Learn how you can show up online by taking live video and repurposing it into a million pieces of content that actually lead to real conversions. Today’s guest is Molly Mahoney, also known as The Prepared Performer.
She’s a digital growth strategist who specializes in creating authentic Facebook Live video content. She’s been a speaker at Social Media Marketing World and has been featured in Inc Magazine.
After creating a video that reached 1 million people organically, Molly developed her signature method, GLAM, which combines her social media expertise and her talent for scaling one-on-one relationships with her 20 years of performance experience on stage.
Today we’re talking about how to use live video in your business, and then how to take that live video content and turn it into a content marketing engine with. We talk about the tools that you should use and systems for how to do that. These are things that no one explains or talks about.
USE LIVE VIDEO TO PROPEL YOUR BUSINESS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:03:40] You’ve figured out how to teach other people the things that you’re good at. One of the things that you specialize in is creating authentic Facebook video content and a lot of live video as well. Have you always been comfortable in the spotlight?
Molly Mahoney: [00:04:07] I would say yes. My mom has photos and videos of me when I was maybe three or four, singing into the vacuum cleaner, standing in front of the fireplace, putting on full concerts.
We used to make videos when I was around eight. My sister and I would make videos of my baby brother in the walker, saying “Watch, we’re going to make him disappear!” Then my mom would stop the camera, and we’d wheel him out, turn the camera back on and say “He’s gone!” We were doing our own TikTok videos when I was eight.
I was a professional musical theater performer for 20 years. That is something that’s been me, my whole life, so definitely yes.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:06:37] I think that a lot of people out there could learn the things that you’ve picked up along the way that have helped you become comfortable in these situations. Before we go there, how are you using live video these days?
How are you using it in your business? How do you think about live video when you are out there creating the things that support you in what you’re doing?
Molly Mahoney: [00:06:59] There are two main ways that we use video. One is for lead generation, to make new connections, to bring in new people to our community. The other is in delivering our coaching and our programs. There are two very different skill sets with that.
For us, we mainly use live video for both of those. We’re using live video once a week on our business page. We connect that with a messenger bot so that we drive traffic into our Facebook group, into our messenger.
Then we do a monthly, almost monthly masterclass or webinar where we teach a bunch, and we offer people the chance to join us inside our Camera Confidence Program.
The thing that I love the most about that lead generation strategy (our whole system we call the Map to Millions) is that you show up once a week, and you have this conversation with actual human beings, whether they’re watching live or in the replay. That one live video can turn into fifteen different types of content.
People will say, “Ugh, I’m going to do a video every week.” And I say, yes! Now you’re building this library that lasts forever because live videos on Facebook don’t expire. They don’t go away. You can repurpose it just by having the replay, but also you can turn it into fifteen types of content.
That’s all content that can lead people to learning more about you, to purchasing from you. It’s pretty dang awesome.
USE PIECES OF LIVE VIDEO IN MULTIPLE SOCIAL FORMATS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:08:29] I want to step further into this because a lot of people will say, “Just create more content. Use the thing you’ve created and repurpose it.”
However, people don’t always list out what they’re creating and how they got there. How do they create those steps? I’d like to start with that. Maybe it’s a laundry list, but give me some good examples of the things that you’re turning that content into.
Molly Mahoney: [00:08:54] There are some things that we do every single time, and there are some others that we’ll wait on a few months until we have extra time or resources on our team to create some more things.
What we’re doing is instantly turning it into a blog post and show notes. The way that I deliver my videos, we do a speedy recap at the end of every live video. That speedy recap is me literally going through the bullet points from that live video, without mentioning the comments, without asking questions.
That speedy recap is taken down. We have a member of our team who chops it off, adds a little bumper to it, and masters the sound. I’m grateful to have our team member who does that, but there are also tools that you can use, like a tool called Repurpose.
We chop that speedy recap off, which then goes on YouTube. It’s set to go on LinkedIn, and we can create IGTV videos out of it. We also are getting ready to launch an Alexa Briefing and an Alexa Podcast. We’re stripping the audio both from the whole version of the video and also from just that speedy recap.
Then two other things that we’re doing is we’re making quote cards or little infographics. If I’m sharing the concept of the social triangle, (which is something that we talk about a lot, how to unlock the goodness of our social platforms so we can get more organic reach,) we then have an infographic that’s created that we can use as an Instagram post.
What’s really cool is once I have these Instagram posts go out, these graphic cards which actually were created based on the live video that I did, I go straight to my Instagram. I take a screenshot of one of those cards. I crop it so it’s just that image.
Then I use it with the green screen feature on TikTok. I go to TikTok and I make a video based on the card, which is made based on the live video that I had already done on my business page.
So I’m fully recycling it. I create a TikTok video with the quote or the infographic behind me. I don’t even have to edit anything, I just step to the side and the infographic is there.
Then I can share that on TikTok and I can share it on Instagram stories. Then on Instagram stories, I can link it to the IGTV video, which then also links back to the live video that I did on my Facebook page.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:11:32] There are so many opportunities. In the TikTok, you stand in front of the background or the quotable. What are you saying? Are you just repeating that? Are you elaborating? What are you doing?
Molly Mahoney: [00:11:46] With the TikTok live video, this is a newer piece of the strategy that we’ve started doing just actually a couple of weeks ago because I struggled.
What I do is I pull up the blog posts. If there are five bullet points, I’ll do a video that’s “Five ways to…” Then I just read my own blog posts. I read the bullet points for my blog post and say, “Tip one, tip two, et cetera”.
With the quote cards, I’ve been doing this really silly thing that I made up that I love. I take the image and I make it really small on TikTok. For example today I had a card that we had made that said, “I had a DNA test, and it proved that I’m one hundred percent shimmer and shine.”
Then I made the image really small on TikTok so you couldn’t see what it said. With the green screen sticker, the filter that you use on TikTok, I came in and I said, all serious, “I had a DNA test done, and I have to tell you what the results were.”
The next thing which I made up, I’ve never seen anybody else do. I blew (exhale), then I stopped the video, and made the thing get bigger. Then I blew again. I made it get bigger until eventually, it took over the whole screen.
Then I moved it away and I said, “If you’re one hundred percent shimmer and shine, follow for more tips!” It’s having fun with the way you repurpose your content too.
LET OUT YOUR FUN SIDE
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:13:40] I think you have to. A lot of us don’t all naturally understand where and how to be fun and bring that side of our personality into the business. I love hearing examples of how people like you are doing this. The TikTok channel seems an easier place to do that.
Molly Mahoney: [00:14:11] Even I will say I seriously struggled with it, even as someone who is a musical theater performer. First of all, there was so much pressure to be funny that the first few videos I did there were so dumb.
When you go back and look at it, I feel like finally, a couple of weeks ago, took my own advice and just did the things that made me happy. If they work, they work. If not, at least I’m creating content that I can use in my Instagram stories.
For me, I’m more using TikTok as a way to deliver value. Find the people that I know are really my ideal clients, but also have fun with the way that I can create the video using the tools so that I can use it in other places.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:14:55] On every channel, I think there’s a period of time where you have to find your voice for that channel. You know who you are, but how you express yourself in these different formats, whether it’s the same or different, I think takes time.
I like hearing these little tidbits of, “This is what I tried.” I know this isn’t a TikTok deep dive, but I appreciate the example.
Molly Mahoney: [00:15:14] To highlight what you said in the beginning when you said, “You’ve been someone who’s always been in the spotlight.” I think that’s one thing that a lot of people when it comes to doing videos, maybe if they see my videos, I think two things happen.
One is people say, “Whoa, she has way too much energy for me. Lay off the coffee!” People will comment something like that. Then other people say, “No talk faster.” It’s definitely either an acquired taste or you are part of that crazy world that I live in.
The other thing that happens is people see that and they say, “Well, you’ve been a musical theater performer since you were a kid. Obviously, this video thing works for you.”
I want to highlight the first thing that I said, which is for some people, my energy is not their taste. They’re not going to be able to hear the marketing strategies that I’m sharing because they just don’t jive with it. They may jive better with you as a listener. Whatever it is that makes you, you, that’s what we want to see on the camera.
It’s interesting to me that with TikTok, I found myself coming into that same issue where I was trying to be somebody else, instead of just taking my own advice and really figuring out who you are as a person, and just elevating that a little bit.
SOME STEPS TO FOLLOW WITH LIVE VIDEO & REPURPOSING
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:16:22] Well, I appreciate you going down the rabbit hole with me on that a little bit. I want to talk more about some examples of what you can create after you’ve created one thing. You mentioned some people that are helping you on your team.
What is step one, step two? Am I hiring a copywriter, because then the first thing I need to do is get transcripts and blogs and quotables? Or am I working with graphic design people? Or am I just using tools? I know there are a lot of routes, but I’d love to hear your take on what’s been good for you.
Molly Mahoney: [00:16:58] I will say that at this point, I’ve been doing live video once a week consistently since 2016. There’s definitely been a process that we’ve taken to get here with that in mind. I did not hire an actual transcriber until about a month ago.
I connected to her through my good friends with the Hustle&Flowchart podcast, Matt and Joe. They recommended their note taker because I loved their notes.
What we were doing beforehand was just having the speedy recap transcribed. I would say for anybody, as you’re looking to build this out and you’re not ready to bring on a whole team, purchase Repurpose.io.
I’ve had that tool because it automatically downloads every single video I do. At one point Facebook was being glitchy and my live video disappeared. I had it saved on Repurpose. I have it set up so that every video I do is automatically downloaded.
I do use be.live, which is the tool that I use to go live because I can instantly add graphics and videos and make things look a little more professional. That way I don’t actually have to do too much editing to the live video after the fact.
It already has lower thirds, it already has names and graphics and a frame. So be.live would be another tool I would suggest that you get.
Then with Repurpose, it’s crazy because you can go in and you can create videos for all different platforms. It allows you to create square videos, taller videos. You can add the little bar on the bottom, the progress bar, which is so cool.
You can customize the color of the progress bar. You can automatically add captions to the bottom of the video, all with that one tool. It’s called Repurpose, which is obviously why I would recommend it as a repurposing tool. It’s so awesome.
The other tool that I would look into getting if you have a WordPress website, we use another tool created by Hani (who created repurpose) and I think it’s Simple Social Press. It’s amazing.
It automatically takes your live video from Facebook, as soon as you go live, and it turns it into a blog post automatically. The video is embedded into your blog posts, which is cool. But what’s even cooler is the comments from your video are automatically comments on your blog post.
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
CREATE A RELIABLE TEAM
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:20:53] You still have to do some work in these processes, right? You use these tools, but who’s actually going in there? You download your live video to Repurpose if you’re going to use it for clips. You still have to pick which ones, so who’s doing that?
Molly Mahoney: [00:21:09] The way that I have it set up right now is our team member, Kendra, goes in and finds what we call little snippets. She finds snippets that we can then use. If you look at my Instagram, you’ll find that there are these little snippets that we use on an IGTV, we use them in our Instagram stories, that kind of stuff.
Kendra does all those. She’s more of an executive assistant. She’s got a great eye for things which is a cool benefit to have. Then we actually, for our repurpose videos we put on YouTube, I do have Vaughn who does full audio editing for us.
I just found that if we’re going to put it into a podcast, while I can strip the audio automatically from Repurpose, I prefer to have it be a little higher quality.
For example, this week I did a video with Ryan Levesque. At the end, we didn’t have enough time to do the speedy recap. I said, “Ooh, this last section that we do, I’m going to pause right here and then Vaughn is going to be able to crop this part out. Let’s stay super focused in this last section.”
Vaughn went through and he found these pieces to pull from the video to put it together, to make it seem a little more professional. I do invest in that, as a team member, to have him as someone who has a higher level of audio and editing.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:22:21] If you’re doing something that’s normally live like a Facebook Live, people expect that certain look and feel or sound.
You translate it to a podcast, and you do have to do some steps. People say, “Well in this format I expect to not hear hums in the background and static.” Get rid of the live commentary of you talking to people in the live videos.
Molly Mahoney: [00:22:43] You can see that if I’m screen sharing or something, it can be weird. He tries to pull much of those out. Then we add a bumper that says, “Hey, if you’re feeling the FOMO because you can’t see the comments, you should join us over on Facebook Live.” We’re honest and upfront about the fact that we’re being platform-specific.
Then I have another team member, Shannon. It used to be Shannon who would take the actual transcript that we would get of just that speedy recap. She would judge it for SEO and stuff like that.
Now Kate does the transcript. She sends it to Shannon and then Shannon does all the SEO stuff. Shannon is someone who’s been on my team for years. She just works a few hours a week for us doing some social media stuff and does those blog posts.
CREATE SYSTEMS FOR DELEGATION
When we do our live video, part of our main strategy is that we have show notes for every show that we’re giving people. In order to get those show notes, they have to opt into the messenger bot. Then the messenger bot says, “Awesome. Now, to get them, you have to go into our Facebook group.”
Inside our Facebook group, we have a show note archive. It’s a file inside our group that Shannon, (after she creates the final show notes on the blog post,) actually grabs those, puts them in the Facebook group, in the show note archive.
It’s really this all-encompassing map that’s very intertwined, of all these things that come together. We have the whole thing outlined in an Assata board, and that’s something that, whether you’re a solo or you have a team, I think you can’t wait in order to create those systems.
Since we had those systems, we’re able to pass them off to different team members easily as we grow.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:24:57] That’s what I wanted to get out of this today. Everyone will tell you to do the thing, but they’ll never either actually show you their approach. They never say, “Here’s actually what I’m creating. Here’s who’s helping me do it. Here are the tools I’m using. Here’s how to get from A to B.”
No one actually goes behind these things and tells you that unless they’re charging you to do it for you.
Molly Mahoney: [00:25:18] Sometimes even when you pay people to do it for you, they won’t tell you how they’re doing it because they live in this scarcity mindset. I would love to show my whole little map if you want to see it. Then you could even include it in the show notes. Is that okay? We can put a link to it later.
If I look at it right now, it’s this crazy thing of bubbles. It shows everything that you’re doing to drive traffic to the video before it actually happens and then what you do afterward. It’s all laid out here so that you could actually see it.
You may think, “Wait a minute. How do I do that piece of it,” but it’s all laid out here so you can see it.
SCHEDULING LIVE VIDEO & REPURPOSED CONTENT
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:26:02] After they have created ten or twenty pieces of content, they have to figure out where to put them in the week, in the day, in the month. How do you go about doing that? You have something fresh coming out, and what of that content are you dropping today versus later in the week, versus multiple times a day?
Molly Mahoney: [00:26:46] We are careful not to have the same, for example, the speedy recap for the video. If I have this mini recap video of it, I’m going to wait maybe even a couple of months before I actually publish that on YouTube so that it feels fresh.
If everything was the same on all platforms at the same time, nobody has a reason to follow you in different places. We haven’t launched this fully, but we have this whole queue of speedy recap videos that we’re ready to put out consistently on YouTube. I released a couple of them.
The real goal is going to be that the description from the video is going to be the description on the YouTube stuff. It’s also going to be the email that we send to drive traffic to YouTube. This will be content that comes out way after we’ve done it on Facebook Live. It’s fresh content.
Let’s say on Fridays, I’m sending out a speedy recap from a past video, but it’s coming out as if it’s fresh content. The same thing on our IGTV stuff. We basically just took all these snippets and we scheduled a bunch of snippets out for months that come out once a week. We’re releasing these other pieces on different channels once a week.
The show notes, our goal is to have them out by the Monday after the show. Then we can say, “Hey, the show notes from last week’s show are available.”
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:28:09] That’s because you have to think about the way you are creating. You’re creating in a live video format, so you need time on the back-end to do the process of these different things.
You have to build it based on what your flow is for the different content you have. It does help to have some kind of structure, to build a calendar, like a content calendar. Everyone uses that word, but at the end of the day, it’s you figuring out what makes sense.
I’d love to hear if you have any tips like this. When I was talking to Evan Carmichael, who’s got an amazing YouTube channel, he said he has a theme day for throwback content.
Once a month it’s Tony Robbin’s day. He posts a clip from his awesome interview and directs people to that video. Then next month he does it again that same day. He has three different clips and just rotates them.
Do you have anything that you’re doing that helps you figure out where this goes?
Molly Mahoney: [00:29:50] We actually have the tool which is called SmarterQueue. What I love about SmarterQueue is that you can set themes. The way that we teach this in our GLAM program (GLAM is Go Live And Monetize) is we have this document that’s called the Content of Clients. It’s these seven action steps that they take once they’ve joined the program.
One of these action steps is the content plan. I find that a lot of people will say, “This sounds really awesome,” but a lot of people will say, “Oh, it’s throwback Thursday and it’s freedom Friday. It’s tip Tuesday and it’s working Wednesday.”
Those are very generic themes that people just use to keep the interaction going in their Facebook group, but people end up tuning out because it doesn’t actually mean anything. We have a whole system where we help you to identify your Tree of Beliefs.
ADDRESS BELIEFS
The Tree of Beliefs is that in order for someone to say yes to your product, your program, or your service, whatever it is that they’re buying from you, they have to believe a certain set of things in order to say yes.
With GLAM, it’s a group program. There is some private coaching as a part of it, but if someone doesn’t believe that a group coaching program is actually going to be more beneficial to them than private coaching, they may have resistance to purchasing GLAM. I need to make sure that in my content I’m somehow speaking to the power of community.
I love that book Pre-suasion. The whole point is that by the time you have a sales conversation or you make an offer, they already believe everything about you.
They believe everything about themselves, about the program or the offer, and about why now is the right time, because your content is constantly speaking to that. We make sure that your categories help move that forward.
ADDRESS OBJECTIONS
The other thing that we do is talk about objections. We figure out what are all the objections that people would have purchasing from you and make sure that your content is speaking to those objections.
Once you’ve done that work, then you’re going to decide that every day, there’s going to be a different theme. You may announce that this is the date, that Wednesdays are the day that we do our Facebook Lives. Everyone knows it’s happening.
It also may be something that you just have internally as the structure for the team. This is what’s happening on this day. What gets really cool is that inside SmarterQueue you can identify these themes.
I have an authority building thing. I have one that’s about showing up. Monday morning, we do a post that’s called Show Up. That’s what our internal theme is. It’s going to be a quote or a video or a post around the belief that we have to show up in order for our businesses to grow.
Then I can fill the queue on SmarterQueue with all of the contents that I have about showing up. As I add new content, it goes into that queue. What happens is it is repurposed within my Facebook page.
If I have twenty things in that show-up category for twenty Mondays, those posts are going to go out on the twenty-first Monday. It’s going to bring that other post back into the queue.
REPEATED CONTENT CAN BRING ENGAGEMENT
We found that even if you have really great reach on your Facebook page, for the most part, it’s not going to be everyone who follows you on Facebook. We found that we have more of a chance of going viral and of getting more engagement, reactions, and conversions when we actually repeat the content that does well.
We just keep that flow going. You can pause it if something happens in the world and you don’t want to have things that are tone-deaf out there. We’ve paused ours a couple of times recently, but for the most part, we never have to worry that we’re going to have an empty page. We have this content in there that’s consistently being repurposed.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:33:47] I think that that’s a bit of a mindset shift. Even if you haven’t figured out where you’re going to put all of this stuff, you start to make the plan to use the things you create. If you start figuring out how you can do that, even if it’s one step at a time, I think your efforts are going to go farther
We put so much time into creating. If we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to be seen by showing it to people over and over again, I think we’re missing the boat at the end of the day.
Molly Mahoney: [00:34:24] Even when it comes to podcasts! I’ve been guilty of this in the past and we’re really focused on making sure that we don’t make this mistake anymore. I hired somebody at one point a couple of years ago to help me get booked on more podcasts.
We saw really low results from it. A big part of that was that I wasn’t doing my part as a podcast guest to reshare the contents, to get it out there, to make sure that I’m promoting it. I’m using it as an authority builder for myself.
I just did a podcast with my friend Roxanne. It went live today and she sent me so many awesome things! It wasn’t just the link to the podcast. She sent me a video that I could use on TikTok. She sent me one that was optimized for an IGTV story.
I know Kim Garst is creating quote cards for her guests. She’s helping her guests to have content based on the videos that they’ve done with them. That’s awesome.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:35:28] That is another level. I just reached out to people who’s shows I’ve been on in the past few months and said, “Can you send me all of your video, MP3, and audio footage from our interview because I should be creating with this and using it.”
Molly Mahoney: [00:35:44] That’s a way for us to work together. We as marketers, as a community, we get so focused and think, “I’ve got to create this new stuff.”
We had a VIP day for one of our GLAM members. Literally, in one hour, we scheduled three months of content for her because she had already been putting out all this content on her Facebook page and on her Instagram.
One of my favorite things to do with clients with Repurpose is to say, “Okay, go find content. You’re going to find content from yourself.”
You just pull in your best posts, because most of you have already been creating content for years and you feel like you have to create new stuff, but you actually don’t. Create one new thing a week, but bring the other things back because there’s so much goodness in the stuff that you’ve already created.
DESIGN GIFS TO REPURPOSE CONTENT
Molly Mahoney: [00:38:18] I do have another re-purposing thing I’d love to share. This one is the one that I’m possibly the most excited about. It’s just for pure visibility and fun. There’s also a way that you can use it to increase conversions.
Kendra has gone back and done this. We’ve actually started using this as a bonus, a free gift for people in exchange for leaving us a review or something like that. We are making searchable GIFs.
We use either Giphy Capture, which is a tool that you can download for free if you have a Mac, or the Chrome extension, which I think it’s called Chrome Capture. You can highlight a section of your video and then make a GIF out of it.
If you go on Facebook, LinkedIn, or in messenger, when you search for a GIF, if you search for the word Facebook Business, or if you search for the term, Go Live, guess what? You’re going to see Molly. There are about five of my faces and my sister, Mary Pendleton, who is an awesome Instagram expert.
We were at an event where we were both speaking. She said, “I don’t know if you realize this, but when you signed up to be an entrepreneur, you also signed up to be a model”. You just need to recognize that your face is more recognizable than your logo.
Having your logo on stuff can be cool, but if people start recognizing your face and start sharing your face…We created a GIF for Owen Video, and it was him going, “What’s up brother,” or something like that, and high fiving the camera. It’s been shared about seven thousand times for free.
I had someone screenshot an email that was sent out. It was a marketing email for some sort of health company. It had my face in the email going, “ Ch-ch-ch-changes!” We had created that as a GIF. I happened to have a witch’s hat on because it was Halloween the day when I made that.
It’s been shared lots of times and it’s my face. It’s stupid and it’s so easy, so that’s really cool.
LEARN MORE ABOUT MOLLY
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:41:03] Before I forget, I do want to let people know where to find you. Where do people go to interact?
Molly Mahoney: [00:41:25] Actually I would love to gift you more information about this Map to Millions that I mentioned. It’s how to announce your video, how to deliver content and pretend that people are there even if they aren’t with what we call a Mr. Rogers style conversation, then how to repurpose it.
This whole system allowed us to hit a reach of 1 million organically and to generate over a million dollars in sales. It’s pretty dang awesome. If you go to molly.live/brandon, it will take you to the Map to Million starter kit.
Once you go there, you can find where we are on Facebook. You can meet our messenger bot, Molly Bot. She’s right there. You can say hi to her and get all kinds of goodness.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:42:09] I love that, and you can always go to The Prepared Performer as well if you want to get to know Molly a little bit more, check out her show and everything else. I appreciate you doing that because I think people are going to want to go and find out more.
Let’s talk a little bit about your people and finding the right people to help you with the clips, figure out the graphics and the things, whatever the thing is. Where did you find them? Did you ever use freelancing services, like Upwork and all that?
I’d love to hear a little bit about your process for that and how you ended up with your people.
HOW MOLLY CREATED HER TEAM
Molly Mahoney: [00:42:56] I have done things where I’ve hired someone to find somebody for me. What I’ve realized is for me, what has worked best is one of two things. My clients have actually turned into amazing team members, and people that are close to me.
So my COO, (this may be weird to some people) she’s my sister in law. We ran into this major issue without having a project manager. Over Easter brunch, I confessed to her in tears that we had had this huge run-in because of a client who was upset about something. That we bit off more than we could chew.
I hired her at brunch. She had just quit her job working in fashion. She was doing in-store installations, but she was managing projects for Sam Edelman across the country. It was randomly a perfect fit.
My other main team member, Kelly, who’s our director of education, was a client of ours who was really great at what I was teaching her how to do. I asked, “Do you want to do this for us?” She started as someone who was building bots for us and then moved up to be our director of education.
Our growth strategist, Beth, was also a client. It’s pretty funny, but Kendra, Vaughn, and Shannon, they’re all people that I actually had a relationship with through either family connections or because they were a part of our community.
For me, the thing that has been the best is finding people who are yes, super-skilled, but also they share our values and they share our company culture really.
That was the thing that was really hard for me when I did go to another service and hired somebody to hire somebody. We didn’t actually focus on that company culture piece. We ended up with a couple of situations that were not the best.
With hiring Shannon, she was the first person that I hired as an assistant about five years ago. I had a VA at the time. We also do have a VA, Kyle, who’s in the Philippines, who is amazing.
I found him simply because my friend Sam posted on Facebook and said, “Hey, I have this awesome VA who also does Facebook ads and we don’t need him anymore. I don’t want to just let him go, I’d love to give him work with one of my friends.”
Sam said, “Message me for more information.” About fifty people had commented on this post saying, “I would love info, I would love the info.” I read the directions, and messaged him saying, “Hey, I’d love more info,” and he said, “Oh my gosh, you are the first person to actually message me.”
It’s just so crazy. Kyle has worked for us full-time for several years, probably two years. He’s just super awesome, but again, that was a referral from a friend.
I remember being at the 90 Day Year event in Vegas several years ago. I had seen Dan Martell do a talk about how to build a team and create living documents that you have in Google docs that can easily be edited and shared. I go back to that talk that Dan Martell did daily, I honestly think, because it was so powerful for me.
I realized that at the time I had a VA who didn’t understand my voice. She didn’t understand my aesthetic, and it was just not working. I knew that my friend, Shannon, who was a professional musical theater performer, had been looking for work.
I thought, you know what? I bet Shannon actually could emulate my voice really well. She’s somebody who I know as a person. I called her on the way home from the 90 Day Year and said, “I have this crazy idea. Would you want to come on to help me be able to do some social media stuff, just to help double my voice basically?”
She’s been with us for five years. It’s just six to eight hours a week, nothing crazy, but it’s been so helpful to have her as someone that I can pop into different areas.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:46:48] I think that’s a great way to think about it. I don’t think most of us would come to that conclusion. Maybe there’s someone out there that you know. If you told them, “Hey, are you looking for something to do that’s about five to ten hours a week”, they’re already aligned like that.
They are going to be able to speak the way you speak, or they’ve been in the same industry as you. Whatever the thing is, that could be huge.
Molly Mahoney: [00:47:12] I host a Broadway-themed open Mike night, once a month. She basically runs the whole Facebook page for that. It’s more of a passion project for me, called The Ghost Light Vocal Jam.
I know I don’t have to worry about it at all because Shannon does it. Sometimes I forget that it’s even there and I’ll go check it out and think, “Oh my gosh, there’s all this interaction and stuff here!”
That’s been huge. Having Kendra is the same kind of thing. As someone who has my voice, she can be there on our business page to reply to people. That’s something that I really want to have, that human touch. We love messenger bots, but I want to make sure that we still have that human touch.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:47:51] I feel like when you can use technology, you actually have the chance to be more human because it gets rid of this stuff that’s more mundane so you’re free to have the real conversations with people.
Molly Mahoney: [00:48:03] One final thing I would add to all of that. When it came to bringing on Kelly as a member of our team, who’s our director of education, we make jokes all the time that we’re like the odd couple.
She and her husband have two kids. We have two kids. When we go on cruises, every Thanksgiving, we call each other life partners. We’ve actually been quarantining with them during that time, where every weekend we’re coming together. We’re the odd couple.
The thing is, I am crazy, squirrelly creative, and over the top. Kelly is like a professor at California State Long Beach. She has a plan, is structured, and all of this. She connects with our values, but it’s a very different energy that she brings. To some people that may seem crazy as part of that “Prepared Performer” thing.
She now is doing live video on our business page every Thursday that are more focused on mindset and health. It’s been awesome to have that comparable energy so that we are a more well-rounded team as well.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:49:00] I love it. I’m going to respect your time and end on this: rules, tools, and pools is kind of a funny framework I’ve been thinking of.
You have to have your steps, your rules, your way of working your systems. You have to have these tools that you’ve been mentioning that help you do things efficiently and use technology. Then you have to have pools of talent. You have to have these people.
I think you’ve given us lessons in all three of those. I really appreciated you being on today.
Molly Mahoney: [00:49:28] Thank you so much. This is so fun.
WHERE TO FIND MOLLY
Her website: www.thepreparedperformer.com
Also molly.live/brandon
Her Facebook Page: The Prepared Performer
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