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What if you don’t need to go viral to build a successful business?

In this episode, I’m talking about the difference between being a creator and being a business owner, and why I think so many entrepreneurs confuse the two. Attention is the new currency, but a following isn’t the same as a business that makes predictable sales.

I’m sharing why I don’t believe luck belongs in the equation when it comes to building a business, the traits and foundations every successful CEO needs, and how I think about organic content as a slow burn instead of a growth driver. 

I’m also breaking down why paid ads give you the speed, predictability, and control that the algorithm never will.

Key Takeaways

● Why a creator and a business owner are two very different things
● The checklist that makes a business a business (and why it’s not luck)
● Why I treat content as a slow burn and paid ads as the speed

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

She’s a creator. That is very different than a business owner. You’re an influencer, you’re a creator, and to get there, it’s a little bit like gambling and luck. I don’t believe that there’s luck when it comes to business. I do think anyone can have a successful business. I do think creating content will help your business. I think that being successful and owning a successful business, there’s traits that somebody must have.

Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I am in a good mood today. I am in a, like, I don’t know, like, let’s freaking crush the world mood. We are about to have a shift in our weather in Austin, and I’m so excited and I hope it stays. Like, we’re gonna get a bunch of rain, and it’s gonna be in the 70s, and I’m so happy because I’ll be able to be outside again, and hopefully it means our summer is over and our fall of 70 degrees is here.

And I’m just, yeah, feeling so grateful. Like, I feel like I’m in this energy of abundance lately, where, where everything from financial to energetic to relationships of just, like, abundance. And I keep showing up that way, and it keeps, I keep receiving that, and it feels really good. I’ve been, on the company side, very, I wish I had more time for it. I’ve been very much doing a lot with AI, a lot with building individual agents throughout the company, really cool stuff. I talked about it a couple weeks ago in the podcast and kinda shared some stuff, but there will be some things that we’ll get to bring to clients.

I’m kinda like the guinea pig, so I build them for our company and internal marketing, and then I get to bring it over to clients, one of them being a really cool tracking dashboard for our VIP and elite clients. I built this incredible dashboard that tracks… essentially, it’s like a software because it goes into each contact record, each sale that we’ve ever had, and tracks their customer journey.

A, a lot of things that we had to do manually, it’s doing automatically. It’s tracking the funnels in a better way, our sales stats, sale- sales scorecards. It’s… I’m pretty proud of it. One of the things I personally love about AI and why it becomes so addicting for me is it’s like inventing things. Like, I sit down with it, and I start with an idea, and that i- idea evolves.

And I can’t emphasize this enough for CEOs. I do think it’s important that you create time to, like, play right now with it because it’s… A lot of times you don’t know what you want, so you couldn’t just go hire it out and have someone build it for you, and it would take the same amount of time as you just, like, figuring it out and playing with it.

And I think there’s a lot of e- essentially invention and visionary and creation that happens within it that is so amazing what’s possible, and we’re in such a cool time where we can bring this into, into your company and, and it be very innovative. And I said this in the previous podcast, but I, I look at AI right now as how can I allow it to create more capacity for the things that only I can really do?

Have AI do your chores, not your art. So anyways, this podcast is not about AI. I don’t wanna talk about it on this podcast, but I have been, like, deep in it. And I have all my my agents in my Slack that are named after Office characters, and it’s quite hilarious. We have, like… Pam, Oscar, Andy, Angela my team probably thinks it’s, I’m, I’ve gone crazy.

And we’ll have… One of the team members, Pam, is our assistant, and so she puts codes when the tech team needs to get into different client platforms. She automatically posts the codes. And one of our tech team members was like, “Hey Pam, it’s me, Jim.” And the AI did not get the joke. And so then it messaged me and was like, “Jim’s trying to get in into, like, so-and-so’s GoHighLevel.”

And I was like, “Who the hell is Jim?” And

then I, I saw the message and I was like, “That’s hilarious.” Like, it did, it went over the AI’s head. So today I wanna talk about, I’ve had this idea for a little bit on a podcast, and it came from, I was having this conversation with my content manager, Haley. And I was like, “This is really good. I need to bring this to the podcast ’cause I wanna talk about it.”

So we were talking about content and being a creator and building a business where you are a creator, and it’s definitely very popular right now. Outside of the online business world is this other world of the creator economy, where you create content and you build your following and then basically you get paid.

You get sponsorships, you g- you can do affiliate. You get paid by other companies because why? You have attention. And attention is currency, so other companies pay you to promote their products in different formats. That could be affiliate or they could just, like, pay you, like, you’re contracted to, you know, talk about their company as a sponsor or an affiliate or whatever.

And I was talking about it And you know, there’s obviously the example of Jessie Gene, who blew up her account and made, I can’t even remember how much, it was like $7 million with her low-ticket product. And now it seems that a lot of what she’s doing is promoting other products that she’s in align with- alignment with, and as she should, right?

She’s using the attention that she built, and she’s got partnerships and paid partnerships, and she’s using that. And I, I made this comment, and this is not in a negative way. Like, let me be clear. I think what she built is amazing. I never wanted to analyze it because I was sick of everybody analyzing it.

And I think it was really fascinating to watch, and you could break it down, there’s a ton of things. But I said, ” She’s a creator. That is very different than a business owner.” In my opinion, and I, again, I mean this respectfully, I don’t believe she built a business. A business is a structure where you have The ideally support for it to run without you.

You have an offer. You usually have more than one offer. You have funnels. Like, it is a system and a structure. That’s a business. She is a creator, and to me, if we were to look at it, I believe that the creators today are now equivalent to Hollywood movie stars. I think that people would oftentimes rather meet a famous creator that they follow, that lets- has millions of followers and is in their corner of the world famous, than some Hollywood movie stars.

And I think oftentimes, not maybe the, you know, the online business audience or entrepreneur audience, but there’s definitely a large audience of people who want to be creators. And just like becoming a movie star and somebody who, know, has that life, there is a huge element of luck in that in my opinion And I think that becoming a creator where that is your full-time job, you do not have a business.

You’re an influencer, you’re a creator, and to get there, it’s a little bit like gambling and luck. Yes, there’s for sure skill. For sure there is skill on creating content, on showing up on video, on messaging, all of that, 100% there’s skill. There’s… But I do believe there’s an element of luck. I don’t believe that there’s luck when it comes to business.

I think that being successful and owning a successful business, there’s traits that somebody must have. There’s key components and you know, ways that a CEO must show up, but it’s not luck. That’s not how I look at business. It is a process and a system that you have a lot more control over. So I thought this was an interesting conversation, ’cause Haley and I ended up talking for a while about it, and she was actually talking about it in the form of what she wants to do, and does she wanna take on more clients, or we’ve talked about offering social media to more of our clients as like a leg of my business using Haley.

We’ve had these conversations. And she asked me, she’s like, “Do you think that organic content is gonna continue to be such a big need?” And I said, “Yes. Like, absolutely I do,” because number one, you have the camp of people who wanna be creators. You have people who wanna build a following. They wanna be an influencer.

They want that to be their, quote, business. And then number two, no matter what happens, attention is gonna continue to be the number one currency. The ability to be able to capture and garner somebody’s attention is the number one currency. And so as a business, the media side of your business is important.

And this is how I look at it, and I’ve talked about it before on this podcast, but I look at media content, organic content, as a slow burn. It is something I am investing in as a three-year plan It is something that I am investing in knowing that I don’t know the direct ROI from it because it’s so hard to track.

I don’t know somebody who came in through my ad and then saw a couple of social media posts and then that helped their decision becoming a client. I know that that happens. I don’t know… I can’t track the direct ROI. My growth of my business, the actual new leads and new sales, is not dependent on organic social media because I believe organic social media has an element of luck to it.

I truly do. Like, the algorithm has… Like, you can put incredible content out there and it can not get seen. Like, sometimes I’ll put something, I’m like, “This is so good,” and the views are low because the algorithm chose it to be that. And that’s why I don’t think it should be a growth driver for your business because there’s just such a lack of control.

And the chance of you being Jessie Gene is, like, 0.001%. It just is. So many things fell into play for her that it was, yes, skill, you know, her background, everything that led up to it, but there was luck involved in it, the timing, the way it, it, you know, it happened, the way her content picked up momentum.

There’s just luck involved in that, and I don’t think that you should count on luck to grow your business. So as a company, I’m speaking to you guys as business owners because that’s my audience. Do not confuse the two. If you are focused on growing your business, you have to look at that bucket and say, “Okay, how I’m gonna grow my business is X, Y, Z.

It’s I’m gonna have a funnel. I’m gonna use paid ads. I’m gonna use borrowed traffic. I’m gonna go do guest podcasts. I’m gonna speak. I’m gonna put myself in other audiences. I’m gonna go into Facebook groups and have conversations. I’m going to come up with a way that I’m getting traffic that translates into leads and sales without organic social media being the number one.”

it is possible, but the number of people… Like, if we took 1,000 entrepreneurs and put them in a room… I would actually love to do this poll. I’m gonna guess here. But I think if we took 1,000 entrepreneurs who, let’s say, have all successfully grown their business to at least six figures, and we polled them and we said, “What’s your number one source of sales?”

I would bet you less than 5% is organic social media. There’s another way. It’s either paid ads, it is referrals and connections that they’ve made. Either a lot of times I see people have in-person connections that translate into online. It’s some sort of borrowed traffic, meaning they s- they went to a different community, they went to a different you know, audience and was able to get that traction.

It’s not from just posting organic social media. That would be my guess. It could be even less than that because I just very rarely see that as something that gets someone to a certain level. It, it’s possible. I’m not saying it’s never not possible. But that’s why I’m so against it being someone’s strategy they’re chasing because then you’re so out of control with that.

You’re, you’re counting on the cards to fall in the right way. You’re counting on the algorithm. You’re counting on luck. And it doesn’t have to be that way. So becoming a creator Where my statement is I do not think creators are business owners, not in a negative way, but you don’t have a business. You have a brand.

You are the brand. There’s nothing wrong with it if that is your goal, but it’s very different than having a business, which to me, a business is something that has a product or multiple products. It has systems, predictable systems, where it, it’s not needing the algorithm to make sales. It- you’re able to put people through a system that goes attention, leads, and sales.

It has systems to run the business without the founder, and ideally, it’s a business that, you know, could be valued and sold, like it has an evaluation. You are not gonna get an evaluation on a creator’s brand. Their audience and their list 100% has eval- an evaluation, but it’s not a business. It’s very different.

Growing a business does not have to come down to luck, and so my point in this is I believe that anyone can have a successful business if they choose because luck is not part of the equation. So what is part of the equation? There are definitely traits, and there are definitely key components and foundational things that have to happen, but those are not luck.

The traits are, number one, the decision to have a successful business. First thing. If you go into business and you’re like, “I think I might be successful,” or, “I’m gonna try and see where it goes,” well, then, then like that’s the reality that you’re gonna create. You’re gonna try and see where it goes. It may or may not be successful.

If you go into business and go, “I am going to build a successful business at this level, six figures, seven figures, eight figures, whatever. I am doing that, and I will stop at nothing until I have that,” you have to have that. The first, the decision Then the product, the offer, the thing that is going to actually serve somebody else and is something that is yours that you sell.

Whereas a lot of creators, Jessie Jane did have her product, but a lot of creators, they don’t have their own offer. They’re selling other people’s offer. They’re s- they’re, they’re affiliates. They’re being paid for their attention, for their traffic. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a different model, and it’s not a business.

A business has their product, their proprietary service, product, offer, whatever, usually more than one. They own, they created, it is theirs, it’s proprietary to them. And a business also has systems across all the different categories. It has systems for marketing and turning attention into leads, into sales.

It has systems for delivery and operations. It has systems for sales. It is a machine that can run without … Like, I don’t believe you have a business until it can run somewhat without you. Right? Somewhat without you, you know, being involved in everything. You have the start of a business when you’re in that place where you’re doing everything, but you gotta get out of that because the goal of a business is to be valued, to have a value.

Even if you’re never gonna sell it, you know, even if that’s not what you wanna do, it’s still to have an evaluation where it’s like this, machine is valued at XYZ which considers its revenue, it considers its, you know, traffic and its email list. It considers the systems it has. Can it run without the founder?

All those things are considered in an evaluation of a business. To build a successful business, it’s like a checklist. Yes, you have to have the traits of relentless pursuit, of I’m willing to fail, I’m willing to mess up over and over and over again. I’m willing to go take unlimited action until I find success, and I’m willing to move fast.

The faster I move, the faster I’m gonna find success. While at the same time, I’m gonna be surrendered in the outcome because I know that all I can control is the actions I take and my learning and my implementation and all the things I’m doing, and then I have to surrender the timing, surrender the outcome, and just do the best I can with the information I have and the experience I have at this time.

A business is a checklist. Being a creator is going, “I’m gonna create content, and I am going to try to build this, this brand where I have all these followers.” And I think the formula of being a creator, like if I’m just saying it, you have to have a certain personality. You do. It’s like being i- it’s like being a, a movie star.

Like, if you don’t have the personality and that magic and that charisma and just the ability to create content at that level, you’re likely not gonna be successful. And so I do think people are somewhat being misled Because of people like Jesse Jane, not intentionally, because they see her and they think anyone can do that.

I don’t think anyone can do that. I do think anyone can have a successful business. I do think creating content will help your business. I do think if you get better on video, it’s gonna help your business. I do think the better you can talk to your audience and you can, you know, create content and speak to that messaging, it’s gonna help your business 100%.

But I don’t think anyone can build a brand like Jesse Jane has or like these big creators have, and I do think these big creators are now the equivalent of our Hollywood movie stars. So if we compare it that way, it’s very different than a business. It’s very much about your talent as a person and your performance in your content, which of course today is about being you, right?

As auth- authentic as you can be in your content, whereas Hollywood movie stars are faking it. They’re not being them. They’re reading a script. You know what… And they, they… But they still are… It’s talent A business, yes, there’s talent. You can learn it, though. You can learn how to build a business. You can learn how to develop that talent as long as you have the characteristics of I will, you know, I will p- I will do this until I am successful.

So I wanted to have this conversation ’cause I just think it’s interesting to compare the two, and to look at, like, where your goals are. And again, most of you listening are business owners. Don’t get lost in… It’s, it’s partly ego, right? It’s like how cool would that be to have that big following and that big impact and I think it’s possible.

You can. But not everyone can, just like not everyone can be a movie star. and it’s not necessary to be at that level as a creator to have a successful business. I mean, there are so many businesses, like let’s be real, that don’t even have a good social media presence. Like, you don’t have to be this face of the brand.

You don’t have to do it that way. That’s not the only way to grow a business. Does it help? Yes. Is it necessary? No, because if you build systems… This is why I love paid ads, because I can be more in control. They’re predictable. I can control who sees the ads, how many people see the ads, exactly if it’s gonna work or not.

I can control the experience. It’s a system. Organic social media is not a system. It’s like a soup of talent, luck, the algorithm, hope, a little bit of strategy for sure, but it’s like… And it’s always changing. You don’t have that control over it. So the way… I obviously have put a lot into media this year and content, and it is a huge priority of mine, but as I’ve talked about on the podcast, it is not the driver of growth of my business.

I saw Caleb whatever his name is, he’s been featured in, I’m, I’m forgetting his last name, but he’s big. He worked with Gary Vee. He’s big in the branding content space. And I saw this video of him that said the most successful creators and, you know, content creators that he’s worked with have had a runway of three years that they didn’t need any return, and that they went into the game of I’m doing this just for the consistency.

I’m doing this just… I’m doing this to create content without an outcome. And then where they got their money is paid ads. He literally said this. I should have re-shared the video. It was perfect. I was like, “Exactly.” Paid ads and paid traffic is where you get the fast return because you’re putting somebody through a direct experience that you can control the timing.

I run paid ads every single day. I get people into my weekly webinar. I convert people. They literally go sign up, first time they’ve seen me, sign up for my webinar, go to my webinar the next day or in a few days, whatever, book the call. We just had this yesterday. Book the call that day, buy that night People are actually making faster decisions when you have the marketing dialed-in.

This is something I feel I’ve proven myself wrong with this year, is you can convert that cold traffic that quickly. Now, is it gonna be more than 3% of your leads? No, you still have the 97% who haven’t bought yet. You gotta create experiences. You gotta nurture them, right? They’re in your bucket now, for sure.

But you can be profitable, and you can create that fast result. So paid ads are speed. Paid ads are predictable. Paid ads are a system. Paid ads are the fastest way to grow your business if you have the foundation. Organic social, content creation, is the slow burn. It’s the, “I don’t need a return.” It is slow.

And it will come back to you, but it will take years. It’s a slow, consistent, slow burn, boring game. You can’t, you can’t bet the growth of your business on that. If you’re betting… That’s the mistake people are making, is you’re betting your growth, saying, “If I just keep creating content, eventually I’m gonna get sales,” and you’re not.

Then you’re frustrated, then you’re not making money, et cetera. You gotta get a strategy in place where you can get in the driver’s seat, and you can have that control, and you can have that speed and that growth. So that’s my take. Of course, if you’re like, “I would like to implement the weekly webinar and the paid ads in the system,” that is literally what we do.

And I don’t talk about it enough on here, but our scale program is so incredible. I mean, we create the strategy for your visibility ads, your lead gen with a small price to offer on the thank you page to offset your ad cost, your live launch funnel. Some clients come in and do a weekly webinar. And we do it all.

We come up with the strategy. We do the, all the funnels, all the emails, all the implementation, launch the ads, and it’s like getting a full done-for-you team at the price of a program. And the results we get are incredible because most of the time what I see is, is these entrepreneurs who are trying to do this all themselves.

They’re not good at it. They don’t have the strategy. They’re fumbling around, and it, then it doesn’t work. And you should be spending the time on the things that only you can do, creating the webinar, creating content that doesn’t have to create you that immediate return. So if you’re interested in that, helpmystrategy.com is our page that explains our offers and how we support people.

And I just wanted to bring you in on that conversation today and, and kind of my reflection on influencers and creators being very different than business owners. And again, I don’t mean that at all in a rude way. I just feel it’s very different. It’s a very different model, and you gotta choose the lane you’re, you’re wanting and what you’re wanting to build.

And I know for me, I want the impact, and I wanna create content, and I’ve built the business that allows me the time to prioritize that. But my business is what’s paying the bills. Not the content, not the influencing, you know. The content sometimes does get clients, and the podcast helps with that, right?

But it’s, it’s an ecosystem. But the business is predictable. The business is you put a dollar in, you get three, you get four, you get five out. Like, that is what is required to have a business that you can scale, and content’s just not gonna do that. It’s just not. Alright, everybody. Hopefully you enjoyed this conversation.

Thank you so much for tuning in, and I’ll talk to you all next week