Episode 6: Is the Storyteller the Most Influential Person in the Room?

Wendy Wilburn 00:00
Trust only comes when you’re having the same messaging over and over and over as a brand. Trust only comes between two people when I stay consistent over and over and over as a person. So my advice to people who are considering becoming a chief fractional or are already in it. Just stay consistent with what you’re doing and stick to your guns about what you believe and your frameworks that you know are effective. Because I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten older in life that most people don’t know what they’re talking about, and so be the one person in the room who does and stick to your guns.

Randi Beth Burton 00:51
Welcome everyone. Welcome to the Atlas Rose Podcast. Today’s conversation is one that I’ve been looking forward to, we’ve been looking forward to. We have Wendy Wilburn with us. She is a fractional CMO, a StoryBrand guide, a business builder, a storyteller, founder of Windustry, her own fractional practice, and she is out there doing the work in the trenches with her clients, making things happen, and that’s exactly why we wanted her here. We are going to talk shop. We’re going to talk about what this work actually feels like, the wins, the weight of it, the leadership side of it, and really what it takes to build something that’s sustainable in the fractional world. Wendy, we’re genuinely honored to know you and excited to pick your brain a bit today. Thank you for joining.

Wendy Wilburn 01:44
Thank you. Well, I’m looking forward to this. I love good conversations with smart people.

Randi Beth Burton 01:49
Wendy, I’ll just kind of toss it to you. Can you give us just a bit of your background? You can go totally professional or tell us personal things too. We love that.

Wendy Wilburn 01:59
I’ll give you a little combo, a little poopoo trick. So I am a native Texan born and raised here in Dallas, and got an economics degree down in UT Austin, and came right back home. But my my story is a little bit different in from my career perspective, in that I learned at a young age, actually, I was 14, I learned the power of entrepreneurship versus having a job, so while all of my friends were babysitting and hostessing at Bennigan’s, now I’ve dated myself and those kinds of things, I when I became a high school freshman cheerleader, I realized that, as I had the cheerleading, well, first of all, here in Texas, football is religion and Sunday school is cheerleading, so they’re kind of hand in hand. So, but behind me were a bunch of girls in eighth grade, seventh grade, sixth grade, fifth grade, who were trying out every spring also, and needed coaches.

Wendy Wilburn 03:11
So I started in 1983 charging $50 an hour for private cheer classes and between my freshman year of high school and going off to college, I had five figures worth of savings from teaching these cheer classes, so I learned again, the power of entrepreneurship, but I also didn’t learn until later in my adulthood, the power of leveraging others to where you know what I had done when I was 14 was created a job for myself. I hadn’t really built a business. So there’s a lesson in that that we can touch on later also. But anyway, went down to UT, got an economics degree, came back right back home to Dallas. But during my senior year of college, I started a marketing consulting firm, traditional marketing and PR firm, because the economy was horrible. It was Desert Storm, my friends who had very high GPAs were not getting jobs, so I did not have a high GPA. I had a lot of fun down at UT and barely graduated, so there was no hope for me.

Wendy Wilburn 03:11
So I started a company, and looked up eight years later, right as the internet was coming online, ’97 ’98 and realized that marketing was going to go the direction of the internet, that that was going to be the way that you could actually give data and statistics and actual actionable business insights around your marketing through the Internet where you’re as you couldn’t with traditional advert. In public relations, you can, you can make an estimate of how many people pick up a print magazine, but do they go to page 47 and look at your ad? That’s the right quarter page of the ad, and then do they call the one 800 number? And do you actually get a customer from that? There’s no tracking that.

Wendy Wilburn 03:44
And so that realization led me to convert the traditional marketing consulting company to a web design, website build company, and I ran that for a couple of years and sold that to what used to be called Internet service providers before AT&T and Verizon and T Mobile got into the game. There were separate companies that were the internet service providers, like AOL was one of the biggest ones. That’s not who I sold my business to, but I sold it to one that was based here in Dallas, because I thought I needed to be a grown up and go and get a real job with a title and an office in corporate America. What you do when you’re 2728 years old. So that’s what I did, and that started kind of my journey across the rest of my career, which has been in and out of corporate America from a consulting perspective.

Wendy Wilburn 03:44
So I’ve spent time at firms like Accenture valtech. There’s a company here based in Dallas called briarland partners. I’ve either been in those companies then consulting to everything from Fortune 50 to Fortune 5000 or running my own independent consulting firm, like I’m doing now, but always from the lens of Digital Strategy, digital marketing, digital brand, and how to translate that online. And so I ran across or picked up Donald Miller’s first book, his StoryBrand framework, a few years ago, and just totally was overwhelmed with a the resonance of that book with me in the idea of taking marketing 180. Most people in talking about their businesses, they’re all I, me, mine and we sentences. It’s all about their company, what they do, the services that they provide, etc.

Wendy Wilburn 03:44
And to have someone like Donald Miller come out and say, You’re doing it wrong. You’re not talking to the customer and their pain point and what? Why should they care? That was a an aha moment for me. And so I was completely sold on his framework and his platform and his positioning, to the point where, this time last year, I got the StoryBrand certification and am now a certified story brand workshop and programmatic delivery of that marketing structure into clients.

Wendy Wilburn 03:44
So I do that. And then I also, because of my time within Accenture and firms like that, I roll that into a digital strategy workshop. So I don’t just do the StoryBrand and then say, Okay, here’s how you need to talk to your customers. I then take that a step further and say, Okay, here’s how you need to be talking to your audience, on your website, in your email, in your social posts, when your CEO goes and speaks at a Keynote or a conference, you know these are the things that you need to be saying. This is what’s resonating with your audience, and here’s how you position yourself as the guide rather than the hero in the story.

Monica Spieles 03:44
Gosh, I’m like babysitting.I don’t know, $5 an hour is what probably my rate was. I wish I would have done wasn’t a cheerleader, but I would have loved a $50 an hour rate. Man, that’s called 10-xing right out of the gate. That’s amazing.

Wendy Wilburn 03:44
I think what I love about your story, Wendy, and when we met a few months back and we had our conversation, what I just love about your story is that you’ve got a little bit of everything. In terms of experience, you’ve got a little bit of everything. I mean, everything from from working in the biggest businesses to the some of the smallest, business and in between, to running your own, to selling your company to and all that before you were 27 Yeah, and then everything in between on that. And it’s just really cool. Where do you find the most joy in all of that? And and I know you’ve chosen a path now, obviously, in your your firm in that. And I’m just curious where, that joy, in terms of all that experience, where does that really sit now?

Wendy Wilburn 09:45
So my joy really comes when my clients have that aha moment of, oh my gosh, we have been sitting here. Wah wah wah wah wah. You know, Charlie Brown’s teacher. Into the screaming and spitting into the ocean and not getting anywhere, and then when they have that realization of, oh, if we just double down, triple down all the way in on this is our client’s problem. Here’s how our product or service solves that problem, and just the light bulb that goes off when I watch them realize, wow, our company is more than just this pen.

Wendy Wilburn 10:33
This pen is meeting in the hand of a poet is mind boggling. This pen in the hand of a composer can make people cry and move them to tears. This pen is a piece of plastic, and it writes on paper, and it’s disposable, and eventually the ink is going to run out of it and we’re going to toss it into a landfill. But the potential of this pen, and the emotionality that can come out of this pen, that’s where I get this just high off of watching a client realize that their product, even though it could be as boring as this pen, has this capability to be so much more In the world and make a difference in the world.

Monica Spieles 11:23
Oftentimes, I think we’ve, we’ve experienced that in the way of reminding the aha moment is, is the founder or the owner remembering or being reminded of why they started the business in the first place? And they got into just believing that all they were doing is selling pens, when, in fact, actually their first vision and whole, you know, mission was to equip composers, to equip poets, whatever that may be, you know. So it’s, I love that moment that you’re right. I’m doing this is not, this is not a J-O-B that I created, you know, it’s actually, it was a business I built to fulfill a mission and a purpose, and that can be lost so easily. So I love that we’ve seen those tears every once in a while that come from those moments.

Branden O'Neil 12:10
Wendy, you know our audience, our primary audience on this show, are other fractional CMOS, and so a lot of what we like to talk about here, and what we like to talk about with you is the business side of things. So, like, your story is just perfect for for folks that are trying to do something similar yourself, right as yourself. And so they’re going to come alongside your story, find themselves in it, and it’s they’re going to find it inspiring. A couple things that I find inspiring are one, I asked you, what brings you joy? And you literally lit up. And you’re a joyful person anyways, but you literally lit up, and when you were talking about that light bulb moment and things like that.

Branden O'Neil 12:50
And so I think, to the audience, I would just like to say, if you find yourself in burnout, remember the why, right? There’s a lot of fractionals out there that are just, they’re just burned out because difficult clients. It’s extremely, extremely difficult to run a fractional business and serve clients at the same time. There’s lots of reasons for that, but if we forget, it’s really easy to disconnect ourselves from why we’re doing this in the first place, and to chase the joy, you know, and that’s why I just love I love that. And so that’s inspiring. And so again, to the audience, if you don’t find yourself lighting up when you talk about why you do this, like we just saw Wendy, do, you might need to get in touch with your why. Again, you might need to think about it. Maybe you’ve never thought about it before, right? This isn’t just a way to make money. This is a way to spark joy in yourself and other people.

Branden O'Neil 13:45
So and another thing I saw in your story is that I think is lacking in the industry, a lot are folks that are willing to roll up their sleeves, right? So I think that there’s a lot of of framework pushers, maybe or or bag a trick folks, or wing it type of people that go out there and and they do their thing and say, good luck with that, right? So we often say, you know, they come in kick your puppy and say, good luck with that. So what I hear, what I’m hearing from you, and where a lot of your success is coming from, is that you’re you roll up your sleeves. It doesn’t mean that you have to do all the tactics, but it does mean that we walk along with them. So I don’t know if you want to talk a little bit more about that. I was thinking like about your workshop and the way that you just kind of are.

Wendy Wilburn 14:34
So it’s, I think you have to walk along with them. But the advantage that you provide, in my opinion, as a fractional is that you’re not completely in the forest. You have the ability to to have that, you know, somewhat outsider view, or viewpoint, to where you can offer because they’re in it. And they are in the spaghetti bowl, and your ability to be outside of that and provide a different perspective is really where the in my opinion, it’s where your compensation comes from. Like you’re not when you pay for me as a fractional CMO, you’re not paying me for what I’m doing today.

Wendy Wilburn 15:23
Right now, you’re paying me for the fact that I learned the lesson back in 1997 about fill in the blank, or what I learned in 2001 when planes hit towers and the entire, you know, our entire ecosystem of business collapsed and had to be rebuilt. You’re paying for that, and also for the creativity of different I have things that I apply to clients today, that I applied to clients back in the early 2000s that are in completely different industries. It’s funny how the pain point or the solution is the pain point on the customer is similar, and therefore the solution and the messaging can be similar.

Wendy Wilburn 16:14
And yet I’m talking about T Mobile versus a nonprofit client that I had. And that there can’t be two things that were more different, but yet, the solutioning from from my brain and the points of similarity that came together for me was to T mobile’s advantage back then, but was to this, this nonprofit’s advantage just three years ago. So, so I agree with you, Branden, that it is you’re you are walking alongside them, but only enough you don’t get sucked into their vortex of the way that they are looking at things. You have to, you have to be somewhat removed, because that’s what you’re really getting paid for.

Randi Beth Burton 16:59
Yeah, that’s really good Wendy, that’s something that’s that would be advantageous to all of us to be able to articulate when bringing on a new client. Because you get you get sometimes you’ll get pushback if you’re not in the industry of whatever it is like, so you have not helped this particular manufacturer do this thing before. Then why would I hire you? And it’s that perspective that is actually really valuable. When Branden, when you were talking about Wendy lighting up in her at her joy, I think that’s something we get to see with our clients, too. And that’s what you said, brings you joy, the aha moment, because we get to step in, into this spot, and we either we’re doing brand standards and we’re talking about who your ideal target customer is, or we’re doing a StoryBrand framework and we’re talking about what problems you solve that business owner hasn’t talked about that day in and day out with their staff, probably in a little while, and they forget why they do what they do, and they start to have that joy come back up of like, what we do really matters, and I love that we get to kind of sit at that intersection and have that conversation. But it’s that conversation that we’re having with multiple clients across multiple industries that makes us effective, because it it translates across multiple industries. It’s not it allows us to be effective no matter who it is that we’re serving.

Wendy Wilburn 18:28
Absolutely and you have to be the one that leads people to those realizations, because otherwise, if you’re talking to one manufacturer, and who’s trying, who’s trying to say, Okay, we’re trying to decide whether we’re going to hire you or not, Randi, and they’re a manufacturing firm. What have you done for other manufacturing firms? Okay, well, the end of that conversation is price. It all becomes a conversation about price. And when the conversation becomes about price, it’s a race to the bottom. Who’s going to get there faster? Who’s going to be Walmart? And then hate their life because they became Walmart. Not that I don’t like Walmart. I was in Walmart yesterday. I’m just saying it becomes so cutthroat that it takes the joy out of what your business is at all. You have to find a way to communicate the the way that you are unique, and you have to convey that emotionality, that connectiveness with your target customer, so that they feel like you’re in it with them together. That’s what creates loyalty and brand advocacy, is that co-identity that happens. It’s a very powerful force.

Monica Spieles 19:51
Back to the industry conversation. The one thing that’s really I think people forget is that when they find so much value in. Having someone from the industry be their their expert, they forget that that comes with the same bag of trip tricks that everyone else is using, and so you’re really not differentiating yourself at all. Go further into it, let’s say you do end up getting to be the outsider that comes in. We get to experience that over and over and over, still, just because we’re in doesn’t mean we’re we’re in. There’s always a battle about, well, that’s not how the industry does it. That’s not how we’ve done it. This is, you know, you’re, you’re the challenger, and that’s a really good thing. That’s a lot of times good management will recognize that’s what they hired you to do. They want you to challenge them in that regard. But other than facing those being the outsider constantly. What is something, Wendy, that you’ve experienced as it takes more energy to manage a client or to be in that seat than people probably realize when working with clients?

Wendy Wilburn 20:54
I think it’s the fact that you have to become somewhat of a psychologist or a psychiatrist, a little bit because people really do not want to change. I mean, even the fear of change and the desire to hang on to the devil you know, rather than risk it with the devil you don’t, is a powerful force, and it keeps companies stuck. It keeps people stuck in relationships that there that aren’t serving them anymore. And it takes bravery. It takes bravery to jump out there and do something different, and especially if you’re talking about a public company with stockholders and a board, and what have you done for me this quarter mentality? That’s a that’s a big it’s, it’s, it’s a huge thing to shift a brand front to a customer-centric mind set, from a product-centric mindset, and if you don’t have that leadership from the top, like a Steve Jobs type of leader, it’s it’s extremely tough, especially when you’re the expedient outsider that once you say the one time too many. Hey guys, you aren’t talking about the customer anymore. You’re talking about yourselves again. They’re like, okay, Wendy, bye, bye. We’re done. We’re done with you. We’ve heard it enough. We’re done there.

Monica Spieles 22:32
It’s that reminder that just because they accepted change one time doesn’t mean they’re they’re bought into every single time it is, it’s you find yourself having that same conversation over and over, having to remind the goal and the road that they’re on that they chose, even though it’s not really what they wanted. They knew they had to choose it. That is a big challenge, I find, because you because you want to get into operation of we’ve got momentum now. We know the road ahead. Here’s how we keep going. But you hit roadblock, roadblock, roadblock, because it’s re-educating, re pitching, reminding that team that this is this is what we’re choosing to do, and not having to sell it over and over and over again. It’s hard. It’s hard.

Wendy Wilburn 23:17
I’ve gotten to where, when I do story brand workshops, especially if it’s like a group of people, and we’re live and I’m up in front of a whiteboard, and we get to that aha moment I’ve gotten to where now I literally whip out my phone and take pictures of the people, because I have to remind them of their faces. They they’re lighting up like, you know, two months later, when we’re in the middle of budget review time. You know it, it’s like, Wait a minute. Do you remember how this felt? Do you remember how you went, Man, that’s something we can get sink our teeth into. That’s something our sales people can get excited about that’s something that our customer service reps don’t feel like idiots trying to discount, discount, discount, you know, I I’ve gotten to where I do that to remind them, and then if they still want to, you know, cut short my contract with them, then that’s fine. It’s their choice. And I tell them, good luck. Because clearly, the you know, it’s I it’s almost a Dr.Phil moment, you know, how’s that working for you? You know, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re going to keep getting what you’ve always got. And so when we look at trying something else.

Branden O'Neil 24:36
I love the so we’ve been talking around this subject a lot, and then I love what you said about we can walk with them, but we can’t be in the trees with them. We have to have a wider perspective. It’s really hard in our role, especially as we want long-term relationships, to find that balance right. Because if we’re too far in the weeds with them, then we’re we’re probably being irrelevant, or certainly we’re not fulfilling our role of being able to look out and having that greater perspective. If we’re too far out, then we’re just an outsider, and we’re being irrelevant because we don’t understand the business in their minds, right in their minds. And so that balance of being a leader within the organization, but still able to look out across the horizon, that’s a tough balance to have right.

Branden O'Neil 25:21
And then, and then also, because you’re, you’re going through the bumps and the bruises of the business at the same time as them, and we are, again, I’m going to go back into your entrepreneurial roots. I’m convinced that nobody really wants to do marketing. I’m convinced that that for entrepreneurs, marketing and sales is really just a necessary evil, because what they would really love is for their business to grow and that they didn’t have to do any marketing or sales. It just happened. But the reality is, is that they have to, but they’re already coming into it like they have to, you know, I mean, like they can kind of get with the sales folks. I get it, somebody going out and talking to people like, I get that as tangible, I understand. But then it comes to marketing, and they’ve probably been burned 20 times before by marketers, and so they already have a bad taste in their mouth, and so they’re already trying to, like, I mean, they said yes to the contract, so they’re trying to pull you in, but then they’re pushing you out, and then you’re trying to do the same thing. And it’s all really difficult. This is a difficult balance to run. I mean, have you found kind of something similar?

Wendy Wilburn 26:27
Well, I find Branden, especially with smaller businesses and startups or VC PE backed firms. I’m going to give you just a like a typical scenario, it’s a tech founder, small team develop something in somebody’s fourth bedroom, and it’s a brilliant idea, but they think they’ve invented the mouse trap that’s going to cure, cure every kind of cancer for all time, for forever. And so we don’t need to market. All we have to do is just say who we are and what we do, and we don’t need to market the world is, in fact, we don’t need to market so much, Wendy, that we’re afraid that if we hired you to actually market, it would crash our entire system, because we would have so many people beating a path to our door that it we would crash the internet so we cannot be responsible for crashing the internet, so we don’t. That’s what I hear more than anything else. Is that my can of cheese is so much better than everything else in the world. I don’t, I don’t need you, and I don’t need to tell we. Just need to say who we are and what we do. And everybody will go, oh my god, I have to have that, like, it’s the fountain of youth or, you know,

Monica Spieles 27:54
And on the flip side, it’s, it’s all these businesses that have been so successful despite anything else that they’ve they’ve just tripped over success, almost, because they did create something amazing, and people did need it, and then they stopped growing, or they started realizing, now I have to engage in something. I’ve plateaued, but I’ve only ever done word of mouth marketing. I’ve only ever just had referrals, and that’s we’ve been so successful off that so, like, why do I need to, why do I need to engage in anything different? This has always worked for us, even though they know in the back of their minds we’ve been flat the last few years and and so that’s that push and pull of, like, I kind of know I need to do something different, but we’ve always been able to 40 years, 30 years off of not doing anything in marketing, and it’s just too abstract.

Wendy Wilburn 28:46
I think you know, more people like us need to get the ear of VC firms and PE firms and say, Hey, if you’re going to invest in these businesses, you are the ones that can drive in the contracts you need to allot 50% of what we’re giving you to marketing and hiring quality marketing people and quality sales people who can get out there and tell your story properly and drive this hockey stick revenue that we expect to See. What typically happens, though, is 95% of the budget goes into, or more, they overspend in R&D, and then it’s like, okay, they don’t even have, you know, the 50 bucks to put up a GoDaddy one page, you know, something. It is like, really?

Branden O'Neil 29:41
Yes, make sure that $50 doesn’t open the floodgates, because we’ll break the internet.

Wendy Wilburn 29:49
Right, right, exactly.

Randi Beth Burton 29:52
It’s so funny. Wendy, I hadn’t, I hadn’t put words to what you said around you know that you get. The pushback of like, well, I’m not sure we could handle the floodgates that would open if you did any certain amount of marketing. And I’ve had that happen, and I almost like, kind of like that they believe I would be that good. But then I also have to say, you need to let me do this, and it’s not gonna open the floodgates like you think, like, I have to lower your expectations. It actually,

Monica Spieles 30:23
You kind of said it Wendy, it comes down to an education of what marketing actually is. And a lot of people forget what it really how it should serve, what it serves, what it is. And we expect that they know that when we go in to sell ourselves. And so there’s a meeting in the middle point that we have to remind ourselves, and it continues to happen throughout the relationship of of educating what our role is, what to expect, how we hold ourselves accountable to what you expect and what you need, because otherwise it’s like we’re we’re actually talking two different conversations, and that’s why there’s never this great win or there’s frustration if we did get the deal, and that education piece is just has been missing. It’s been missing for a long time, and it becomes a part of our vernacular always, because it’s very broad. What marketing is is very broad. And we’re not going to we’re not going to cover it in a single conversation. We’re going to continue to bring you into that throughout the relationship.

Monica Spieles 31:23
And that’s I think all marketers need to need to come away with that. We’ve learned that lesson a lot of times, is we are so convinced of what we need to do and what they need to do, but all along the road, we forget that we’re still seen as the people who are just doing business cards. And so how could we possibly be influencing a pricing strategy or go to market strategy on anything like really, where does our value sit? And so, I mean, when you have that much confidence to sell yourself at $50 an hour as a cheerleader back in the day, then you certainly now have the confidence to sell yourself at with great value for what you can do for businesses and we but we’re not seen that way, because marketing isn’t seen that way.

Wendy Wilburn 32:07
And I want to go a little deeper on that. I you know, I’ve started having a theory about it seems to me that everyone that marketing gets put last and money isn’t allotted toward it because everyone thinks they can do it. Everyone doesn’t think they’re a dentist, everyone doesn’t think they’re a lawyer, everyone doesn’t think that they’re a fireman, like there are professions that people know I don’t have that skill set. I need to hire someone or I’m going to get into legal trouble. I’m going to screw up my books and get you know the IRS is going to come after me. Like these are bad things that can happen.

Wendy Wilburn 32:53
If they don’t have good marketing, really good marketing. They think they can live without it. They think it doesn’t matter. And I think most people believe in their gut that they personally are extremely influential in their words, in their behavior. I think that we all as humans, think that we have far more power than we actually have over other people. And so therefore, I think that everyone thinks at their core that they know marketing. And so that you compound those two things, it’s that not thinking that marketing is really worth all that much, and then the fact that everyone kind of thinks that their gut that they could do it, you’ve got a recipe for it just it gets set to the back burner. It gets set aside.

Wendy Wilburn 33:46
It’s, I don’t believe, I believe that the chief marketing officer is the one c-suite position that is the least respected, because it’s fluffy, it’s creative. It has been now. It’s data driven, but traditionally it’s been, oh, you’re the logo girl, or the color palette thing, or, you know, you’re designing the booth at the conference. And yes, there are things, those are aspects of marketing, but it’s rooted in a foundation that is far more powerful and influential and actually has a direct correlative to your bottom line than a lot of people give it credit for.

Monica Spieles 34:31
Yeah, the consequences are not as tangible. Sometimes you’re so right.

Randi Beth Burton 34:36
That education piece, I think that’s something that it’s this important topic for fractional because we’ve talked to we’ve talked to some who, if you’ve been in a career in where you’re a marketing director inside an organization, you’re not necessarily having to teach everyone why you’re doing what you’re doing. You just do it, and you’re either successful or you’re. Or not. When you switch into this fractional world, you also it’s important because people either think they can do marketing or don’t really understand the foundations of why things are done the way that they are. And you have to teach it.

Randi Beth Burton 35:18
Atlas Rose began as marketing strategy coaches. That was a name before it was Atlas rose, because that’s really what we are. We’re coaches, we’re teachers, we we don’t tend to call ourselves consultants, because we don’t want to just come in and say, This is what you should do and then leave. There’s a lot more teaching that goes into that, and here’s the why behind it, and this is how you can evaluate its effectiveness and so forth. I find that that that’s a difference, typically, from being within an organization to then becoming fractional. How often do you find, Wendy, that you are teaching a lot? Or for me, in my absence of teaching, I usually find that I wish I had or that I had gone back and explained certain things. How’s that? How’s that experience been for you when you’re serving clients?

Wendy Wilburn 36:11
You know, I do find that I’m teaching a lot. I find that it takes a lot of understanding the client’s background and where they’ve come from, and what they’ve been through up to the point that they engage with me what’s worked and what hasn’t, and then really drilling into well, why do you think that hasn’t worked? Or why do you think that has worked? And usually, nine times out of 10, I can find that thread from someone in the room who says something that can then be the start of the foundation that I lay as to why the StoryBrand framework works like I can talk till I’m blue in the face about movies and storytelling. And this is the seven step arc of every movie you go to and every book you read like this is, this is what we as humans emotionally connect to.

Wendy Wilburn 37:12
We connect to this pattern of storytelling, but saying that and having them realize, okay, yeah, I see that in Star Wars, and then trying to apply that to their again pen company, that’s a that’s a big chasm to get them across, unless I can extract out of someone in the room that one time that they were able to sell a palette of 24,000 pins to blah customer, tell us about that. How did that happen? How did you get there? What did you do? And then they tell the story. And inevitably, there’s a thread that will link to the StoryBrand concept. And then once I can get them to lower them, the people in the room, to lower their guard on okay, this woman isn’t whack a doodle, maybe I can listen to this a little bit, then you can start the process of influencing that. But it’s, it’s education, I mean, and it’s a lot of listening, it’s a lot of listening, and a lot of you know.

Monica Spieles 38:24
And lot of conviction in that you’ve seen it time and time again, you know, the foundations of marketing that are crucial to have established to be successful in any kind of, you know, strategy that you’re you’re going after, and to have the conviction to stand behind that every time and not let that be a loose acceptance of if we’re going to do it or not. You know it is, it is how we’re going to run this effort. And so that’s that’s crucial.

Branden O'Neil 38:51
I always say that we have to earn the right to call ourselves CMOs every time we enter into a client situation. Right? We are not gifted that, sure they may be buying our marketing title or whatever product, productization, you know that we sold our agreement under. But at the end of the day, we have to come in, and we’ve got to earn that. And at Atlas Rose, what we do, the way that we do that is, is we start off with, like a real deal, big, heavy lift of a 12 month strategy, typically. There’s other ways to start, but typically that’s that’s how it works best, because when we’re able to come in and and tell the client things that may they may not have known or asked questions that they haven’t been asked before or asked in a while, but business type questions, not marketing type questions, right?

Branden O'Neil 39:45
I mean, it’s not like, what’s your favorite kind of social media post, and, you know, how can we help you? It’s like, it when we start to dig in and understand the profitability, like, what are the growth levers of this darn thing, then all of a sudden they’re like, Oh, you, you are concerned about more than just marketing, right? You are concerned about my business, and I understand that, and I’m, I’m glad that I’ve got that kind of commitment, and now you’re bringing me value, and now I want to call you my CMO, right? But I think a lot of times we come in under this, you know, I’ve earned my right to call myself a CMO, whether we’ve earned it or not, and and we and we expect that respect right out of the gate. And I think that’s a mistake.

Wendy Wilburn 40:29
It is. I mean all relationships start with listening. I mean all really good relationships start with listening. And, you know, I say pretty quickly in the conversation that I am a marketer for the sake of sales, not for the sake of being creative. I really don’t care about being creative. Do I like it when I am creative? Yes, but I only care that I’m moving the needle. What’s going to work, and how can we quickly get to a point where we dial in on exactly what that message is and then hit it over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Wendy Wilburn 41:12
Because, and here’s the other thing that clients want to do, I find all the time, you hit on the right thing, but then they want to get all creative around it, like, oh, well, we said this, but now we need to say that, and then we need to say this, because the customer has moved on to this or that, or whatever, and it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You get really, really good at the thing that you’re known for. And then maybe, if you’re lucky, you can branch out. Do y’all tell the story of Lululemon and who their ideal target customer is? Do y’all know that story?

Monica Spieles 41:50
No. Curious. Yeah.

Wendy Wilburn 41:52
Tell me who you think lululemon’s ideal target customer is. Describe that person.

Monica Spieles 41:59
College aged girl with a parent’s credit card who mildly wants to work out.

Randi Beth Burton 42:13
I was gonna say something similar, around the price point that they they are wealthy and more the yoga class at 11am type.

Branden O'Neil 42:26
Their target market is the guys who like watching girls in yoga pants.

Wendy Wilburn 42:34
That’s interesting. You went to the guy’s perspective. Okay, I love it. So everyone was wrong, just like I was wrong. So when I first had to take a guess at this, I said it’s the 45 year old soccer mom driving an Escalade, wearing Uggs and is running through Chick fil A on her way to pick up 3.5 kids from ballet, tuba and whatever else. So we’re all wrong. So lululemon’s Target, ideal customer is a 28 year old engaged woman named Ocean who owns her own condo, earns $125,000 a year, travels four times a year and spends two and a half hours a day working out. So lots of things going on in that description. Number one, her age, 28 number two, her income, $125,000 that’s pretty good for a single woman, owns her own condo, travels four times a year, spends two and a half hours a day working out.

Wendy Wilburn 43:49
But what I love the best is that her name is Ocean. Like you see her, she’s like boho chic, you know, she’s got the tie dye tank top, like hanging off a shoulder, you know she but she earns great money because so she can afford the pants, but she’s got all this kind of hippie vibe going on also. So that makes me tell when I tell customers this, that that is who Lululemon is talking to. They’re like, Well, why now is there men’s clothing? Why are they now, you know, going in on mats and and water bottles, and Lululemon is now this whole ecosystem of things. Yes, it is, but it’s because they got really, really good at Ocean, and Ocean is who built the whole Lululemon ecosystem. So when you totally go in on who your ideal customer is, you then can grow your revenue to the point where you can deviate here a little bit, or zag over there a little bit, and create new business units and new customer profiles. But you can’t ever get there trying to talk to everyone. You won’t get there trying to talk to everyone. You have to talk to Ocean first.

Randi Beth Burton 45:17
Well, Wendy, this has been a treat, really. I love where the conversation went. And thank you so much for your insight. We do have some like rapid fire questions that we would like to just throw at you to close it out. If we can do that, what’s your go to coffee order?

Wendy Wilburn 45:38
Oh, my. At Starbucks. It’s a flat white.

Monica Spieles 45:43
Flat white. Are you a morning person or a night owl?

Wendy Wilburn 45:48
I’m a morning person.

Branden O'Neil 45:50
What’s your favorite book that you’ve read here recently?

Wendy Wilburn 45:53
Honestly, my favorite book that I’ve read in the last couple of years is a book by Elizabeth Lesser called Cassandra Speaks. It’s a hot pink book jacket, but the subtitle is, when women tell the story, the human story changes, and it’s a it’s definitely a feminist book, and it’s all about how the person in the room with the power is the person who tells the story. There’s a quote by Steve Jobs that’s along those lines. Also something about the most powerful person in the room is the storyteller. And historically, our history has been shared and told and passed down through Anglo Saxon white men, and so what would happen to our understanding of our history and our culture if women were allowed more of a voice in the room historically? How would that be different? So it’s very much, and it’s based on the Roman story of Cassandra and how she went insane. And I will let your audience look that up.

Monica Spieles 47:05
Fun. Last question would be, what’s one place you would travel to and anywhere in the world, over and over and over again?

Wendy Wilburn 47:12
Oh, Venice, Italy.

Branden O'Neil 47:14
I have one more last question, and that is more serious question. What advice would you give fractionals, especially fractionals are just starting out, what advice would you like to give fractionals?

Wendy Wilburn 47:28
I think the best advice is just kind of general advice. It’s you have to believe in yourself enough to convey that you are trustworthy and that you have the experience and the skill set and the mindset of someone who can truly be of service to your client’s company. I did a post, kind of a mini rant yesterday on LinkedIn about trust in marketing, and I said that trust is the coin, if you will, for 2026 marketing, and that you’ve got to that trust only comes when you’re having the same messaging over and over and over as a brand trust only comes between two people when I stay consistent over and over and over as a person. So my advice to people who are considering becoming a chief fractional or are already in it, just stay consistent with what you’re doing and stick to your guns about what you believe and your frameworks that you know are effective, because I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten older in life that you know most people don’t know what they’re talking about, and so be the One person in the room who does and and stick to your guns.