Overcoming a Crisis

Episode 940: Overcoming a Crisis, with Nicole Mahoney

Overcoming a crisis, especially during the pandemic, was quite challenging. Learn how Nicole Mahoney and her team persevered in overcoming a crisis.

With a talent for creating special events that blossomed while working for her dad’s car stereo shop, Nicole Mahoney got her start in marketing at Frontier Field in Rochester and she began serving as the executive director of the internationally known Lilac Festival. Later on, Nicole headed the Canandaigua, New York Business Improvement District while also performing projects for the tourism promotion agency Visit Rochester.

In 2009, Nicole founded Break the Ice Media, with more than 20 years of experience in tourism marketing. She now hosts “Destination on the Left”, a highly successful tourism marketing podcast.

As a business owner, Nicole knows what it takes to be successful, especially in overcoming a crisis. She founded BTI to help businesses tell their brand story through public relations, digital and traditional channels. Nicole has the ability to uncover unique marketing opportunities and develop marketing and public relations initiatives that help clients build long-term success.

What you will learn from this episode about overcoming a crisis:

• Why the onset of the global pandemic pushed Nicole and her team to “double down” on their thought leadership and content creation
• How Nicole’s investment in her thought leadership has paid off in an overwhelmingly positive response from her audience
• How Nicole’s clients within the travel and tourism business have been significantly impacted by the pandemic, and how she is working to help them through the challenge
• Why focusing on being a great partner, establishing goodwill, and planting seeds now can help you in overcoming a crisis
• How Nicole and her team navigated the early days of the pandemic, and why transparency in decision-making has been vital as they navigate the challenge
• How Nicole and her team decided to hold a three-day virtual summit for her community well in advance of the pandemic, and how they succeeded in overcoming a crisis
• How the virtual summit, already planned to be held in April, was ideal under the conditions of social distancing
• How Nicole and her team are now helping their clients convert their own events into virtual shows, and how that service is becoming a new offering for Break The Ice Media
• How the virtual summit gave birth to the idea of offering an online course with modules for clients, and how the team coordinated to create the course
• Why being completely transparent and showing how they have done their work has been key in better serving their clients

Resources:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: travelalliancepartnership.com
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/nicolemahoney/
• Twitter: @Break_TheIce
• Facebook: @BreakTheIceMedia
• Listen to a podcast about overcoming a crisis and the importance of leadership

Additional Resources:

• Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
• Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
• Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
• Listen to a solocast about overcoming a crisis from Predictive ROI

 

 

Overcoming a Crisis: Full Episode Transcript

 

Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.

 

Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation, where I interview today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built and scaled their business. In fact, my team at Predictive ROI while we’ve been rebuilding our free resources section. In fact, it’s turned into a resources library on predictive roi.com.

 

So you can now download free practical and tactical guides for everything from how to build your own authority sales machine, everything for how to create your ideal client avatar, how to create a value ladder, a sales funnel, how to make sure your content strategy aligns with the ten truths to what makes someone an authority within their niche. Just go to PredictiveROI.com/Resources and as always, everything you request, we will send it right to your inbox.

 

Learn about the importance of leadership in overcoming a crisis

 

Overcoming a Crisis: Nicole Mahoney’s Introduction

 

Before we welcome today’s very special guest on Onward Nation and our special guest today is Nicole Mahoney. She’s the CEO and founder of Break the Ice Media. I want to share some additional context about why, when Nicole and I started talking about her coming back to Onward Nation for this encore, I knew it would be an exceptional opportunity to find the silver linings during this crisis and albeit Onward Nation.

 

I get it. We may need to look a little harder to find them, but I assure you they are there. So this is the context around this really amazing conversation that we’re going to have. So Nicole is going to share how Break the Ice media and why they decided to double down on their thought leadership. You’ll hear that they have been very progressive and proactive regarding thought leadership for years.

 

But then during Covid, they saw this as an opportunity to take that even deeper in order to help their industry. She’s also going to walk us through how her team positioned the company to grow their audience in face of the pandemic through their virtual summit strategy. This is a brilliant strategy Onward Nation and one that you can take and apply into your business to race.

 

But we’re also going to talk through Nicole’s forward thinking leadership style, how that style inspired and motivated her team to jump into parts of the business they had never done before. And we’re also going to talk about the result outcomes from that type of move. She’s also going to take us behind the curtain and share how her team accelerated their three year plan to develop an online course, and turned it around and launched it in less than a week’s time, which is amazing.

 

And lastly, throughout this entire conversation, she’s going to share some of her strategizing for the future and specifically how the team is going to continue to double down to help their niche, their niche industry, as well as their plans to broaden reach into parallel industries through an expanded service offering. So Onward Nation. This is going to be one of those conversations where you’re going to take a lot of notes.

 

You’re going to walk out of this with plenty of golden nuggets to take and apply into your business. So without further ado, welcome to Onward Nation, Nicole. 

 

Learn about the importance of leadership in overcoming a crisis

 

Overcoming a Crisis: Doubling Down on Thought Leadership

 

I’m so excited to be here. Stephen, and thank you so much for having me back. And I’m excited to share with Onward Nation. You know, my experience or personal experience, my team’s experience are totally looking forward to this conversation.

 

Me too. And because I think it’s going to be just packed full of strategic insights and practical and tactical things that that Onward Nation can take and apply. And so let’s first talk about, you know, doubling down. And because you have been very, very progressive in creating thought leadership content, you know, sharing that with your industry to help your audience be better, help them, move into the next stages, into the future and be ready to do that.

 

And well positioned them for growth and so forth. So then comes Covid. So walk us through the decision on how you can double down even further on thought leadership and some of the things that you and your team decided to teach and share as part of that strategy. Yeah. So first of all, when I say double down, one of the first things, one of the first decision points for us was that we were not going to stop marketing.

 

And for us, our marketing is our thought leadership. I host a podcast, produced by Predictive ROI. Stephen, you and your team, I’ve been working with you for three years, and that was kind of like a sacred cow, if you will. You know, one of those things I’m like, we’re not touching that. We are not giving up on that.

 

We’re investing, you know, in our thought leadership. And that’s so important to who we’ve become as an agency. And I couldn’t even imagine putting that on pause. And I just know from a lot of clients that I’ve talked to and, and other business owners, you know, they were marketing is one of those things you look at first and you say, where can I kind of expense.

 

Right. Revenues paused or we’ve lost some revenue, we need to cut expenses. And that’s just an area that we decided early on. We’re not touching that. You know, if we touch that, it means our business is going to fundamentally change. And I don’t know if we’ll even survive this without it. So that’s the first piece.

 

And then the second piece was, realizing that we are so networked, myself, through the Agency Management Institute network that I belong to, I also belong to a women presidents organization. My team belongs to Prsa and the Public Relations Society of America and other organizations. And we were receiving information, through our networks, about kind of the, you know, the loans, the small business, the SBA, the idle loan, you know, all of these different programs that were out there, work share programs.

 

And it occurred to us early on that we had access to information that maybe our clients might not have, or that we had the information, broken down to us in a much more helpful way that maybe our clients didn’t have. And so when I doubled down, not only did we say we aren’t going to stop our thought leadership, but we also said we’re going to share business type information that typically we don’t share with our clients.

 

You know, we’re going to talk to them about work share programs and reducing staff and PPE loans and whatever it is that they need to talk about and be as helpful as possible. we’re a marketing agency at Core, but we very quickly became, you know, this business partner, and really trying to to broaden their network, through our own networks.

 

Does that make sense? It does make sense. It’s super smart and savvy. to. I love the word that you were. The two words, I guess, that you used as far as the, you know, putting on the business partner hat. So, what has the response been? And my guess is it’s been overwhelmingly positive. And you’ve probably heard from some people that maybe you hadn’t heard from in a while, but what has the response been as you started sharing that type of information?

 

Yeah, I mean, the response has been extremely positive. You know, we’re still being thanked, you know, by our clients and by folks who are our clients who are just in our audience, because we do have our thought leadership. So we do have, you know, a broader audience than just the clients. And we receive, you know, emails and feedback, that are very positive.

 

Learn about the importance of leadership in overcoming a crisis

 

Overcoming a Crisis: Supporting Clients During Covid

 

This is really good information. Nicole, thank you so much. Thank you for thinking of us. You know, and then all of a sudden, I started getting questions about things that I wasn’t sending out, like other types of questions, like, one question that came to me was, do you know anything about liability and insurance as it relates to this?

 

And so I don’t, but I’m like, okay, let me see if I can find out. Right. Because this is what they’re grappling with. And, you know, for them to get into a position where they can hire us or, you know, do more, we want to make sure they’re strong so that we still have a client base when we come out of this.

 

And so that’s really the approach that we took is what can we do to help. Another thing that we did is several of our clients, we work in the travel and tourism industry. And so your listeners, you know, that may make you cringe because travel and tourism has been hit so hard. And so our clients, a lot of them have been hit very, very hard.

 

And, some of them, you know, had to pause work, others have had to cancel work for us. We have lost a significant amount of booked business. We started the year in one direction and we’ve lost a lot of that book business. But I do have a belief that that’s going to come back to us.

 

But one of the things that we did do is we started to support our clients and some of, some of our clients, even in a pro-bono way, whatever we can do to help them through because it’s a tough, tough time. and this is just one very, very small example, but a small kind of project that we do every year is organized.

 

The 4th of July parade. And, in the local community where I happen to live. And it’s a paid opportunity. but we’re not having a 4th of July parade this year. And very early on, I went to the mayor and said, listen, I know with social distancing, it’s looking like the 4th of July probably won’t won’t happen.

 

My team would love to work with you to come up with some sort of virtual way to celebrate the 4th of July for the community, and this is our give back. Wow. And, you know, for no money at that point, I had a contract that was signed and they hadn’t even canceled it yet. But I knew it was coming.

 

And so preemptively, I went and, you know, and offered that. And not only is that really goodwill for, you know, for a client, but the community that I live in, but also makes my employees feel good that they’re able to give back. I think everyone in this time, you know, wants to feel like they’re doing something, to help.

 

And, that’s just one small example. But that’s another way that we really double down. Wow. I can only imagine, like, how grateful they were for one, the idea which is super proactive on your part of being a partner. So a really cool idea. And to my guess is that there was some gratitude around the fact that you had a contract, you could have been a stickler about it and, you know, made it into something that, you know, was negative, but you didn’t, and you were super proactive and gracious and partnered and so forth, which already turned into a stressful situation into something that is awesome.

 

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Overcoming a Crisis: Keep Going Even If Things Get Tough

 

Well done. Well, thanks for all in. Because because it could have been it could have been completely different, right? I mean, every business owner is under a lot of pressure right now. And so the lesson really trying to cement here early on in our conversation is things are different. And how can we be a great partner?

 

How can we think creatively for people that we’ve been with, people that we’ve worked with for maybe years? How can we establish goodwill? How can we plant more seeds now, even though we might not harvest well into the future? Or maybe never? But this is such an opportunity to use your skills and talents Onward Nation in ways that maybe you’d never would have thought of before, but they will pay you dividends into the future, right, Nicole?

 

Absolutely. And, that’s exactly what we firmly believe. You know, one of the interesting things is when this whole thing started, my team, we moved so quickly to a work from home environment, you know, we were navigating through a number of different client conversations, trying to figure out what business was, you know, going to stick around and what business was on pause.

 

And, we’re still navigating through some of that, but there was uncertainty about, you know, for revenue for me as an owner, if our revenue was going to be able to if I was dropping, if I’d be able to maintain, you know, the same staffing level. And we’re trying to be smart about how we make decisions in terms of maintaining profitability or at least a break even situation for the year, you know, and, what was interesting is one of my employees early on said I was never worried, Nicole.

 

They weren’t worried. And I thought, wow, what a gift. I mean, that made me feel so good, actually, because, you know, I know so many people who are concerned about their jobs or, you know, the economics of what’s happening and that that my employee was saying she doesn’t believe that at any point, you know, there might not be a job for her.

 

I don’t really believe that’s what she was saying, but she had confidence in what we had built together in our company and just how quickly we changed direction. And she said she wasn’t worried. And actually, this came from my biggest worrier on the team. So it was amazing.

 

That came. But it really, it really kind of, that sort of thing really energizes me. You know, to keep going even when it’s tough. Well, great, great vote of confidence though for your leadership too. And, and that that you have created either intentionally or unintentionally. My guess is that you’ve created a calm within the office within the now obviously working remotely, but, because it could be panic stricken, it could be the sky is falling, it could be crisis after crisis and shifting gears from here to there or whatever.

 

And there’s certainly an ebb and flow to what we need to get done on a day to day basis now, because things are changing rapidly. But it also speaks to through all of that chaos, you’ve clearly been able to establish some calm through the storm, which sounds like has been greatly appreciated with that, because that is a wonderful compliment that she gave you.

 

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Overcoming a Crisis: Stay Forward Thinking

 

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s that calm then I’m trying to also instill in my clients, and providing, you know, the guidance and the thought leadership and the sharing of information, to try to help them stay focused and, you know, looking towards the future, which is still so unknown, especially in travel and tourism. I mean, right now we’re talking about reopening, but communities, there’s been a lot of talk about resident sentiment and how comfortable residents of communities are welcoming people from other places to their community.

 

So, you know, you might live in a community where there’s an anchor or there’s a beach or, you know, some sort of large attraction that brings lots of people. And residents are nervous about having lots of people come to their community from other places right now. And so trying to help the travel and tourism industry, the industry that, you know, I love so much, my team love so much.

 

We work so hard trying to stay forward thinking, what are those things that we can do now? What are the actions we can do now? Providing them with, you know, even just ideas and small tactics that they can be employing at the moment, even if they don’t have a budget. Those are the kinds of things that we’re really trying to do to continue to be helpful and to support.

 

Yeah. So I love that. I love the choice of words there where you said, forward thinking, helpful and and really being progressive and bringing ideas to your industry, really super smart. That’s what a thought leader does Onward Nation. And it’s not about selling. It’s about being helpful during this crisis. And Nicole, in her team, is doing that in spades.

 

Learn about the importance of leadership in overcoming a crisis

 

Overcoming a Crisis: Working at the Office Post-Covid

 

So let’s actually talk about your forward thinking leadership style here at Nicole. And because I know during this process, not only was that inspirational to your team, it also motivated your team to jump into, you know, parts of the business that they hadn’t worked in before. So tell us a little bit about that then. Then we’ll switch into some kind of result.

 

But tell us a little bit more about how your team felt inspired and motivated to jump into new areas, because that’s a push, but it sounds like it was probably a great push. Yeah. You know, early on when all of this was happening, the day that we ended up working from home, I had actually just come back from a trip and I came back on a Friday.

 

So my first day back in the office, I’d been gone for a week, was on a Monday, and I’m driving in that morning and my leadership team had asked for a call because there’s four of us on the leadership team and two were really concerned about this Covid 19 and what they’d been hearing in the news. And they weren’t sure that we should be even going to the office.

 

And, the other myself and the two of us were saying, well, we don’t have enough information yet. The governor hasn’t, you know, hasn’t mandated that people have to stay home yet. We don’t want to be over reactionary. And so there’s kind of this, like, balance of, you know, safety for the employees. And then, not being too over reactionary early on, which sounds really silly now that, you know, you know, this far along.

 

So literally driving to the office and it’s probably 8: 30 in the morning, this is our conversation. Get to the office. We have our weekly huddle status meeting and at 11, I get to the office and we kind of do another leadership huddle, and we’re saying we have to work from home. What would we do? What would that look like?

 

What would we require from the team? Quickly sketched out some things. And then during this hour and a half period of time, the governor had announced, our, you know, our, stay at home policy was going to start like in a couple of days. But by the time I was done with the conversation, no, it’s actually starting tomorrow.

 

So we literally walked out of this little huddle into our status meeting and said, we’re all going home. And, so but from really early on, I was completely transparent as to what our decision making process was, what we were looking at, what I was considering, why we were thinking this way. And, that included talking about our finances.

 

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Overcoming a Crisis: Be Fully Transparent

 

At one meeting, I think we were maybe two weeks old. And, you know, our employees are. This account’s on hold. This, you know, job that we had, one that we thought we were going to start now isn’t happening. You know, all of these things. And so it was very transparent about where we were when the PPE loan program came.

 

It was very transparent about that and that we were applying for it. And thanks to my network, I was the first one in my bank. And so we were early in the game and getting funded. And once we were funded, I said to the team, we’ve been given a gift. We have two months of space, we have space to do something like, we don’t, you know, we don’t have the pressure of meeting payroll because I have that covered.

 

And that’s the biggest pressure that, you know, we feel. So I said with this time we are going to do something, we’re going to do something big, and we’re going to make sure we’re not wasting this opportunity. And everybody was on board, you know, from, diving in, I know we’re going to talk about this a while, but, you know, diving in to help pull off an online course which has seven modules and several homework assignments.

 

And this whole I mean, it’s pretty big build out, that people had never done it before. one of my employees, I thought, oh, my gosh, wait till we tell her we want her to be on video and be part of this online. She’s going to like it, she’s not going to like that, you know, because we tried to have her on video before and she didn’t like it.

 

Well, here’s what happened. Her supervisor calls her to tell her, you know, this plan. She thought she was getting the call to be let go. Oh, no. So all of a sudden, it occurred to the supervisor like, oh, no, that I’m calling you because we’re working on this great project and we want you to be part of it. And all of a sudden she was like, oh, I’m in. Yeah, I’m in.

 

But anyway, I think it was really the transparency and the openness that we had early on and everybody was invested. And it really warms my heart to see how much, how hard everyone’s working, because they are so invested in the work that we do, the clients that we serve and this business that we’ve kind of co-created.

 

I mean, I’m the CEO, but my whole team that’s, you know, built it into what it is. And that, I think, is really what made a huge difference. This might seem like an obvious question or maybe observation, but we’d love to get your take on this. So do you feel like your willingness to be fully transparent? Do you think that that contributed to your team?

 

I mean, I know that you have a great team anyways. but do you think it contributed to your team quickly, getting all the oars, rowing in the same direction in the willingness to take on new things? Absolutely. I mean, the other thing that’s been really interesting, a big learning for us is we’ve been working hard on our core values for years now.

 

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Overcoming a Crisis: Live with Your Core Values

 

I think it was about four years ago that we did a workshop with the team, and we established our core values. But what’s been really cool is this crisis. We’ve leaned on those so hard, and the team brings it up all the time that we’re leaning into these values there in front of everyone all the time.

 

And transparency is one of our core values. So when it, you know, just naturally started happening was being very transparent and the finances and everything that was going on. But then what I saw was, how cool is this? Because everybody’s rallying, you know? And then I reflected and I thought, this is our core value that’s like, you know, and overdrive right now.

 

And it’s working. So you know, the core values. It’s just incredible how much our core values have really helped us because I had mentioned that before. But it really has made a huge difference. Great leadership. And I know that your team, your entire team, not just you obviously live the core values, but I love how you just said how you’ve been leaning on or the team has been leaning on the core values and super, super smart love that.

 

So also with the forward thinking to take us into the strategy around virtual summits. And first, just set some context for onward business owners who are listening. When you say virtual summit, you mean this? So take us into that in the strategy behind it. Yeah. So Virtual summit is part of our content strategy.

 

And we started holding them last year. I was looking for a way to engage in a different way with my audience and with my podcast guests. And I did a lot of, you know, research and poking around to see what kinds of things we might try. I was thinking about hosting a live event, and then I came across this concept of a virtual summit and, last fall, that felt a lot less daunting than the expense that can go into putting on a live event.

 

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Overcoming a Crisis: Launching a Virtual Summit

 

And so we hosted a virtual summit last December, our first one. And what we did is we invited, folks from the podcast who have been guests on my podcast to be presenters, and we put together a three day, summit with 15 presentations over three days, and people could watch them live and do a live Q&A with the presenters, but they could also watch them on their own time.

 

Of course, we included some of the Break the Ice team as presenters, so we wanted to show off our own thought leadership and smarts as well as part of that. And it was successful. And so fast forward into 2020 and we said, we’re going to do this twice in 2020. We’re going to do it first. And, April and second in October.

 

We’d already had that in our plan and we had launched the virtual summit, registration, like around March 1st and then of course, this pandemic hit within, you know, weeks of us launching that and suddenly, people were looking at us going, wow, you’re so smart. That’s like talking about forward thinking. How did you know?

 

Because everything’s virtual now but we hosted a virtual summit in early April, and we had, a little more than 350 people attend virtually. we had for that one, I think we had 12 presenters over three days. And, it actually worked out great because it was a time, you know, we were a couple weeks in for April 1st.

 

Think about where we were. and on April 1st. So we were a few weeks into work from home. And, for my audience, I was one of the only, virtual, you know, events that was out there because I was already planning prior to this happening. Now there’s all kinds of webinars and summits and things that you can attend.

 

But we were in there very early, and we were able to really use that to help our audience early on in understanding, you know, the, the pandemic, not in terms of understanding the, you know, the public health and all of that, but just understanding how they could be thinking, as we work through the crisis. So it was really interesting.

 

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Overcoming a Crisis: Building The Momentum on Virtual Events

 

Wow. 350 attendees, that’s impressive. Nicole. Congratulations. Yeah, it was pretty awesome. Wow. Okay, so where do you anticipate this to go next? Because I know you’re building a strategy around this, whether that’s going to become a service offering or package, advising it in a different way, where do you anticipate that this is going to go next?

 

The virtual summit. Yeah. So two directions. One is it’s even more so part of our content strategy moving forward. And we are planning for one, to host, in October, in the fall. so we’re, we’re working it in terms of how it fits into our own content marketing strategy. but the second is we are offering this as a service offering.

 

And the interesting thing was, one of our clients, not the 4th of July parade, but another client, we organize a live B2B style travel show for them every year, and that was scheduled for June, of this year, which obviously we can’t take place in a live fashion. So we were able to work with that client and keep the show.

 

But change it to be a virtual show. And because we had already hosted our own virtual summit, they had more confidence in the idea that we were bringing to them. And they had confidence that we could pull it off because we have, you know, history and what we’ve done for ourselves. so that was kind of the first step that we did.

 

And then from that, the longer we’ve been in this work from home and the more virtual events that we’re seeing everywhere, we have decided as an agency that this is going to be another service offering. And we also see it as an offering that we can offer to other businesses, not necessarily just in travel and tourism, because it’s more of an event planning, style offering versus the marketing that we do for our niche market that we work in.

 

And so for the agency, it’s going to help us maybe level a little bit, our revenue streams, at least that’s our hope as we’re thinking about the future for the agency and who we serve. But, we’re being very careful because if we’re not we’re not going to leave our niche. So we want to still, as I said earlier, we’re doubling down or, you know, we’re doubling down.

 

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Overcoming a Crisis: Don’t Be Afraid to Take the First Step

 

We’re really focused on our niche. We’re definitely, you know, thought leaders and great partners for businesses in the travel and tourism industry. But we can also take our experience in event planning and specifically virtual event planning and offer that to other industries. Here again, another super smart golden nugget for Onward Nation business owners, because the virtual summit strategy obviously smart and doing it for yourself first is a great way to validate the strategy, get proof of concept, get some great experience for your team and then potentially the people that you want to offer this to Onward Nation may have even attended the first one.

 

And then they loop back to you and say, hey, could you do that for me? Because they’ve already seen on stage, if you will, in this case, virtually the excellence at work. So it’s a very easy leap. In fact, it’s not a leap at all for them to then envision and invite you into that conversation as Nicole and her team did.

 

Expertly, really, really smart. Nicole. Well, thank you. You know, it was all this big vision and this big plan. Well, it would be lovely if that were the case. Yeah, right. It’s all building blocks. No. Right. It’s just, you know, you take that first step. I tell my team this all the time or any entrepreneurs that I talk to, there’s several people that, I know right now are trying to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs, you know, and, I might always say just take that first step and, you never know how to build.

 

Well, it would be lovely if this was all part of a well crafted, awesome, amazing plan that you wrote down in very precise detail three years ago. But the reality is that is not the situation. And this is a great example of not just your leadership, but also the values within breaking the ice of okay, the environment is now different and it is changing fast and the water is flowing quickly.

 

And our job is to navigate the boat in the calm waters again at some point and we’ll find it. But in order for us to do that Onward Nation, we need to make quick decisions based on what we know to be true today, in realizing that each day we’re going to learn new data points and there’s going to be some ebb and flow to that.

 

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Overcoming a Crisis: Getting Recognized for Your Initiative

 

And that’s exactly what Nicole and her team have done. Yes, they had planned to have a virtual summit in April. Was there some ebb and flow to how they executed that? Sure. And now after having done that successfully, now they’re getting all this awareness and recognition about, hey, could you maybe do that for me? And it might turn into an offering, as you heard her say, that is really, really smart.

 

And it’s responding and also being proactive to the landscape. So just an amazing job, Nicole, because many, many business owners and why I’m trying to shine such a bright light onto this decision making here is because many, many business owners will just freeze during this crisis and then do nothing. And that’s not what you’re seeing. Nicole shared behind the curtain.

 

As to all the decision making that has been going on to break the ice, that’s why it’s an exceptional job. Nicole. Yeah, I appreciate that. And, I mean, I kind of said it better myself. You’re right. If you can’t freeze for me. You just keep going. Back to forward thinking, forward motion. You know, I’m not the kind of person that can just sit.

 

As a matter of fact, when there’s a crisis or a problem, I’m actually maybe at my best. I talk about it on my podcast all the time. One of my favorite questions to ask my guests is, tell me about a some adversity or a challenge that you have faced and the creative solution that came from it, because I think that we’re at our creative best sometimes when we’re in that type of a situation or we’ve been in it now for a while.

 

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Overcoming a Crisis: Building the Online Course

 

Amen to that. Oh my goodness. Well, so let’s go back to the course because you started taking us down that path and gave us a couple of nuggets. Let’s go back to it. And where you mentioned seven modules. It’s an online course, obviously, that’s a significant amount of work and effort to build something out like that with excellence, as you guys did.

 

So, walk us through that process. I mean, because it was part of your three year plan, and then I’m assuming you came to your team and said, well, I know that we’re going to do it as part of our three year plan, but I’m going to shorten the time frame to tell us a little bit more about the decision to condense it from three year plan to, you know, weeks instead.

 

Yeah. So it came down to actually coming back to being helpful to our industry. And we thought about what we can do to help our industry. They can’t hire us necessarily right now to help them stay with a recovery plan. So what can we do to help them? And we thought, well, we can teach them how we do it.

 

And we decided that we were going to do a course as a follow up to the virtual summit. So we had these 350 people at our virtual summit. And then we thought, how do we keep these people engaged? What can we do to help them, you know, in the next steps as they’re moving through this crisis? And so what we decided was, let’s move this online course, go all out of our three year plan, and let’s move it up.

 

And we decided that about a week before the summit was going to, fiscal yet come and go. And we said, well, let’s see if we can build the online course and we’ll build it in modules. So when we launch it, we’d have the first class done. So if somebody bought it on day one, the first class was done.

 

And then we put together a seven. It’s a seven part course. So we put together a seven week plan. Production plan, where we assigned out to the team, you know, different components of the core of the classes. So what that meant was a team member got assigned and they were assigned a 5 to 7 minute snippet of a concept, but they would write the script.

 

We had one person on our team that was responsible for reviewing all the scripts to make sure they were, you know, that they were flowing, and that one person didn’t say something and someone else kind of contradicted it, or that two people weren’t, you know, going over the same thing. So we had an editor, and then we had, you wrote your script once it was reviewed and approved, then you recorded it.

 

We used zoom, to record video. And then there was homework and supplemental materials, and basically we broke it down, I guess going back to my. Just take one step. We broke it down, you know, piece by piece. And over the course of seven weeks, we just, we’re actually just in the process of finishing it. but it’s launched and it’s available for sale on our website.

 

And then the other thing that we plan to do with that, other than just having the online course, what we’ve learned from this process, because basically we’re doing what we’re calling it, it’s a strategic planning course. It’s kind of like DIY. We’re completely transparent. And this course is exactly how we do strategic planning for our clients.

 

We’re sharing all of the, you know, resources that we use for research. We’re sharing all of these spreadsheets and different tools that we use to organize an action and implementation plan, all of it completely, 100% transparent. And so through this process, two cool things have happened. 

 

One, we realized, wow, we really do have a pretty cool process in how we do strategic planning that’s different and deep and, you know, but just, and the second cool thing that happened is we’re now thinking about ways we can use what we’re doing in the online course as a DIY and develop into some other type of product that might be more of a workshop or, you know, some kind of a, a bridge between you can’t hire us, you don’t want to DIY because, you know, you don’t really have, the time or the focus to spend that much time on doing it yourself. But something in the middle where we can be helpful and we wouldn’t have actually been able to see had we not gone down this path of building up this online course.

 

So, it’s still a work in progress. but I’m really excited about it. I love this so much as a strategy because it’s rooted in your desire to be helpful. 

 

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Overcoming a Crisis: It’s All About the Teamwork

 

And you said, well, what can we teach them as part of that process? How can we generously share our smarts in a way that is helpful to them?

 

What an awesome thing to add as an outcome after the virtual summit in that asset, this piece of thought leadership is going to serve you for a long period of time. But really, really smart and to not run from the work because it is a lot of work, but you embraced it with this intention of being helpful.

 

Amazing. Yeah. it is, you know, there were six of us. So my team is, there’s eight of us on the team, actually, and six of us worked on this project. Wow. So, yeah. So it was quite, quite a bit of resources put behind it. And, you know, there’s also the video editing and, you know, all of that other work too, that we, that we did internally.

 

And then of course, building out the platform that we were using. So, yeah, so it’s definitely an investment, but I think it’s got long term. It’s just the start of something that I think in the long term it’s going to serve us really, really well. I love that. It’s just been a great, great conversation.

 

And I appreciate your generosity very, very much. And I know that our time is quickly coming to an end. But before we go and before we close out and say goodbye, any final advice, Nicole, that you like to share and anything you think we might have missed? And then and then please do tell Onward Nation business owners the best way to connect with you.

 

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Overcoming a Crisis: Final Advice and How to Connect with Nicole

 

Yeah, I just, thank you so much, Stephen, for having me on the show. And I know I said this to you in our pre-interview chat, but it’s actually helpful for me to be asked these questions because it helps me reflect on what we did, what we’re doing, how we’re being intentional. And, it really does help, I think moving forward to have that reflection time.

 

So I appreciate the opportunity to be able to reflect with you and with Onward Nation today. And, as far as looking for me, you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn, the company, and also our website, BreakTheIceMedia.com, if you want to check that out. We have a resources tab there where you can find the podcast, our blog, our virtual summit.

 

We have a Covid resources page there as well. So you can see all of the thought leadership that we’re putting out. And I’m happy to talk. I’m transparent as I am with you here. I have one off conversations with people all the time. I love to share. And I find that sharing actually helps me get better.

 

So feel free to reach out. Okay, Onward Nation, what I what I probably should have mentioned at the onset was that you were about to receive a blueprint, a blueprint for how it’s done, a blueprint for what it means in all sincerity, a blueprint for what it means to be a thought leader, to be the authority, to be the trusted expert within your niche.

 

Because when somebody has earned that status, they’ve earned the trust of their niche, the people who they’re there to serve. That person does everything that Nicole just described. That person approaches their audience with the core value of how can I be helpful? And then also the core value that Nicole blends with it of how can I be transparent in the process and generously share her smarts along the way?

 

So literally, what she just gave you was a blueprint for how to do it. So my hope is that you took a bunch of notes that you’re going to take and apply the lessons that she so generously shared with you and Nicole. We all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day, and I am grateful that you said yes.

 

To come back and to record this on core for Onward Nation business owners, to help them move their businesses onward to the next level during this crisis that we’re all feeling. I’m grateful for you sharing your smarts. Thank you so much, my friend. Thank you. Stephen. 

 

This episode is complete, so head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

 

Learn about the importance of leadership in overcoming a crisis