The Fit to Grit Cast
Fit to Grit is an audio/video/newsletter hybrid featuring in-depth conversations with leadership within the athletic space. Guests range from top executives within the athletic space to professionals in adjacent industries with a proven track record of success working in the athletic industry.
We explore visionary ideas and practical strategies driving the industry forward, covering areas such as marketing, finance, branding, equipment, product development, biz dev, and more. Join us as we share actionable insights and real-world experiences while embodying the "fit to grit" spirit.
The Fit to Grit Cast
Elevate Your Business by Embracing Change
Unlock the secrets to balancing leadership, mental health, and business growth with insights from Zach Colman, an experienced CMO and marketing firm owner. Discover how acknowledging and managing mental health challenges can be a game-changer for scaling your brand. Zach sheds light on the crucial mindset shift required when moving from doing everything yourself to confidently delegating tasks, paving the way for focusing on strategic, high-level growth. Plus, stay ahead of the curve by adapting to technological advancements, including leveraging AI and social media, all while maintaining your personal well-being.
In this episode, prepare to reframe your mindset for unparalleled growth. Zach shares transformative strategies on how pattern disruption can effectively separate visionary time from integrator time, ensuring your strategic planning doesn't get lost in execution. Through personal anecdotes, he illustrates the power of changing self-talk from obligation to desire — a simple yet profound shift that can redefine your motivation and drive. This conversation is packed with powerful tools and fresh perspectives, designed to help you become a brand visionary and an effective leader in your field. Whether you're navigating brand marketing or other leadership roles, these insights are your guide to sustained success.
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You hear about it all the time. You hear gurus all the time talking about you know, when you're smaller you're probably gonna be at a spot where you're like, oh, mental health, blah, blah, blah, blah, let's hustle, hustle, hustle. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of my podcast. I'm your host, zach Coleman, and the reason I didn't come up with the name of this is because we're kind of going through some changes and and you know, a little resonance with me we have our normal joints guest podcast, the gym break, where we go through all those visionary ideas that come to us as we're taking our normal daily gym break and I kind of want to take these individual ones and kind of I'm not going to say spread them out a little bit, but kind of spread them out a little bit. So I'm not really going to change the name. You know this is still overall going to be the Gym Break cast, but we're really going to focus on helping those leadership roles and that leadership team turn into those brand visionaries coming from owning my own marketing branding firm, working on very large projects, very large teams and working with some of those smaller clientele, getting kind of a grasp of every type of audience that I have seen as I've continued to pivot, grow, change and evolve. This is all going to come at you from a visionary who's also a CMO and understanding the different types of tactics that we can do and we can push forward as we continue to build our brands and build our leadership and what we're trying to do and achieve in the growth of everything that we're trying to do and achieve, in the growth of everything that we're trying to do. Now, going off of yesterday's topic, I kind of want to talk a bit about something that we dabbled on just a little bit in one of our previous episodes, which is anxiety and mental health. You know, you hear about it all the time. You hear gurus all the time talking about. You know, when you're smaller, you're probably going to be at a spot where you're like, oh, mental health, blah, blah, blah, blah, let's hustle, hustle, hustle. And then you're going to hear the bigger ones talking about mental health and family are by far the biggest traction to growing your brand. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, there's going to come a time, depending on no matter where you're at, where you could be still the business owner, still doing integrator, still working on all this stuff and someone else to do it, or you could be at a point where you're starting to build a team or finding an agency to complement a certain service or a certain audience, and so I think it's very useful to kind of bring up the mental health side of things and how that really can be something that could detour the growth of your brand, detour the growth of plateau, the growth of what you're trying to do and what you're trying to achieve. Now it was funny because you know, I remember about two to three years within my brand and my business growth personally, being in the marketing world.
Speaker 1:We deal with a lot of very similar type phrases from our clients. They send us a PDF, for instance. That PDF isn't the correct file usage. We have to scrap things. We spend more time fixing stuff. Making something out of nothing, for instance, is something.
Speaker 1:But I hear a lot of people that will talk about and I don't know if this has happened to me. It probably did at the very beginning but having business owners or leadership roles not even know what a PDF was and why do I think that that really relates to the overall concept, because I used to look at those and I would laugh with people and I would laugh and I'd be like it's crazy. They own a multimillion dollar company and they don't even know what a Poodie S is. I think it really relates to today's topic of mental health. Why? Because I think, at the end of the day, I don't know, I don't know technology is growing so fast that new things are coming out, and how it is really going to affect you as a brand owner is there's a double edged sword that you're going to kind of have to. You're going to have to be teetering on as you continue either valley of death between you know half a million to a million, valley of death between you know 3 million to 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 50, 50 to 100, there's always going to be these different mental things you're going to kind of have to accomplish and change mentally, and part of that is going to be you're going to have to start bringing on other leadership roles to focus on different types of things If they be an integrator, if they be an assistant, if they be, you know, someone in marketing, someone in operations, and when it comes to you know developing things, you know I tended to see now like, oh, the reason why leadership are so successful is because they do learn how to delegate and they start taking out all that useless information that lower end on the totem pole type people can do. Does that mean they should know what a PDF is? I mean, I'm not saying they don't need to know. I mean, get with the times. But other technologies, how to utilize AI, for instance, how to utilize social media what is a LinkedIn post versus a social media and that's where the education comes in. But they are willing to sacrifice that type of information so that they can do higher level type things.
Speaker 1:I am a CMO, I run a marketing team. Internally, I help other companies develop their marketing teams and assist with the execution of said developing a brand, developing a website for a team that they don't have right, and so there are certain things that you need to understand and comprehend that from your certain industry, yes, but a couple of those mental health. When it comes to reaching that stage business owner, leadership role wherever you are at, there's going to be some certain criteria that could start happening to you that you need to start letting go of, and one of those will probably be, you know, technology anxiety. You know, being a business owner and or in a leadership role, especially if you're looking to develop a marketing team. Sometimes those technologies are ever changing. I just mentioned AI is one of them. You know websites, you have WordPress, you have Magento, you have Shopify. You have all these different situations that you should know very little about, but you should know just enough to know if you're making a right decision, and you just have to learn to trust the people that you hire, to be able to understand those growing technologies.
Speaker 1:A really big one I think we all go through, which is marketing anxiety. You know like am I reaching the right people? Am I bringing in the right amounts of clients? This is actually kind of what I consider the funnest part of business, the largest part of growing a brand, creating those actionable items. Marketing, in a nutshell, is just like operations. It is just like finance, just like building a sales team. It really comes down to coming up with systems that work for certain types of people and making sure that you are not forgetting the biggest portion of it, which is what you, as a leader, should be focusing on. If you're looking to grow a marketing department or you're looking to hire an agency, which is strategy what direction are we going to go? What's our vision?
Speaker 1:I mentioned a pain point the other day where I can always notice a leader person that's kind of gone through that transformation personally on being much more of a leader versus being still kind of in that doer type doer type role and the size of their company funny enough just by the way that they communicate around the services in the systems that we provide. For instance, creating a logo. Creating a logo is just that, it's a logo. I don't think you necessarily need to have a large brand identity, a large system in place, and that's really what the creative process is as a visionary right. So we always tell people hey, this isn't just building a system of language and communication, which is really that's what it is language and communication, visually or written or verbally, whatever it may be. It's taking that and systematizing that creativity to evolve and allow other people within your organization and or the agency to take a role into producing assets more efficiently, faster.
Speaker 1:On brand and having that anxiety on your mental health is something that trays all of us. It takes time to grow a brand. It takes time to grow a marketing department, it takes time to find the right people in place, and so know that the anxiety over finding new clients is actually something that I have learned as I'm becoming more. You know continue to improve on my leadership skills and evolve as a leader in my organization that these aren't really hard to come by. That's not the hard part.
Speaker 1:The hard part is making sure that one you're bringing on the types of people internally and even externally that match the values in the organization that you're trying to grow. That could be based around price point, how you differentiate yourself, and there's gonna be certain plateaus that you're gonna hit where, if you're not getting the clients necessary, you have a step solution. How do you differentiate yourself more? How do you find a much more targeted audience? How do you change your pricing to match that certain audience? Are you doing a volume play? Are you doing a value play? You have to kind of figure that kind of stuff out, but it's fun because you'll reach a certain level and you'll be like man, we have too many clients. We have all this overhead. We're making about 5% profit margins.
Speaker 1:When I get clients that come to us like that unless they're an e-commerce store, which it's very common in an e-commerce store but I would be looking at huh, do I need to change my pricing? Do I need to relieve some of our clients to try to make it to the next level? And I would start to look at it that way. I mean I tell, I tell clients all the time like, hey, you know, if I have marketing anxiety and this gets into financial anxiety as well and if we're burnt out constantly, I don't have time for visionary time to think about that higher level stuff. What are some tips I can do to kind of make it to that next level? How can I get from a 5% profit margin to a 20%? It's total control over your thought and your mentality and your mental health. That's why I always say, hey, I like to take an hour a day to work out or go for a walk or spend time with my family, away from everything. I put it into my calendar because that time allows me to breathe. It allows me to look at certain things and evolve certain things.
Speaker 1:I think a very common one that I hear about all the time is imposter syndrome. How do you get over imposter syndrome? I think as entrepreneurs, we love change. If you're in a leadership role, you may have an entrepreneur mindset, because you're going to be the only one that's going to be able to understand and comprehend how to lead that type of team. So how do you get over that imposter syndrome? In fact, it will always be there, because you make it to the next level in your company growth or whatever you're trying to achieve, you're always going to have some sort of imposter syndrome. A good way to look at this is looking back at your brand and what you've developed. What's your vision? Looking at your value proposition, for instance, if you have anxiety over having imposter syndrome, is it a price issue? Are you? Is your price too low because you're afraid to raise your prices? Is it price too high because you have so much imposter syndrome and ego that you're saying, oh well, we're worth this, we're worth this, no matter what. Well, doesn't the market pinpoint that price? So, basically, an actionable step from there would be like look at those things personally that you need to work on to get over some of that imposter syndrome.
Speaker 1:How did I relieve that? Well, honestly, I started to go do some EMBR therapy. I don't think it's bad. I, honestly, I'll tell everyone that I think therapy is needed for everyone. It's great to have someone that's non-biased against you know, like your family or your friends or people that don't like you. So it's good to have a non-biased person kind of looking at you and helping you through things. And I had an emotional connection to our pricing for a certain type of audience because I was like we're worth it.
Speaker 1:I had an imposter syndrome to the point where I was afraid on growth. So I put our prices so high that I was subconsciously not bringing anyone in without looking at the market and segmenting properly. I had to take that emotion out of that to scale right, just scale the way I wanted. And it's a continued effort but you know, right now it's tending to work pretty damn well, you know. So how can you kind of identify some of these fears, some of these fears that you may have over some of this anxiety, if it be imposter syndrome, if it be financial anxiety, marketing even, you know?
Speaker 1:Back to the technology side, well, I think one of the huge ones for me is mindfulness. Mindfulness is something that whole thing is on mental health and how you can kind of work towards the growth of what you're doing and kind of coming up with reframing techniques. You know I have a coach that helps me reframe. He has a coach that helps him reframe. We're on a similar level, you know, on certain perspectives, because everyone's always growing. So it's nice to work with somebody who can talk about certain things authentically. Help me reframe.
Speaker 1:I go through a pattern disrupt, for instance. I take that 10, 15 minutes to kind of separate out visionary time and separate out my integrator time. It could be meetings versus execution. I started reframing the way I've been talking. A good example is I no longer say stuff like, oh, I need to go to the gym. I haven't gone, for I need to eat healthier, I need this person in this spot, I need this correct person.
Speaker 1:I say I want, I want to go for that one, I want to eat healthier. And it seems so simple, yet it's so hard. But once you start doing that, you're going to start reframing the way you think in your head. So you know. First off, I want to thank everyone who's continued to join. This is only like our 15th one here, but I hope I can continue to bring value and help you guys become brand visionaries with your own organization and what you're working towards, to become that better leader, towards growing either a brand marketing department or whatever you're trying to do. And so that's it for today's episode. I hope that you all kind of go to the podcast, subscribe, give it a rating, make sure that this thing continues to grow and evolve, and I appreciate all of you and I hope you all have a good one.
