Why You Need To Hit The Pause To Be More Productive With Mary Fain Brandt

Kathi: Hi everyone, I am with Mary Fain Brandt today. Mary teaches entrepreneurs, business leaders and other sales teams how to fill their pipeline using LinkedIn strategies. She is a trainer and she advises financial advisors, coaches and business owners to increase their visibility and, importantly, learn how to connect, cultivate and convert, because guess what? If you're not converting, it don't matter. So, thank you, Mary. I really appreciate you being on the show today.

Mary: Thanks for having me. And I'm sorry; we were talking before going live here that it took us a few years to actually make this happen and actually reconnect, because now I'm in a different state. But it's all good. We're here now.

Kathi: Yeah, you even moved states on me while I was trying to connect. So, yay. And Arizona is a good place to be. I've heard a lot about it. Mary, you've had a life before you were the LinkedIn queen. So, tell me what you did prior to that.

Mary: So my professional trade, I was an executive assistant at a law school and at a private school in San Diego. My last boss, he called me the gatekeeper. I was the color-coded queen. Everything was color-coded. I'm super organized, and nobody got to see him without going through me, because he was a very busy man. After that, I became an executive assistant and marketing person for someone through that school, and at a community bank. So that is what I do without missing a beat: being an executive assistant.

Kathi: Okay. And that makes sense that now you're moving into your new role. And what challenge do you help your clients solve right now?

Mary: Oh, so when I work with clients, I take them from unknown to unforgettable, from boring to branded. I help them on LinkedIn so they can get known, get found and get clients.

Kathi: Love it. Love it. So how long have you been doing this, by the way?

Mary: I started this business in 2014. Didn't know what I was doing. Let me just put that out there.

Kathi: Yeah. I'm sure there have been times where you're burned out and stressed out and you need some new energy around your business. What do you do to recharge yourself as an entrepreneur?

Mary: I like to dance to YouTube videos in the living room with my husband with a little glass of rum. Literally, dancing in the living room is my stress reliever. That, or being on a boat on a lake. Take me to a lake where my cell phone service isn't great, or I don't want to have my phone out, right? So it actually forces me to unplug. So I think unplugging, getting outside or dancing.

Kathi: Yeah. Put me on a boat, too. I'm a happy girl. Even just put me on any kind of water where I can float. I'm happy about that, too. And you don't really want to be connected with any kind of electronical device anyhow at that point. So there you have it. Yeah, that's good. That's good. So do you have a favorite hack, or anything besides the dancing and the boating, to keep people more organized within their business? How do you do it yourself, because you get a lot done?

Mary: I know. Thank you. I think I do. Sometimes I don't feel like I get enough done, and then I talk to my friends and they're like, "Oh my gosh, you're knocking it out of the park getting things done." So I think a couple things. When I started off: make sure you have a business email and a business calendar. Get a booking link. If you're in the service industry, where people are booking appointments with you, get a booking link right away. Don't be trying to do all that yourself. Send them a link. Say, "Book some time." Use Google Calendar. Use Google Drive. Those are my favorite tools.

Mary: Time blocking. So, my new thing from the last 18 months, and I haven't mastered it, so let's all be real here. We're all a work in progress, but time blocking is important. And also, the other thing when you're just starting off: set up the schedule that you want. It's your business. You set the boundaries. It took me quite some time to get to that point. But what I did last year is I decided client calls were on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Videos: I was online doing a show on Wednesdays, so that's hair and makeup day, right? And then Mondays and Fridays, no appointments. You can't even book an appointment on my calendar. I try to keep that open, for when we're traveling. And Monday is: get me started for the week. What's my social looking like? What appointments do I have? What presentations do I need to work on? And Friday is the wind-down. My goal is to only work four days a week.

It's your business. You set the boundaries.

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Kathi: Yeah. Hey, spoken by an organizer. Girl, you're very organized, because I teach the same things. I'm very curious: what type of time blocking do you do? How many hours in a little chunk of time do you allocate for things?

Mary: So on Mondays I like to block two hours to go over the social: my emails, my social posts, what's going on, what do I have to promote. And then for presentations it's two hours. Two hours; I can't work longer. You also have to understand when you work best and how you work best. So I did human design. I don't know if you've ever heard of human design. I have a degree in organizational leadership, so let me just tell you, I have taken every personality test out there twice, not once, because my master's is in OL as well. So I took them in my undergrad, and then I go to the master's and I ended up taking all those tests again. But human design kind of tells you how you work with clients and when you work best, and so I work best in two-hour chunks.

Kathi: Okay, that's really good. If you have someone that was going to strike out into a new career, which is happening right now, what test would you recommend that they take? The human design, you think?

Mary: Well, I like the human design. I think it's important to know. I mean, there's Myers-Briggs, Kouzes Posner leadership. I think it depends on the person and where they're at. What stage are they at? What industry are they going into? Are they in an industry that they like, but they just want to move on and get a higher role, like a new title at a different organization? So I don't think you always have to take those tests. I have career exercises that I've created myself after working with clients. I was like, well, this is always coming up and this is an obstacle. So I've created some of my own exercises when I work with clients, and one of them is a red flag list. It's a super simple exercise, but it has saved clients from saying yes to a job. When we've created this red flag list, they're like, "Oh, nope, wait, I hear Mary's voice. That is on my no-no list." So even though the job looks good on paper, like the money, the team, the responsibilities, when you have a red flag list created, then you know what you don't want as much as what you do want.

When you have a red flag list created, then you know what you don't want as much as what you do want.

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Kathi: Which is a very big sign of being professional: being able to say no when you should be saying no. I love the idea of the red flag list. When I first started and became a professional organizer, I actually really fell upon What Color Is Your Parachute, to figure out what I wanted to do when I grow up, right? So, I love change. So, hey, how do I help people change? So there are so many different things out there. If you guests who are listening are looking to switch, just check out whatever you feel resonates with you as far as figuring out who you are, and take a few of these tests, because I did the whole thing too, and as you did, multiple times. I think that's so very important.

Mary: So you can do some inventory. Take some inventory on yourself. That's my biggest advice right now, with what we're going through with the job industry, right? The landscape of the job market has forever changed. It is a job seekers' market right now. If you are thinking about it, even if you're slightly thinking, I might want to do something else, now is the time to think about it and really prepare for that, plan for it and package yourself up. Because it's ridiculous the number of jobs out there, and it's also ridiculous the number of people that are thinking about it but not taking action.

Kathi: Plan, prepare, package, by Mary. Okay. So if you had an organizing obstacle in your life, what would it be? What's the biggest thing that you've had to overcome as far as being organized yourself?

Mary: My digital world. There's a lot: digital files, duplicate files. So from the get-go, I wish I would have organized my business files better. So if you're just starting off, invest in the time. Get someone to help you. If you're like, I don't know what to name things, there are digital organizers out there. My friend does that, and she actually helped me probably three years ago, four years ago, to set up what makes sense to you. And the other thing is, you have to realize that just because someone does it this way doesn't mean it'll work for you. You have to figure out what works for yourself. And so I think getting organized digitally from the get-go is so important: your files, your photos, your accounting. Get that set up from the get-go. Get an accounting program, whatever it is that you want to use. I use Xero now. I've used several. I can tell you all the programs I've used and what I'm on now. I'm on my third iteration of all programs.

Getting organized digitally from the get-go is so important: your files, your photos, your accounting.

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Kathi: Well, and your contact database, too. If you're first starting out and you have all these contacts, make sure that you're classifying them and putting them into buckets so that you can find them later, because as we start a business, all these people, right? And then, oh, who was that? Not sure. But I agree about the digital files. If you start out even small, with even some small semblance of an idea of how you want to organize them, that's going to help you as you create more and more and more.

Mary: It's a lot harder to go back and try to put all this together once you're established, when you've got the history and all those files and all those contacts. And in all transparency, I didn't have a CRM. I just bought a CRM system last year. It's crazy. And I'm like, "Oh, yeah. I need to start using this." I bought one, and then there's another LinkedIn program that I'm testing out for LinkedIn CRM.

Kathi: Yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah. That'd be perfect for you. What CRM did you jump into when you started?

Mary: What did I buy? So, I'm an AppSumo junkie. I buy a lot of programs on AppSumo because I love a lifetime deal, right? It was Samdock. It's real basic.

Kathi: Okay. Good. Good. We can put that down below too, for people who might want to know. So if you had an entrepreneur sitting in front of you, and you had to give them a piece of advice, and they're feeling like they have zero sense of freedom anymore, their business has taken over their life, what advice would you give them to get that life balance again, that they started their business for, right? To get that freedom.

Mary: So I would say do a planning day. Block off a whole day. Grab a business bestie, a coach, whatever. You don't always have to hire a coach to go through some of this stuff. I did this in December with my girl. We're business besties here. We're doing monthly check-ins, but we had half a day at a library with poster boards that I could show you. And we talked about what we have on our plate, what we liked, what we didn't like and what we were going to let go of. And so I let go of my show, Bite-Size Tips for Busy Entrepreneurs. After four years, I was like, you know what? I think I need a break from it. And it opened up space for something else.

Mary: So go through; you've got to take an inventory. Where are you busy? Is it your fault that you're busy? Are you scrolling on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram during your work hours? I might go on for a minute as a break, but I try to only do that at night, and I don't do it that often. So take inventory of where you're spending your time. And then if you're truly that busy with business, with work, maybe you need a VA. A VA is pivotal. It's life-changing, you guys. And everyone says, "I can't afford one." You're right. I get that. That was me. So start with two hours a week. Test them out. Then you'll go to four, then five, then 10. And then you'll realize you can't live without them.

Kathi: Yeah. You never give them up.

Mary: So if you're making money and you're super crazy busy, and this is not the roller coaster that you wanted to be on, then you probably need a VA, and you need SOPs, your standard operating procedures. You need all that typed up. But a VA was critical for me.

Kathi: Yeah. And you're a girl after my heart as far as planning goes, right? So plan, and then let go of that busyness that you don't need to be doing anyhow, and that is with a VA or something.

Mary: I had two shows and I was like, I don't need two shows. It's a lot of work. And it opened up space for me to do a free monthly training instead. So saying goodbye, letting go is allowing space for something else to come in.

Saying goodbye, letting go is allowing space for something else to come in.

Kathi: Add space to your life. Okay. Had to just put that one in. Sorry. Okay. So, Mary, you have a valuable free resource that I know you're going to offer our listeners, or viewers as they may be, whichever they choose. What would you like to offer?

Mary: I would really like to offer you guys my PDF called the 3C Method. And that's how to connect, cultivate and convert. And I go over what each of those mean. And when you read this document, you're going to understand that convert has a different definition than what you probably think it is. And I'm going to leave it at that, because I really do want you guys to read it. It does help you with business: how to connect, cultivate and convert on LinkedIn. Of course, I'm a LinkedIn trainer and strategist. But this philosophy, this method, I created because of all the noise of 2020. I saw a lot of bad stuff on LinkedIn. I was like, I can't handle this. I've got to do something. And that's when and why I created the 3C Method. It'll help you learn how to grow a strong and strategic network. It'll teach you who you should connect with and how to cultivate those relationships, and how to convert to opportunities.

Kathi: Perfect. Perfect. Okay. So to wrap this up and circle back around, is there something that I should have asked you that was super important, a message that you want to get out there to the world?

Mary: Yeah: little changes create big results. So I would have loved to have been asked, what book did you read that made a big difference? And this is, as you can tell, a very thin book, but it's packed full of value. And it helps us remember that as an entrepreneur, when we don't get those big clients, or we can't see the end of the tunnel, as my mom used to say, I can't see the end of the tunnel, there's a light coming and it's the train going to hit me, right? Run me over. It's these little steps that you take every day. They're going to get you the big results.

Kathi: Thank you. And I'll put a link to that as well down below in the show notes, if anybody wants to pick that up. So there are all sorts of resources here at the Organized and Energized podcast. And you have been just a gem to offer your words of wisdom in bite-size pieces that we can partake of. And I really appreciate your time, Mary. For anybody who's interested in learning more about LinkedIn and getting it zeroed in so you're effective, go to this girl. She knows what she's talking about. I appreciate your time, Mary. Thank you so much. I'm glad we finally connected after years.

Mary: Finally. Bye, everyone. Don't give up.

Kathi: See you later.