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
Focus on Building a Community, Not Just Chasing Leads
What happens when you stop chasing leads and start nurturing real connections? Discover the answer as we navigate the delicate balance of personal authenticity and brand evolution. Reflecting on my own journey, I share how aligning my content with my core values transformed my brand from a relentless pursuit of external validation to fostering genuine community connections. By embracing self-care and prioritizing personal wellness, I found a sustainable path to pursue my vision without the burnout, shifting from being a mere leader to an inspired visionary.
Join us as we unravel the power of self-awareness in creating meaningful brand relationships. This episode emphasizes the importance of understanding your own values and how they shape brand perception and engagement. Explore the art of authentic marketing strategies that move beyond impersonal outreach, embracing opportunities that align with shared passions. Through candid discussions and personal experiences, learn how to navigate challenging interactions and foster deeper, more authentic connections with your audience and partners. The journey to building a thriving community starts with staying true to yourself—listen in to hear how it’s done.
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I was not just trying to be someone I wasn't, but my business and my brand were growing a way that I thought somebody else was building. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of our podcast foundational series. This is the second of many here to come on our foundational series, where we hope that we can help turn those leaders into brand visionaries. Today we're going to kind of go off of a theme. You know it is the foundational series per se so we're going to kind of go back into the lead generation type mythology and what we're discussing here, and I kind of want to talk a little bit about that mind shift side of things and why you should be building a community and not chasing leads. I've been there. You know that constant grind of lead generation. You know, and I'm hoping that in this episode that we can kind of explore that powerful shift in perspective for you from starting to move away from chasing those leads to starting to build a thriving community, which one will help you get less burnout, it will help your brand grow and, most of all, it will help you build those genuine connections that you know are going to drive you to push forward, to do the thing that we're all here and meant to do, which is help our society grow. To start off, let's kind of talk about a little bit about when I went through my paradigm shift, and it's not something that happens overnight. I so much media is out there on the internet and out there in the world now that it's very easy to get caught up in the chase and the rat game, so I don't think it's gonna be one of those situations where it's just going to be like one day I woke up and I was all happy and perfect and I said that I was going to be doing this. It's not how it works. I went through multiple years of I own an agency and I went through multiple years of trying to build an online presence. I'm still building my online presence to this day, but my content started to really feel forced. You know, you look at these podcasts, for instance. I'm doing them all natural. I am utilizing them to be my authentic self. Say the things that I want to say, knowing that funny enough. All the things that I want to say, knowing that funny enough, all the things that I want to say to the world, are actually the things that people like to hear. Right, you know there are going to be trolls out there, but that's besides the point. You know a lot of my older content if you look back from you know. I'll just say, eight years ago, when I first started and I first started getting that burnout in this whole perspective is that everything was scripted. My content writers wrote everything, my team wrote everything. It wasn't me, I was not just trying to be someone, I wasn't, but my business and my brand were growing a way that I thought somebody else was building. It was growing towards a direction that I hated. I didn't like the direction it was going and that shift is going to take me time now to change that paradigm shift in the business side, in the present side.
Speaker 1:But I was desperately seeking external validation. But I was desperately seeking external validation. I wanted everyone to look at me and be like look at him, look at him. And a lot of that came back to me. So it wasn't until I started to have self-reflection, started connecting with my own values and my passions, bringing those back. If you watch my TEDx, which you'll have a link down in the comments or in the newsletter, to watch it, I would love for you, if you watch my TEDx, which you'll have a link down in the comments or in the newsletter to watch it. I would love for you to go watch my TEDx. You'll kind of get a full story on that whole shift, but you'll start to see how I had to start bringing back the things in my life which actually helped me slowly start to reestablish my audience, which we'll talk about on another cast. But I had to bring back my value. I had to bring back my passions.
Speaker 1:You know there's two types of entrepreneurs and leaders. There's the good ones and the bad ones. No, but seriously, they're the ones that think that, oh, I have to work 80 hours a week to beat the competition. And there's the ones that are doing it because they know it's hard and they have to say the things that no one else is willing to say or do. Does that mean you're always positive? No, does that mean you could be negative from time to time? Yes. Does it mean you have to be straightforward with your team as a leader? Yes, but once I started to bring back my values and my passions, I started to slowly build a brand that began to resonate with me. I started to say the things I wanted to say.
Speaker 1:I started to follow the vision that I wanted to follow, and a lot of people look at this kind of stuff and they say it's hocus pocus. I remember when I did. I remember starting out looking at people that were like you know, just do this, just do that, wake up, meditate, you know, go to the gym, make sure you're working on yourself. Does that mean you have to do that? No, there's lots of people out there that say, oh, you can just get straight out of bed If your main goal of your business is driven on and you will 100% love what you do. That may drive you, but what I know personally. I can only give you my experience being a dad of three, trying to still be a loving husband, take time out for my kids and still being able to show them how hard it is to work. I need my time to myself. That's where the gym break cast came in talking about those visionary ideas that come up to me while I'm at the gym, because that's me, that's what I love to do.
Speaker 1:But once I started to take control of my own personal health and my own athletic regimen, it could be going on walks, it could be going swimming, it could be something that you love to do. It may not even be athletic, it may be something else that you love to do from a tactical perspective. Maybe you are more visionary and you can bring tactical and integrator type stuff in. You could be playing chess, I don't know. I'm just giving an example here. People talk about daily journals, but at the very end of the day I had to bring that stuff back because that's what I have control over. If I cannot sit down or stand up, if we're talking about going for a run or something, but if I had to go out there and do that stuff, if I couldn't, I couldn't hold myself accountable for that stuff. So I wasn't necessarily following the values that I wanted to portray onto my business.
Speaker 1:So the three topics I wanna kinda go over on today's podcast. Hopefully that story kind of resonated with you a little bit. Maybe you were there, maybe you're going through a time of why your content isn't working, no matter what it may be. Or maybe you just delegate off the very beginning. I mean, I've done that too. That's part of that story. But how do you become more authentic? How do you create the content that you want to create but still make a difference and hit the right people.
Speaker 1:So part of that is we'll talk about self-awareness. I want to dive into self-awareness. I want to dive into authenticity and building a strong brand. I want to talk a self-awareness. I want to dive into authenticity and building a strong brand. I want to talk a little bit about strategies for fostering connections with your audience and the different thought processes you can go to and what it really means to connect, and then really building a community that supports your brand Maybe a little bit of a different take on what community really means to you, maybe a little bit of a different take on what community really means to you.
Speaker 1:So I realized, through this whole perspective of finding my values and really what I wanted to achieve, that I had to build genuine connection with myself. I had to connect with who I was. That's an ongoing process. I evolve, I grow, you evolve, you grow that if I truly wanted to connect with the people that I wanted to work with, I wanted as part of my team, if I wanted to realize that I first had to connect with myself, have you ever talked to somebody? Have you ever talked to somebody and you were just like in complete awe about how unaware and how self-absorbed they were as people and how much that turned you off to relate to them. Or maybe you, you know you're a runner and you you love that community and you got in a in a, in a in a feud with someone who was religiously connected to you know biking per se. I know that's a weak, that's a weak example, but it shows you, you know the difference between trends, trends and and you know personality types versus. You know actual actionable, you know things, but you both still have things in common. The person that's self-absorbed may not listen to you, may not value the same things you value, so you end up not becoming connected with them. Or you may be self-absorbed, not thinking about other people, other types of people, and maybe that's what's causing you not to be able to connect with them.
Speaker 1:Connection is rooted and I had to find that connection with myself, which is an ever-growing, ever-evolving process that I have to go through as an individual. That somewhat also correlates to my brand and how I want it to be perceived in the world. Our brain is perceived a certain way. We're perceived certain ways. That's what, you know, makes leaders and brands authentic, because they're the same. You have to figure out who you are. In a nutshell, that's one of the hardest things we have to do as human beings is figure out who we are, and I still struggle with it. Am I better at it? Yes, do I continue to work on it when I can Do? I have rough days. Do I work through it? Yes, do I have rough days where I realize I need to take a break? Yes, that's part of it. But that importance of self-awareness and me realizing that, hey, I have burnout right now, or I'm tired or I need to find time to work on my personal self, allows me to open up. It allows me to bring back that authenticity of what I wanna say, what I wanna do, and it helps in the direction of building a strong brand because it relates. It's that authenticity. Why is that so important? Well, you heard my story. It happens, I think, to all of us. That's part of building a brand, that's part of building connections.
Speaker 1:I know this is all about lead generation, but we'll get there because lead generation is really connecting with certain types of people, that your self-awareness on who you are, what you want to become, what you want to do, is directly correlated to not just that authenticity but to the people that you want to connect with. We've all had crappy clients, crappy friends. Is it their fault that they were crappy or is it your fault for allowing them to connect with them? Or is it that at one time which is most likely the case you guys were very similar. You matched similar values and maybe your values what you like personally just evolved. Maybe your vision for what you wanted to evolve and theirs didn't. They didn't value the same things anymore.
Speaker 1:There's plenty of people in my life that are still acquaintances. Maybe they don't match 100% of my values, but they're still acquaintances of mine, but I don't thrive to get energy and to be around them. And then there's people that I connect with on a deeper level that I want to. I enjoy having conversations with. They enjoy having conversations with me. So how do we build those and foster those connections with our audiences? I want you to look at the term connection as that word like really think about it. Connection You're connecting with someone, you're connecting with them, kind of like how you go out and you get in a relationship. Do you connect with that person or not? I look at the strategies around making a connection back to you know my CMO and marketing of what we do for brands is we use those values as a guiding point towards those things that we value.
Speaker 1:So back to my story on seeking external validation. My seeking external validation meant oh, I need to prove to everyone I can do this. So what am I outreach? I'm going to email Nothing wrong with that in certain industries but I'm going to email blast. Random people constantly try to get a phone call with them. But I don't value that type of selling process. I don't value. I'm a connector. I believe that people are meant to find each other. They're meant to find each other, which is a two-way street. If someone wants to have conversations with me about my services or our offerings or our consulting, that they're part of that too.
Speaker 1:Do I still do email outreach? Yes, but I don't do email outreach in that fashion. I don't reach out and try to sell. I'll reach out and ask for associations and corporations if they have looking at their overall yearly events, if they have any sort of speaking opportunities or workshops, and then we'll go back and forth and we'll set up a call. But I'm not necessarily going to email them and say, hey, I want to do a speaking gig. Here's me pretending like I know everything about your company, which I just Googled, for 10 seconds, and then that I tell them a bit about myself, who I am, a little bit about their event and how I think I could relate to that event Because I think that it would bring them value. And then if they see that value in return and they go, that makes sense, let's have a conversation. We do, and if we don't, we don't.
Speaker 1:But when it comes to prospecting and selling, that's not the mindset that I have. Nor do I want to bombard thousands of people in a number game. I don't see that type of value. I'm a connection guy. So back to my audience. I deal with a lot of leadership, I deal with a lot of directors and I deal with the occasional business owner. When I deal with those people, I know for a fact that I need to connect with them on a deeper level. I want to connect with them on a deeper level from both sides, right. So I know my values. I know what I value is connection. So I know my values. I know what I value is connection. So where can I connect with those types of individuals that also value building relationships and connecting and where does that flourish? More workshops, bringing them value that way, maybe doing the occasional webinar, helping them out, doing casual webinar is there some selling in that stuff? Absolutely. But the whole goal is I'm going to show you what I can do, how I can connect, who I am as a person, and if we can connect and you find it intriguing, then you can set up a call with me. I know what I'm worth. I also know what different types of industries will just say are worth incomes in terms of value. There's just certain types of industries and audiences but they're not going to have the same value in the same thing. So you do have to take that into consideration and that's part of my contribution phase, but that's another story for another day.
Speaker 1:For now, let's get back to these strategies for building a genuine connection. So look at your audience. If you've already figured out your audience and you know them by heart, how do you connect with those people I brought up in a previous episode, working with moms that maybe you work with moms that are 20 to 30 years old and you own a studio and maybe do yoga, maybe you contribute to, maybe you work with a daycare we talked about that. That would be a partnership opportunity. But you can build strong. You can build connections with those types because they value the same things. They want to take care of children where you want to take care of the mom that you know wants to take care of the child so you could foster a connection with someone like them. That would be a great connection and then you can have audiences that relate to each other. But you can build genuine connections and even cross promote in that way to help you connect with your audience more, because you're going to connect with an audience that values what you have to say and values you.
Speaker 1:So, last but not least, building a community that supports your brand and drives organic growth. If you're out to start say, hey, I'm just going to start a random group page and I'm going to get as many people in as possible, that's the way of building a community that I wasn't talking about. Could it be part of the strategy? Yes, getting a place where people can all connect. It's very similar to if you had a location and you threw an event. It's just digital and it's a little bit more tailored to them on a normal fashion. But I'm talking about actually building a community of people. I want you to think in terms of I always hate to use religion here, but it's still a great example. You look at a certain type of religion, a certain type of community in that perspective. Nothing wrong with that stuff. I just always try to find different examples. That is considered a community. There are lots of business owners and brand owners that foster building a community. There are lots of business owners and brand owners that foster building a community around that value.
Speaker 1:Back to community and supporting your brand and starting to drive growth. To build a community, you have to figure out your values. You have to figure out the self-awareness of who you are. Build your authenticity. Have that start to be what builds your brand, who you are, what you wanna say. That start to be what builds your brand, who you are, what you want to say. You'll start to attract those types of connections based off of your values, your audience. Maybe you'll connect with, like I said, someone that runs a daycare. Maybe you'll connect with somebody that maybe you run a yoga studio and you need someone that helps with mental health. You'll connect with those types of people because you guys have similar values, you guys have similar audiences. That's how, internally, you could have some sort of package that really resonates around helping with mental health, maybe a mental health off day or something along those natures.
Speaker 1:But once you start to do that, you'll start to build that community. They will start to support you and be advocates of you and your brand and will start to attract more people. If you're a local brick and mortar, it will happen a little bit differently, because you have a location and you can utilize those people that are advocates because they value to tell friends. That's a strategy you can utilize to build a community Discounts offers, mental health, workout day anything that you feel is going to help in that perspective. And that's going to help you build organic growth. Because you're starting to be consistent with your brands from a different perspective. It's not just the logo being on the side of here and on a direct mail piece, it's you're actually. You're building the messaging and the advocacy around your brand and that's starting to spread the message, the verbal you'll start to build and that will start building organic growth for you. And that's part of branding. It's part of your brand growth, which will move you away from just trying to reach out to 1000 people and you'll start to become get less burnout, you'll start to get less burnout. You'll start to grow a brand around abundance and connection and growth that way and that will just waterfall and that's how you start to build a community.
Speaker 1:Again, my name is Zach and if you guys don't know this, we do have multiple micro courses we like to call them mini courses that you guys can go to and you can get some downloads. Start working through some of this stuff. If you really can't write it down on paper, these podcasts really don't help. I'm going to throw a link in the bio for you to be able to download one of our value worksheets. This value worksheet is meant to help you kind of work through and figure out your values and possibly how you can take those values and how you can start to utilize them to bring in the right people in to your brand that follow those same values, follow that same vision that you're trying to portray to the world. Go down and link the comments below Get that download. I really appreciate all of you and this is another episode of our foundational series of our podcast. We will talk to you all next time.
