Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:01.407)
If you are a service-based woman in the $2,000 to $8,000 per month range who wants to stop guessing and start building a community that buys consistently, then Kelly, our guest, is going to show you step by step how to bring in a steady flow of sales from your community.
Kelly Harris teaches women business owners how to transform their stories into a simple system that creates consistent clients without burnout. She's a mum-of-four, a fractional CMO, and the author of The Stories That Build Us. Welcome to the show, Kelly. So excited to have you here.
Kelly Harris (00:34.51)
Thank you so much, I'm so excited to be here.
Adam O'Leary (00:36.723)
This is gonna be so much fun. I am so curious. How do you go ahead and build super fans? Because I know that that is the biggest thing that you are the best at.
Kelly Harris (00:47.662)
Yeah, actually it was one of those things that when I started my business, I realized really quickly like community is, you know, we, we get on the online space. A lot of times they talk about us being really like, oh, you're behind your screen and you know, you never actually see people. And I started doing chats and things like that because it was like, I'm a mom of four. My oldest is 15. My youngest is two. Like I need adults to talk to. And so what I realized though was community was the piece that was missing for me.
And as I started kind of researching this and looking at it, what I realized was I love fractional or relationship marketing because it's about building relationships. It's about building community. And I think that in the online space that we live in, especially since 2020, community is a piece that's really missing because people that get online, they'll make their comments, they get off, but they don't really have that piece where they start to know people and people start to...
not just refer them, but they start to like, you know, my friend Lauren is this thing and I know her, I know about her kids, I know about her world, I know what she's thinking and I know that she can help me. And so over the last year, year and a half, what I realized as I was being a marketer was that I loved relationship marketing and building this community and that the piece that was missing for most people was stories. And when I say stories, I'm talking about their lived experience, their
perspective on their experience. All of those things are the differentiating piece because so often people will say, well, what's your secret sauce? What's that thing that you need? And it's like, it's your stories. It's your experience. And that's how you create the super fans.
Adam O'Leary (02:32.189)
That's awesome. And so when we talk about stories, are we talking about getting people in the door, having people enter your world, or is this more for people who have already entered your world?
Kelly Harris (02:42.53)
I both. I look at story as it's a couple things. One, it's a connector. It's a connector in getting people to go, hey, you're posting something online and I'm curious. I want to be a part of your community. And let's take that second and say like, what is community? It depends on what you're doing. Your community could be your Facebook group. It could be your school group. It could be your email list.
It's just that container that you're gonna start bringing people in because once they're in that community, that is when you can say, cool, I can now use story to not just bring you in and get you curious, but I can now use story so that you actually, I can help you move forward because I'm also a big proponent of servant leadership. so all of my stories are all the way that IU story is we always have to have a takeaway for our audience. Like we don't just.
trauma dump or something like that. We're actually gonna make a point of being like, here's my story. This story is illustrating this point that I want you to see. And if that resonates with you, then reach out to me and maybe we need to work together.
Adam O'Leary (03:46.719)
Absolutely. So tell me, explain to me what is servant leadership and how do you go about that?
Kelly Harris (03:51.774)
So servant leadership, I was very very blessed to, I laugh about this too, so my two oldest are in Scouts and we went to just the basic training and while we were there they said there's this corporate level training thing that you should do. It's called Wood Badge but it's like corporate level, it's like five, six, seven thousand dollars worth of training.
and you should go. And so I had just started my business and I talked my husband, I'm like, ooh, ooh, let's go. Like, I need a buddy, you're coming with me. And he was like, yay. And so we go to do this. It was a week long thing where we learned in a week the different skills of servant leadership. What that is, is it's a type of leadership that believes that it is my job to help you be prepared for the next step of your journey. And so,
Servant leadership typically leads from behind, whereas managerial or something like that or dictatorship is going to be like, this is what we do or whatever. Servant leadership, I spend a lot of time asking my kids like, so what's your plan? Did you think that through? Like, what happens if? And I do the same thing with my audience and with the people that I work with. I'm like, cool. How like we need to figure out what your goal is, what your vision is, because your vision is your long term picture of success.
And from there we can reverse engineer the goals and all of the things, the action steps that we need to take to get you to that vision. And so I was really blessed, like I said, to be able to learn all of those things and also learn how do we deal with people? How do we have hard conversations? How do you step into being able to show up even when it's hard? And so all of those things unintentionally became the foundational stuff that my business was built on.
Adam O'Leary (05:43.71)
That's amazing. And so when a client comes to you initially, what's kind of like the step-by-step process that you take them through?
Kelly Harris (05:50.595)
So when they come to me initially, what we usually do is I'm like, cool, what I want to know first is what's working and what's, well, what do you think is working and not working? Because a lot of times they will tell me, I'm not making sales or my marketing's messed up or, you know, my messaging is messed up. And usually a lot of times it comes down to a messaging issue. A lot of times it also comes down to a, like, we haven't really researched, we aren't talking to our audience, so we don't really know what they want.
And so there's a communication piece that is missing, but we start talking. And then when they work with me, what we do is we first map out, cool, what's the vision? What's the long-term picture of success for you? And then what are the major steps to get there? Can we break these steps, these action steps into smaller steps? are there monthly themes that we can use so that we kind of are building? Because I'm a big proponent of like, we don't just trauma dump. We don't just throw out stories like,
We need a plan. And I laughingly tell people all the time, it's like, you know, when we were kids and we learned like, this is what makes a story. It's got the beginning and the rising action and the climax and the fall. Like your business does the same kind of thing. Like is it grows and it pivots? Things are going to change, but you need a long term plan to say, cool, this 90 days, which most people, if they're not in the marketing world, they don't understand that it takes 90 days to get any kind of traction, any kind of momentum.
and they call it the 90 day marketing thing. And what we do is like, what are the three themes that we're looking at? What does your audience need? And from there, we start to reverse engineer and build out those stories. Pardon me, I'm losing my voice. So we build out those stories and it's like, the other thing we do with each story is what's the key takeaway? What is the thing that we're actually trying to get to here?
And it has to be a natural segue to whatever story we have brought in to actually be like, the next step that makes sense is working with you. The next step that makes sense for people is working with me. And so one of the ways that I do that is I do a monthly training called Sales Every Day, and I teach them, here are the five stories that you need to have in your business. And if this makes sense and you want to know how to do it even more,
Kelly Harris (08:10.904)
to actually do this in a systemized way that are bringing in consistent leads, then come talk to me.
Adam O'Leary (08:18.354)
Amazing. And can you actually walk us through just really quickly what are those types of five stories?
Kelly Harris (08:23.436)
Yeah, give me just a second. I'm gonna pull up my notes so I don't lie to you. Because I do this so often that I get really excited about this and then I'm like, wait, that wasn't what I was supposed to actually talk about. So the five stories that you really wanna make sure, you have a turning point story. That is usually like, why I started my business? When things changed in my business? A lot of times I tell people one of my turning point stories because anybody who knows me,
Adam O'Leary (08:27.422)
Don't be lying to me, Kelly.
Adam O'Leary (08:39.006)
You
Kelly Harris (08:53.154)
knows that I was a kindergarten teacher. And then when the pandemic hit, I went from working about 65 hours a week to about 85 hours a week. And it changed the landscape of education. And my husband came to me and said, like, not sustainable, get out. And so I had to kind of figure out what the next right step was for me. And so I actually found an online course and took it. And that's how I started my business. And another turning point story would be I was talking with somebody this
March and said, I have 121 emails from on my email list and I feel like they're good and they are meant for something more. And this person said, put them in chat GPT, just put them in chat, ask AI what to do with that and see if there are any themes. And AI came back and said, cool. Here are the three main pillars that your business is actually built on. If you were to reuse these, use them, write a book.
and here are chapter ideas and here's what email would go with each chapter. And the entire thing from start to finish came together in about a month. And it was not on my bingo card for 2025 at all. It was just a turning point thing that kind of happened and I was like, okay, let's just run with it.
Adam O'Leary (10:13.032)
Super cool, okay, no that's amazing. And what sort of results have you seen from working with clients? What have been the big takeaways that you've seen from it?
Kelly Harris (10:21.41)
The big takeaways that I have seen is one of my clients that I worked with last year, when we were actually doing this, we weren't calling it story first, but this is basically what we did is we used stories in her email list and we also put together three little different ads, different takes or perspectives, if you will, with real quick stories, because know, ads are quick and her email list.
It went from about 600 people to about 1500 people. And I only worked with her for a little over four months. But like her email list exploded, her Facebook group exploded because people wanted more. They wanted to know more about her life. They wanted to know more about how she could support them.
Adam O'Leary (11:07.038)
That's amazing. And when people grow their audience, so they're growing their Facebook community or their email list, I mean, at the end of the day, we're all business owners here, right? How have you seen that translate into sales?
Kelly Harris (11:18.126)
There's been a couple of things that I've seen be really successful. First of all, most people don't know that your email list is an asset in your business. You want to grow your email list when you're ready. This is not a beginner thing. Just add that caveat right there. But when you're ready to grow your list, you want to try to get people off of the social media platforms because you don't own that information. We've seen Facebook and Instagram and even LinkedIn go down a couple of times. And if your entire business is built on that platform,
it goes down and you are up a crick without a pedal and it's just a really bad day. But if you have an email list, you can absolutely turn and pivot and say like, hey guys, I was going to talk about blah, blah, blah today on Facebook. Instead, I made this quick YouTube video and you still have your list, you still have your business. And so one thing I will also say, and this is one of the reasons that when I was a copywriter, I loved email marketing, is it has the highest return on investment.
The last time I looked, think it was $57 for every dollar that you spend, you should be making back on your email list because your email list is essentially a list of warm to hot leads.
Adam O'Leary (12:24.763)
My favorite experience with Facebook is I was spending six figures a month on Facebook and they decided to pause my account. And so we went from making hundreds of thousands a month to zero, literally overnight. That was a wonderful experience.
Kelly Harris (12:39.63)
And unfortunately, it's not an isolated experience. Like it happens to people every single day. The Facebook gods get angry and they turn off your stuff and then you may or may not get your account back. And so always good to have that email list in the background or your YouTube or your school community someplace else that they don't own all of your stuff and have the ability to go, nope, you're done here. Like game over.
Adam O'Leary (13:08.637)
Absolutely, 100%. And where can people go to learn more about you?
Kelly Harris (13:13.166)
So they can go to my website kellyharriscreative.com. It's actually going to be redone very soon. You can also email me kelly with a Y at kellyharriscreative.com. And then also, and I gave you the links Adam, but one of the things I'd love to gift all of you is something called Story Sparks. And what those are, those are questions to try to get you to think about the right kind of questions. I don't know if we have time to talk about the other type of stories that you want, but you want to have a client win. You want to talk about a time that your beliefs shifted.
You know, you believe something and then maybe things happened and you know, it changed how you looked at things. Always talking about your processes or behind the scenes. People love that because they feel like you've let them, you've pushed the curtain aside and you're showing them how it looks, how it really looks. And then the other thing is a values and actions that actually show like, I talk about my values, I talk about my content pillars, but like...
this is the real me. This is me showing you because people say all the time, actions or you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. So if a picture is worth that, like what are your actions worth? And those are things that I've just found to be really, really successful to get people in the door. And there are some other things that I do with my clients to start to create that pipeline. But essentially what we do is we're bringing in the people and then we're nurturing them to a point where they're like, I have to work with you.
Adam O'Leary (14:38.577)
That's awesome. And how does somebody know if they're actually ready to come and work with you?
Kelly Harris (14:42.382)
So a lot of times when they come to work with me a couple things that I will do is I'm going to ask you, know, like how much money are we making? Typically, if you're starting to run ads and things like that, they will tell you no more than 20 % of your budget. Now that occasionally I've seen people take a risk and, you know, buy the program or whatever and have really big success. The other way that you're going to know is if you're like, my sales have stalled.
pivoted, I've gone from working one on one, now I'm trying to do a course, or now I'm trying to get my YouTube channel running, and suddenly it's not working anymore. And what most people don't think, don't realize about marketing is it's a whole bunch of things and we're gonna try different things. Maybe it's the call to action, maybe it's how you're bringing people in, maybe it's the stories that you're telling aren't the stories that they need to hear at that time. And so if you've hit a wall and you're like, I don't know, I know...
that sales were really good and now they're not, I would argue that it's probably because you've removed yourself out of your own business as much as possible and so we have to put you back in.
Adam O'Leary (15:49.534)
Amazing, well thank you so much Kelly for jumping on with me today. Awesome, well this was awesome everyone and please go check out Kelly's website at kellyharriscreative.com. Thank you all for listening and I will see you on the next episode.
Kelly Harris (15:52.738)
Thank you for having me.
