31: Molly Pittman: Growth with Integrity and Navigating Tough Situations

I am so excited to be bringing you one of my smartest friends ever, Molly Pittman. Molly is the CEO of Smart Marketer and used to be the VP of DigitalMarketer. She has so much experience in this online industry, running ads for amazing businesses and just being such a bundle of positive super-smart inspiration. Obviously, her expertise is Facebook ads and paid traffic, but she’s also really smart in how to run a business in general.

How do you handle pivots? How do you handle messaging? How do you sell something while still remaining in line with your own Integrity? How do you handle refunds as a business? How do you handle being a people pleaser and still managing a team or managing relationships?

Something I think Molly does really well and in a really interesting way is her own energy management, because she gets a lot of stuff done but I always admire how she manages her time. So, we dive more into that and the why behind how she does it.

Molly has been in this industry almost nine years. She started as an intern at a company called DigitalMarketer, worked there a little bit over five years, became the VP of marketing and really learned a lot of what she knows and got started. Then she went out on her own, started an agency, did consulting, partnered with her now business partner Ezra on a few products and that’s led her to Smart Marketers.

 “Prioritizing being around people that make you feel good, it’s common sense but it’s something that I know I wasn’t aware of truly until the last few years. And it’s made such a huge difference in my personal life and my business life.”

– Molly Pittman

• Divide your activities. One of Molly’s top challenges has been energy management. People say that you only have a certain amount of energy. Molly doesn’t think that’s necessarily true. She thinks there are ways in your day-to-day and in structuring your life so that you can be around people or do activities that help you produce more energy or at least keep more of your energy. She realized that she has to structure her time to achieve balance or things would be never-ending and she would just continue moving. She does that in a few ways- usually Tuesdays and Thursdays are the days that she does things like this podcast, or Tuesdays and Thursdays are the days that she has classes with her students and all of the training that they do. So, she actually tries to fit those into certain days so that her mind and body know that these are the days where she is going to use most of her energy. Other days can be full of activities that bring her energy or a bit more calm. So, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, she does take calls and she still works but she does other types of work, like writing or strategizing or internal calls with her team or anything that’s a bit more introverted. And Tuesdays and Thursdays are more for those extroverted activities and then the weekends are usually restful with maybe a little bit of social interaction.So, think about your schedule. Think about your routine. How can you put things in boxes to manage your energy? Because otherwise if you’re not aware of it, you might not do as good of a job establishing those boundaries. Even for people that feel more extroverted and know they’re more extroverted, they need just as much rest. Just think about how you can structure your day to fit these two different types of activities- introverted and extroverted.A good episode to listen to is number 18 of this podcast “Being productive as a chaotic creator or if you have ADD”.

• Batch your travels. This is another thing that Molly does.Traveling takes a lot of our energy, so instead of taking a bunch of random trips throughout the month, she’ll try to batch it into a week or she’ll try to batch all of her U.S. travels into a few weeks so that it’s a little bit more sustainable.

• Crucial conversations. One of the biggest challenges for Molly in the last two years was managing the relational side of business and how draining that can be or how tough it can be. Because in marketing everything has to do with people, not only are you selling to people and creating a product or service that serves people but you are working with people internally within your team no matter what size it is, you’re working with other people in your industry. Molly recommends to everybody to read the book “Crucial Conversations”. We talk about the tactics in our business and the strategy and the marketing and all of this, but we don’t realize that for most of us 20 to 70 percent of our time, depending on how big our team is or our current situation, is spent managing or dealing with people in some form or fashion. And if we don’t have direct and loving communication, it doesn’t matter how awesome the business is or how great the opportunity is with the market that we’re serving, things can and will crumble. That is a huge mistake that Molly made in her career, just coming from immaturity in the beginning, not having the guts or the strength to have those crucial conversations and letting resentment build up and letting personal or relational issues get in the way of the business. When you’re looking at business relationships, especially your business partners or employees, people that you’re working really closely, when it comes to communication pay attention to what are people really saying, and even with yourself- when you are conversing with other people, are you saying what you really mean or is there some underlying message there that maybe you’re not getting across yet.

• Caring about others. If Molly had to pick one reason, she is successful today, she believes it’s because of empathy and caring about other people. Clients, people that work for her or have moved with her from multiple companies, did so because she truly cares about those people and they know it, because she shows that through her communication and a lot of business people think that it’s a waste of time. But this can lead you to so much success. You may not realize it, but when people think about “Who do I want to work with? Who do I want to have on my show? Who do I want to do this with?” etc., a lot of that is how does this person make me feel, do I like this person.

• Refunds and business karma. When it comes to refunds, Molly says it depends on your situation. If Molly was a solopreneur right now, who just put a course out and was relying on that course revenue and someone asked for a refund, she simply wouldn’t have that money. Today she is in a completely different situation at Smart Marketer, and if anyone comes to them at any time wanting a refund, they give it to them. She does believe in business karma, what you put out is reflected back to. If people are coming to you after a refund period asking for their money back, they probably really need that money and if you are in a place to give them that money back, that will come back to you in some way.Imagine you are at lunch. There is a table next to you. What would someone at that table say that would make you turn around and say “Hey, I have a business that can help”. And if you go deeper, your targeting will be better, your whole understanding of your marketing will be better and that is where the true scale comes in business- drilling down and understanding that customer better and understanding that there are multiple avatars buying your product. A great way to scale your business is to start talking to different groups of people than you have before about your product or service but understand that that person is hanging out in different places online and they have different reasons or different pain points that you’re going to solve for them.