#88: Creating Meaningful Content with Kim Walsh Phillips, Founder of Powerful Professionals
Do you know how many Instagram photos and videos are shared everyday?
The answer is 95 million.
That’s a lot of content being thrown in our face, and a lot of time spent scrolling through feeds.
But what gets someone to stop scrolling and pay attention?
My guest today, Kim Walsh Phillips, Founder of Powerful Professionals, shares her wisdom on creating meaningful content to help grow your brand.
She shares:
How she landed a HUGE client from a famous TV show
What surprising factor could contribute to your lead generation
Why you should take the offer first and work backwards
Make sure to tune in to hear how Kim’s faith helps play a role in how she does business.
Learn more about Kim here: https://powerfulprofessionals.com.
Check out my new free training on www.yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond.
Listen to the Show:
Laura (00:02):
So many entrepreneurs, dream of living a life of massive impact by creating a mega successful company, but only a tiny percentage of businesses actually scale to that point. And when they do it is so often lacking the very joy and freedom that got them into entrepreneurship in the first place. So on this podcast, we speak authentically on what it actually takes to scale your business in a way that creates freedom and joy that works for you, your team, and the incredible impact that you are meant to make in the world as a visionary entrepreneur. My name is Laura Meyer and I'm your host. I'm a serial entrepreneur wife, mom, to three. And I love talking all things business, especially digging into what it actually takes to scale joyfully to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond let's get started.
(01:01):
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Scale with Joy podcast. I'm here with Kim Walsh Phillips. Welcome Kim. So glad that you're here.
Kim (01:09):
Oh, I am so happy. I've been looking forward to this and such a joy to be with you today.
Laura (01:13):
Likewise, now you and I met in clubhouse and I was so blown away by how you've utilized so many different platforms to grow your business to an incredible amount in a short period of time. You're the founder of Power Professionals. But before that you had an agency for many, many years, it was very successful where Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank was one of your clients. That's amazing. Can you share a little bit about how that actually came about?
Kim (01:40):
We were the group of entrepreneurs and we decided to hire different people that have speaking fees to come in and, and be with us for the day. So we actually had booked Kevin O'Leary with a speaking fee to come be with us for the day. And like all of the times before I always prepped before these meetings, and you went around the room and mentioned, had us introduce ourselves. And when I, when I talked about the ROI we got for every dollar we spent on marketing and he said, wait, what do you do? And I do direct response, social media marketing. And he was blown away because the only things he had ever heard and seen about social was fluff and didn't provide any ROI. And in a big group of people, he said to me, I like to hire you to work on all my companies.
(02:27):
And I'd like to bring you in to speak to all my shark tank investments. And I'd like to bring you on the show. And the third one never happened. Although that would have been amazing. And I mean, time is not over yet, but he became a client. I worked on all of his non shark tank, investment companies. I spoke at his event. Many of his companies became a client. Several of them are still in my coaching to this day. He
remains a dear friend and we do a lot of things together. But he is, he's really incredible. He is all he really has. He's very kind, but he is definitely all about the numbers. So we got along really well.
Laura (03:03):
So awesome. I mean, did you just sort of like fall over when that happened in that moment? Like, what did you say?
Kim (03:11):
I had a staff person in the room and I was so glad that someone else could actually hear that moment. Like some other friends have told the story again. I'm like, okay. So that did actually happen as it's happening. I was like, inside, like, it was like, it was like, we should, you should take on all my businesses. Like yes, yes, yes. I should do that.
Laura (03:29):
Glad that you finally saw that that should be happening. That's one of those just like amazing moments in your business that I know changes the trajectory. And while that's a lot of your claim to fame and it's so fun, cause I've seen you together doing some, some work. You have this incredible background above and beyond having him as a celebrity client. Like you've had, you know, top selling books on Amazon you have created this incredible business. What was that transition like? So you moved away from the agency and now you're mainly focusing on coaching.
Kim (04:01):
This is a somewhat, you know, morbid example, but did you see Schindler's List? Yes. You know what? The very end he sees a gold lapel pin on. He realized he looks down, he sees on his chest, there was a gold lapel pin and he has regret because he thinks I could have sold that and I could have saved two more people. That is my, that is my jam. Like I think of every single thing that I do every minute of my day dollar in my pocket ounce of my town and energy of how many more people can I reach to save them. And so everything that I do, how I'm quote unquote, everywhere people say that I am always there. It's always never once. Is it about me? It's about how many people can I serve in that moment. And that's why I had to sell my agency because working with clients, we can only scale to 32.
(04:50):
Like at that limit, we would start falling apart. And when I finally handed it over, I got three offers for my company. We launched our agency in a year. We went to 11,000 because there were all these people waiting to hear from us. And so I look at every day, like this is crazy, but we have a virtual event coming up and I have, I mean, I have a multiple seven figure company yet, we had these postcards that we put as part of an exercise we'll do at the event. And if I bought the postcards already cut, it was $500. If I bought a slicer and the cards I could cut myself, it was going to be $35. And I look at that as an additional 45 people I can get to come to the event by choosing to cut them myself. So every single thing is, is decided how many people can we serve today?
Laura (05:38):
I love, love, love that philosophy. So I know that you have used clubhouse to really serve people and you are a big believer in organic social media as well. Is that right?
Kim (05:50):
Yes.
Laura (05:52):
What are some of the things that you think people who are listening might not know about creating growth on social media platforms? Because once you get to a certain level, I think that the, the belief or the commonly held belief is it's a pay to play type of situation.
Kim (06:09):
Right? And it is in some ways, I mean pay for speed. We wanted to get people into a workshop in four days and we had to buy ads. Like I cannot be enough places organically in that amount of time to drive in major traffic. But that being said it, if you're starting, you're scaling, you're growing, you absolutely positively can do it using organic because the people are on there waiting and hungry for information, but it has to be entertaining content. So when it comes to organic, I like to think of it as a distribution platform for your own television show. And on that television show, if you have guests on that are other content leaders that have audiences, yes, you are going to reach more people. If you use a live on Instagram to interview somebody else, you're going to bring in more people. But one of our biggest ROI driven activities using Instagram is coming up with a poll, a silly one, not a serious one, but something like, do you like pineapple on your pizza?
(07:10):
Yes or no. Everybody votes on it because they just can't resist because Instagram set it up to have a pleasure trigger after you vote, you see the results. So then you find out, am I normal, normal, you got to see where you rank with other people. And if you do that kind of poll and then you make your next post, an actual call to action post Instagram, will share your poll post with a lot more people than you have normally reached in your audience. And then more people will see your call to action posts. And there are a lot of behaviors like that on social media, give them the thing the algorithm wants, which is fluffy things that they just adore and then put a call to action right behind it.
Laura (07:52):
That gives them the cute bunnies and then sell to them. That's a good philosophy. And I know to you, you really specialize a lot in book authorship and helping people publish their books. You had your own books published. What do you think are some secrets that people don't know about when it comes to actually being able to do that work?
Kim (08:12):
A book reader is if you're a coach or consultant or have thought leadership, a book reader is your absolute best prospect ever, because this is someone who has chosen to consume information. They've taken the time to do it. They had to find your link. Then take an action to go to it, which is very different than clicking on a post. Now I love my social media traffic, but the reality is the book readers, my podcast, listeners, someone from clubhouse, they had to take additional action in order to go into that space. So think about it from a book, the podcast, a clubhouse, they had to usually download an app or make a purchase, go through content, scroll through pages, and then take action jumping through a hoop to take that next step. So these are typically action-oriented individuals who are willing to put time, money, and energy into something.
(09:04):
So you are marketing to someone in a modality that already gives you the perfect target market. And the thing that you want to make sure that you do is the messaging inside the book. It gives them a compelling reason why they need to give you their contact information. Typically it's going to be to get an outrageously amazing gift. And that gift is going to be a supplement to the material. It's crazy though. So Mike, the author of one of the best books ever profit. First. He came to us back when I had my agency and he wanted to us to help him with lead generation. And when we went to his site, all of the resources he was offering from the book could just be downloaded without giving their contact information. He was missing out on a massive number of leads and an incredible amount of monetization opportunity. So simply by putting the free gifts behind an opt in wall and on his thank you page, offering them a $97 digital products. He brought $18,000 in revenue in the first 30 days. Like there is stuff that you already have in place that you could just put number a little level two and start to get a greater list of more ROI.
Laura (10:17):
That's so, so good. I love that example because I think for so many people, they have assets that exist that have so much potential. And it's really just a matter of making shifts to those assets so that they're more leveraged in order to be able to create a different result. I think it's so like so many people think I have to create this new thing, but a lot of times it's just doing approaching things differently on what you already have.
Kim (10:39):
And he knew enough to get an outside perspective because we can't read that label from inside the bottle and you are so good at this. And I think that's why you keep so many people come to you for that outside perspective. And if you are currently just asking people for advice around you and they've never accomplished the thing you're asking for advice on, stop asking them for advice and get an actual professional look at your thing because sometimes it's like legit, the button didn't work and you could not see it for as many times as you visited the page, you needed somebody who knew what to look for to tell you what works and what is it?
Laura (11:16):
Oh my gosh. So hard. And I appreciate the kind words, but I had that same moment the other day where I woke up and I was like, we're doing another launch. Why aren't we using the same ads that worked from February? Like, why are we creating ads? Like I slack the whole team. And they were like, I don't know. Why are we I'm like, I don't know. I think even as a marketing expert where it's so good to have that outside perspective, and I know so many people just want to kind of check the box on marketing, right? They want to have the post created and scheduled in LinkedIn. And it's like, good job. I'm done for the day I'm done with my marketing. How do you approach it in a way that makes sure that it's meaningful and not just busy work?
Kim (11:57):
We are taking the offer first and working backwards always. So we go from offer to conversion events. So that would be the opportunity to sell them the offer to how are we going to get them on the conversion opportunity to what is the big takeaways of the offer that they would need to understand and believe to be true in order to make, to say yes, and we take that and break it into social content. So all of our content is leading to the outcome. That sounds like a lot of words. But if we were to say something along the lines of, in order to, let's say I'm a nutritionist. And in order to boost your metabolism, I believe that there are four core principles you need to do like drink a lot of water and get a good night's sleep and only eat till full.
(12:43):
And then the fourth one would be to, I don't know, to move your body 15 minutes a day. Let's say that was my jam. Then I would build all of my social content around those four principles. And every single time I shared one of those principles, I'd say, and for more things about this visit whatever the next step is. So really there should be no random content. It should always be super valuable, incredibly amazing, but always walking them towards the next step to opt in for the next step. That would be the offer.
Laura (13:13):
Oh gosh, I love that with the word that came to mind when I was hearing you speak, it's just that intentionality. It's not just creating to create, but creating with intention. And that's such great advice. And it's funny, I'm sitting here talking to you about business. And one of the things that you and I have in common is faith. And it's one of the reasons why we connected for those of you who are listening, hilarious fact, but Kim and I are both half Jewish, half Italian, and we both live in the Northeast and we're probably around the same height by just as an estimate of seeing pictures. So it's really funny. We have these, these amazing things in common, but in addition to that is this perspective of faith. And when you are in a process of making decisions like you've moved from your agency to coaching, or you're in your coaching business and you have big decisions. Well, what are some of the, I've heard you talk about this before, and I'm so excited for you to share it to the audience. How do you go about that decision-making that incorporates your faith?
Kim (14:02):
First of all, I, I am an incredibly driven and busy human. And so I have to be intentional about taking time to have conversations with God, because I can be so busy that I never asked him what he thinks. And then I am trying to figure everything else out for myself. And it's a hot mess express and something will happen. So he's like, yo, listen up. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. But he, when I spend time, I know that that's a spiritual gift. And so I, I understand that people, not everybody can hear that clearly. And I understand that too. So I have compassion for you. If this is something you struggle with, because I know it's hard and that you have to spend time actually in my pastor, I'm really good friends with Jason Tucker. He had the book called Listen Louder, and it's all about how to hear it more clearly.
(14:49):
And he gives some really good practices to hear it more clearly. But I have that intentional time. And what I will do is especially during service, I will journal and I will journal with intention. Like there's something that I'm working on or something I want to share with my audience. And always, there's some clarification that will come to me to be able to share with them when it's something and this was the one that just hit me, which I think you'll appreciate this came this weekend and it's blowing my mind. But you know, you've heard the term before your mess is good. Your mess becomes your message, right? Like we played that 5 million times. And then like I had expanded upon it and said, your mess becomes your mission. Because then that goes a little bit bigger, but it actually hit me this weekend that your mess becomes somebody else's miracle because the day right, the day that, that happened to you, their story began because now you're seeking a solution that when you uncover, you can share with them. And that's when it was like, oh, that's behind all that we're doing. I'm not my purpose. Isn't to help people unlock their purpose. My purpose is to help people unlock so that someone else could have their miracle.
(16:09):
And there's this story in the Bible. Everyone's pretty much started this, like the bread and the fishes. And I had heard it from a perspective, always like in my mind, the perspective was Jesus had the bread and the fish and there wasn't a lot, but he went out and he fed all the people, but he did not feed all the people. And I heard this differently, right in the moment I was supposed to hear it differently. And that was that there were the five disciples there and he gave them the job to go feed them. And they're like, yo, we don't have anything. He's like, what do you got? And they're like, we have a few pieces of bread and a few fish. And he's like, go feed them with that. And they're like, I, we don't know what he's like.
(16:50):
They're like, it's not enough. He's like, just go feed them. And I will keep refilling the basket. And so he started feeding them. He started feeding and it kept the basket, kept filling, kept filling, filling filling. And he, they fed all the people so much that they had 12 baskets leftover in the end. And so that's what I look like at my life. I will go forward with
what I've got. And I know with my faith that he will give me the next step. I don't know always what it's going to be. I'm just going as fast as I can. And he will fill my basket up and I will feed them when I got, and he will keep giving me more to feed them as we go.
Laura (17:24):
Love that. It's this idea of creating space. I think for God to show up, I have learned that the hard way. I think sometimes we're like, okay, God, when you show up, then I'll make the space. Or like, you go first. And I think a lot of times it's like, no, you create the space for me to show up. You create the margin, you, you make it available and then I'll meet you there. Right. And that's really, really powerful message. Wouldn't you think is the key to growing a business as a faith-based entrepreneur. What do you think the main broach is that really helps make that possible?
Kim (18:02):
I think each person is going to have to come up with that with their own journey and, and decide what that means for them. I had it very clear of what my purpose is to unlock other people's purpose. And then I'm supposed to do that in the main business marketplace, not specifically for kingdom entrepreneurs and I'm supposed to serve men and women specifically, but I know each person's going to have their own piece of that. And so what I look at each step is does it help every single thing that I do? Every single thing that I do is put against us. It helped me fulfill that mission. If it isn't a distraction, if it's about my ego, if it's about a wealth or breed, then I, the answer is no. And so I just, I use that as my guiding principle, what am I trying to do?
(18:45):
I'm trying to help men and women of all colors, races, shapes, religions, uncover what their purpose is. Then if it helps me do that awesome. If it doesn't, I have to look for the next thing that does and it really, and it, and is it the most impactful use of my time, money and energy to do that? Cause like, am I going to have to travel for three days to go to speak to in California to 10 people? I will not do it. Even if they're going to pay me a ton of money because I can't reach that many in that moment. So I'm always looking at that as my bar to how many people can I serve in that way at that time? Oh my gosh.
Laura (19:18):
I absolutely loved that. And just as we're wrapping up, where can people find you, if they want to connect with you, what's the best place to look?
Kim (19:23):
I purposefully I have three names. So I'm the only one like being Kim Walsh Phillips. And I want you to go to your favorite spot that to hang out. So whether or not you like Instagram or Facebook, those are good places. Or my company is powerfulprofessionals.com.
Laura (19:37):
Awesome. Thank you so much for being here Kim Walsh Phillips. You'll see all those links in the show notes and I appreciate your time.
Kim (19:44):
Thanks so much for having me.
Laura (19:45):
Hey there: before you head out, I want to let you know about a free new training I have right on a brand new website called yournextmillion.me. It's yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses, to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond. And I have to tell you, it is not what you think. So check it out at yournextmillion.me. And if you loved this show, will you subscribe to it and share it with a friend or just say something nice about it to someone, you know?I'd really appreciate it so much. Thanks so much for being here and I'll see you next time.
The Scale with Joy podcast dives into the mindset and strategies of scaling your company to the million dollar mark and beyond. Each week, we follow the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts and leaders - sharing behind the scenes stories of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned-all while building their multi-million dollar empires.