[00:00:00] Mia Fileman
Are you tired of empty promises and stolen ideas? Me too. Got. Marketing is a podcast for marketers and small brands who want real talk and clever strategies without the bs. Running an online business is hard, but everything gets easier when your marketing starts performing. I am Mia FileMan, your straight shooting campaign loving friend here to talk marketing, running a business, pop culture, and everything in between.
Let's dive in.
I've spent the last four years with this picture in my head of being on stage running retreats and events, hosting rooms full of clever and kind women who love small business as much as I do. I dreamt of building the kind of community I would've killed for when I started my business, which [00:01:00] felt. Really clicky, and now I'm here.
I've just returned from running a retreat with 17 incredible women, the caliber of their businesses, the conversations, the itinerary. It's everything I wanted and I'm so proud, but this is the part I didn't expect. I have found myself thinking, God, I would just love to be one of the attendees. To be the one sitting back, not running the show.
No logistics, no final checks, no mental tabs open, just sitting in a comfy chair, sipping the tea, taking it all in. I joked with fee that the next retreat we should just attend as guests, not as hosts. I want someone else to be the one agonizing over the program while I turn up and am looked after. And it's funny because this is exactly what I wanted.
I worked for it. I obsessed over it, and I even sacrificed for it. And still part of me is eyeing off the next [00:02:00] version of success. The easier one, the one with less responsibility. Maybe you know that feeling too. There's this incredible Hidden Brain podcast episode called. The moments that change us and the central idea is that we plan our lives based on who we are right now, but we don't account for how much an experience will change us.
So the person who sets the goal is often not the same person who achieves it. Running a business is one of the most formative revealing character building things you can do, and it changes you. You get braver, you get more resourceful. You learn what you value, what you won't tolerate, how you bounce back.
And what you really want. So it makes sense that by the time we reach the thing we wanted, we are already evolving beyond it. That's not a failure of ambition. To me, that's personal growth. We learn who we are by setting off on a [00:03:00] particular path. Years ago, I couldn't sit in an audience. Without feeling agitated, itching to be the one on stage, wondering why I wasn't up there, but something has shifted these days.
Being in the audience sounds like bliss or care. No responsibility. I know I'll be back on stage soon enough, riding the adrenaline and feeling the weight of that moment, but I also want to be the one soaking it all up, listening, learning, laughing in the breaks. And definitely eating much more than my fair share of lemon tarts.
So if you've ever felt like the only way to grow is to do maybe being in the audience, is your chance to just be, sit in the comfy chair, have someone else, sweat the run sheet, and be nourished by ideas, creativity, and connection. There's a version of me from 2019 who would be in awe of what I'm doing right now, but that version of [00:04:00] me would also be annoyed to hear me say, I'm so tired.
I just want someone else to run it. It's human to want more, to be tired, to imagine an easier path, but it's also important to pause and remember you wanted this. This is your dream delivered. So don't rush past it.
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If you're listening and you're not there yet, maybe you're still building, still growing, still figuring it out, then I wanna let you know that I see you. I am you. I've been there, and I'll probably be right back there again next month because business is weird like that. But wherever you are. I want to gently suggest, don't let your desire for more rob you of what is already working today.
Because sometimes the moment you are in is the payoff, even if it's messy, even if it's full on, even if part of you wants a break from it all. So here's something that I'd love for you to sit with today. What do you have right now that your past self desperately wanted? Maybe it's a full calendar, a community, a.
Dead stream of clients or the guts to start even when you are scared. And then I want you to ask yourself, am I actually enjoying it or have I already moved the goalposts? Because ambition is beautiful, but so is a rival if you let yourself feel it.
Low hanging fruit: When bad ideas happen to good marketers.
Free cocktails and fuzzy metrics. A cautionary tale from the bathhouse we visited on our recent retreat. There's a mullumbimby bathhouse that we attended on the retreat that offers a free cocktail for every app download. We were about 12 of us were marketers, and we were all left dumbfounded when we discovered this.
Okay, so the reality is. That most of this bathhouses clientele are tourists here for a good time, not for a long time. They'll never use the app again. After using the baths, many of us would've happily purchased a cocktail or a mocktail, but instead they gave us one for no good reason. So they've set the KPI as app downloads and that's it, but there's no clear link to return visits, upsells, or even revenue.
It's just a vanity metric that looks great on a marketing report and leaves the accounting team going, wait, what did you do? The cost of this tactic is lost revenue, increased waste, and a very strained relationship between marketing and finance. This is a classic case of optimizing for the wrong metric, solving for what is easier to measure, not what actually matters, and forgetting that real success comes from lifetime value, not one time downloads.
So marketers, please, not everything that can be counted actually counts. If your KPI doesn't map back to revenue, retention, or customer experience, it's just noise and someone has to pay for those cocktails. Thanks for listening. Definitely a change of pace of episode for me today. I'll be back soon with my usual opinionated rants.
It just, this was the message that I wanted to send today, so I'll be back next week hopefully with a full night's sleep and somebody else making my tea.
Outro
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Podcast reviews are like warm hugs and they're also the best way to support a small business. You can connect with me, Mia FileMan on Instagram or LinkedIn, and feel free to send me a message. I'm super friendly.
