Fractional
Fractional
Michelle Keefer: Time blocking and managing clients
This week we're joined by a former colleague and friend, Michelle Keefer. She's been helping to build and deliver for marketing departments as a fractional executive.
We dove into the highs and lows of her work, discussed the importance of time blocking and managing multiple clients with task switching.
We also talked about vacations, how to define minimum engagement periods, and the difference between freelance contracts and fractional executives.
We also referenced Founder Mode, by Paul Graham.
You can find her at:
https://frameworks.marketing/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-keefer/
Hello and welcome to episode 67 of the Fractional Podcast. Excited to have a longtime friend on the show today, Michelle Kiefer, MK at Frameworks. marketing. Michelle is a fractional marketing leader, executive working with marketing teams, developing teams, delivering outstanding marketing results for her customers. And not only are you in the fractional world, but you've also been in our world. Excited that we get to reconnect and have a chat and hang out. Michelle and Joshua and I overlapped all at XWP for some time. So this is a fun walk down memory lane. So welcome to the show, Michelle. Super glad you're here.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here and to talk about this stuff.
SPEAKER_01:And I just got to say, we had Lee Sweat on sometime last year. He's a fractional CFO, and so I got to work directly with him. But I believe you were the first fractional I had ever even heard of. We were working together, and there was a point at which I realized, wait, Michelle's not here full-time? I didn't even notice that until you said it. And I'm like, wait, what is that? How is she working with multiple companies? That sounds amazing. And that kind of opened... I didn't ask you a ton of questions because it was so different, but it kind of opened my mind to other possibilities at the time. So yeah, I just want to say that was the start of the journey for me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I have to piggyback on that too, because when I was on my way out from XWPA, I also was thinking I want to go down this fractional path. Joshua, you and I had been talking a lot about it, but I had a couple of phone calls with Michelle and gained a lot of good insights there, how this could work. So yeah, both of us have benefited from it. Oh, you guys, I'm so happy
SPEAKER_02:to hear that. It's definitely changed my life when I pivoted my thinking from being like, I'm a freelancer or I'm a contractor to No, I'm a fractional executive and it totally changed what my engagements were with how I worked with different clients and helped me kind of create the life that I needed to have so I could pay attention to my kids and pay attention to my hobbies and my husband while still providing really high quality work. So I'm glad to know that my pioneering days of trying to navigate this stuff has helped. And so hopefully the conversation today can help some other folks too. I
SPEAKER_01:just want to, this isn't on our agenda, but I just want to butt in and ask, what do you, one, however you want to answer, what do you love the most about it? And maybe what's the one thing that's the most frustrating? And then we'll get into some topics.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. So the thing I love the most about it is the engagement model. It really helps build a lot of trust with specifically the C-suite and CEOs. I'm coming in to be a part of their team and to really immerse myself into the organization versus being seen as like a consultant or a freelancer or a contractor where I'm really kept at an arm's distance, right? Like it's what you need to know is all I'm going to get to know. And for marketing specifically and lifecycle marketing, that can be really challenging because I don't get all the insight that I need to do good marketing strategy. So that's definitely my favorite part is just the functional engagement of it is really empowering for me. The thing that I like about it the least is you know, it's almost not quite enough time. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but we'll be going through something with the client and it's really challenging to kind of force myself to like maintain the boundaries for what my engagement is. Sometimes I'm like, golly, I just want to go all the way in house and just fully focus and dedicate to this. Then I have to remind myself that that might be good for the short term, but for the longterm, ultimately it's, it's best, it's best to have that boundary. And so that kind of segues into, you know, some of the Things we were going to talk about, boundaries and time blocking and managing those, you know, when you've got a CEO that's on fire and really, really has a lot of urgent things that he needs and you want to just fully throw yourself at it. Knowing where that line is, is the hardest part, definitely. And the part that I like the least because I'm a people pleaser. But yeah, so that's high level, best and worst of this type of engagement for me.
SPEAKER_01:So that does lead into the next question I'm wondering, which is you see teams, and I've been part of teams like this in the past. You see it on LinkedIn all the time, or X or Twitter, whatever, that you need to have a founder mentality put in 60, 100 hours a week. That's what is required to get the work done if you really care and really believe. And I hope you can pick up in my tone. I'm not in complete agreement or any agreement with that. So leading into time blocking, how do you get good work done that perhaps Thank you. What's your philosophy on that and how do you have positive engagement knowing that time is frankly going to be more limited?
SPEAKER_02:So the first thing I do when I really come in and start to assess the situation of what needs to be done is I make two lists. One list is what are things that I'm going to do and one list of things that I'm going to delegate. And depending on how much time I have available, those lists will ebb and flow one direction or not. So if I have less amount of time available, then my delegation list needs to be longer. If I have more time available within my do list can be a little bit longer. So that's kind of the first step is figuring out what do I actually need to achieve that there isn't somebody already on the team that could do something. And so that's where ego checks and vanity checks come into play. And you really have to remember as an executive leader, it's not always about what you can bring to the table. It's what you can facilitate somebody else bringing to the table. And so even if you might like to do something your specific way, if there's somebody else who can do it and get the job done, then you've got to empower and trust that person to do it to keep your do list shorter than your delegate list. So that's kind of where I start. And then I start time blocking from there and looking at at least having a daily check-in where I'm looking at Slack, I'm looking at email and things like that. So maybe a 30-minute time block per client just to come in and see what's going on. I'm making sure I'm at least touching every single day from that capacity. And then we kind of continue to build the blocks from what's needed there, but really understanding what the resources are inside of an organization and how you can delegate and how you can collaborate with others. And essentially that's the value of a fractional executive is that you're implementing yourself in to leverage the full team resources, again, versus as a contractor or freelancer, it's what you and your resources are that plug in and that's all you've got. But when you're really leaning into fractional You have a full team, you know, all the full time people that are there and figuring out what they can do sets the stage.
SPEAKER_01:I just love that way of thinking, looking at do and delegate. I never thought of it quite in that clear of a way. You know, I've had moments where I get something done in half an hour for someone and they are shocked and they view it in their mind like that's worth a full week's worth of work. The reason sometimes I can do it is I've done it before. six times before in similar ways in different verticals and so i'm able to leverage that my brain kind of goes to the filing cabinet and says wait a minute we've solved this one before we're going to pattern recognize apply it to this specific company and actually given let's say 10 times the amount of time the results might not be that much better and in fact So it sounds like you're leveraging the years. This is a common refrain I have on this podcast. Long-time listeners have heard me say this before, but you're leveraging the years of experience versus the hours in the day to try and provide value.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Absolutely. Because... Ultimately, regardless of what the engagement is, there's a certain amount of time and materials that are being delivered. My time has to be spent in the best way possible when it's fractional. And that's actually why my agency is called Frameworks Marketing is because I leverage frameworks over and over again. So I have a framework for implementing marketing strategy. I have a framework for implementing customer feedback loops. And it's the recycling of that knowledge and practicing it over and over in the different verticals and different organizations that helps move things along at a quicker pace when a value is coming in brand new cold. I might have to spend two weeks worth of research and interviewing people around the team to understand what the best approach is. But another thing that's beneficial of doing that is even if it's not... perfect, you can put some, you can stand something up and get it going. And then you can let the data tell you what needs to iterate for that specific audience and that specific use case and that specific product service match. So yeah, you. You're definitely not paying for an hour of my time. You're paying for an hour of my knowledge being applied towards your project.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, what a good way to describe that, actually. I love that. Kind of a follow-up on this. I have tried, and I know we're not talking about time blocking in the traditional sense, but I want to kind of poke on that for a minute to see how you think about this. I have tried blocking out my day. When I was doing full-time fractional, I'm no longer doing that. But when I was doing full-time fractional, I'd block out my day sometimes where this half a day is for this client, this half a day is for this client, et cetera, and shift them out. And what I found is sometimes the client needed a lot more. Sometimes they needed a lot less to get them taken care of in that week or day. And sometimes I wasn't in the right mental space to do it. So I'm curious, how do you look at your day based on your energy, things outside of your work life that you're trying to juggle? And frankly, maybe whether you're enjoying working with that client on that day, like what do days look like for you?
SPEAKER_02:That's definitely another favorite in the lane of fractional. If a client is bothering you or challenging you, you just switch over and focus on a different client instead until you've got the energy restored or you can go back. But to answer your question, so rather than looking at my time blocking on a day-to-day basis, I block on a week-to-week basis. And so I see a whole week. as an opportunity of when am I going to touch everything I need to touch? How many times do I need to touch it? And things like that. I also give myself gaps in my time block. So not every single minute of every single day is scheduled because I know that I'm going to want to go turn a little laundry or I'm going to want to you know, go on a walk with my dog in the middle of the day. I also know that I need to leave space in case of a meeting or a partner call or something comes up and I need to have flexible gaps for that to be able to fall into. So I'm not difficult to pin down. And that was something really early on when I very first started time blocking that I didn't do a very good job of. And I would have, especially at XWP, this happened. People would try to schedule things with me and I was just like, sorry, you have to wait. And so It's this iterative process of learning how to block and time block and massage those blocks to kind of find the optimum thing. So looking at it on a full week scope instead of a day-to-day helps a kind of keep that flexibility that I need. And then I also have a rule that if I have a time block on my calendar and let's say I go two weeks in a row without adhering to that time block, then I delete it because it's not serving its purpose. And so I iterate. I probably spend at least an hour a month looking and adjusting and shifting my time blocks. So it's not something that, again, when I very first started, I would get a new client, I would set those time blocks and try to rigidly stick to that schedule. And I only time blocked at the beginning of a new engagement. But now I've learned that that's just not really practical. I also, you know, if I have a gap and I find that I'm always working through that gap, I have a work journal next to my desk and I kind of just kind of keep note. What am I spending my time doing this? And if I see I'm commonly using these gaps in the same way, then I just turn that gap into a time block and allow myself to have that dedicated time. So it really requires a lot of of self-awareness and ability to recognize yourself and what you're actually doing instead of judging yourself for what you're not doing or what you think you ought to be doing and just kind of staying flexible. But if you try to keep it two-zeroed in on a day-to-day basis, in my experience, that was just... stressful because I was setting myself up and not following it more often than I was following it. And I would beat myself up because why am I not doing this right? And shifting that to where I was looking at everything on a week-to-week basis really helped.
SPEAKER_01:Lance, I've got 10 more questions. Do you want to ask any before you're
SPEAKER_00:on a roll? Yeah. You were mentioning the concept of hours before. I'm curious for our listeners, do you invoice hours? Do you invoice... retainers, how do you approach, maybe you do different things with different customers? How do you think about that?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I have different approaches with different sized customers. So like my, what I would consider like a primary client, someone who I'm doing a longer term ongoing engagement, that's based off of a retainer. And it's loosely set on like an average amount of hours. And so for example, I might bill someone at a monthly rate or a monthly retainer, and that gets them about 12 hours a week. But sometimes it's actually 18 hours or 20 hours, and sometimes it's eight hours. Kind of what you're saying, Josh, sometimes you just need less needs to be done, but it all kind of averages out. For my smaller clients, the folks who I can't seem to not want to help, even though they're broke and can't really afford me, and sometimes they're paying 10% of what my other clients are paying me, those are hour by hour. And I I just kind of flex for them. But I never bill anything less than like a half hour. So even if I'm only spending a couple minutes on it, I still bill a half hour. And that's just like my minimum blocking. I do have a nice insight. My husband has worked in the oil and gas side of things as a broker for a long time. He's also worked with attorneys. And so I've learned a lot about how... those industries bill hours and broker hours and resell hours. And it's really different than how folks in like web agencies bill a broker hours where time and materials is a lot more literal. And so I think that's having that different perspective layered in has really helped me kind of wrap my head around how to value my time blocks and bill for them.
SPEAKER_01:So does that mean then, and if this is something you can't share specifically, that's totally fine. I've been very curious to hear from people who are more tracking hours. Do you have a mental maximum amount of billable hours you know you can handle week to week? For me, for instance, when I was doing full-time fractional, I noticed 15 hours of billed time in a week. And by the way, I never actually billed this, but I did log it because I wanted to correlate the two, right? 15 hours was an okay week or like that was good. 20 was a hard week, 25 challenging, 30 I was completely dead. So I'm curious for you, do you have a range you shoot for and how do you average out over time if you can share it?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. So that kind of leads into the task switching, right? Like once you get up to that many hours in a week, you think about how many times your brain had to switch from thinking about this product and that partner to a different product and a different partner and a project within a project. And you know, even within one client, you can be thinking of 10 different things in a week. And so And so to me, that's really where I try to focus more regulating myself than actually the number of hours in a week that I'm sitting at my desk is how often am I task switching in a day? How many... I want to pay attention to each client every day, at least on that 30-minute minimum, make sure there's nothing urgent yelling at me. But otherwise, I try not to task switch more than three or four times a day because that's really what gets me exhausted. If I'm working on the same project for six hours, it is not nearly as a exhausting is if I'm working for five projects over six hours. You can see what I mean? The way you use your brain, the energy it takes to stop thinking about one thing and thinking about another thing is actually going to take so much more out of you than the number of hours you're spending at your desk. And so getting really smart about when you're task switching. For example, I have a client that I will only do their meetings on Tuesdays. But I have another client that I'll do their meetings on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. because it's easier for me to switch in and out of that mode. But if it's something that I really have to focus on and I'm not, and it's more challenging for me to switch in and out of, then I want to put those time blocks and lump them together where I'm getting more dedicated deep flow for that client than other things that I can flip on and off more easily, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00:So it would be a mistake then for someone who's starting out in a fractional role to think, okay, I want to make X amount per year. And if I break that down into 40 hours per week, it's this much per hour. So I need to be billing that amount per hour when really the amount of hours you're able to bill to a customer is... are not the same as the amount of hours in a week. You have available.
SPEAKER_02:Oh my gosh, yes. So I wouldn't say that it's a mistake to do that calculation because it's good to give yourself that baseline. So you have something to look to and be like, okay, about how much is my hour worth? Am I billing at about$100 an hour,$200 an hour? Like where do I really need to be? So just, but to then live by those hours is where the mistake is. So do the calculation, kind of get an idea of what you can actually take on about how many clients you need to take on in order to achieve the value of that you're looking for in your annual income. But yeah, when it comes down to actually time block, like if I'm like, okay, I'm billing this customer this amount. And so that means I need to be giving them this many hours a week. So that's how many hours I have to put on my time block for them. Like it's not one-to-one. So for example, I have a client. I know I need to give them about 20 hours of value a week. That looks like eight and a half hours of time block on my calendar. Because even though I'm only doing eight and a half, that's eight and a half hours of dedicated flow time plus I know I'm going to see it on Slack. I'm going to check my email in the evening after I brush my teeth. I know there's all the invisible time that I'm not actually tracking. It's kind of like counting calories. You might have a really good idea of how many calories you're eating, but when you actually start counting calories, you're like, holy crap, I had no idea how many calories I was actually eating in a day. The same thing happens with time blocking and managing our time. I put an hour on my calendar and I'm like, that's the hour I spent today. But then you forget all the other things. Or when I was walking my dog this morning and I was thinking about this problem. I wasn't at my desk, I wasn't clocked in, but I was actively solving for it and applying my knowledge, applying my expertise towards it. And you can't really capture those kinds of hours. And so you really have to find, and that's what goes back to like modifying your time blocks regularly and learning about yourself and how much value you're applying in a certain amount of time, not just the minutes that you're applying in that amount of time.
SPEAKER_01:Does that make sense? This podcast is a great example. Like Lance and I might have one hour a week of a podcast, but there's time and preparation and talking to guests ahead of time. And like, for me, I spent 20 minutes getting my software, my hardware set up again, because I'm in a different office. It's like every time this actually leads into a question I'll have, but every time I have a meeting in the day, there's usually a period before and after that's still devoted to that meeting, even though I'm not in the meeting. And I guess my question is two parts. How do you say no to clients when they're not in the meeting? And have you seen a correlation between more meetings and client retention? That's just this question I always have myself. And I'm curious, like, are your clients, do they need to talk to you on a Zoom call or are they more asynchronous? Just, yeah, I'm curious how that works for you.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, every client's different, right? Every CEO has their preference. And usually as a chief marketing officer or chief revenue officer, I'm reporting into the CEO. So I always have to, you know, figure out what that's going to look like. on a case to case basis. But to answer your first question, the easiest way to say no to meetings is to say, I have very limited time. Would you rather me produce something or do you want an update? Because I can spend my time on an update and a meeting with you, or I can just send you a quick note and I can continue producing. Nine times out of the 10, a CEO is going to be like, you're right. I'm going to pay you to do the job. You're here not to sit on a meeting. When it's full-time staff, they don't care as much about quote unquote wasting or spending money on a meeting because it's all part of accountability and collaboration. It's like a bigger system. So even though I'm embedded like a full-time person, I'm not. And so when I just remind them of that, my hours are limited. How do you want me using them? That's usually a really good way to get out of meetings. And I use it for not just the CEOs, but for other folks too. Like if we have like every other week content meeting and I don't need that hour on my calendar this week, then I'll just, hey, I've updated everyone on Asana. Let me know if you have questions. No meeting this week. And so that's easy to get around. The other question about whether or not I see a correlation between retention and having recurring meetings is yes. I absolutely see a correlation between retention and recurring meetings. The more informed your stakeholders are, the more likely they're going to continue to trust that you're there really caring about their team, even if you're not, quote unquote, founders mentality, 60 hours a week pounding the pavement. Like they know you still care because you're speaking to them regularly. Yeah. Some clients I've had, and I do a one hour once a week, and it's consistent. Every single week, we're going to have that hour. Maybe if someone's traveling for a conference or something's going on, we'll skip it occasionally. But more often than not, that one hour weekly recurring is pretty standard. Although I do have other clients that, like the first response, they don't want to spend that hour with me every meeting. They just want an asynchronous stand-up at the end of every week. So as long as I'm consistent on putting in my stand-ups and they're seeing the other team turning things into me, then they don't need to talk with me because they can see that work is happening. So again, it really depends. I've actually started something brand new with this most recent client. It went over really, really well and I'll continue to do it going forward. I drafted a letter to the CEO and it's essentially my promise of my integrity of showing up and doing the work and caring about it. And so when it's part of my onboarding process. I give this letter to the CEO and encourage them, ask me questions. Ask me as many questions as you want. Anytime. I'm not going to take offense to you questioning what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. I would rather you know and feel confident than you suspect something and not be sure about it. And then that poison you and plague you over, you know, how you're looking at the work that's happening over time. And that's part of it. It's like, ask me questions. We're going to have to learn how to communicate together for this to be successful long-term. This is important. You're running this business. You're taking on all the risk of managing the finances and the vendors and the budgets. I want to be a resource and an asset to you. And if you aren't sure what I'm doing, then I can't be. So that helps too, just like kind of putting it up at the front and encouraging questions.
SPEAKER_01:So the counterpart to all of this is how do you handle vacations, taking time off, like taking time for yourself?
SPEAKER_02:I just do it when I need to. I don't know. I try. I don't know if this is like one of those weird mentality things that I have. I know a lot of people stress over these things, but I just don't, you know, I, again, it's part of that communication and the relationship that I develop with my clients. Like, yes, I'm fractional. I'll always make it up. If I'm I'm on a monthly retainer. I'm going to make that time up throughout the month that I'm not there during those specific days. And again, just kind of like how we time block on a weekly basis. I look at my retainer and my engagement on a monthly basis. And so if I need to take a day off because I'm sick, last week I had a sinus infection. My kids stayed home and I told them my brain is working. My voice is not. I will be asynchronous today. And I was available and I worked for like two hours that day and slept and took naps. But then I, you know, I catch up. And so I just don't worry about it. I set that expectation also at the front that I'll always let them know where I'm going to be or if I'm going to be away. They all know I'm fractional. So sometimes I have to go to a conference for one client. I'm going to be totally out of pocket for you. So trust that I'm going to make that up for you at another time. And just it all it all evens out in the end.
SPEAKER_01:So that actually that leads really great into another question that we were touching on before the call started. This works well when you have clients long term, right? And And I've had personal experience with fractional clients who are just month to month. And you never know. You can't think long term with them. At least I have struggled to. So I imagine that works a lot better when you're going to be around someone for longer than a month. How do you try to structure your engagement periods? How does that go? Do you have any struggles there? Just anything you can share about that, because I think that is a struggle for some people getting into fractional.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. And so that kind of goes back to the initial shift in the mindset shift between are you a fractional executive or are you a freelance client? of posing as a fractional executive.
SPEAKER_01:All right, what's the difference there? Yeah, can you...
SPEAKER_02:So an executive is somebody who has long-term strategic influence over the growth and sustainability of an organization. And so that, whether I'm talking about how to grow your marketing and sales or whether someone's talking about product strategy or recruiting and talent development or operations and logistics and, you know, tool, like... if you're coming in at an executive level, there has to be a certain amount of commitment to long-term strategic growth. You can't do that on a month-to-month basis. And so I use that to filter people out. If someone's looking for a month-to-month and they just need someone to come and plug a few holes here and there, then they're not looking for a fractional executive. They're looking for a contractor or a freelancer. But if you're looking for a fractional executive and someone who's going to embed themselves in the organization, you have to understand and accept and appreciate that there's a curve to that. You have a team is, what our resources are, what our positioning is, what are we actually trying to accomplish? For marketing specifically, are you trying to grow this business because you want to have a long-term successful business? Are you trying to grow this so you can sell it in six months to a VC organization? Because that's going to be a very different approach. So you have to have a certain amount of time to figure those things out. Like I said, anywhere 30 to 60 days, depending on the size of the organization. And then you have to have your first delivery, right? No one's going to deliver exceptional, exquisite work the very first time, no matter how good you are at your job, because you're doing something new and a new environment with new resources and a new audience and a new goal. And you've never done it before and they've never had anyone come in and do it for them in this regard either. So first one, you might get close, but you're not going to get it right. So after you deliver your first time, you need to have space to iterate and deliver a second time. And it's not until you've delivered the iterated second or third version of something where anyone's going to actually understand whether or not what we're doing is going to be successful because you have to allow the data to develop. And you can't develop data month over month. You have to do it quarter over quarter. And that's where you're going to see it. So I, again, just set the expectation upfront. There's no point in taking on an executive level resource if that person is not going to be trusted to help guide and influence the strategic growth and success of the organization. And that takes time. And that's just the bottom line. And so I do a minimum of a six-month engagement. And if you can't commit to a minimum of six months, then there's just not... I have lots of people in my network who I would happily refer them to if they're looking for someone that wants to just come in and just solve a specific problem for them or do a specific project for them. And so you really just pivot it back to the stakeholders who are hiring and how serious are they about investing in their growth and their strategy? How much research have they actually done or do they think they know? And how willing are they to... to stand by that.
SPEAKER_01:So this kind of leads into something else here then. What if someone, and this absolutely has been myself, what if someone is realizing, no, you're just kind of doing that freelance consulting and that's not really where you want to be? You think maybe you have the ability to make the jump? How would you speak to someone like that who is wanting what you've just described? They'd like to be strategically involved and they think they have a chance at doing that.
SPEAKER_02:So it's mindset, right? You have to really think about, you know, If I'm an executive leader, I'm going to spend more time managing and planning and reporting than I am actually creating and developing and doing. So it goes back to that, how much am I doing versus how much am I delegating list? If you're in a space where your doing list is longer than your delegating list, then that's where you start. Get comfortable with... providing clear instruction, to briefing others to do work for you. Test things out by taking... Even if you have a contracted project, go hire somebody on Fiverr to do it for you and see how well you can manage them to do it within your... your timeline and budget of what you're getting paid and kind of start practicing managing other people to produce the work at your level. Once you can manage other people to produce quality work at your level, there's a lot more comfort in having space to think about strategy and developing departments and developing plans and developing multi-year lifecycle products and things like that. Because if you're looking at it one task to the next or one project to the next, you're not able to to zoom far enough away to get yourself out of that space where you're just like one project right into the next. So practice breaking yourself out of it and thinking about managing and delegating more than doing and creating yourself.
SPEAKER_01:So this week, and we're not a news cycle-based podcast, but there's been this thing going around by Paul Graham about founder mode. I'm not sure if you saw that from Hacker News this week. I won't even get into the piece, but I can reference it in the show notes. It essentially comes down to founders who think about where their company wants to go and who actually continue to push that vision through the end will do better. And then there's been a bunch of refutations of people saying, well, actually, some of the best companies have been the ones who have the founders have delegated to good managers who have really taken it somewhere, all that. So there's a question here. When you come in as a fractional executive working under the founders or the CEOs, or they could be the same, how do you relate to helping grow their business when you're not a founder for them? You're not specifically maybe vested for them. How do you pitch them on that? Or how do you even approach that yourself to So I
SPEAKER_02:absolutely agree that having that vision of what the goal of the company in the long term is, is critical. Because whether you're going to carry that vision yourself, and you're going to carry that torch as a founder, or you're someone who's coming under pressure. a founder and trying to help facilitate them reaching that, you have to have it. And it's not just, where do you see yourself in five years when you want to have this percentage of the market? But really understanding, is the purpose of this business to grow and acquire other businesses? Is the purpose of this business to grow and just continue to solve this problem that we care about for this company, this sect of users forever? How long will they need to solve that problem? Does my company have a lifeline before we need to iterate to something else. And so you really have to think about the long-term vision of not just who you want to be, as an organization and as a brand and as an employer. But what's the end goal? What's your retirement? How are you getting out? Are you selling? Are you putting in a succession plan? And figuring that out first and understanding that from the founder's perspective, it's critical. Because for me to come in and help them achieve that, again, I'm going to take a very different approach if what you're wanting to do is just grow enough where you can get bought. We're going to take a wildly different approach than someone who's like, I want to create a company that is the best employer of this type of talent for as long as possible. I want to be a safe haven in the economy for employee health. We're going to do a lot of different things in our marketing than we would... you know, someone who's just trying to grow. So those are the areas where understanding the vision is the most important part of it. I don't know how well I answered your question.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's fantastic. And I also like you... bring a mentality of being a founder of sorts of your own company, right? And you're helping support other executives. So it's a way of thinking. No, I think that's fantastic. I have a whole other area of client acquisition I want to talk about next time, but is there anything that we didn't ask you that you are thinking about or you'd want to share with us just about this whole journey? Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:I think, yeah, we could definitely just talk more and more on that. I've When I got my start in marketing, it was in market research and I worked with a lot of startups. And so I was rapidly exposed to so many different founders. I've started my own organization. My husband and I have launched a nonprofit. I've helped him launch a business. So we're definitely founders. I'm definitely of that founder entrepreneurial mindset, even though... that's not necessarily what I'm doing with my life every single day. And
SPEAKER_01:by the way, I'm coming off in a certain way and a certain attitude for a reason. I agree. I have founded my own company, been part of my own organizations. Sometimes though, when I'm working with a client or when I've been an employee, I'm really just trying to do the best I can in the time I have. And then I'm literally just showing up to do the job, but that's not a bad thing when you're bringing everything you have. And then maybe my evenings are dedicated to my family because my kids are small or Or maybe they're dedicated to a startup idea I have because I'm at that stage of life. People go through different stages of life and it's okay to not be all in on everything all the time because then you'll get burnt out if you otherwise.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, we're not robots, right? We're going to ebb and flow. And that goes back to the beauty of this engagement model at all is that it naturally gives us space to kind of push and pull where we need to, to live a life that makes sense for us. And it changes. When I started out, As a fractional executive in 2019, 2020, when I very first started doing this compared to where I am now, I'm doing it so differently. And that's because I've constantly adjusted to, I tried that and I didn't really like it, or I tried this and I liked it and I wanted to do it again. And just navigating that, honestly, I keep journals, I keep all kinds of notes for myself or honest self-reflection because, you know, memories are faulty, especially when we're doing a ton of tasks, switching and our brains are tired. You can't always exactly remember what happened. So journaling, I keep a work journal that's separate from my like regular journal. So like my journal that I have for my life, my meditation and my practice with, you know, my own spiritual practices, you know, I'm talking about my family and I'm talking about life and all these things. And yeah, work is a part of it, but then I have a journal that's specifically about work and how do I feel about work? And what do I need to be focusing on? And what am I stressing over that I could do less stress, have less stress on? And I really have to compartmentalize it. But because of that focused introspection, it's really allowed me to evolve and it's worked. It's working well.
SPEAKER_01:So what tools do you use for journaling? I'm curious about that.
SPEAKER_02:I'm old school millennial. I like pen and paper and stickers and I draw myself little notes and little pictures.
SPEAKER_01:I love it. I've gone back and forth between analog and digital over the years. So I'm always curious how other people do it.
SPEAKER_02:I will use like a note keeper on my phone. So if I don't have my journal on hand, I will use that digitally sometimes. And if I just have to get something out of my head, but yeah. Yeah. I'm otherwise it's, it's pretty chaotic. I have, you know, I just mapped out a talk for a conference coming up on how to just, how to just tell the difference between good marketing and bad marketing when you're using the same strategy and like it worked here and it didn't work there and why. And it's like on three napkins and it's half and highlighter and whatever, whatever tools you need. Then again, like I, early in my career, I referred to myself as the, the MacGyver of marketing because you just have to use whatever resources you have and your tools aren't always going to be reliable and you can't let that stop you. I
SPEAKER_01:love that. So final question, where can people find you? And I'll put links into the show notes if they want to chat or learn more.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. So find me on LinkedIn. I'm active on a week-to-week basis. You can DM me there. We can set up time. I love, love mentoring and I love helping teach other people how to figure this out. I'm not, you know, I could have made a course and put it behind a paywall, but I would rather just build relationships with people who actually want to learn this stuff and are committed to making their lives better. So very accessible. Just follow me, DM me and I'll respond.
SPEAKER_01:And then if someone is thinking, oh, I could use Michelle's help as a fractional, is that going to the frameworks? Is it finding you on LinkedIn? What's the best way they could reach out to you?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, same way. You can go to frameworks.marketing. I've got a forum there. You also can get a sense of what types of marketing you want when you go to the website. It's very tactical. I also do workshops and one-offs. I also offer a marketing therapy session. So if you just need someone to bounce things off the wall with, it doesn't always have to be that long-term engagement. And again, that's why figuring out lots of different ways to offer my expertise has been a part of this journey as well. because it takes the big clients and the small clients and the one-off sessions and the workshops over here all coming together to keep me sharp and on my toes and practicing good marketing in different places. But it also helps keep the bills paid and the family happy.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you, Josh. Thank you, Lance. It was great to see you guys and I hope to chat again. For
SPEAKER_01:anyone listening, it's email at fractional.fm if you want to send us questions or responses. Thank you for being on, Michelle. And I'm looking forward forward to chatting again soon.
