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Several years ago, I was a member of several local clubs for women in business, and often got invited to speak at meetings and events.

One day, an invitation rolled into my inbox asking me to give a talk. I told the event organizer, “Sure, that sounds great! I’d like to title my presentation ‘Think Like A Stripper’, and base it on my upcoming book.”

If emails could express ‘stunned silence,’ that’s exactly what her reply would have sounded like.

She wrote: Actually, we’re hoping you can choose a different title for your talk – and not mention your book. We don’t want to potentially offend anyone.

If you’ve known me for about 5 minutes, you’re probably aware that “don’t want to offend anyone” isn’t a part of my vocabulary.

If you have to tone down your magic, you’re working the wrong crowd.

So I wrote back: I’m willing to change the title of my talk, if that feels absolutely necessary, but I’m not changing my content – or my story.

Let’s just say . . . that speaking gig didn’t pan out.

Nor did the speaking gig where I was asked to speak to a group of commercial real estate industry professionals – but if I wanted to bring my book to sell at the event, I’d have to hide the book in a brown paper bag so participants wouldn’t be embarrassed to walk out of the venue with it. No thanks!

Or the other time I was UN-invited to speak from a national women in business group – after I had already promoted the event on my website and to my mailing list.

Turns out I was too edgy for the board of directors. Too bad for them!

My street smarts are what helped me co-create a multi-million dollar commercial real estate investment company and a successful business coaching consultancy. Their audiences could learn a thing or two from me.

Here are stunning results from one of my speaking presentations where I showed the audience how to create bold viewpoints in their business.

– One participant sold $4000 in jewelry THAT day.

– One participant closed a $20,000 consulting deal a few weeks later.

– One participant got featured in the Washington Post.

And one participant had her article featured on Fast Company’s website.

I could have boxed up the stilettos and toned down my message to score more speaking gigs, but that’s not who I am.

Even though it initially hurt to not score that speaking gig, to get uninvited, and to be asked to put my book in a brown paper bag, it made me more determined to share my voice, and leverage my story. Frustration and determination always strengthens my personal brand. 

Side note here: What I discovered from other organizations that weren’t afraid to have me as a guest is that I don’t enjoy giving your standard speaking presentation. I very much enjoy interacting with the audience, bringing them up on stage, asking them questions, and doing live coaching in front of the audience. 

And while I haven’t done any live speaking in about eight years, the only way that I will do them now is if they are interactive. Otherwise, I have zero interest. This decision to only do interactive live speaking presentations is another example of how I have crafted & curated ‘the me I love to be’ in my personal brand. And have taken hurdles and obstacles and turned them into personal branding opportunities.

You have the right to experiment and explore how you conduct your business and deliver your products and services. (Really how you do anything. No wild idea is off the table). And I encourage you to do so until you find the right fit for yourself. This is the only way to have a sustainable business, and still be in business (and might I add LOVING your business) decades from now. 

Hiding your true self halts business growth and keeps you constantly second-guessing your magic. So again I say, if you have to tone down your magic, you are working the wrong crowd.

As we move through this month, I want you to think abbout what you are boxing up. What part of YOU are you hiding? Keeping pent up. Or shoved down. 

Your inner hippie? Your inner glam girl or glam guy?

Your inner smarty pants? Your inner bad girl or bad boy?

Your inner woo woo? Your inner nerd?

Your inner artist? Your inner dominatrix? (Oh. Come on. I can’t be the only one.)

How does it feel to squash yourself down? To make yourself properly acceptable to anyone and everyone?

Let’s unbox that part of you and invite it to play in your personal brand.

Because unboxed YOU. All of YOU. Is POWERFUL. The kind of unboxing that gets you noticed. Makes you memorable. Adorable. Fascinating.

So unboxed that people can’t stop talking about you. Being unboxed is the missing link that catapults you into the spotlight. Do you need me to dare you? Don’t worry, I will.

XXXO

_______


Ever since I saw The Devil Wears Prada, it’s been my dream to have an assistant who would practically give their life to Lyremark, Inc.

Yes, I do have high demands. No, I’m not nearly as mean as Meryl Streep (or maybe I am?).

So when I was out shopping one day and struck up a conversation with a sales associate who told me she wanted to be the Hathaway to my Streep, I was in heaven.

I started imagining her happily serving me my morning latte at 7:01 AM on the dot, color coordinating my Le Pen collection with my Tieks, and popping in at the end of the day to say that she had sent my mother her weekly bouquet of pink peonies.

My mother is getting pink peonies from me? Every Friday? Really? Yes please!

Soon after, we had coffee together. She showed me her resume, and it was pretty good––not perfect for my needs, but not bad either. So I gave her a writing test. She passed––just not with flying colors. But maybe she would get better with some help and TLC from moi.

I was t-h-i-s close to offering her the job––but a little voice stopped me. ‘Erika – even though she told you everything you wanted to hear, you’re settling for something that’s just OK, but not great. Don’t settle. Your Hathaway is out there.’

The problem was that intuitively I knew that––after all, there are over 7 billion people on the planet. But logically I was getting hung up on the HOW?

HOW was I going to find this person who could …

Write like a mofo,
Market like a maven,
Wrangle tech details like they used to work at the Apple store,
Have great taste in flowers,

AND not want to build their OWN company?

Because up until now, all of the seriously talented people I’ve wanted to work for me, either already had their own company or wanted to eventually have their own company.

And just like Ms. Streep (in the movie), I wanted ALL of their attention. I was NOT going to let this ‘how’ HALT me!

I decided to have an energy clearing session with Christina Ambubuyog from I Love Intuition because I really needed my brain to believe that my Hathaway was out there.

(I think of energy clearing as a way of cleaning out my internal house. For example, I’m not going to buy a brand new sofa and place it on top of my old sofa. Nope, I’m going to get rid of the old sofa, wash and scrub the floor, and then bring in the new sofa.)

After my session with Christina––which was amazing by the way––I wrote down what I wanted from my Hathaway and what they could expect from me.

I will give you the full ad a little bit later on in this post (you can swipe it and use it to write your own ad) but for now here are a few snippets.

___

: You are a skilled and experienced copywriter. You probably have your own blog and write poems––and taglines just for fun. You can’t help but want to re-write everything you read. (You might even want to re-write that last sentence – or maybe even the whole page!).

: You are obsessed with marketing. You love to test out your powers of influence and persuasion for the greater good.

: You are addicted to learning and you always welcome feedback so that you can get better at what you do.

: You have no problem whatsoever with clearing a huge portion of your schedule to work on someone else’s business.

: You are not interested in building your own business. Working for someone else suits you just fine, thank you very much.

: You do not mind reading this long list of qualities and you will read every last word. Including the next instructions.

: You are reading carefully enough to know that you need to reference “The Devil Wears Prada” in your cover letter (cover letters without this reference will be rejected).

___

You get the idea.

I was specific about what I wanted. It made my hiring decisions easier––plus whoever was reading could decide if they wanted to give their life to Lyremark, Inc.

This was a huge step for me which––for whatever reason––I had been resisting.

Around that time, I was returning a pair of boots to Zappo’s––stick with me here, my boots have everything to do with the story.

I wanted a refund rather than an exchange, and I got such a great response from Anna S. in customer service, that I actually wrote her back.

She was cheerful, off-beat, and made me feel good. So good, I actually suggested that she apply for the job.

She never did, but it made me realize that there was a good chance that my Hathaway was working in a corporate type job (or had just left one) was bored, and desperately seeking a new challenge in their life. I had more hope than ever before.

At this time I was also ramping up for my newest offering––fully trusting the Universe to send me my Hathaway – when I got an email …

“Hi Team Lyremark –

While I am not on the fence at all about working with you, even though I’m just on the verge of setting up a business and still nailing down what I want to offer – I’m ambitious, hardworking, and smart. I just want to make sure that being an embryonic business owner is right for you and the other ladies – I don’t want to hold anyone back by being a bootstrap beginner!

Give me the thumbs up and I’m SO in – thumbs down and I understand.

Thanks for your time – Elle”

I loved the energy! So I shot back an email to find out what kind of business she was trying to set up.

“I’ve been working (for others) as a writer and social media strategist, and while I enjoy those things, I’d really like to try and figure out how to utilize my super-weird-special skill of – what to call it? Information Mining? Findology? I’m a natural data warehouser, love information for information’s sake, and, whether people want to know what’s the best shoe store in Seattle, if there are artist residencies for making pagan objects, or whether Jane Austen was left handed, I’m the gal who knows, or can find out pretty quickly.

Most asked question? ‘What was that movie where the guy did the thing?’ Give me a third variable and I can figure it out 98.6% of the time!”

And then, I asked her how she found me.

Usually people say things like ‘I saw your website’ or ‘my friend so-and-so loves you’ or ‘I read your book and really wanted to work with you’ but the answer that came back was this:

“A couple months ago it became clear to me that having my own business was probably the way of the future, and finding someone much smarter, successful, and more knowledgeable than me to learn from was indispensable.

So I built a search string in which the results had to include all of the following: ‘best smartest funny kick ass awesome effective business coach’ and you were the #1 return. More than a dozen other people had all posted about you, using every single one of those words. So I surfed in on the wave of your avid fans, got on your list, and hoped an offering would come up that I could pounce on!”

Could this be the Hathaway to my Streep?

Could the Universe be clearer?

Would we one day have our likeness turned into glamorous dolls?

And even though I felt really weird about doing it (and I’ve done some pretty weird things, as you know) – I mean she had already paid for the program to discover what she wanted to do in her business, and here I was assuming that working for me was going to be her business dream.

But I had to take the risk.

I put on my big-girl panties, summoned up some courage and asked if she might be interested in working with me. And I believe her response was:

“Holy Mother of Mozart, are you trying to make me faint?”

OMG! So I sent her over to my advertisement for my Executive Producer – which I hadn’t even posted yet, and she came back with a cover letter, a resume, and not one, but TWO references to The Devil Wears Prada.

I think you know by now I hired Elle.

I held out for just the right person, and I knew it when she turned up in my inbox.

But there’s just one more crazy twist in this adventure.

She’s not Hathaway to my Streep: now don’t cry for me. Keep reading.

We have WAAAAAY too much fun!

It’s more like she’s the Chuy to my Chelsea Handler – and while she says she’s slightly better looking than Chuy, she also says that relationship works for her.

XXXO

P.S. Keep reading. I’ve included the whole want ad I wrote to find my Chuy – and broken it down with simple prompts that you can follow to craft your own want ad.

SWIPE FILE

Executive Producer Needed by Successful Business Coach/Author – Must Love Copywriting, Marketing, Customer Service and Organizing Other People’s Lives to the Point of Obsession.

Your Turn: Write a Headline that Covers EXACTLY what you want.

Team Lyremark is looking for an Executive Producer for a dynamic, fun, totally amazing business coach & published author who runs a successful (and rapidly growing) business in Minneapolis, MN.

Your Turn: Tell them who you are and what you do.

This is a subcontractor position at the moment. However, I’m only interested in talking with candidates who are open to becoming a full-time employee (potentially within the next 3-4 months).

Your Turn: Are you putting them on the payroll or setting them up as a contractor?

You will handle all my customer service, social media, co-write all my website content / blogs  / course material, do all my PR, and manage my online profiles. You will also be in charge of my affiliate program.

(And there will be more … yet to be determined.)

Your Turn: Be CLEAR about what you want them to do.

YOU MUST POSSESS THE FOLLOWING QUALITIES

1. You are a skilled and experienced copywriter. You probably have your own blog and write poems – and taglines just for fun. You can’t help but want to re-write everything you read.  (You might even want to re-write that last sentence – or maybe even the whole page!).

2. You are obsessed with marketing. You love to test out your powers of influence and persuasion for the greater good.

3. You are addicted to learning and you always welcome feedback so that you can get better at what you do.

4. You love and are incredibly good at:

• Social media
• Copywriting
• Reading anything you can get your hands on
• PR & pitching
• Organizing someone else’s ideas into concrete plans
• Handling customers with professionalism and stellar communication skills

5. You are hyper-organized to the point that a trip to The Container Store is more exciting to you than a day spent shoe shopping. (You may also be obsessed with gorgeous shoes, though!)

Your Turn: Let them know EXACTLY what skills they need to bring to the job.

7. You have no problem whatsoever with clearing a huge portion of your schedule to work on someone else’s business.

8. You are not interested in building your own business. Working for someone else suits you just fine, thank you very much.

9. You do not mind reading this long list of qualities and you will read every last word. Including the next instructions.

10. You are reading carefully enough to know that you need to reference “The Devil Wears Prada” in your cover letter (cover letters without this reference will be rejected).

Your Turn: Make sure they are reading carefully and can follow instructions. Give them a mini pop quiz!

11. You are Internet and tech savvy and there’s no computer challenge you will not solve or track to resolution.

12. It’d be amazing if you also love documentaries, pop-culture and infomercials.

13. One of your deepest desires is to be a part of something great and work with people on the rise. (Think Oprah’s producer Sheri Salata.)

Your Turn: Try adding some references that are important to you – if they don’t know who Oprah is (or whoever is your hero) they might not get where you’re coming from.

14. You want a career where you can grow. You want to make more & more money. (Bonuses? yes please!)

Your Turn: Let them know there will be rewards for a job well done.

PAY

To Be Determined

Your Turn: If you know what you are going to pay, say it. If not, then write “To Be Determined.”

PERKS

: Free access to all my courses. PRICELESS!

: Free mentorship from a successful entrepreneur & published author. PRICELESS!

: The most fun you have ever had at work (and did I mention you can work in your pajamas in your own home?).

Your Turn: Are there any other perks besides getting a paycheck?

LOCATION

Can be located anywhere, but candidates in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area will be given huge preference. (I’d love to sip green juice with you while we go over this month’s project schedule and this week’s tasks.)

Your Turn: Let them know where you are located and if they can work in their pajamas.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR NEW BOSS

– I change my mind on a dime. What was the A-plan yesterday may be the sh*t-plan today. Until I know something makes me money I keep the strategy flowing.

– I’m collaborative. So you may send me something and then I may send it to other peeps for feedback and to change it up. So if you’re attached to it being your way, we won’t work out.

– I pay my bills. On time. Always.

– I’m not cheap. But I spend my money wisely.

– I like frank feedback. I dish it out. And I can take it too.

– I move fast. Keep up.

– I’m organized. Mostly.I need fast communication turnaround time (preferably within 4 hours).

– I work on the weekends and evenings. And appreciate if you are available for questions or if I have an emergency.

Your Turn: WARN them about you. If you’re bossy. Let them know. If you’re uptight. Let them know. Some people love bossy uptight people. Really!

HOW TO APPLY

1. Write a cover letter that starts with, “I always have my greatest epiphanies when I am….” (all standard, boring cover letters will be rejected).

2. Tell me why you geek out about marketing, taglines, soundbites, infomercials, etc.

3. Tell me what blogs you read religiously and why.

4. Attach, or include in the body of the email, your resume, a link to your blog sample writings, or portfolio.

Your Turn: Ask them specific questions about themselves and you’ll find out if you have anything – or nothing – in common.

5. Tell me why this position interests you and why/how you are available for both contract work and potential full-time work in 3-4 months.

6. Tell me why – very specifically – you want to work for me. What do you think I can offer you (besides a paycheck)?

Your Turn: Here you can find out what their plans are, plus you find out if they know anything about you and what you do. Are they just throwing their resume at anyone, or have they done their homework?

If helping me dominate the planet – for the greater good – sounds like your dream, send your cover letter & resume to hello@dailywhip.com (put Executive Producer in the subject line).

I can’t wait to hear from you!

XXXO

P.S. Make sure you understand all the legalities to hiring – and firing, and have an independent contractor/new hire agreement before you get started.

_____

Seeing cherished, respected leaders melt down on social media. On purpose. Drives me bananas.

– The money coach who just maxed out their credit cards over the weekend.

– The nutrition coach who just binged on donuts and so many Sweet Tarts that the roof of their mouth is out of commission.

– The branding coach who sobs on Instagram about how hard it is to be authentic in the online space.

When I see this happen, nobody hits the delete button faster than me. Because those people aren’t connecting with me. They are confessing self-sabotage as a marketing ploy. To be relatable. To feel like we are all in this together. 

But we are not. 

I didn’t follow that person because I wanted a friend. But because I wanted to go from point A to point B. I’m always on the lookout for aspirational leaders.

A real leader is someone who has moved through their stuff. Someone who has become stronger, smarter, and more capable because they’ve done the work they need to do. Someone who isn’t confessing their self-sabotage on social media as part of their marketing plan.

You can be a leader in any field you want to be, but EVERY good leader – meaning one I’d want to follow – have something in common.

LEADERS connect by listening and responding to the people in their network and offering solutions, not by creating drama to get likes and comments.

LEADERS hold themselves to a higher standard. They recognize that leadership is a responsibility, and not a place to share your sh*t on social media.

LEADERS share their viewpoints based on their expertise and their experience. They’re not going along with the crowd. And they definitely aren’t confessing self-sabotage as a marketing strategy.

LEADERS do what they say. They’re not creating a facade for public consumption, then living a completely different story behind the scenes. If they say they’re going to host a Facebook live stream at 1:00 pm, then they show up at one sharp.

LEADERS have worked out their stuff relevant to what they’re teaching. They don’t simultaneously lead others and battle that same issue. 

LEADERS don’t have followers, they have a network. Which means they’re out there speaking and connecting with others visibly and consistently. 

It takes work to be a leader. It takes commitment to think in terms of the future, building true trust, and taking responsibility for keeping that trust.

And if you have what it takes to be a real leader, do it. Because you’re the one I want to follow.

PRO TIP: If you’re looking for a better way to connect (than confessing self-sabotage) do what Helen Hunter Mackenzie suggests: Share your quirks.

The little things that make you adorably you.

For example: If we go out to dinner, there’s a good chance that I will reach my fork across the table to take a bite of your meal. So if you don’t want me stealing your food, you should order the same thing as me. Or don’t invite me to dinner :)

XXXO