid and kind of playful in just expanding the possibilities of what could be. So that was a really important piece for me. So just to think about, of course, when we're experimenting, it should be for a reason.
Jillian Vorce: We want to try to improve something or discover something, et cetera, but to try to not lose that flame of curiosity, I think. So experimentation should kind of sprout from curiosity. So the Seth Godin piece also reminded me of, I don't know if you know James Altucher. He's a pretty prolific podcaster and a million other things, entrepreneur, et cetera, but one of my biggest takeaways from him is ideas. And so he now has a new startup, I think, called Notepad, where you share your ten ideas. And so the reason that I connect those dots is because of this kind of mindset of experimentation. I think it really ought to grow or it will grow better if there's a container of abundance where you feel like there are new ideas and it loosens the pressure.
Jillian Vorce: When you think there are always new ideas, there's always going to be new ideas. So it's not like you've got this one idea, we're going to experiment, and we need a certain result. It doesn't have to be so stringent. So this idea of yeah, so I just wanted to share a little yeah, just like a little hat tip to James Altutcher, and that has been helpful to me over the years. But to try to kind of turn the corner a bit and give some tangible things. I'd be curious what you could offer to this as well in thinking about folks who are in smaller, medium-sized companies, either owners or running departments, et cetera.
Jillian Vorce: I think kind of what you're mentioning earlier about how booking.com or a lot of big companies have resources to do a lot of this, but what about smaller businesses that may not? So I think there are a couple of tools that can be used. So just share a few, and I'll give a couple of examples and then see what you can offer. So, of course, I feel like one of the most obvious or probably simple or most common ways to experiment is through A-B testing. I'm not sure if you've done a bit of that, but there are lots. Yeah. So with websites, all of these things are different landing pages, button colors, and all of that. So we've used like, crazy egg, and then there's lead pages, there's Google, Optimize, ClickFunnels, et cetera. I know optimization tends to be for.
Veronica Guguian: Bigger companies, but I think Mailerlite MailChimp, everyone is offering this.
Jillian Vorce: A B testing is generally basic. Generally basic, yeah, it should be, but not everybody's even using that. So I'll just use this as an example. Quick segue and then hear what you have to say. So what it reminds me of, again, is just kind of reflecting on clients that I've worked with over the years, how there can be a tendency to think it ain't broke, so don't fix it. It's like, well, we do it this way. Yeah. It's like, well, we do it this way. Well, why do you do it that way? Well, because that's the way we do it. It's interesting. So there's so much of it is like the headset about. So, first of all, for things to be working, I say this lovingly, because, no, I don't love all of my clients, but I appreciate a lot of them.
Jillian Vorce: Some of them are characters. But there are things that we say as business owners or as people that we don't ever necessarily stop and think about what we're saying. So things like, oh, we do it this way because it works well. It's like, okay, it works well. According to what? How do we know that? Let me take a look at the data. Oh, we don't have any data. How do you know it works well? Oh, because Susie Smith told us it looks nice. It's like there's a sense of like, oh, this is good because we built it in 1986 and it's still going, and we don't know if there's any problems.
Jillian Vorce: But really, maybe it's because of the culture there's a culture where people either don't feel comfortable to tell you what's wrong or there's no mechanism set up or nobody is tasked with that. There's not any mechanism by which we reevaluate what we're doing to look for things that are broken or that are becoming obsolete, or my big kind of hot button with all of this in terms of experimentation, et cetera, is it serving the client or the stakeholder in the best way that it could? Are you enhancing it? Are you adding any value or is it really adding value to you as the business or is it just simply a matter of comfort for your business? Because that's how we've done it.
Jillian Vorce: So I tend to dig into that other side and look for opportunities to iterate or to experiment where we could do two things. I'm always looking for how we can improve the customer experience or the stakeholder experience and how we can create a more streamlined internal process period. So that's to me what we're like just about every client, every project, everything we're working on, we're looking to check those two boxes. So that for me is how we bring experimentation through all the things that we do.
Veronica Guguian: I recognize that all my clients come to me because of that because this is exactly where we are working but of course from our perspective, they are coming to us realizing something is not working but you do need to bring them to that point. You need to change different things and then you start exploring like what exactly do we need to change? Is your company properly represented on your website products, how you do business, communication, and all of this? What are the internal processes? Because they do tend to have a couple of things, one is they are not changing because they are afraid and it's working. So what you said before, like why fix it if it's not broken?
Veronica Guguian: Even if maybe it's broken they are not willing to accept it or it's like an old card that is still running. It's still running so why should I invest in a new one until it's not properly broken? I can't do anything with it and others realize it's not working so they want to do it. But again, actually, it's fear in a lot of cases, fear of change. So I feel I'm not a coach, I'm far away from that and I keep on saying that but some people tell me you're a coach. No, I'm a consultant and I'm a marketeer and I'm implementing but sometimes you do need to take them by their hand and realize what's wrong.
Veronica Guguian: Why don't you want to change what holds you back can because meet like the example you gave it's telling me that but you need to go deeper and understand what exactly is the issue and to see if can you solve that issue by having a conversation showing different other ways of doing it or how we do the methodology? Actually why I'm always starting. It is about the client and discovering the client. Sometimes it's just falling in love with your business again the moment you started your business. And it's valid for me, and I'm pretty sure for you as well, how you were, how you thought, how you used to do things, where you were in your life at that point, and how you are at this point. It's a long journey.
Veronica Guguian: And I'm not saying only in terms of time, but also in terms of your growth and experience. So, of course, what you did half a year, one year, three years, five years ago, it doesn't apply to what you're doing now because you are different. So you do need to go through, like, who are you as a company? Are your values the same? Is your mission the same? Are you communicating that to the audience? Do you have the right audience? What do you want to do? Do you need to say goodbye to some services or change them? How have you been doing business so far? It still applies.
Jillian Vorce: It's so funny to hear you so two things quickly and then I know we're probably going to wrap up, but what you're describing, the way I explain that to clients is like, the longer you've been in business, the wilder your garden probably is. So we need to do a little Pruning to figure out what the heck's growing under all that thickery. I use that analogy a lot. Like you put stuff in play, but you have to go back and prune it. Right. And the other thing, as you were talking about the change part and how you said you're not a coach, I laughed. I just published a blog post about this very topic, about the kind of leadership in change management. And I often say that over the years, I've had a lot of experience with this.
Jillian Vorce: And so I say clients often want change right up until the moment it's time to change. Then it's like, forget about it. So I always joke about this with them, and I ask them right up front, like, how are you with change? What's the last thing you change? But here's the thing. I think it's the fear piece. Yes, the fear is the low-hanging fruit. However, I feel like sometimes the hidden stepsister is complacency. And for me, that is a harder one to overcome because when people are so just in it's harder to kind of get some momentum. So I think those two things, the fear part, or I don't want to say that fear is normal and complacency is abnormal. I don't want to frame it that way. No, the fear part, we understand it's common. Well, complacency can be acceptable.
Jillian Vorce: Yeah, exactly. We talk about the fear, but the complacency piece is a tougher nut to crack.
Veronica Guguian: I will add one more thing to that, actually lack of clarity, because I do like your analogy with the garden. And if you keep on adding things, it becomes too, what's the word? You can't see the forest because of the trees. So there are too many things that require your attention. Cluttered. Thank you. That was the word. It's too cluttered. And then you get confused and you don't know what to focus on, what to prioritize, or what to communicate. And if you're not clear on that, it's impossible for your clients or audience or whoever you're targeting stakeholders to have clarity and to understand clarity. Definitely. I would add, and I think both of us, what we do by all of true different methods is provide clarity and just clean house.
Jillian Vorce: Absolutely. So I feel like we gave a lot of examples, and I feel like, oh, my gosh, I didn't know how this conversation was going to go. And it turns out we're like so.
Veronica Guguian: Anyhow, that's the beauty of it.
Jillian Vorce: I know it's fun. This is what we're supposed to be doing, having fun. So hopefully folks have gathered at least one nugget from today. But we certainly covered we mentioned some tools. We have a bunch of examples. So I feel like it applies really to everybody, regardless of the size of the company or the role is to dig into the tangible pieces, the tools, and what you're experimenting, maybe some of the parameters around it, or maybe there's more work to be done on the kind of culture side and the leadership side. But hopefully, folks will with the willingness.
Veronica Guguian: To play yeah, willingness very small and grow it to a bigger scale. So no excuses. Doesn't matter if you're a small company, have no budget. It can be done like I did. The ones with a Simple Mindset are cool as always. I'm going to invite everyone to share in the comments or send us a private message. With their current experimentation, what would they do? I'm very curious to hear from you. And thank you, Jillian, for another very fun, riveting conversation. Riveting. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Until next time.
Jillian Vorce: Ciao.