SPEAKERS
Eva Jannotta, Lara Schmoisman
Lara Schmoisman
This is Coffee Nº 5, I’m your host, Lara Schmoisman. Thank you everyone for being back on Coffee Nº 5 today. And as you guys know, I’m huge on strategies, this is something that you’re gonna hear, every time I talk about anything it comes back to strategy somehow. I believe in strategy as a huge part of my business. But also as a huge part of my life, I don’t think I could be… have a house, a business, kids, a dog, and, and function. If I didn’t have all the strategies in place, I gotta have come with a definition soon, because this is something that I was discussing with Eva Jannotta. I’m welcome, Eva thank you so much for being here today at copy number five. And the great thing about the strategies is that they can change all the time, they’re flexible, and they can grow, or you can minimize them. And they’re versatile. And that’s what I love about strategies. But for me, strategizing is making a plan, but the plan will contingencies that you need to be open that your strategy need to might not work, so you need to observe it and be able to adjust it.
Eva Jannotta
Yeah, I’m so glad we’re talking about strategy. You know, that’s a word that gets thrown around a lot. And one of the things that, it seems to me happens is sometimes folks get confused. What is strategy strategy versus a tactic. And what you said resonates with with the way I think about strategy, which is like, like you said, it’s a plan or a way you have of trying to solve a problem. So and you mentioned, like strategies for my kids, for my dog, for my house. And that really helps, when I think about it that way that helps me really get grounded in what a strategy is, like, you have a house to take care of, you have errands to run, and you need to have a plan. And an idea of Okay, I’m going to go to point a to do this and point B to do that to solve the fact that I need groceries or my children need to be picked up or dropped off. And similarly, with a business, you have these problems, or these, maybe you don’t want to call them problems, maybe you call them challenges or projects or outcomes that you’re striving for. And so your strategy is simply here I am now and here’s the steps that I plan to take my plan to get there.
Lara Schmoisman
Yeah, for me, it’s also like if you will see a map, and you have many chores to do. So you’re going to be looking at the map and say, Okay, how is my plan convenient to do it is how to make it more efficient strategies is supposed to make your life more efficient, not more complicated. But what I love about strategies is also that if you do a strategy, right, you’re going to get data, you’re going to get information, some from that information. Because that’s why it’s really important, important to be consistent with this strategy. If you get the information, then you can learn what he did right and what you did wrong. And you can evolve that strategy in something that is even more efficient. That’s another one of my favorite words efficiency.
Eva Jannotta
I love the word and the concept of efficiency. And I’ve actually, my husband and my, my family members have teased me about kind of being obsessed with efficiency. Like when I’m driving somewhere, I have to make multiple stops, I think through what’s the most efficient route I can take in my car. Or even if I’m like moving from room to room in my house, and I need to take this over there, I think, Okay, what else do I need to take into that room? So I can do it all at once. And not everyone thinks that way. But I find it really gratifying to think strategically.
Lara Schmoisman
Oh, my God, I was just… Yeah, I’m nerding out here. It’s like, I enjoyed this so much to find someone who does the same thing. My office is in the lowest level. So if I gonna go upstairs, I need to do it for multiple things, not just one. Yes. Unless I need to really to run to the bathroom. And then it’s another story. But yeah, you have your priorities. And well, but even when I need to run that in way back, I find out that I need to do something else, before I come down. It’s about combining and really when I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of business owners and I fail, I see that a lot of businesses fail for that reason. And because they don’t know how to use their assets and make them efficient. And that’s one of the coaching programs. So they also developed like how to strategize your business from the marketing side, of course, but just so you can learn how what assets you have in your company that you can utilize and which are what assets you need to go and use outside and how to combine those assets.
Eva Jannotta
Yeah, that’s a really smart way of thinking about it like, what do you have already? What do you need to go get? And again, that comes back to that’s like problem solving or, or challenge solving.
Lara Schmoisman
Exactly. Because it’s really important that first you need to know what you counting with. Like I always say like, of course, there are all the social media platforms that but the winning them all the way near, we need to be everywhere, I mean, each business, we need to think about the conversion, and what our is our conversion is our conversion in every platform, or our target audience or in certain places.
Eva Jannotta
Yeah. And something that you know about me, Lara, is that I’m a proud social media monogamist. So I’ve made the strategic choice, I’m only going to use LinkedIn, because it’s most efficient for connecting with my audience. And it’s also most efficient in terms of using my energy, I find the interface pleasing, I find it easy to use and navigate, whereas other social media platforms, I find, I don’t like the way I feel when I use them. And so I think it’s interesting when you think about strategizing on your marketing, what is efficient and strategic, to meet your goals from like a practical perspective in terms of connecting with your audience, but also from a personal one in terms of what are you really going to do what’s really going to be the most advantageous use of your energy?
Lara Schmoisman
Exactly. And this is something that when people come to I offer, I have the agency side, and then I have the coaching side, and when they created the coaching, because I figured out that there were a lot of people that they didn’t have the money to pay the agency, but also there are a lot of startups and a lot of small companies that they don’t feel comfortable an agency taking over, but they don’t need the strategy so that they create that programs to give strategies. But what I found out the most is that people get confused, and they don’t know how to work the conversion is gonna come from so even you can have this is not a popularity contest. Many times you do need to have certain followers or someone hears your message, of course, but you will rather have 100 followers, and that they’re gonna convert that a million followers that they are not my target audience.
Eva Jannotta
Yeah, it’s really easy. And I think, you know, social media platforms are designed this way to kind of make you feel competitive with other with with your peers, you know, who has the best photos, who has the most followers, who has the most engagement? That makes a lot of sense, from Mark Zuckerberg’s perspective, or from the platform’s perspective in current terms of keeping a captive audience consuming the content. But from your perspective, as a business owner, you’re right, Lara, it really does come down to what’s most effective, what’s converting in the way that I want, you know, convert, converting somebody to like your page is a different quality conversion than converting someone to download your lead magnet and be on your email list, you know, which is most valuable for you.
Lara Schmoisman
And those are funnels are great, because they’re part of each business that they need to understand. But I found that a lot of the failures with companies intrapreneurs, is for them to try to copy other people’s strategies. Totally. I seen this so many times. And I feel terrible for that. Because basically, you’re doing the same as your competitor. And second eo are a few minutes or years or months behind, so you cannot compare. So you need to create your own strategy. And like I call it your own twist. Even if here’s your competitor, find your twist, find the how your story’s different.
Eva Jannotta
Yeah. And I think that’s a good point, Lara. And it makes sense. Like, when I started my business, I was definitely basically copying other people. Because to an extent, that is how you learn. And you learn by I see this over there. I’m going to try it over here and assess whether I like it, assess whether it works. But I was curious to ask you like when you’re working with your clients, and they might say, oh, Laura, I want to try this because I saw so and so doing it and you’re like, how do you kind of coach them to think creatively or to think of something they maybe haven’t seen before? to come up with the twist?
Lara Schmoisman
Well, that’s a hard one, because depends of each client. And I pride myself of having a personal relationship with each one of my clients. And the thing about social media is that everyone thinks that they know everything about it, because it Everyone has, other than in their hands, they can touch it, they can manage. It’s not the same as SEO that people. It’s like hidden world. Social media is there and they can do it. But the thing is all to me about performance. So we need to look at the numbers and to me performance speak louder than anything we can do. And we can have an office about engagement. Like if you see, like someone was coming to me the other day and say, Oh yeah, I have 2000 followers. They say, Yes, honey, but you’re following 1900. So the algorithm doesn’t work in your favor, they need to remember that there is an algorithm. So I think that the conversation is to make them understand that the followers or the likes is not everything, the algorithm is how you use algorithm in your favor, and then to analyze it again and see what works and what doesn’t work. But talking about personalities is your nature, like, I work with a lot of doctors. And I always say, I mean, you’re great. There are many doctors or they’re great, or they are, but when you’re competing as a doctor, you’re competing, your competition is one, and it’s your personality, why people will choose you against another one, let’s say that the both are under have insurance, or they don’t have insurance. They both have beautiful offices. Those are other things. But the main difference that you can put out there in social media is our personality and find the right voice.
Eva Jannotta
Yeah, that’s something that I talk about a lot with my clients when we’re working on developing their thought leadership content, and I’m really working with them, like how do you get your most strong opinions and bold perspective and big ideas out from between your ears and into a way that’s accessible to your audience. And part of it, a huge part of it is the personality, you know, anybody can kind of or I would argue that anybody can kind of write in sort of like a professional tone, and it ends up all kind of sounding the same and being indistinguishable from other people who are writing in a professional tone. But when you start to use metaphors and tell stories from your life, and bring some of your own humor and quirkiness into your content, that’s when it gets to exactly what you’re talking about, Lara, where suddenly your audience can distinguish, oh, this is the doctor or this is the person that’s really going to resonate with me, I want to get my information and my learning from them, not because of their qualifications, per se, or because of the beauty of their website, or their office or their brand, but because the way they connect with me makes me feel really seen and heard and drawn in.
Lara Schmoisman
Absolutely. And also is the same way. And with anything we do in life. Unfortunately, I believe that we live in a very PC politically correct world right now. And we were taught Well, not me, because I didn’t graph here, but I can see it with my kids. So they are taught not to say certain things, not even to think certain things, like I always say many times locations will take them, prepare them to work in a cubicle without the window, and not to see the world. And there are so many things in this world that they are not right, or they are right. And but very few people speak up. Very few people are taught how to make a process of thinking, Hey, I’ll take the five minutes how I really feel about this. And we take in what other people think about this. I think that what’s my in when we’re talking about leather leadership is about recognizing how we’ve really feel about things, and not that we’re taking it from someone else.
Eva Jannotta
Yeah, Lara, what you just said is really important. I want to first just quickly about the political correctness. You know, one of my clients wrote about this recently, and she said, when she pointed out that when people kind of complain about not being able to say things are needing to be politically correct, she challenges you to ask yourself, who am I not respecting right now. Because a lot of the time why I think political correctness is valuable and important is because it ensures that groups that have historically not been respected, do get the respect that all human beings deserve. But on the other hand, what you just said, is really important, asking yourself, how do I really feel about this, because you can have an unpopular opinion, that is still respectful. And I encourage my clients to, to develop their unpopular opinions, provided that they’re not offensive to anyone, of course, but to develop them because unpopular opinions, anything that goes against the status quo, and that really comes from a place of like feeling in integrity with yourself and really trusting you know, what I think about this and what I feel about this is valuable, and I’m not alone. And if I can have the courage to come out with my unpopular opinion, or my strong perspective that might might not be agreeable to everyone, then I’m really going to attract people that feel the same way. And I’m going to repel people that don’t and that is very valuable for building my audience and growing my business.
Lara Schmoisman
I believe it was George Bernard Shaw, who said that we don’t fall in love with the perfect, we fall in love with the imperfections.
Eva Jannotta
Oh, I’ve never heard that quote, I really like that.
Lara Schmoisman
Yeah. And I love that one I so I think you need to show yourself as an imperfect that you could be, because that makes you more human. And that’s what we fall in love with.
Eva Jannotta
And sometimes it involves, like, making mistakes, and owning up to them publicly and being honest about where you’re still learning or where you were wrong a couple of years ago, and now you’ve changed your opinion,
Lara Schmoisman
I changed my mind, I learn, and that’s okay. And that’s okay to keep learning, I think that I will appreciate and I would value someone who said, I made a mistake, I changed my way. And I will respect that. I was about to tell you this short story that my, my son is blond, blue eyes. And he was in in high school. And he made a comment about someone Latino, and he ended up at the office, my son and the dean and me, we have a long story going on already here. But anyway, I said, I didn’t understand why. And they call me to the office. And they told me that he cannot say that. And I was why. He just said that his Latino, and my son is half Latino. Yeah, but his rehand. And he has blue eyes. So the perception is that he’s not Latino. It’s like, really, we live in this world that is all about the perceptions. My, my son is half Latino, is half Middle Eastern, is like his mix. So we are like, it’s reverse discrimination, somehow. It’s like, every time that we are allowed to say less, I mean, it’s okay to say something about Latino because it’s part of the culture and I’m a proud Latina. And I feel like identified by that. So why I would be offended for someone to call me Latino or Latinx now.
Eva Jannotta
Right. Yeah, I mean, people identity politics can get very uncomfortable, I think, particularly for white people who haven’t grown up being accustomed to identify ourselves as white. And that’s my identity. And, you know, the way that most white folks are brought up in the United States at least is we think of our identity as sort of neutral or non existent. And everybody else, you know, people of color have different stripes, they have racial identities, and we don’t, and that in my purse, from my perspective makes us Can you make us very awkward, calling things what they are identifying ourselves and others using a proper language, we sometimes just want to pretend it’s not happening, pretend it doesn’t exist.
Lara Schmoisman
Exactly. I’m done with a pretending I mean, you’re not insulting anyone by saying who they are, I mean, will be will be offended if they tell you you’re a white person?
Eva Jannotta
Absolutely. Not.
Lara Schmoisman
Exactly. It’s who you are
Eva Jannotta
it’s very strange. And like that some or maybe it’s not strange. I mean, there’s a lot of history here. Of course, that would be way off topic to get into. But it is, it is certainly true. You know, my experience being a white person and knowing a lot of white people that we tend to be very uncomfortable. And I think it’s unnecessary, to have that level of discomfort.
Lara Schmoisman
And that’s why I go back to my clients and how I make them unique is about talking about the core beliefs and who you are and who you believe. And I believe that being ethnic is makes you who you are, it’s huge part of culturally, so find your age with all that knowledge that you have make a difference. And, and believe me, being Latina, doesn’t mean that I’m going to be working only with Latinos, I’m going to be working with whoever. Because culturally and richer if I’m able to take the wide part of me, the Latina, married to someone from the Middle East, and mixing all that, I think you learn more from the world.
Eva Jannotta
Absolutely. And like you said, in terms of like, what sets me apart, what gives me my edge, what really makes me stand out, you know, really offering your perspective from all of your intersecting identities, you know, your religious background, where in the world you grew up, you know, where in the country you grew up, ethnicity and race, and there’s on and on and on, there’s so many dimensions of diversity. And that’s what you have, and that will always set you apart and even somebody who has who shares your identities like a sibling or something, they’re still going to have their own experiences and their own perspective and all of that richness is and having the courage and the comfort to come out about all of that richness is really important in effective leadership in effective marketing. And in just being a an effective business owner,
Lara Schmoisman
I think is part also of being vulnerable.
Eva Jannotta
Yeah, for sure.
Lara Schmoisman
I’m being okay to show that you’re vulnerable and there, it’s okay. Do you have feelings and Not every day is your best day
Eva Jannotta
back to those imperfections that you mentioned earlier.
Lara Schmoisman
Exactly. I mean, and I’m all you’re paying, my team knows that I can come in today and say, Hey, guys, I’m doing my best day. So basically don’t piss me off. And they know that it’s not my day, I’m going to try to make it better. But it’s okay to say that you’re not okay. It’s okay to say that. I feel like, of course, we have an age gap here an age difference. And as a woman growing up in the 80s, and starting to work in the work force, in the 90s, I had to shut down a lot of the imperfections and a lot of just to grow professionally. And even more I suffer horrible migrants, the kind of that that I will go to hospitals, because I am blacking out and inject myself. But I had to shut it down. And I couldn’t say that I had a migraine, because it was agh, there you go, she has another another headache.
Eva Jannotta
I really hope that that dynamic is changing. You know, one of my clients was on on a live stream this morning, and she was talking about redefining power. And she was talking about her identity as an Asian American woman and how when she started her career, she felt like she had to check a lot of herself at the door. And she couldn’t come in being her fullest, most powerful, authentic self, because of the perceptions that you’re talking about. People didn’t want anyone to write her off and assume she was capable of less because of anything that was less than perfect. And it’s, you know, one of the benefits I would argue of being an entrepreneur is that we are in charge of ourselves and making our own decisions. And so we have some more options, perhaps you could argue with like how we show up and what we what we talk about, you know, talk about migraines, talk about mental health stuff. But I am hopeful that as the discourse changes nationally, and globally, especially after a year of pandemics, that we’re able to have ever more honest conversations about all the things going on in our lives and how they affect us in all kinds of workplaces.
Lara Schmoisman
Yeah, and I want to go back for a minute about the leadership, I learned that being a leader is not easy. Being a leader, I don’t know your definition of leader. But for me, being a leader come with responsibility is of responsibility not only to lead others, but also to mentor others, and to be that they are for them. And with that leadership also is a responsibility that others might follow. And I feel like a lot of people want to take that responsibility of leadership without but then when finally they get the followers like what’s going on here. What do I do now? How do you prepare someone for that?
Eva Jannotta
Yeah, one of the things I’m thinking of is I’ve had a couple of instances where clients of mine, you know, when they start working with me on their thought leadership, strategy and marketing, they’ll start to gain followers. And so they’ll start to get more attention and more feedback. And sometimes that feedback is negative. And people don’t like what they’re saying. And so one of the things that I coach for myself and I coach for them is to view negative feedback as a sign of they’re doing the right thing, because it’s a sign that they’re really challenging their comfort zones, that they’re really challenging themselves to say what they truly believe and value and inevitably, you know, you’re not here for everybody. Some people are just perpetually grumpy and unhappy, you can’t make everyone happy. And so what I find very helpful to think about for myself and my clients is okay, push back, that’s a good thing. That doesn’t mean that you need to shut down and stop doing what you’re doing. And when you talked about Laura you know, like you get more followers you have more responsibility to keep showing up for them. One of the things that I come back to with myself all the time is consistency. That doesn’t mean perfection, right? Like consistency just mean like sometimes I might have an off day and off week and my consistency means being open about that with my followers rather than sending a quote unquote perfectly edited email but the fact that I don’t ghost on them I don’t disappear I don’t bail them that shows them that they can trust me that they can rely on me in some you know that I’m going to be there even if it’s not in my most polished or perky or humorous way
Lara Schmoisman
Yeah, I’m so with you and I gonna let you go with but another phrase that I love and I’m sure you’re gonna love it show. This one is from Don Quixote. And it says something like, Hey, Sancho, if the dogs are barking is because we’re, we’re moving.
Eva Jannotta
I love that. Oh, you are so good with a quote.
Lara Schmoisman
I love quotes. I really do love them. And I think so people keep moving. There always gonna be barking.
Eva Jannotta
Yeah, that’s Yeah, so the barking is an assignment need to run away or be afraid. It’s just a sign that you’re moving. And that’s it. Good sign
Lara Schmoisman
Exactly. So don’t let the fear paralyze you just keep moving.
Eva Jannotta
I love that. That’s a great quote to close on.
Lara Schmoisman
Eva, thank you so much for being here. It was wonderful to talk and, and talk and talk about strategies and all the things that I love. So let’s keep in touch and keep strategizing.
Eva Jannotta
Thank you so much, Lara. It was great to be here with you.
Lara Schmoisman
Thank you for joining us. If you like the show, remember to leave a review. I will really appreciate it. If you want to know more about marketing and and myself, follow me on Instagram. My handle is Lara Schmoisman. Was so good to have you here today. See you next time. Catch you on the flip side. Ciao ciao.
