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As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business goβbut you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the 2x Webby Award Honoree Be A Marketer podcast!
On today's episode, you'll hear from a business owner on a mission to change the global economy one small business at a time. This is the Be A Marketer podcast.
Dave Charest:My name is Dave Charest, director of small business success at Constant Contact, and I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore what it really takes to market your business even if marketing's not your thing. No jargon, no hype, just real stories to inspire you and practical advice you can act on. So remember, friend, you can be a marketer. And at Constant Contact, we're here to help.
Dave Charest:Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. And I'd like to direct your attention to the one and only, Kelsi Carter.
Kelsi Carter:Oh, I'm here. That was such a nice intro. Hello. Happy to be here as always.
Dave Charest:Hi, Kelsi. Good to see you.
Kelsi Carter:Hi, Dave. Great to see you.
Dave Charest:I've got a question for you. Have you ever had run into one of these situations where you kinda meet somebody for the first time and you just, like, hit it off right away?
Kelsi Carter:Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
Dave Charest:Right?
Kelsi Carter:Yep. yeah.
Kelsi Carter:Some of my best friendships that I still have have happened that way.
Dave Charest:It's amazing when those types of things happen and you just like, the conversation is effortless, and it feels like a productive conversation too. It's not just, you know, you run into those people and it's not going well, and you just have, like, that idle chitchat, and it's, like, painful. Right? Yeah. And then you feel
Kelsi Carter:a little awkward or uncomfortable and you're like, when is this when are they gonna leave?
Dave Charest:Yeah. Can this can this stop now? And so I'm excited about our conversation with our guests today because this is one of those ones that I was really like, do we have to stop? Do we have to stop talking? Like, can we just keep going?
Dave Charest:And I got to really you probably saw it as you were watching it live, but and heard it as we were listening back. But I got to geek out a little bit too about some of these marketing things that really excite me, and I love that our guest today has these processes behind all of that stuff. And so it's a really great conversation that I'm excited to bring to everybody today. And I'm also excited because our guest actually does some really interesting things on how she actually runs her business. Her customers can choose how much they pay for her product and her platform, and she gives the profit back to her staff.
Dave Charest:And these are all things that you probably aren't gonna find in how to run a business book. And so really lends to that idea that you get to build the business that you want to build. And she also runs a global movement called thank you Small Business, and that's focused on convincing corporations and consumers to buy from small businesses so we can create this world where we're all living in these communities and neighborhoods that are full of vibrant small businesses that we all benefit from. And those are all things I'm sure we can all get behind. Yeah?
Kelsi Carter:Oh, yeah. Definitely.
Dave Charest:So, Kelsi, who are we chatting with today?
Kelsi Carter:Today's guest is Carissa Reiniger, the founder and CEO of Silver Lining. Now Silver Lining is a software as a service or SaaS platform that helps small businesses set and hit financial goals. The platform is based in behavior change science, and its purpose is to help individual small business owners not just set their goals, but actually modify their behavior so they can take the right actions and stay on track to achieve those goals.
Dave Charest:I love all of that. It's like music to my ears, these things that you're saying. And so what I love about what Carissa brings to this is her background in psychology, and she really takes into account the context in which people are operating. Right? So it's about what is the agency someone has inside their set of particular circumstances, and how do you acknowledge that context and then support people despite those circumstances to achieve their goals?
Dave Charest:And so really gets into this in a deeper level. And Silver Lining is on a mission to really change the global economy one small business at a time. So you might be thinking, hey. Well, how do you do that? Right?
Dave Charest:And from Carissa's perspective, the focus is really twofold. One, you've gotta design solutions that help individual small businesses set and hit their financial goals. And then two, at a macro level, you really need to look at the systemic things that make it hard to be successful as a business owner and really try to address those as well. And so you might be wondering, well, how's that working out? And, well, I asked Carissa, I was like, why is Silver Lining still around twenty years later?
Carissa Reiniger:When you get the chance to work with small business owners every day, like you guys do at Constant Contact, you come to I have deep admiration and deep respect for every single small business owner I've ever met. You know, I say all the time, like, the fact that we've decided that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are the titan of industry and, you know, the examples of entrepreneurship that we all wanna become, I think is deeply distressing, actually, because it is absolutely the antithesis of, a, what the world needs, b, how we grow the economy, and c, the type of people that we wanna adore. In counter to that, these small business owners that we work with around the world face unending hardship. Many come from marginalized communities. Many were forced to leave their countries.
Carissa Reiniger:I mean, you're talking about the type of resilience and tenacity that is almost Herculean, and yet we write them off as being small, insignificant, you know, irrelevant. And so if the root answer to all of this is, it's I'm here because of them. I'm here because they deserve the right products and services. They deserve people that don't give up on them and go upmarket because it's hard to sell to small businesses. You know, they deserve the right resources.
Carissa Reiniger:And by the way, not only do they deserve it, all of us in the economy benefit from their success. And so when we look at bigger issues like a growing wealth divide, gender inequality, racial inequality, I mean, I genuinely believe that small business is probably the solution to most of those big, big, big macro problems. And so I always say, you know, I'm almost twenty years in, but I think I'm just getting started. I mean, these are these are such big issues that it will take lots of us lifetimes of commitments to shift. But at the end of the day, it's an honor to do what we do because of the businesses that we serve.
Dave Charest:So, obviously, in all of this and any business has to be profitable in order to sustain and continue to go. And so would you mind sharing just to give us a sense of, like, how does your business make money today? Where does that come
Carissa Reiniger:from? Yeah. So we have, we have three revenue streams for a very simple business model. Like you alluded to, one of my issues is that a lot of small business owners who are going through financial hardship or having a hard quarter, they often don't get the support they need because they can't afford it. And so we create this growing divide between those that succeed and those that don't, which is, of course, the root issue.
Carissa Reiniger:So we have a pay what you can model. Any small business anywhere in the world that makes less than 250,000 US dollars a year or US dollar equivalency a year in annual revenue, choose what they pay for SLAP. So SLAP is technically 300 US dollars per month for small business. But anyone in the world, no strings attached, no application process, they get to the paywall, they choose choose what they can pay. So that's revenue stream number one is monthly credit card swipes from all the small businesses that use SLAP globally.
Carissa Reiniger:Number two is we have a partnership model. So we work primarily with economic development agencies, financial institutions, and franchisors. All people that have a vested interest in seeing the small business owners in their community, their franchisees, their main street small businesses, their lending, banking customers. Their success depends on the success of the small businesses. And as an industry, we're woefully inadequate in supporting those small businesses, like franchisors and banks and lenders and government agencies basically make money on.
Carissa Reiniger:So they will subsidize the cost of slap for small businesses in their community and will develop really deep partnerships to help their small businesses succeed in a way we call it a quadruple win deal. The partner wins, silver lining wins, small businesses win, and the economy wins. And then our third revenue stream is that I get asked to speak a lot. People buy books we create. There's a lot of education we do, and so we generate revenue from that.
Carissa Reiniger:But that's it. It's a really simple business model, very intentionally designed to be that way.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Love that. So you mentioned obviously doing this a long time coming up in twenty years. You feel like you're just getting started. When you start to think about the work that you are doing in your Slack community, what makes you smile when you think about running your own business?
Carissa Reiniger:You know, I was just saying right before this conversation, I came out of a room with a group of our small businesses, about a hundred of them. I think in the room today, there were people probably from about 40 different countries. And the point was to be there to talk slap strategy, but I lead a slap strategy call once a month where we talk strategy and how to optimize strategy. But the reality is you can't talk about strategy as a small business owner if you don't talk about the context that you're building the strategy in. So there's been election results all over the world that are continuing to go in a very certain direction.
Carissa Reiniger:There's a lot of uncertainty in terms of global conflict. There's a lot of changes in technology. I mean, at a geopolitical, geoeconomic, and geotechnology level, we are facing into deep uncertainty. Whatever people believe about those truths is sort of irrelevant. It just means there's a lot of change coming.
Carissa Reiniger:And in the midst of that change, small business owners will be deeply affected, especially small businesses from marginalized communities. And so we were there to talk strategy, and we ended up instead having people share their stories about how they're doing right now. One man shared the fact that his black son was killed by police in Minneapolis recently. One woman shared that she had to flee Ukraine and move to a new country, and she's basically building from scratch because she had to flee her country. And so you hear these stories, and they make me cry first.
Carissa Reiniger:But what makes me smile is that these humans are so resilient and so beautiful. And despite the atrocities that they face and the hardships they face, their determination is to keep contributing to society. They wanna build a business that contributes, that creates opportunity for others, that provides for their families. That's what makes me smile. It's just these beautiful humans.
Carissa Reiniger:And despite the odds, despite the failure rate, despite the issues, they want to contribute. They're not in this to gain. They're in this to continue to build something that contributes to the collective. And so it's just such a beautiful thing to be able to witness, you know, day in and day out.
Dave Charest:When you think about you personally, what do you find most challenging about running your own business?
Carissa Reiniger:How long do we have, Dave? Yeah.
Dave Charest:Can we steal some extra time from him? Hours. Yeah.
Carissa Reiniger:I always say running a business is relatively simple. I think we all have the same problems. And, right, it's so hard. It's simple and it's so hard. So I have all the same problems our small businesses have.
Carissa Reiniger:It's hard to figure out how to manage cash flow, especially when the economy is uncertain because we have this pay what you can model. You know, we can't have the standard prediction of capital in the same way others do. So cash flows are real. You know, I'm always figuring out and thinking about cash flow, money in the bank, how we do it well, how we continue to scale and grow. We never turn anyone away that we protect our business.
Carissa Reiniger:We're at an inflection point where the way that I've run Silver Lining so far, it's not working anymore. We can't be so reliant on me as CEO. And so I have to build a really, really, really good executive team right now, and that's hard to do. It's hard to find those people because of our deep conviction to justice and profit and being high performing and protecting our culture. There's not a lot of individuals that can operate at that intersection at a senior level.
Carissa Reiniger:And so finding the right staff, all of us have labor issues, finding the right staff, building the right team. I think one of the other things I think a lot about is how I make sure that as we scale and grow, the quality of what we do never gets diminished. So it's easy to do that with software. You know, the software stays the same for everyone that uses it, but we're deeply I would say we're like software as a service with the service in all capital letters. We do a lot of human support for every single small business we work with.
Carissa Reiniger:And so I'm deeply convicted about and always concerned about how we make sure that every small business, no matter who they talk to at Silver Lining, is honored and feel just given the best possible experience. So those are probably my three big, you know, cash flow always, the right team always, and, you know, protecting, making sure that even as we grow in scale, we never compromise the experience of any one individual so that we're always doing our best to help every person we work with.
Dave Charest:So I wanna shift this a little bit to think about just marketing here. I mean, this is a show about marketing, and, obviously, that's one of the top challenges we often see with with business owners because, of course, they wanna do their thing, and then marketing is the thing they also have to do in conjunction with that thing, which, you know Yeah. People don't always have a degree in that or understand how that works. And I I'm curious, what level of experience would you say that you have with marketing today?
Carissa Reiniger:Personally? Yeah. Me?
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Carissa Reiniger:I'm definitely a better salesperson than marketer. So I have built silver lining through these channel partners, these sales partnerships, much more than I focus on marketing. That being said, I've tried every marketing trick in the book to varying degrees of success. And so I would give myself a, like, seven out of 10 on how knowledgeable and skilled I am at marketing in the current moment right now.
Dave Charest:Where did you start?
Carissa Reiniger:Zero. Yeah.
Dave Charest:So so what was that And
Carissa Reiniger:by the way, things are changing so fast that I could be zero again tomorrow. Right? I mean, I think that's the other thing about yeah. You guys know more than me about this, but the marketing landscape, you know, how you do sales kinda stays the same all the time. How you do marketing has to change and evolve constantly.
Carissa Reiniger:So, you know, I'm very humble about what I would consider my marketing knowledge.
Dave Charest:Well, we mentioned, of course, that for many small business owners, marketing is really that kind of necessary evil. It's a thing that they know that they need to do, not something they necessarily want to do. And I feel like you've probably got some type of interesting relationship with marketing yourself. What can you tell me about your feelings toward marketing in general?
Carissa Reiniger:I mean, I'm gonna say something provocative. You guys can edit it out. I hate marketing. I hate it. I don't like it.
Dave Charest:Well, so how do you deal with that? Right? Obviously, again, you know it's something you need to do. So how do you deal with that complicated relationship?
Carissa Reiniger:Yeah. Listen. I think it's totally necessary to your point. And I think if it's done well, it's very beautiful. I think and I'm not just saying this because I'm on a constant contact podcast.
Carissa Reiniger:I think tools like constant contact are critical Yeah. To be able to do it well. What my relationship marketing is very specifically is that I always say to our small businesses, I say to my marketing team, nobody wants to be marketed to. People wanna be connected with. And so, like, stop marketing and just figure out how to help people, but figure out how to help as many people as possible.
Carissa Reiniger:That's basically marketing. How do you share a message and add value to as many people as possible in such a compelling and authentic way that they then have a little moment of trust built with you that you can build on and potentially turn into business if they're the right customer for you. So my personal philosophy on marketing at Silver Lining has been, we educate, we don't market. Mhmm. And so if you see anything out in the world about Silver Lining, you'll see that we're usually trying to offer tips on how to grow your business or I'm speaking on stages teaching people our methodology for free.
Carissa Reiniger:It is a proprietary methodology I designed, but we share it freely. Anyone anywhere in the world could find everything you need to know about how Slap works. We're not precious about it. We don't hide it. We don't make people pay for it.
Carissa Reiniger:We try to be generous with it. The second thing that we're really focused on is trying to really celebrate small businesses, you know, to be an advocate for our customers. So we're not trying to sell them. We're trying to profile them. We're trying to raise their, you know, respect in the world.
Carissa Reiniger:And now as we do that, as we try to help them, and as we try to profile them, we build trust with them, and they start to consider us someone that is for them, not marketing to them, but fighting for them. And so we see that the conversion then wanting to become a slapster is much more high. We've got high conversion rates. Once they know about us, we've got pretty high conversion rates because at no part of the process are we trying to market to them. We really genuinely are trying to use marketing strategies to connect with them at scale, but really within the name of helping them.
Carissa Reiniger:The other thing that we are very audacious about, we don't have a target market. We have an ideal client, so a very specific profile of who we know we're best suited to serve. And so we are very open. Every time I speak on a stage, I say, this is our ideal client. I built Slack for you if you are like this.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Carissa Reiniger:If you're not like this, I hope you get value today, but this is not for you. And so we're really, really focused on not marketing to a target market, but connecting with our trying to be as specific and diligent about how we do that as possible.
Dave Charest:Talk to me a little bit about that ideal client thing. Right? Because, like, I think this is important for people to hear, even if you just think of talk to me through how that just changes how you approach what it is that you do, even how you communicate. Talk to me a little bit about that.
Carissa Reiniger:So if you're a small business listening, this applies to me and you and probably to Constant Contact. Right? What we teach in Slack and what I've applied to Silver Linings is that the most important person in your small business is your customer, your ideal client, not you. So when you're thinking about marketing strategy, don't think about what you want. I don't really care if you wanna be Instagram famous.
Carissa Reiniger:I don't really care if you wanna be in the news. I don't really care if you like or don't like going to events. I care about how your ideal client consumes information, how they get their information, how they make their choices. And then we need to design connecting strategies that meet the reality of the ideal client. Now if you're gonna choose the right strategies to market or sell, connect, we say, to your ideal client, you need to know who they are.
Carissa Reiniger:And you don't need to know, like, a target market profile. You need to know exactly who they are. Where are they Saturday mornings at 10AM? How often are they at home or at their desk or in their car? Do they take public transit or drive?
Carissa Reiniger:Because all of a sudden, all these seemingly very complicated decisions about how to make marketing spends or what to do or what to invest in become really easy. So when you create an ideal client through Slack, you figure out who they are, so their age, their gender association, their marital status, if they have kids or not, how old their kids are, where they work, if they're self employed, how much money they make, what their annual salary would be, if they live in the country or a city or a suburb, in a house, in a condo, in an apartment, how they get around, a bike, a car, a truck, public transit, their hobbies, their personality, their passions, what they read. Are they sitting around on the weekend reading a novel or the BBC app? What are they doing with their lives, their time? And when we understand that profile really clearly, it becomes so easy to know what to do to connect with them.
Carissa Reiniger:So I always say if I had a dollar for every time a small business owner asked me if they should, like, should I have an Instagram account? I always say to them, I don't know. Does your ideal client use Instagram? Is it their primary place where they make choices and consume information? If so, yes.
Carissa Reiniger:If not, absolutely not. Like, think people are looking for these answers, these magical, mystical answers. Right? And the reality is it's very specific specific to each customer for each small business and their ideal client.
Dave Charest:Yeah. I've found time and time again, the ideal answer is, well, it depends.
Carissa Reiniger:Exactly. That's fun fact.
Dave Charest:Really? Yeah. Yeah.
Carissa Reiniger:Yeah. Exactly. So Exactly.
Dave Charest:I'm curious here just in terms of, like, what you're saying, of course, with ideal client and all of that is spot on. But where does the I guess, how do you make sure that as you're creating this and thinking through this, that you have something that is based in reality? Right? Because I think it's very easy to create something that, okay, I imagined this person, but this is so far away from real people that you're never gonna get anywhere with it. Right?
Dave Charest:So how do you
Carissa Reiniger:I love this question. Yeah. Good quen no one's ever asked me this question, I think, in twenty years. I love that you asked this question. It's so good.
Dave Charest:Everybody's got it. Important.
Carissa Reiniger:And now, thank you, Dave.
Dave Charest:You have
Carissa Reiniger:to be a marketing expert. So what we say is an ideal client has four attributes all the time. They pay you. This is not your, like, grandma's neighbor that you give free flowers to from your flower shop because she's so lovely. That's not your ideal client.
Carissa Reiniger:They pay you for your product services. Number two, they value you. You're meeting a real need for them. So it's not something that they do once off or on the side or because they reluctantly have to. You are really important to them.
Carissa Reiniger:They value what you offer and you're solving a problem for them, some need they have. Number three, they refer others to you. Your ideal client you always know they're your ideal client because they start referring others to you. They know other people like them. And if you're really meeting a need they have, then they're gonna tell other people about you, you're gonna get referrals.
Carissa Reiniger:And then number four, and this is critical, you enjoy working with them. None of us could work this hard building a small business to be miserable our whole life, working with people we don't care about or we don't like or we're not passionate about. And so the ideal client is someone that you personally wake up out of the morning and think, oh my god, how fabulous that I get to serve these people. So I always say SLAP would work for tech startups. It's a basic framework to grow a business.
Carissa Reiniger:It would work for bigger companies. I don't care about tech startups and bigger companies. I care about small businesses. So my ideal client is a small business. I care about them.
Carissa Reiniger:I get joy working with them. So the way that we help our small businesses to find their ideal client in our software, they literally have to go find 20 examples of real customers from all of their years in business that fit these four criteria. They enter their real names in the platform, and then they answer all these demographic and personality details about each of those individual humans. And a hundred it's, like, kind of, like, fun. It's, like, little magical fairy dust.
Carissa Reiniger:A % of the time, the patterns in their gender association, their age, their income level, where they live, how they get around, their personality, it's almost always revealed.
Dave Charest:Mhmm.
Carissa Reiniger:Every once in a while, maybe you'll see a conflict between two competing ideal clients. Right? There's sort of two trends that emerge. And then we say to the customer to our customer, the small business, okay. Choose.
Carissa Reiniger:You can't have two ideal clients. So which one do you care about more? It looks like your product or service could work for either of these categories. Which one do you wanna invest your life, your energy into? Who do you care about more?
Carissa Reiniger:And so we help them basically use real context, real people, real examples through the lens of these four attributes and build that avatar that is based in fact.
Dave Charest:I'm so aligned with everything you've just said. It's such a simple thing too, right? Because we often get so abstract with all of this stuff. And it's just like, I've often said, even in my role at Constant Contact, in content roles, it's like the worst thing we can do is stick a bunch of marketers in the room and try to figure out the problems that we're trying
Carissa Reiniger:to solve. Exactly.
Dave Charest:Right? Like, you actually have to talk to real people. And so
Carissa Reiniger:And can I just double down on that? Please. Yeah. Yeah. So every time a small business owner calls, like, I don't know what to do.
Carissa Reiniger:I'll say, don't call us. Call your ideal client. Yeah.
Dave Charest:The answers are in front of you.
Carissa Reiniger:They're right there. Yeah. And not only that, customers love when you ask them. Every strategic decision I have made for Silver Lining in the last twenty years, every product feature, every new business strategy we've implemented, every direction, everything I have done at Silver Lining, I have actually asked our customers what they think first. I ask them, hey.
Carissa Reiniger:Would this help you? Do you need this? I see this thing in the is this true? And then they tell it through surveys and conversations and town hall, And then I just go do whatever they tell me. And then I always get it right, not because I'm smart, because they're literally telling me what they need, and then I go make sure that that happens, and then we work together.
Carissa Reiniger:So it could be so simple.
Dave Charest:I'll say this. You were smart enough to pay attention to that. Right? Because to your point, they will tell you, they will give you the answers and you have to do something with that information. Right?
Dave Charest:And I think that's where I mean, there's so many complicated factors that get in the way. There's ego. There's what you think. Right? And sometimes there's a combination of those things, but
Carissa Reiniger:Yes.
Dave Charest:You have to be in tune with that audience in order to make it work.
Carissa Reiniger:%. And then business strategy is actually really simple. But to your point, we have a I'm not sure if I can say this. At Silver Lining, we have a no ego and no goal.
Dave Charest:Oh, you can say that.
Carissa Reiniger:It is okay. It is impossible to help a small business owner if they have a big ego or if they're an There's nothing we can do. Right? In the world of behavior change science, the fundamental principle of behavior change is I can't change you, you can't change me, but we can each change ourselves. We do have agency inside of us.
Carissa Reiniger:We just need the right structure and support wrapped around us. But if you're not interested and committed in your own change and you're not willing to embrace outside structure and support, there's nothing that anyone can do. And so to your point, every human can succeed. I mean, I bet my career on it. I believe it to my core.
Carissa Reiniger:I've got countless amounts of data to prove it, but not if they don't want to change, not if they don't want to listen. Right? And so if you're listening, if you're a small business owner, I can just tell you with every bone in my body, your success is not in pretending you've got it all figured out. Your success is in being curious and humble forever. You know, I've been in business for almost twenty years and I'm more curious and actually much more humbled than I was when I started.
Carissa Reiniger:And that doesn't mean I'm perfect. I still got all sorts of problems, but I am trying so deeply and I become so clear that by asking for help, by saying I don't know what I don't know, by constantly asking my customers what they need, by never assuming I've got it figured out, that that is another big reason I'm still here today. You know, if I had relied on my own wisdom, I put that in, you know, in parentheses and brackets and my own know how and my knowledge and my own gumption, I would definitely not be here.
Dave Charest:Yeah. So I feel like we have a lot to really kinda dig into here. And so, you know, we talk a lot about that idea of time, of course, and money being hindering factors or challenges in terms of really, businesses many times just finding new clients. And so what have you found to be helpful to I'm gonna say people in that situation, but that really feels like every business owner. Right?
Dave Charest:So what have you found to really help with time and money being those challenges?
Carissa Reiniger:Okay. Great. So when I started Silver Lining, I interviewed 400 small businesses in the first year. My goal was to go for one coffee a day every day for the first year, and I ended up doing 400 over that first year. And what I heard, basically, these business owners could not have been more different from a demographic industry.
Carissa Reiniger:I mean, everything. Right? But what they all said is I don't have enough time and I don't have enough money. Mhmm. That's why I can't grow my business.
Carissa Reiniger:And then I would say, well, how do I help you create more time? And they'd say, well, I need more money. If I had more money, I could hire more people and have more products and have more software. Said, okay. Well, how do I help you get more money?
Carissa Reiniger:Well, I need more time. If I have more time, I could do more business when I could sell more things, I could do more things. So we call this the cash flow capacity catch 22. We don't have enough time and money. We think we need more money to make more time, more time to make more money.
Carissa Reiniger:And then the irony is every small business on the planet wants to grow their business, but growth requires time and money.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Carissa Reiniger:And this is why small businesses fail. Right? It's not market conditions. It's not economic issues. It's not the politicians in power.
Carissa Reiniger:It's not even inflation, labor shortage. All of those are circumstances we have to be good at dealing with. But we fail because we either run out of time or we run out of money. We go bankrupt or we burn up. That's the reality.
Carissa Reiniger:And so if we wanna shift the success rate of small businesses, we need to use the time and money we have better. So what I say to every small business is unless they can find a money tree that I am unaware of or they can magically find more than a hundred and sixty eight hours in a week, more time and more money is not coming. And, actually, growth doesn't make that cash flow capacity catch 22 go away. My company is bigger than it's ever been. I've got more cash flow capacity catch 22 issues and more time and money pressure on me than I've ever had.
Carissa Reiniger:So as business owners, our objective, our assignment is to do two things. It's to become more skilled at how to use the time and money that we have. I would estimate that on average, when small businesses come to SLAP and they start their SLAP, they are wasting, and I'm using that word very intentionally, they are wasting about 80% of their time and 80% of their money. They're misusing it. Not because they're bad people.
Carissa Reiniger:I don't mean they're cheating. I mean that they're spending it on things that are not helping them grow their business. And so if we can just stop all those bad choices and take that time and money and put it into the highest priority activities that will actually get to results, you instantly see a shift. I mean, instantly. But the second thing we have to do is actually build the mental resilience to handle the pressure of the cash flow capacity catch 22.
Carissa Reiniger:There is never in my twenty years of business been a moment where I've met someone who has too much time and too much money. That's not happening. Right? It's not magic. This issue is not going to be
Dave Charest:a waste.
Carissa Reiniger:Right. Exactly. What do I do with all my time and my money as a small business owner? Find me that person. So what we need to do instead is build the mental resilience, the mindset to handle that pressure.
Carissa Reiniger:So time and money are the two things we talk about the most at Silver Lining, but it's really a combination of building the skill set of how to say no to everything that is not the highest priority and spend every minute of our time and every dollar of our money on the highest priority actions that will have the most direct correlation to results. And then in parallel to that, building the mental resilience, the mental stamina to just be able to handle the sustained pressure of the cash flow capacity catch 22 because it's not going away.
Dave Charest:So there's a couple of things here just in terms of, think, emotional, psychological elements here that we're talking about. And I think one of the things, I mean, I like about marketing, and I'm sure you found this too, is that those elements actually really come into play when you start thinking about how you can apply them to what you do strategically in many ways and even just in terms of messaging and that type of thing. But there's another side to that too, that I believe is really based on the emotional and psychological elements as they pertain to the business owner themselves. Right? Yes.
Carissa Reiniger:Huge. And so
Dave Charest:when they're thinking about like what they're doing from a marketing perspective. And so tell me more about this idea of what it really means for business owners as, as humans and their values and their goals and their personality, even how they get that all working for them in the right way.
Carissa Reiniger:Yes. You're asking amazing questions. These are such good questions. This is like the heart of the work. You're asking exactly the right questions.
Carissa Reiniger:So we say the SLAPP methodology is built on four concepts. Commitment is a choice. So going back to what we talked about earlier, you can choose to be committed to your success. I can't choose it for you. You can't choose it for me.
Carissa Reiniger:We can all make choices to be committed. Profit is a skill. There's very basic skill that you need to learn. It's not an MBA. It's not 20,000,000 courses and workshops.
Carissa Reiniger:There's basic things you need in place to be profitable and sustainable. Mindset is a muscle, which is what you're talking about. And then success is science. There is behavior change science that tells us exactly what you need in order to set and hit goals. We can apply that to small businesses, and then we can succeed.
Carissa Reiniger:So going though to mindset as a muscle, I'm going to what you just said. We think that there's four habits that small business owners need to build that we help them do in order to have a strong enough mindset to sustain the pressure of being a small business owner, of making the right choices, of doing the right behaviors, of making the right marketing choices in the most practical of senses. The first is to say no. So it is instinctual inside of us to say yes. And if you're the type of person that started a small business, you're a yes person, and that's the thing.
Carissa Reiniger:But we wanna build a habit of saying no as the primary. No to everything that is not the highest priority and in alignment with values. To your point about values, I'll just say this. Every single small business owner that uses SLAP, they set a time budget, how they're gonna use their hundred and sixty eight hours a week as a revenue profit and sales target. So what they're going to do to build a profitable sustainable business, and then they set an impact goal.
Carissa Reiniger:What contribution they wanna make to the world as they're growing their finances. And what we see is that 67% of our customers globally choose providing for their family as their impact goal, followed by creating jobs, creating equality, giving back to their community. Those are sort of the categories that are the highest chosen. So because we're a SaaS platform, we're collecting a lot of data. We're using that data to make recommendations of how the business owner can become better at growing their business, and then we're using gamification to try to motivate them.
Carissa Reiniger:When we try to motivate a small business to do a modified or an optimized behavior, and we motivate them by the idea that they could hit their financial goal, which we'd all assume would be very motivating, zero success. No one cares. Small businesses are not motivated by money. This is like the grand irony. But when we gain their behavior against their contribution goal, their impact goal listen.
Carissa Reiniger:If you do this behavior, you will hit the sales target. If you hit the sales target, you'll be able to take your family on that vacation you set as your impact goal. We can move mountains. And so if we're gonna build a resilient mindset as small business owners and, actually, if we're gonna get good at the tactics of marketing, it ties all the way back to being connected to our values. It ties all the way back to remembering that when it's really hard, when the cash flow capacity catch 22 is brutal, when the marketing campaign we just spent $5,000 on didn't work and we're stressed and our credit card's maxed, that it's not about money and it's not about fame or fortune.
Carissa Reiniger:It's about our values. It's about coming back to the contribution we wanna make in the world. And so when we can align, I always say, when you're a small business owner, there's no such thing as work life balance. It's not happening. Get over it.
Carissa Reiniger:So instead, we need to be aligned. And alignment is way more powerful from a mindset point of view. If you can start to see that as your small business grows, so too does your health and wellness and resilience and your bank account, your profit, your sustainable profitable revenue, and your contribution tied to your highest values, then all of a sudden, your business doesn't become something you're fighting with and frustrated with. It becomes this powerful tool, this mechanism to build not just the business you want, but the life you want. And when we can get business owners into alignment, their mindset shifts, and all of a sudden, we move behavior much more effectively.
Carissa Reiniger:And then that has that positive impact of we make more money.
Dave Charest:It's amazing how much that mind shift really comes in. Right? The mindset shift really comes in to do this.
Carissa Reiniger:It's critical. It's foundational. It's nonnegotiable. If that can't happen, that's where when ego's there. Right?
Carissa Reiniger:If you think you've got it all figured out, you can't make that shift.
Dave Charest:Yeah. And
Carissa Reiniger:then there's nothing we can do.
Dave Charest:Right. One of the things I think is most difficult and one of the challenges that as a business owner, just in life, really, I mean, if you think about it is that there's going to be so many decisions thrown your way that you have to make. And what I love about some of the things that you're listing here and saying that people need to do is that by prioritizing the work and getting clear on what is important to you and setting the targets and setting the goals and doing those things, for me, those are all shortcuts to making decisions, to being able to say no to something. Right? So that you can just forget, okay, great.
Dave Charest:I don't have to hem and haw on this. I can say no because I know it doesn't fit what I'm trying to do right now, so I can move to the next thing and then prioritize what's important. Right? What is it then that I guess one of the things I think we're talking about here too, and which is great and the thing that I admire with business owners too, is that you're in control. Right?
Dave Charest:Like, you get to choose and much like you, you get to choose like how you're showing up in the world and your mission and what you're trying to do. I guess the question is how does someone find the confidence to make those personal choices when it comes to what they can do from a marketing perspective, as opposed to what it is that we all think we're supposed to do.
Carissa Reiniger:Yes. Ugh. Dave, we need, like, seven hours. These are you're getting you're getting
Dave Charest:to set up part two.
Carissa Reiniger:Let's go. Really? Literally. You're getting to exactly the root of oh, so good. So first of all, at a practical level, every small business builds a slap statement.
Carissa Reiniger:It's one sentence. It says what they do, who they do it for, the scale they do it on. Three choices they have to make as a business. So silver lining slap statement is silver lining self claps to James on a global scale. So every time I have to make a decision, every time, Chrissa, will you approve this new budget for the marketing team?
Carissa Reiniger:Chrissa, will you speak at this conference? Chrissa, will you go on this podcast? Chrissa, can we make this new hire? Chrissa, what about this new feature in the software? Every request I get, my rule is, and we teach our SLAPs just the same thing, every time someone asks me for $1 of my money, one minute of my time, or one ounce of my energy, because energy management also matters in alignment, I ask myself three questions.
Carissa Reiniger:Can I talk about SLAP? Will my ideal client be in the room? Is it global in scale? If the answer is three yeses, I show up. Here I am on this podcast.
Carissa Reiniger:Right? We're talking about SLAP, two small businesses on a global scale. Done. Easy yes. Even if I don't have time, I don't have money, I do it.
Carissa Reiniger:But if it's only two out of three or one out of three or zero to three, you cannot move me. I will not spend any time or money or energy on it. And so that's the simple framework for learning when to say yes or when to say no. Much deeper, much more important, which you touched on, is the confidence to make those choices.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Carissa Reiniger:To actually let yourself make good choices. And I think one of the biggest mistakes we've done in the world of entrepreneurship is that we've created this very false idea that there's some formula for success. You know, if you just take my seven week boot camp and you do these 47 emails in this way, you'll make a million dollars. You know, if you are like this, if you raise venture capital, you'll raise millions and sell for billions. There's this formula that I think online marketers and gurus and tech entrepreneurs have sort of forced upon the world of entrepreneurship in the last twenty years.
Carissa Reiniger:And I think it's at a great disservice Sure. To the confidence of the average business owner. And so we spend a significant amount of time in our community saying, there are all sorts of good ideas in the world. You need to be confident enough to do what is the best idea for your business. So you need an Instagram account, you don't.
Carissa Reiniger:You need TikTok ads, you don't. You need Google ads, you don't. You should be sending an email every single day in a nurture campaign. You should never send an email. It's gonna annoy people.
Carissa Reiniger:There is no right or wrong answer. And the opportunity right now is that I think the marketing field is becoming so exciting. It's more and more accessible because of people like you making things easier to use for for small businesses. You don't have to be a marketing expert to get good at marketing. So now the wisdom of the business owner really needs to be reliant on not assuming there's any one magical thing that's gonna work for them.
Carissa Reiniger:Yeah. But using enough confidence and wisdom and alignment to say, this is what I do. This is who I do it for. This is the scale I do it on, and these are the best combination of activities and tools that I can use to connect with my ideal client to hit my sales goals. And so I really think that opportunity and access is becoming better, which is a wonderful thing, but so is overwhelm and spending a lot of time and money doing the wrong things.
Carissa Reiniger:And so my hope and my wish and my dream for small businesses is to have such a simple business plan, such a simple action plan as we call it, that making those choices is really easy. And so the confidence relies on the simplicity of just a good strategy, not feeling like you have to have it all figured out.
Dave Charest:It's amazing too how much the simplicity also can many times be a problem because you feel like, really? Is it that simple? And then you ignore it. Exactly. But it's like, no.
Dave Charest:If you just do those things, like, it is that simple. That's simple. Yeah. Yeah.
Carissa Reiniger:Yeah. Yes. Totally.
Dave Charest:Alright. Sadly, we're coming to the end of our time here. So I wanna ask you one more thing. So if there's one thing that someone listening to this here takes away from the conversation, what do you hope it is?
Carissa Reiniger:You were brave, audacious, courageous enough to start your own small business. Don't fall into the trap of assuming there's a simple answer that is right for everybody. Don't go looking for someone to tell you what to do with your business. Build the confidence and the clarity of what is right for your business. And I think if all of us as business owners build businesses on our own terms in a way that works for our alignment, our personal goals for ourselves, our profit, our impact, and then we really do not do everything, but we do the right things with the time and the money that we have, we can dramatically increase the success rate of small businesses, which dramatically changes how the global economy flows and makes it better for everyone.
Carissa Reiniger:So your success matters. Your small business is very big. It's very consequential. And the beautiful thing about how you succeed most is actually by getting most aligned with yourself, not looking for an outside answer, but getting to your own truth and building your business based on that.
Dave Charest:Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number one, educate, don't market. If there was ever a secret to marketing success, Carissa just revealed it to us. As she tells us, nobody wants to be marketed to, but people do want to connect. So your marketing mission becomes, how can you share your message and add value to as many people as possible?
Dave Charest:How can you do that in a compelling and authentic way so that you build trust? And how can you use that trust to get the right people to do business with you? So don't be afraid to share your knowledge freely to attract those that need your support. Number two, connect with your ideal client. Carissa goes beyond the generic target market.
Dave Charest:Instead, Silver Lining has an ideal client. This is a very specific profile of who the business is best suited to serve. Carissa instruct us that your ideal client must have four attributes. They must be someone who pays for your products or services. They must be someone who values you because you're meeting a real need for them.
Dave Charest:They must be someone who refers you to others, and they must be someone you enjoy working with. As Carissa explains it, you wanna wake up in the morning and think, how fabulous that I get to serve these people. Now just a reminder here that these are real people, not some made up avatar. If you can be specific and diligent, you'll find you can develop the marketing strategies that connect with the reality of that ideal client, which in turn allows you to attract more of the right people to your business. That ideal client is your north star.
Dave Charest:Number three, spend time and money on high priority actions. Carissa introduced us to the idea of the cash flow capacity catch 22. As business owners, we think we need more money to make more time and more time to make more money. And then the irony is that every small business on the planet wants to grow their business, but, again, growth requires time and money. And businesses fail because they either run out of time or they run out of money.
Dave Charest:They either burn out or they go bankrupt. So that means to shift the success rate of your small business, you need to be better at using your time and the money that you do have. And that means shifting time and money toward highest priority activities. And that also means building the mental resilience to handle the cash flow capacity cash 22 because, well, it never goes away. That means you've gotta build the skill set of saying no to anything that is not the highest priority, then spend every minute of your time and every dollar of your money on those highest priority actions.
Dave Charest:By doing so, you'll see a direct correlation to your overall results. So remember, focus on those highest priority actions. Here's your action item for today. Take a moment to celebrate you. Being a business owner is hard.
Dave Charest:You're doing something that many people don't have the courage to do. And I wanna go back to something that Carissa said here, and it's that your success matters. Your small business is very big. It's very consequential. And the beautiful thing about how you succeed most is actually by getting most aligned with yourself.
Dave Charest:Not looking for an outside answer, but getting to your own truth and building your business based on that. Friend, you've got this. And thanks for letting the Be a Marketer podcast and Constant Contact be part of your journey. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. Please take a moment to leave us a review.
Dave Charest:Just go to ratethispodcast.com/bam. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. That's ratethispodcast.com/bam. Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.