165: Are Your Clients Bringing Out the Best in You? Engineering the Evolution of Your Business with Ilise Benun
Here are a few food-for-thought reflection questions, inspired by today’s guest: Are you working with amateur clients or ones who bring out the best in you? Are you pricing the “aggravation factor” into your proposals when necessary? What about “throwing proposals over the fence,” creating self-inflicted stress when prospective clients ghost you as a result? Finally, are you stuck in the feast-or-famine cycle of your business?
If any of the questions above resonate, you will love this conversation with Ilise Benun, who has been running her business helping creative professionals for over 35 years. Ilise shares The Proposal Oreo Strategy; how she stays consistent with content creation while walking the line between discipline and rigidity; why she sees word-of-mouth marketing as a result, not real marketing; and creating abundant interstitial time by embracing eigenzeit—the German term meaning “the time inherent to a process itself.”
More About Ilise: Ilise Benun is the founder of Marketing-Mentor.com, the go-to online resource for creative professionals who want better projects with bigger budgets, through which she offers business coaching. She is also a national speaker and author of 7 books, including "The Creative Professional's Guide to Money," three online courses via CreativeLive and Domestika.org, and The Simplest Marketing Plan – all tailored to the needs of creative professionals. She has also been hosting the Marketing Mentor Podcast since 2008, with over 465 episodes at the time of this recording.
🌟3 Key Takeaways:
📝Permission: Stop listening to the scolding voice in your head. See your business as a laboratory, where everything is an experiment.
✅Do (or Delegate) This Next: Clear even more space in your calendar with interstitial time, space between events or obligations that you can use to prepare and reflect. Ensure that you have big blocks of time that you can use to let ideas marinate and develop.
📘Books Mentioned:
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