[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.
Hello friend. Welcome to Got Marketing. Today's a little bit of a personal update for me, so you will know that I am a very proud defence partner. My husband's a helicopter pilot with the Army, and we are trying to transition out of the military [00:01:00] would've been 15 years. Uh, so my whole relationship with my husband, he has been in the army and yeah, he's ready to make the leap to the civilian world.
And actually we cut our year abroad short by one month so that he could come back to Australia. And get his civilian pilot's license. And yeah, we've just been embarking on the job hunting process and I definitely mean we, because of course I wrote the cv, the cover letter, all the things that you do. But we still don't have a job.
And it has now been about seven months of looking and we're making some big decisions about what we're gonna do next because we are living in absolute limbo. We are thinking. Month to month, we can't plan any trips or any big decisions like changing our kids' schools or really anything because we are kind of expecting at any [00:02:00] time he could get a job.
So we've made the possibly crazy decision that we're going to leave Darwin at the end of the year and we are going to hail marry it to Newcastle at this stage. And just kind of take matters into our own hands because if we make it to the end of the year and he still doesn't have another job, that would've been 13 months of waiting.
And I am not very good at waiting. So this plan is flawed of course, because you know that we're gonna get to Newcastle and get settled and start new schools and. Get all really happy 'cause Newcastle is such an awesome place. And then we're gonna get a call saying, no, no, you are moving to Canberra, or Lismore or Brisbane, but.
Sometimes you have to risk it for the biscuit, right? So what I wanna talk to you about today in this episode is just a [00:03:00] little bit about defence partner life, because this is an element of my life that I don't really talk about in a business context very much. There's no real marketing lessons about being an Army wife, but I wanted to share it with you because it might give you some perspective about your life and yeah, also, I needed a.
An idea for a podcast episode. 'cause we do these every week and sometimes it can be hard to like. Think about what we're gonna talk about. So what is it like to be a defence partner? It's definitely not easy. Super rewarding. I'm super proud. But if I had to think about what is the hardest thing, there is no one super duper overwhelming, hard thing.
It's not the moving every couple of years, or my husband going away for long stints at a time. He's away up to four months of the year. Not continuously, but on various training continuum. It's not the fact that, you know, you are [00:04:00] constantly unsure about where you're going next. Like all of those things add up and it actually is death by a thousand cuts.
So the first thing is most defence families move every couple of years. You can kind of embed yourself into one location. It can often be a really career-limiting move for the military member if they choose to just stay in the same location. Each posting, but it's really good for the family, right?
Because you get that stability and that continuity. I don't really mind the moving, or I haven't minded the moving for the last 15 years because you get to see so much more of Australia than you would've seen otherwise. And so we've lived in Toowoomba, we've lived in Newcastle, we've lived in Darwin for eight years, and we also took some time and went abroad.
And so yeah, I feel like it has been a really great adventure. So on its own, moving every couple of years isn't the end of the world. And then you've got the fact [00:05:00] that the member is away or the partner is away. And that makes things really challenging because they miss birthdays, they can miss Christmas, they're just not there.
And you are solo parenting, which again is not the end of the world. And then there's the unknown, which is exciting, but also annoying that you can't really plan the rest of your life because you don't know where they're gonna send you. You do get preferences. You do get to tell them that, Hey, I would prefer to go to these places, but there has to be jobs that your partner is suited to in those locations.
So my husband being a helicopter pilot, there are only a few locations in Australia that have those aircraft. So it's not like we can just say, oh, I wanna go back to Melbourne where my family is. Here are some of the things that you might not know about being a defence partner. Defence does not help us in the slightest as the partner.
They look after the member extremely well, and I can't actually fault them in the slightest. My husband has never booked a medical [00:06:00] appointment outside of the military. All of his medical physio is all covered. It's all. Incredibly high top tier quality. Uh, they do really look after his mental health, his physical health, his emotional health.
They really do look after their people. The families, uh, kind of fall outside their area of care. I will say, for example, I run a business, but I'm not allowed to run a business from a defence house. So that's an important part of my livelihood and also being a defence partner and moving every couple of years.
It means that my cv, if I were a salaried employee, would look like crap, right? Like if every time I got up and moved I would have, you know, 10 different jobs on my cv. So entrepreneurship and running a small business is actually really well suited to defence partners. Part of the reason why I'm here, however.
Defense. Don't [00:07:00] acknowledge that and say, oh, cool. It's probably gonna be a good thing that defence partners run a business. Let's accommodate that. In fact, they make it harder by saying, you can't run your business from a defence house.
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So let's talk about housing for a minute. 'cause this is [00:08:00] weird, right? That you don't just get to choose where you live. You don't. So the way that it works is that when you get posted to a location, you will have a look at the availability of defence housing, which is heavily subsidized.
And you choose the house. It's like a realestate.com, but just for defence, but nowhere near as well, photographed. Usually, the house are vacant when they're photographed and you choose your house based on availability and the photos. You don't get to inspect your house before you move in. It's very unlikely that you will have been inside your defense house before you actually move into it.
So it is a lot of rolling the dice and hoping for the best. And if there is even one house available that suits your family size in that posting location, you have to take it. There is no like, oh, I don't like anything, [00:09:00] so I'm gonna go and rent my own house. You can go and rent your own house in that location, but defence is not going to support you at all with any money.
If there is no house available in your posting location, which can be common, then defence will give you rental assistance and you are allowed to go and rent whatever house you like. And defence will pay some of your rent. And a lot of people love that, right? Because they get to choose their own house and they get to choose which suburb they live in, and you can run your business from that house.
We own our own house in Darwin. We knew we were gonna be here for many years, so we bought our own house. And we received an excellent home loan through National Australia Bank for defence, families, and defence help us pay off our home loan. So really, really good situation for us. Yeah, that's defence housing.
Most people don't live on base. There are [00:10:00] bases all around Australia. Some of them you can live on like Akia here in the Northern Territory. But generally you don't live on base. You live in a community that is all military, but it's not like a secure swipe on swipe off type base. One of the things that I find the most challenging about being a defence partner is that the admin load falls to me.
So when my husband receives a new posting, he's essentially starting a new job. And as you know, starting a new job, you are learning things and expected to know things really quickly, meeting new people, new systems, new policies. You know, you're taking more responsibility in your last job, it could be a completely different job.
For instance, my husband flew for three years with the Air Force in Newcastle. He's with the Army, completely different branch of the military, completely different aircraft. He had to learn how to fly an entirely different aircraft. [00:11:00] He's a rotor wing pilot. He had to learn how to fly a fixed wing pilot.
Now, at this point, I want you to be extremely impressed that I know all of this terminology, okay? So we get posted to a new location and he is knee deep trying to figure out this new job so that he makes a good impression, which means finding the schools, finding the doctors, finding the afterschool care facilities, finding the dentist.
Did I say that? Finding the hairdressers extracurricular activities, setting up the house. Re-registering our cars, changing over our driver's license, all of it falls to me. So that brings me to operation me out, work less in 2026. Because we now know that we are going to move and leave Darwin for good at the end of this year.
I need to now plan for the fact that a good portion of [00:12:00] next year, at least the first half, I'm gonna have a lot of family responsibilities. That I wouldn't always have in a particular year. And so I'm working with the campaign Delmar team, now I'm talking to Fi about Ripple Festival to really make sure that I create that space so that I, you know, have the capacity to do that because humans, we are so flawed as creatures, right?
We just. Take on more and more and more and more, and we are so optimistic that we think we can do it all. And it's only when we've overloaded our plates that we realize there was no earthly way that we were going to be able to manage all of this. And so from failing spectacularly many times, by taking on too much, I've actually learned that I need to do this.
Because there's just, there's no way to make time magically multiply. I'm going to have the responsibility of setting up a new life in a new location, and I need to factor [00:13:00] that into my business. The good news is that Marketing Circle, which is really the only thing that I offer in Campaign Delmar, is basically full.
We we're sitting at something like 42 outta 45 members, so this is a really fortunate position to be in. Because do I need to keep up the level of intensity with our marketing when my membership is essentially full and we're really getting great referrals from existing members and we have people who have indicated that they are planning to join in the next six months.
And so it's actually kind of a really good time for this to be happening, which is that I've paid my dues, I've done the hard work in my business for the last three years of setting up. Really strong foundations investing in assets like my website and my landing pages and my campaigns, and amazing social proof and great imagery and lead magnets, and a massive [00:14:00] library of social media content and email content and blog content that really I can take the foot off the pedal next year for a little bit, not forever.
And I definitely don't mean stopping altogether. I mean, seriously. I mean, yeah. Reinvesting some of the time that my business gets back into my family, which is really exciting, right? That's what we are doing this for eventually, that our business has to help us meet all of our goals, right? So yeah, that's the Plan 2026 campaign.
Delmar will look a little bit different and we're asking questions like, do we need to have 10 Instagram posts? A week across Got Marketing and Campaign Delmar. Do we need to do a weekly podcast episode? The answer is yes and uh, you know, just asking these questions, not just doing things because we've always done them this way.
And then really thinking about what I can take off my [00:15:00] plate, delegate to somebody else in my team so I can create more space in my life. And I had a really great thing happen last week. I was asked to deliver a email marketing masterclass for somebody else's community, and it was gonna be on Thursday night, and we had planned to go to Kakadu and I asked my husband, Hey, can you please book a hotel room for Thursday night because I have this workshop that I'm delivering?
And he was like, yep, no problem. He forgot and he booked a camps. So I couldn't possibly deliver an email marketing workshop from my swag. And so very last minute I asked Lily in my team to take over. I had prepared all the slides. Could she actually deliver the email marketing workshop? Now, Lily is a qualified marketing manager.
She loves email marketing. She's a copywriter. She was so jazzed about this opportunity. She's trying to raise her personal brand. Sarah, who booked me to do the workshop, was very happy to have Lily and Lily knocked it out of the park [00:16:00] like so good. I got a two minute voice memo from Sarah saying how much she loved Lily's session.
And like that's the goal, isn't it? That you can start to remove yourself. From the equation. That was a really good moment for me. I got to go camping. Lily got to work on her speaking and workshopping and personal branding and Sarah got a great workshop for her customers. Win win, win, win. Anyway, at this point, I am just rambling in this podcast, so I'm gonna wrap this up and say that yeah, big news, uh, on the personal front and yeah, watch this space.
Alright, I'll catch you next time.
Outro
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