Episode 23 Transcript

Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. It’s me, Lisa, and I’m so excited to have my friend, Lori here with us today. I’m just gonna jump in right away and get Lori to introduce herself and tell you who she is and what she does. I met Lori, I’ve never met Lori in person, but I came across her online, I think mainly through Facebook and I’ve just been following her for probably over a year now. So I thought what better way to get her out there into my world by having her on the podcast. So welcome Lori and let us know who you are and what you do.

Well thanks for having me. I always like hearing how people come into my world. I never really know right in the social media realm. So okay how do I summarize this? I’m on a personal level. I’m a mom to three super busy little boys. They are stupidly close in age together 10, 11, and 12 now. So I am like sports mom mania, constantly going in seven different directions, happily married, living in the country, and that’s pretty much all I have time for on a personal level. From a business standpoint, I’ve been in the network marketing industry now for well over a decade. I was with the same company for…over eight years until they kind of changed the rules on me and they went direct to consumer. And then I actually did, I actually started with a company that was just launching in Canada, which was a lot of fun. And then on the other side of my business kind of ventures, I coach women in network marketing and social media to build sustainable and scalable businesses around super busy lives and I’ve been doing that now probably for close to five years.

Awesome. And I knew you were the perfect person to have on here to talk about time management because I know that time management is something that we all struggle with. And it was funny because when I talked to you about this, like, yeah, I even need help in this area because I have all the things, I could do all the things, but I don’t feel like I have a consistent schedule where I…You know, I feel like just a relaxed state, right? It’s always like a reactive state, not a proactive state. So I would love for you to share some tips and tricks and any info that you would think that our listeners would find useful around time management. Yeah, honestly, this is one of my favourite topics because I think that if you can master your time, you can pretty much do anything in life, right? Time and energy is probably one of the number one things that my clients struggle with. And so I kind of help them in a couple different areas. So I think we need two different lists when I’m just going to ramble for a minute and you can ask me any questions that you have. But I think we need two different lists in terms of like our to do lists. Number one is something I call like our baseline activity list. And that’s the list where if you if she is sorry, if everything’s hitting the fan, like life is out of control and your dog is sick and your aunt needs you and like your kids are in 17 things. That list is the thing that you do regardless of what’s going on in life, right? Like it’s your non-negotiables and it doesn’t matter what’s going on in your life, you do that. Because what happens when we’re busy moms and like there’s only so many things that we can have on our to-do list, our business sometimes becomes an expendable, right? It’s the one thing where we’re you know what, I don’t have time for this. My kids are my priority and like, so I will pick this back up next week. But that’s not called a business, right? That’s called a hobby. If you can pick it back up and take it and do whatever, like that’s a hobby. A business is something that requires an input of energy and time every single day, even if that’s only 30 to 60 minutes a day. And so my baseline activity list, I would say those are things that are like 20, 20 minutes of a day. Like, probably it’s posting on social media, probably it’s responding to messages in your DMs. And that’s really like it, because if you do those things, the rest of the world believes the lights are on in your business, right? Even if like behind the scenes you’re turtling and you’re just juggling your balls. The other list that I would say you have is what I like to call a power hour. And that’s when you have that hour to work your business. And what you do is you take your week, let’s say a five day week, because everybody deserves a couple days off. And you take a look at what you need to get done in a week. And you break that down. And on Mondays, you do a certain stack of things. On Tuesdays, you do another kind of like pocket of things. But the beauty of that, and I developed this when I was working, I had I think, I had three babies under the age of three. I was commuting to and from work an hour and I was teaching full time and I was like, I don’t know how I’m gonna get this all done, but I knew it was worth it to me. So I used to get up at a stupid time of day before the rest of my house got up and I would just do the thing. But it’s one thing to set aside the time, the other important piece is to know what you’re gonna do at that time. Right. Right? So planning is so, so important so that when you sit down and you carve out that time for your business, you know exactly how you’re going to use that time.

Right. So knowing that my listeners are the average direct seller, the other 99%. So they’re not ones that, you know, I shouldn’t say they’re not, but mainly they’re people who are working their business as a part-time gig, not necessarily a full 40 hour a week. What are there certain things that you can share with them that, you know, are like non-negotiables, like you said, posting on social media. So, and responding in your DMs, should they be on all social channels? Should they pick just one? Like what’s your views on that? Yeah, you know, it’s so interesting, you’re right. There’s a, there’s so many different places we could, and someone will tell you, you should show up. I always kind of tell, I always think if when I’m, and here’s the thing, I work with the other 99% too. I’m not working you know, doing this full time. I’m really working with the average woman who probably sets aside 30 to 60 minutes a day to work her business. But I always tell people when they’re very first starting out, and here’s the thing, we all come into this industry with different knowledge around social media. Some people, when they join my team or some of my clients, they’re great at social media already. They’ve already got a following on Instagram. They already are consistent on Facebook. And those women are kind of already off to the races. If I had, for instance, one of my clients last week, brand new to social media. So we set her up with a VIP group. We got her comfortable with posting and we worked on launching her business because I know that that’s one of the most manageable areas inside the social media that’s going to give her a lot of bang for her buck. Right. Do I think everybody should be on Instagram with a personal and a public account? I do because And while I still believe in VIP groups and I believe that online events work still, they’re the same way that they did three years ago or two years ago when we were in, you know, the online, you know, when we were in hell. And so now we need new ways to grow our audience and you need to have some kind of public social media account where you’re delivering consistent value and pulling in a brand new audience so that you don’t find yourself begging your friends and family and giving them their discount at the end of the month in order to hit your goals.

Yeah, I love that because that’s one thing that I train my team on. It’s like, you have to post publicly. People need to know that you’re open for business. And it’s great to have a VIP group, you know, that you’re really spoiling your customers. But if you’re trying to just work your business from a VIP group, you’re basically trying to sell to the same, say 30 people, 100 people every month. And your business just, it’s not sustainable that way. So I love that you say, you know, you have to have a public facing side of your social media and it has to be business related. You can’t You can’t hide your business from the world. You have to be able to. I think we need to be proud about what we’re doing, right? Like if we went to an amazing new restaurant or we bought a pair of shoes that we really liked, we could share those or, you know, like Starbucks, like how often do people share what they’re drinking at Starbucks? We don’t question whether people care. We don’t worry what they’ll think when we post those things. So why would we ever feel that way about the products that we love and believe in? Yeah, that’s so true.

Now, I know that as we speak, you’ve just launched a Reels workshop, a 21 day Reels workshop. And by the time this airs, you’ll be one week into it. So can you just share with the listeners a little bit about what your workshop is involved? Because I’m sure it’s something that they can maybe jump into at that point or possibly even join the next round. But I’d love for you to share what you have going on there. Yeah. So one of the biggest things that I find myself coaching on right now is Instagram, because I think that we are, you know, there’s so many different transitions to network marketing. Like when you think about it, we used to go door to door, right? Like, I mean, you and I didn’t, but at one point in this industry, that was the norm. And then when I built my very first business, like I built a six figure business on in-person parties and then that evaporated. And then we kind of transitioned into VIP groups slash online parties. And then that kind of started to do it at all. And so the next evolution are those public accounts, which is Instagram and Tik Tok and maybe a little YouTube. So when I find myself teaching on Instagram, one of the number one ways to get noticed on Instagram is by doing reels. But if my, my client base, which is very similar to who I am, I talked myself out of doing reels for good year and a half because I told myself they were hard. I told myself I didn’t have time and you know what they’re not hard and you do have time but the only way to build kind of a habit to build that confidence is to like commit to doing it crappy in the beginning and to commit to learn. So that’s what we’re going to do in this 21 day challenge. I’m going to give prompts and sometimes I’m going to give templates and sometimes I’m going to give tutorials. And other times I’m going to show them an example of a really good reel and inspire them to kind of take the idea and run with that. And we’re just going to do 21 days of getting used to doing consistent reels. And I think people will really be, if they commit to it, I really do think people are going to be amazed at what that will kickstart inside their Instagram accounts. Not only will they be more comfortable and confident, but they will get more views. They will get a bigger audience.

Yeah, I’m very excited because I know you were on live earlier today and you asked the question and it’s like, you know, how familiar are you with reels or whatever? It’s like, I definitely know how to do them. I know how to edit them. I know how to do all the things, but I just need to do them. That’s the thing, right? That’s part of the problem, right? I wouldn’t even necessarily consider myself an expert. I don’t know if you feel this way, but sometimes I feel like I always just want to take the easiest route to do it. something into getting something done. And I think I was having this conversation with myself in my own head this morning. And I was like, you know, people need to start just getting comfortable with doing things 80% life and business, because if we could complete everything at 80%, we would be so much further ahead than those of us that are looking at 100% perfection, right? Yeah. Then we waste so much time that we almost don’t even do the thing because we want it to be so perfect. But if we were okay with 80%, we would get so much more done.

So true. And you know what, that it’s so funny because that relates to, I always ask and I’ll ask you your quote at the end of the call here or the podcast, but I’ve had so many people come on with similar quotes to that, that have inspired them to do things. Like, you know, perfection is the enemy of done. Like you can’t be perfect at everything. You just have to get it done. And the, and you’ll start getting better over time, which makes you look perfect, but you’re still not perfect. Even the people who are doing it out there, like the people that we idolize on Instagram and social and all those things, they’re not doing it perfect. They’re just doing it better than us because they’ve been more consistent and they have the confidence to do it. Yeah, exactly. You almost don’t have anything to perfect if you aren’t doing it. Right? Like, so you just have to get a little bit better every single time. But like anything in life, you just need to commit to not being good in the beginning. You have to expect to fail. I always, people used to ask me in my first company, like what’s your, what’s your key to success? And I was like, or what’s your secret secret to success? And I was like, well, I just show up. And like I trust myself that I will always show up, but I will always do what I said I was going to do. And I always assume that I will fail. because I fail more times than I succeed.

And I love that because you’re saying, you know, expect the failure, don’t fear the failure, right? I mean, failure doesn’t hurt. Trust me, you guys, failure doesn’t hurt. Like, it’s not that painful. Yeah, I mean, after being in business for 18 years of failure hurt, I probably wouldn’t be around, right? So that’s so true. We can’t be too sensitive. That’s so true So other than your Reels workshop, what other services do you offer to clients in terms of like coaching and training and stuff like that? Yeah, like I do have a number of private clients that I work with, but then I also have courses. I just launched a brand new Instagram course. I run an Instagram bootcamp. If you wanna take the course and essentially have that like hand holding accountability, personal touch alongside of it. I have a full academy that leads you from A to Z through building a network marketing business branding, social media, building a team, leading a team. And like, you know, I offer oftentimes monthly workshops on just kind of deep diving and smaller, smaller things that we’re doing inside of our businesses. Yeah, I love it. So I’ll make sure that I link your website or your Stan store in the show notes so that people can check you out. There’s definitely things that I jump in on monthly and you always take little tidbits away that you can use in your business. And people always say to me, it’s like, Lisa, how did you learn this stuff? It’s like, well, I didn’t invent it. I just follow people who have done it before me and like I take it and I use it. know, that’s all you could do is never be afraid to stop learning. I’m like, you have to keep learning in order to grow your business. So you know, what’s funny is I don’t really think that any idea is an original idea, right? Like all we do is we look at it from one place, we put our own swing on it, and we put it back out into the world and we say it a different way. And sometimes you just relate to the way somebody teaches or speaks. And you can see how that would apply to you. Yeah, that’s so about the same topic last night in a mastermind. And people were saying, yes, Lisa, but the way you present your trainings and stuff like this, it speaks to a different clientele. So don’t be afraid to put your spin on things and put it out there. So I love that.

Yeah, so Lori, tell us where can we find you on social? How could people connect with you? The best place really is on Instagram and I’m the Laurie Ervin, L-O-R-I and E-R-V-I-N. And that will connect you to kind of all the things in my world. Awesome. And before we go, I wanna know if you have a favorite quote or words of advice that you think that every direct seller needs to hear. Oh, probably have a billion of them, but-The first thing that kind of comes to mind and something that I even have on a shirt is done is better than perfect.

And so I just like, I don’t know, my husband always tells me that I’m like 150% of a human with the amount of things that I get done in a day. And it’s because done is better than perfect, right? You can’t actually sell anything if you never complete the real, you can never sell, like you can never You can never build your team if you never ask somebody because you’re perfecting your words behind the scenes. You don’t get anywhere when you’re working and when you haven’t aren’t producing. I love that. I love that so much. All right, Laurie, well, I have taken enough of your time and I really appreciate you joining us on the podcast. And I hope everybody enjoyed this. And I know you’re going to take a lot away from this little episode and we’ll talk to you on the next episode. Take care, everyone.