The Visibility Secrets Every Female Entrepreneur NEEDS to Hear

Jim Banks:00:00:00

Hey podcast fans. It's Jim Banks here on digital marketing stories. Welcome to today's episode. I am so pleased. I've got a fantastic guest. We've just been shooting the breeze in the green room, and I'm sure that, my guest today, Michelle, has got some amazing things to talk to you about. Michelle, Thames, we discovered in the Green Room, it's Thames, is, coming to us from Chicago. And I'm delighted to have you on the show today. Michelle. Great to meet you.

Michelle Thames:00:00:25

Yes. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here today.

Jim Banks:00:00:29

so when you come on as a guest, you have a bio. you're absolutely the first visibility strategist I've ever met. So tell me what a visibility strategist is and what does it do?

Michelle Thames:00:00:42

Yeah, so I help women entrepreneurs to get visible leveraging social media and digital marketing, and that can look different for everybody. It can be through podcasting through. Email marketing. I like to focus really on my clients in a not so cookie cutter way. What makes the most sense for your business? So ultimately, helping women increase their visibility so that they attract more clients and monetize their skills and expertise. Because my story is I was fired back in 2016 and I was really able to leverage social media for visibility to get. Speaking engagements, opportunities, collabs, partnerships, and so social media has really changed my life, and it is free. It's a free tool, so I'm yelling to the mountaintops and wanting to help as many women as possible just to leverage social media for visibility in their business.

Jim Banks:00:01:35

So again, like I, I think it's phenomenal that you are supporting, women. Because again, I think sometimes, women have had a kind of bit of a rough deal in, in terms of getting on in, in the industry, right? I mean, yet there's no sort of barriers for them to be able to do the same job, if not. equally as well as men, better than right? there's no physical power that you need. You don't have to have strength and, muscles and everything else, right? You just need smart brains. And I had some phenomenal, women guests on my podcast. so again, I was really excited to have you come and talk to us. Today. what is it about women that they feel that they need to have that community to be part of? why do you think that there's the kind of this desire, such a strong desire for, for, women to offer that sort of coaching and supporting role through a community?

Michelle Thames:00:02:23

Yeah, so when I first started my business, I did notice that there were just not a. A lot of women groups for women entrepreneurs to come together and, like you said, I, I do help everyone. so if you come to me and you need some help with visibility, we definitely can help you too. But the reason why I focus on women is just because, that tight-knit community, sometimes in spaces we don't feel, that. Fair for us sometimes, right? Like you said in the beginning, we can do the things as well as men sometimes, but when I was just starting my business, I found that there wasn't a group for women entrepreneurs to help them succeed, to help them with visibility. So I said, you know what? This is my lane, right? To really step in and help women, especially women over 42, because sometimes we have skills and abilities. Tools and resources. We work nine to fives and sometimes we can forget that we have those skills and that we can monetize from them. We go into the workplace, especially like something in marketing, right? Heavily male dominated field. And so I said, you know what? I'm going to approach this and just help my women out. And so I just really am super passionate about helping bring that out of women to really also help them leverage their skills and expertise, but also to monetize off of that.

Jim Banks:00:03:37

So you are again, like I, if, if you do nothing else other than listen to the episode or watch the episode on YouTube, by all means you really, really do need to, visit Michelle's website. It's a phenomenal website, really well built, and again, I was like, wow, Michelle's Big, a really big deal. you've certainly done a terrific job of, positioning yourself as that that person, I, I always say most marketing agencies do a horrible job of, presenting the, their own proposition to, To the world, right? So why would they be any better at doing that for clients? But I think in your case it's clearly, you, you can see clearly that you are in, in a sort of good position to, to support the women that you do. what, what was it that kind of, made you, again, so obviously you helped women by offering that sort of community led. initiative, you help them through coaching again, do you have like regular weekly calls, zoom calls, that type of thing? how does it work?

Michelle Thames:00:04:31

Yeah, so in my elevated empowered community, we do have weekly calls. I bring in guest experts. We do sessions all the time just around visibility. Around building your business. Tonight I'm having a webinar about digital products, so how to create digital products because that's a really amazing space, to go into. But back to something that you said that I think is really important as a vi visibility strategist, as a marketing expert. To me, I do think it's important to have that foundation if I'm out here telling people that I help you get visible and become the go-to expert in your field. But I'm not the go-to expert. I just don't think that that makes me as believable. And so since I am doing it, I'm in the trenches doing it. I help my clients do it. I think that is a really great just reflection and of something that. For me to have as my backbone, right? You go to my website, you can Google me, you can see all the speaking engagements I've done. You can see my podcast, you can see my social media, you can see all of that. So if I position to you saying, or anyone listening, right? I help you with visibility. I'm more believable because I'm actually doing it. I'm in the trenches. I have results that I can help you do that rather than saying, yeah, I'm a visibility strategist and here I am, but I'm not actually implementing it. For me, it's important for me to show that on social media and beyond that I'm actually in the trenches that I'm actually doing this and that I can help you do it too. So I really love that you brought that up. But yeah, back to my community, we do. Multiple events a month. We do challenges. Just a supportive community to also network and have other women who get it right in that same space, so that's absolutely why I built my community. I also do events in retreats and so retreats. We love to get away and go away places. I have retreat coming up in January in Scottsdale, Arizona. To so we can really focus on our business, but also get away in a different area and have a good time. and I also, like I said, do events. I'm hosting an event in Chicago, November 1st, 2025, that really focuses on monetization, visibility and systems and community as well. And so I like to do different type of events, different ways to connect with women, and all our ways that just I feel are really beneficial. So yes, I offer coaching, consulting a community, but it is just so much more as well.

Jim Banks:00:06:52

Yeah, I, I always think that, some, some of it is the, The, the secret source that people can bring to the table sometimes is your ability to be able to put people together in the same room, right? Because not everyone has the same business. Not every everyone has the same objectives. Not everyone's selling the same thing. And by doing that sort of collaboration, quite often you'll find that you. get people in the room and they can achieve amazing things because they talk to other people in a, in a safe environment. They feel like this is, this is somewhere I feel safe to kinda share information about my business. People aren't gonna steal it. and they can obviously then take that information. again, like if, if, if you think about setting up a business, it's really intimidating for a lot of people, right? And, if you've never done it before, there's so many things. I mean, it, I, it really grinds my gears when you see some of these people saying. Oh yeah, you just gonna go on and set up a business and you'll be making 10 grand a month in no time at all. It's well, how? you need to set up a, a sort of, what's the company structure gonna look like? Is it gonna be an LLC? Are you gonna be an scorp? I mean, there's so many different things that need to do. You need to have some sort of, bookkeeper, finance kind of person finance software, Website domain names. There's all sorts of different things that you need to, and, and, and. When I talk to people that are just starting out, I try, I tend not to work with startups because, again, it's not, it's not, I don't believe in startups. I just think sometimes I've, I've worked with startups in the past who've worked for big companies. They go into a startup mode. And they have that sort of almost like entitled, they feel like they're entitled. And it's well, no, you're a scrappy startup and you are not Heineken, or you're not sort of like some big, big, big, multinational brand. You know you are a small brand new startup. You have to almost go back to the beginning and start again, like playing snakes, snake snakes and ladders. You've gone back to the beginning and you've gotta start working your way through that. And you've gotta put in the reps, right? You can't just expect to kinda get to that point. Your, your skills and expertise will enable you to pull a go to market strategy out better than, than a lot of people. But, you're still actually in that position where, you're, you're going back to the beginning and starting again, right? that, that's always the thing that I find. Like I said, it grinds my gaze and I, and I, I always see these people that saying, I help my clients get millions of views, and then they, the post that they put it up on has got like 15 views or 20 views. It's well, you should use some of that skill and magic source that you've got to kinda do stuff on your own things, right? Because clearly that's not evidenced by, by what you've done for yourself, right? So it's always difficult to make claims that you can't really back up.

Michelle Thames:00:09:27

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jim Banks:00:09:29

so when you got laid off, right? So you, you, you're a bit like me. I got, I started my own entrepreneurial journey because I got laid off three times in 18 months and I just thought, you know what, screw this. I don't want to do this again. I don't want to work for somebody else and have somebody else dictating my future. I believed in myself, my own abilities, and that was like. 99 and I've been doing it ever since. what was it about your journey that made you fired you up to take that step?

Michelle Thames:00:09:57

Yes, and that's super inspiring. And every time I hear entrepreneurs say that they've been doing this a while, it gives me the inspiration to keep going and motivation. So yes, I was fired from my job in 2016 and at that time I had started a blog, a beauty blog, and a a blo, a lead blog and a YouTube channel. And when I got fired I said, you know what? I bet you that I could actually go all in on this. I can do some freelance writing. I can work with brands and I can really make an income for myself. And so I leaned back on my passions. I leaned back on my blog. I started having having companies reach out to want to pay me. To have space on my blog to do different brand deals. And so being an influencer wasn't even a thing back in 2009 when I started. And so just to see the evolution of content creation being an influencer evolve, it's very exciting. and at that time I actually don't even have, a degree in marketing. So I'm completely self-taught. My degree is actually in health administration and. At the time I was going to a lot of events and just meeting other people in the industry, and I met this woman who had a hair care business and she was just starting up and she needed someone to do her social media and hired me. I was able to help that brand get to over 500,000 on Instagram alone, and also to just build their social media foundation. So that was just motivation for me to be like, okay, well now. You've done all this freelance work, you've helped other people in their business do this too. And then I said, oh, I bet you I could do this for more people. And so that's when I branched off and started my media company and it's been, amazing ever since. And so I, like you said, bet on myself, right? I really love the time freedom. I have a 11-year-old daughter. I've been married 11 years, and it is just. So amazing to be able to wake up every day and do podcast episodes like this. This morning I was on the phone with some sponsors for my events and so it looks different every day, what I do, right? But being able to create an income for my family, me and my husband work together, and just to be able to do that is just amazing. And so entrepreneurship may not be for everybody, but I believe that. I was fired from my job for a reason, and I am going all in on this. And just again, to hear stories like yours that you've been doing this for a very long time just keeps me inspired. So that is how I got to where I am today.

Jim Banks:00:12:32

The, the thing that, again, I always say to people, look. When I first start, 'cause people say, wow, you're really smart to have been in the industry as long as you have, right? And I'm like, yeah. And in the time that I've been doing it, YouTube have started, Facebook started, right? All, all these massive billion dollar companies have started and done well. And I'm like, why didn't I think of them? Why didn't I think of YouTube? Why didn't I think of Facebook? But, again, I I look at it and go back in the day, I mean, in, I guess in 99, 2000. I would probably say in, in total, in the whole world, there was probably 2000 people that worked in digital marketing full-time. Made a full-time living from digital marketing. I think it's quite interesting, back in the day it was, again, it was a bit like the wild west, and, and everyone wanted to, to do well. And, and you, you hear about this sort of side hustle culture. Now everyone's got a side hustle, right? So back then, I called it moonlighting. Everyone wanted to run their own business, but they wanted you to pay them while they ran their own sort of side business. And, and I, and I was very conflicted about, whether you, whether you should do that or not, right? I mean, I think if I was gonna do it now, if I looked at my sort of. 20 year younger self, I'd probably go, yeah, I'd be, I'd probably be okay with that. And in some respects I'd probably support people doing that. 'cause it helps to maybe potentially bring new skills and expertise to the agency that we necessarily don't have now. It could be, I'm gonna learn coding or I'm gonna learn, now chat prompts and things like that. Things that, that, didn't exist back then. Whereas now they're, they're doing it. and again, I think, I think Google have. Always like for, for all the time that I've worked with Google, I've worked with with them since the day they started advertising products in, in total, they always had every single person that worked in Google could spend 20% of their work time. So that's one day a week on a sort of private project. So it wasn't like they had to work five days a week, nine till six or seven or whatever. they, they could spend one day a week on a side project. I think some of the, the kind of best things that Google have, have come up with, have come up from, engineers that kind of came up with an idea and worked on it on the side, and then brought it back to the table and said, look, I, I built this, what do you think? And they went, yeah, love. It's great. let's roll that out. And, if they didn't do that, if they didn't support people to learn things on, on. On their own, on their own dime if you like, or not so much. They, they were still being paid, but they were able to learn something that was outside of the scope of their job. I think it's quite interesting in the UK here, Google had a partner program. It was very small. When they first opened an office here, they had two people working in basically the dungeon. I mean, it was like a basement, no windows. Bit like my office now, no windows. they had two people they pleaded with me to spend money with them. And I'm like, well, not really sure. so I did and, and they morphed into what they are now. but what was quite interesting is in, in the sort of pre IPO Google, I think they, I'm, I wanna say they. The IPO in 2005, something like that. But the sort of pre IPO Googlers were very different people than the Post IPO Googlers. The pre IPO Googlers were very friendly, amenable. We used to go out socializing a lot and and it was great. I mean, I, I, I loved the people I worked with and interestingly enough that the, the girl that was our rep. Looking after us. she was the first person to be employed by Google here in the UK to, to basically go off and, and have a baby, right? So she went and got pregnant and, had a baby and came back from maternity leave. And, and in the end, like she, she basically resigned because she was feeling guilty about. Going home at six o'clock, which was the time that they were expected to go home to go and spend time with her daughter. And, and that that wasn't, Google weren't piling, the pressure on her colleagues weren't piling the pressure on. She just felt right. It wasn't really something that she could do. And I'm guessing that that's probably the, the root that a lot of female entrepreneurs. Have taken to get to where they are now. They don't feel they can balance the, being a wife, being a mother, as well as, being a, a sort of committed employee working for a big company and, expected to put the grind in, do 75, 80 hours a week. So they go, okay, I'll just dumb down my expectations a little bit and just take something and. Do something for me. And, and, and that's what they've done, and they've taken their expertise and skill from the job that they had and translated that into, in some cases, some hugely successful businesses. Which, again, I'm, I'm, I'm such a fan of women that have taken that step. So they're still. A wife, they're still a mother, right? But they can also run a successful business if they get their support ecosystem in place. And as you say, you, you and your husband work together, right? You have a daughter together, you support her together. and that's the way it should be. I think, it should be mentioned, support their, their wives just as much as the wife should support their husbands. And, but equally they should always put their family first, right? I've always said my, I, I love my clients to bits, right? I, I've got the clients I work with, they're a small group of very, they, they, they're like very close friends of mine now, right? As a result of the, the relationship we built up over time. but they know like my, I've got a family, I've got, wife, children, grandkids, right? And, some from time to time it'll be like, I'm just gonna go and focus on them, right? It mean it's summer holidays now here in the uk, right? So my wife's gone to Malta with. Two of my grandkids and I'm here in the uk, still working. I'm fine with that. I mean, but, but that was something that we discussed together and we agreed that that's what would happen. And, and she's gone ahead and done that. But, she said, look, you need to come, I would've gone. And, and that's, just something that I, I always say you need to educate your clients. whenever I go to a trade show, I always say to my clients, look. I'm gonna a trade show. I'm probably gonna be very slow in responding to anything, but you know, if you need me, call me. You've got my cell number. Call me if it's urgent, right? If not, that's when I'm back in the office and I'll pick things up at that point and they're like, fine. Great. There you are done. but I think a lot of it is like, again, you need to, to. have a, have the ability to be able to be that sort of assertiveness and, and put it forward and, and educate your clients. Because I think a lot of, a lot of people hate working with the clients they have, right? Because they've just focused on chasing money rather than, finding somebody that they can really support. And how, how do you how do you deal with that sort of situation?

Michelle Thames:00:18:48

Yes. No, I definitely agree. It's, it's about the quality clients, right? Really working. With people, like you said, developing relationships. I am 100%. All in on relationship building and honestly don't wanna work with clients who I can't build a relationship with. I want to be this work to be meaningful and for it to matter. And so if I'm just a transaction, then you know, it's not as beneficial to either one of us, right? I want to build those genuine relationships, help you reach your goals, and then how can we continue to collaborate together, And Share what we're doing with the world. And yes, I totally agree with you. Not just doing this for the money. the money is great, but this is passion. This is something because I know what it feels like to be fired, to have skills and to not want to go to work for somebody else. So if I can help any woman leverage her skills and do that for her own business, great. Even if you don't wanna quit your job, because I understand I'm not the person to tell people to quit their jobs or anything like that, but. You can absolutely build a business from your skills, from what you love to do. I think you have to be passionate about your business or it probably won't work. There's so many times that I've wanted to give up in this, this space. I mean, just a few weeks ago I had something happen and it was a very transformational situation in my whole business. And I say, you know what? I love this though, so I'm gonna keep going. Like this may be a bump in the road for right now. Once I get over this hurdle, I'm gonna see why that had to happen. And so every LI wanna say lost is actually a lesson. It was a lesson in that. And so I'm going to keep going. I'm going to, keep moving forward. And I just think you have to love what you do to be able to do that. There's so many entrepreneurs just chasing the next dollar, but do you actually love what you're doing? Every day that I close my computer, I feel fulfilled to know. Wow. I give my all today to my clients, to my online community, to, at this webinar, on this podcast episode. And when I close my computer today, I'll say, well, job well done, right? Because I'm super passionate and I actually love what I do. So yes, to everything that you said, let's not do it for the money. Let's do it because this is what our passions are and what we wanna help people, right? We wanna yell to the mountaintops, our missions, and who we serve. And so that's what I do it for. It's not about the money. It is about. The connections, the relationships, other things that come from what I'm doing besides the money. Again, while it's great, we don't wanna be doing work for free, right? But it's just really not all about that.

Jim Banks:00:21:29

Yeah, and it's, I think it's, again, I, I think if you, if you look at, the one thing I've always said to everyone that's involved in businesses. The one thing that's absolutely guaranteed is things are gonna change, right? There's always going to be change, right? Sometimes that will be changed for the better, and sometimes it will be changed for the worse, right? I mean, we, I, I've been, I went through the sort of.com boom and bust in 2000. I went through the financial crisis in 2008, right? We, we had obviously COVID, there's, there's been so many sort of things where you've, you've had to. stop, regroup, pivot sometimes, and try a different tack and, and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. And I think a lot of people would just collapse and go, oh, it's all done. It's all we're done for, it's finished. and I think, you, you just need, again, you just need to be versatile. Be nimble, think, think differently. Have that community to talk to people that you can go and bounce ideas off. 'cause again, sometimes you'll find, you sit with three people on a call, somebody will say, I'm, I'm doing this. And, and people will go, what's that? You tell 'em about it. Go, wow. Mind blowing. and I, and I'm, I'm always amazed at how, the things that you think are really easy are really easy because you've been doing them for a long time. Whereas for other people, they have never seen these things before. And they go, that's just like mind blowing. And, and I, and I think that the reality of it is that, that, there's always gonna be people that are worse off than you. And there's always gonna be people that are better off than you and better than you at doing things. And I've, I've always said, you, you should always defer. You ne you're never the, the, the. The expert and, and you, you should be always open to learning things. I mean, that's the, the thing that I've really enjoyed about the, probably the last three to five years is the, the constant change and the constant learning. I mean, we're in this situation now where everyone's using AI for everything and chat GPT and clawed and, and I'm like, you. Th those are not in and of themselves. They, they'll help a lot. But in some respects, I'm using chat GPT and Claude and things like that to take the things that are repetitive and boring off my plate to enable me to do the things that I want to be doing with the clients that I'm working with. And, that, that sort of thing. again, it's, it, I've seen people that, that, they take a podcast episode and they'll throw it into Notebook LA and create this sort of. Horrible sounding, podcast with two people and, and it just sounds awful, right? But great. If people wanna do that, knock themselves out, fine. one of the things I've noticed that there's a lot of people trying to become faceless YouTube creators, right? So they're not putting their face behind the project. They're just trying to, grab a script from somewhere. Spin it through some cycle and spin it out with some B roll, and that becomes their YouTube channel, right? And I'm like, again, I, I, I just don't see, apart from the money, I can't really see what's in it for them to do that. Doesn't make any sense why people would do that, but some people are making a lot of money through faceless YouTube, but they're the people that ultimately are a bit like the, the, in the gold digging world, the, the kind of people that made the money. Were selling the picks and the shovels and the, the, things, not the actual people looking for the gold. So I think there's a lot of people that have built tools to help people build these faceless channels. They're the ones that are making lots of money, right? By hyping things up. Telling you things that are clearly not true and and then. Saying you can get the same experience. And I don't think that, I think, a lot of people when they go into business in any way, they need to have a a bit of a reality check when they go into it as to what's involved in doing this. And if they're then still prepared to do it, then that's I guess where people like yourself can come in and say, Now we can take this and transform you into the the person that you want to become, right? But you know, these are the steps that you need to go through. I've always said you need to put people into a uncomfortable position before you can take them outta that uncomfortable position and walk them forward. They need to understand some of the implications of the decisions that they're gonna make, right? And then once they've made those decisions, they can then go forward. Saving the knowledge that, you've got their back, you'll look after them, you'll make sure that they're okay. And that's where I think, somebody like yourself can really add huge amounts of value, right? Because you can help people from putting their hand through a grinder or something like that.

Michelle Thames:00:25:44

Absolutely.

Jim Banks:00:25:46

Michelle, you, you are, you are a, a, a, an award-winning podcast. So when I looked at your podcast before you came on, you had something like 550 episodes, which was amazing. I noticed that they're small bite-sized episodes that you make. why did you kind of like opt on for small bite-size rather than, long-winded like video podcast like I do?

Michelle Thames:00:26:06

Yeah. at the time I didn't see. Any women. There was a few women who had marketing podcasts, but there weren't a lot of women who had marketing podcasts. And the other thing that I noticed was there were, their podcast episodes were long, I am a straight shooter, straight to the point type of person. And I said, you know what? What if I created this podcast and it was like three to five minutes long and I just give bite-sized information every episode. Now, I do have interviews and I do try to keep my guest interviews to 20 minutes or less, and so I have to prep my guests sometimes and say, okay, let's have those. Great value answers, but quick to the point. And I started off doing it like that. Once I started getting feedback from people, they were saying, oh wow, I really love how this podcast is super short. It's straight to the point, but I get those nuggets that I could implement right now and see results. And Once I started seeing that people really were taking well to it, I just kept consistent with that. I've been podcasting since 2020, so during the height of the pandemic I said, you know what? I'm gonna start this podcast and I'm gonna be consistent. And most recently I have attempted. A podcast a day. And so what I do is I just batch record a bunch of solo episodes. I have about 20 guest episodes already recorded this year that I need to edit and post, but I think that I'm pretty much set up to be able to finish out the rest of the year with a podcast every day. And so I'm really excited about that. And yeah, the reason that I created these short episodes is just. You could listen in the morning, you could listen on the way taking your kids to school. You could listen at the gym, you could listen, while you're in the bathroom and just get those, quick dose of information and be able to implement and see results. And so 550 plus episodes later of social media decoded. I am so excited about what's to come. But yeah, that's why I decided to do the short episode.

Jim Banks:00:28:03

Yeah, it's funny, I, I, I've been, I've been a, a fan of, there's a lady that runs a, a, a. Podcast. I think I, I, I wanna say it's a podcast. I think she's like a live streamer. She runs a podcast called Stream like a boss tv. Her name's Tanya Smith based in Atlanta, and she, she's incredible at live stream. I, I'm recording this. I'll chop it up and get it all ready. She just presses go live and go streams. All over the place. And interestingly enough, one of the places that she's doubling down on now is Substack. And Substack was, has been around for a long time, right? They just raised, I think a hundred million dollars, of, of funding to take them forward to the next level. and what's been really interesting for me, understanding kind of their whole ecosystems, I think a lot of people assume that. Substack was all for basically creative writers, right? And, and people that wrote, and, and obviously people like Tanya, another guy called Jim Fs, they opened my eyes to the, the potential that, that you have. And you can obviously post your podcast on there, right? So it's another sort of string to your bow. You, you have a database. You don't have to pay for an email list. So every time you put an episode out, whoever's subscribing to your. Your, your substack right will basically get notification of the fact that there's a new episode out. And the open rates and click through rates is really, I mean, the engagement's phenomenal. and I think a lot of people are waking up to the fact that. Substack is being used for other purposes, right? So they have audio streams, a bit like Twitter spaces, I think needs to be. they've got, the, the kind of live streaming. So again, you can kinda stream live if you want to. what you found is that a lot of the, the kind of the CNN anchors people like Don Lemon, Jim Acosta, they left. Kind of CNN obviously Don Lemon left and, and bidder tail between his legs. but he's become like a big deal. On, on, on Substack. Jim Acosta's become a big deal on Substack. They have a subscriber model, so people pay to subscribe, to get. Content that isn't available to everyone. So there's tiering in there. And a lot of people are using Substack as a, as a route for them to sell digital products. promote like live events and things like that. And, and I'm, I'm always amazed at how, there, there's people that, that come to your, come into your world that you don't know before, and you go, wow, this is opening up. so all of a sudden you've got like a whole new opportunity potentially for you to get in a very early stage To capitalize on something, that will just, again, I just think I can't see Substack doing anything other than growing pretty rapidly. And I didn't know if you had, you'd had the, opportunity to have a look at Substack at all.

Michelle Thames:00:30:34

Yes, I did. But as you're saying this, I have so many ideas I get, I am subscribed to a few people's substack, and I could actually see myself doing like a subscription because I have been thinking about what exclusive content I can offer to my community. And a private podcast has been one of those things, obviously, I love podcasting, but I could actually use substack. As part of my private podcast to have the people subscribe to that. And so my wheels are turning. And so after this, I'm writing down Subec in my notebook right now to take a look because how can I implement that in my current business? And so I am grateful that you said that because I've been looking into it and I want to be able to do that. So I think it's a great class.

Jim Banks:00:31:21

apart from me, obviously the first person you need to follow on Substack is Tanya Smith Stream, like a boss tv. She, honestly, she's, she's very. open, honest, Frank again, she talks about some of the things that had gone on. I mean, she had a period of time when she had, multiple deaths in her family. And, she's very open about them, shared them, but she, she makes a point. I'm gonna go, I'm still gonna go live streaming. she's got incredible audio, video, visuals, and, but equally she uses herself as a bit of a Guinea pig. So there's new stuff. She, she's got people filling in like a sort of chat show, So she's using some tools to kinda get people doing that. So she's helping to Punch through the ceiling of what the capable, what the platform's capable of doing. Which for me, again, like as soon as I get a notification that Tanya's live, I'm like, if I can, I mean, the problem is because she's in, Atlanta, Quite often she'll go live at seven o'clock at night, which is midnight ish for me. So I tend to watch her on catch up, but I, I would love to Interact with her live when I, when I'm able to, and I, I, I do try and do that. So she always brings people from the, from the conversation. So I can post a comment on her live stream when she's there and she'll call you out. She'll put the, the kind of comment on the screen, right? So get the community engaged in it so it becomes not just about the actual. The, the, the live stream, it's about the community that's there. And a lot of people will meet other people through that community, through the fact that they're all they have a shared interest in wanting to know what Tanya's talking about. So for me, I think, like I said, I think it's just great that, she does that.

Michelle Thames:00:32:52

Yeah. No, that's awesome. I'll be checking out Substack

Jim Banks:00:32:55

Good. so Michelle, this has been fantastic. I've really, really loved getting to talk to you. for anyone that's like a, a, a, an aspiring entrepreneur, I can see nobody better than yourself to go and talk to. So obviously, all your contact details will be available in the show notes and all your. information, your bio and, and everything else. it just remains for me to say thank you so much for being such a phenomenal guest. if you're listening on a podcast episode, Follow. Share. that's the best way you can tell me you like the content by doing that. but interestingly enough, I posted something the other day. I had a new consulting client that I picked up. He didn't like my videos, didn't comment on them, didn't share them, didn't engage in any way, just hit me up directly and said, love your content. Love to talk to you about doing some consulting for me. So not everyone is going to be somebody that kind of interacts with whatever you put out there, right? They'll find a way to to talk to you if you put good content out there, right? So if you do nothing else, other than that, doesn't matter what. Please you gi give to people to say, like my stuff, the best thing you can do to get people to, engage and come back is to put good content out there. it just like I said, Michelle, I I, I've listened to a lot of your podcast episodes that you, you have a subscriber in me 'cause I'm, I'm just in that ecosystem. and I would love for other people that, that, that are watching or listening to, to do likewise. So thank you again for being such a great guest.

Michelle Thames:00:34:16

Oh, thank you for having me. This was awesome and I can't wait to connect with everyone.

Jim Banks:00:34:20

Super.