She Talks Business – Details, episodes & analysis

Tune in to this episode of She Talks Business to learn my proven formula for achieving exponential growth, including the game-changing fourth element I’ve recently discovered. Drawing from my experiences over the past year, I am breaking down how these four fundamental pillars work together to create unstoppable momentum in your business.

You'll discover:

• Why your vision needs to be audaciously big—so big that it becomes a lifelong pursuit—while still maintaining the sweet spot between impossible and inspiring

• How to realistically assess your capabilities, strategically build a dream team to fill your gaps, and embrace continuous learning as you scale

• The secret to expanding your reach through authentic connections that generate more impact than simple social media metrics

• My newest success factor: the critical role of daily, intentional effort in achieving exceptional results

In this episode, I’m revealing real-world examples from my own journey, including how I’ve implemented these principles to elevate my own work to new heights. I’m sharing actionable insights on balancing these four elements to stay focused on both the big picture and high-impact daily actions.

Whether you're just starting out or looking to take your business to the next level, this episode offers practical strategies for assessing and leveraging these four pillars of growth. Learn how to craft your compelling vision, maximize your capabilities, expand your meaningful reach, and apply the right effort in the right places.

Don't miss my powerful questions that will help you evaluate and strengthen each pillar in your own business. Start implementing these principles today to unlock the exponential growth you've always dreamed of achieving.

Listen now to transform your approach to business growth and turn your boldest aspirations into reality.

• Importance of acknowledging sources of inspiration
• Aligning vision with purpose and values
• Importance of skills, knowledge, and resources
• Building networks and authentic relationships to grow your reach
• Aligning effort with your expected outcome

Visit lisalarter.com/e178 for all resources from this episode.

So how do Tim Ferriss and James Clear do it? How do they get millions of people on their email lists and, most importantly, how do they keep people subscribed? I believe a small email list of engaged subscribers and active buyers outweighs a large email list any day, but we have a lot to learn from these two men’s strategies. Listen to this episode to hear which of their tactics I'm going to be using to grow my own email list this year.

A $40M Business Owner Reverts to a $5/hour Strategy for His Success  

The truth is, you don't need large numbers of subscribers like Ferriss and Clear to succeed. The lists cultivated with high-touch strategies may be "small" in comparison to millions, but the engagement of the subscribers produces incomparable results. Learn the exact direct sales flywheel strategy of Nathan Barry and how his manual efforts produced undeniable success even in this automated AI world.

Let's Talk Tactics

Building your email list will not happen overnight, and it certainly does not end with putting a subscribe button on your website. In this episode, I share my plan for growing my email list this year and how I plan to keep my subscribers engaged. You'd be surprised to learn the value you need in order to grow could be something you've already created. Stay to the end for some great ideas for freebies to offer, as well as my favorite way to impact engagement with my top readers.

Don't let your email list stay stagnant for another year! Create your lead magnet and make your content so valuable for your subscribers that they never want to leave your list. 

• Mailing list maintenance and engagement
• The $5 an hour strategy inspired by Nathan Barry
• Personal touch in content creation for stronger relationships
• Ensuring consistency and reliability in communication
• List-building strategies 

What To Do Next

Visit lisalarter.com/e177 for all resources from this episode.

Welcome back for a very special episode! We're celebrating the release of Michelle Weger's book, Don't Snooze Your Dreams. Michelle and I have been working together for 7 years now, and I've seen her do some really hard things. I'm so proud of her for writing this book and sharing how she reframes fear to accomplish her dreams and helping you all do the same.  

Michelle Weger is an accomplished entrepreneur, speaker, and now #1 International Best Selling author. As the founder of Venture Creative Collective, Michelle helps small businesses thrive with innovative automation and web development solutions. Living with narcolepsy, Michelle has transformed personal challenges into powerful lessons, inspiring countless individuals to pursue their dreams despite obstacles. 

Consequences of Advocacy 

As someone with an invisible disability, Michelle discusses how she's grown in her advocacy. She's faced a lot of tough pushback and consequences because her service dog is "too big," or people don’t believe she’s a service dog and don’t believe Michelle even has a disability. After seeing how her mother, friends, and colleagues stood up for her, Michelle realized if she stood up for herself now, she would also be helping others. 

Only Two Types of Fear 

In her book, Michelle identifies only two types of fear we all suffer from. We have a social fear, which, boiled down, is the fear of embarrassment, and physical fear, which is fear of something that could actually kill or harm us. The metaphors she uses in the book are brilliant in reframing how you feel about fear. Keep your ears open for when we talk about the paper dinosaur and the terrorist in our heads. 

Fear and adversity are ever present throughout our lives and our careers. Whether we're facing a promotion at work or an autoimmune disease diagnosis, we will always be battling our paper dinosaurs and terrorists in our heads. Listen in to hear about Michelle's DREAM method, which anyone can use to overcome whatever obstacles they're facing in life and achieve their dreams. 

• Facing adversity for a non-apparent disability like narcolepsy 
• Role models help bolster advocacy for yourself and, eventually others 
• Metaphors for fears holding us back from our dreams 
• Tactics for doing hard things 
• DREAM method for overcoming fears and achieving dreams

Visit lisalarter.com/e168 for all resources from this episode.

It’s time for the finale of the Leveraging AI series with Mary Fearon! We're wrapping up with a final discussion on improving customer service with AI.

When to Start & Stop with AI Automation

Chatbots and automated messaging systems are the most common AI solutions for customer service and prospecting. These solutions certainly have their place, but at what point do they become harmful to your brand? 

In this episode, we discuss the harm of over-relying on AI to be the solution to your (or your customer’s) problem and how to avoid this mistake in your business.

Behind-the-Scene Uses of AI to Benefit Your Customers & Clients  

When you think about customer service, the goal is to provide a valuable experience. Tune in as Mary and I discuss how AI can enhance this by acting as a personal assistant, quickly handling labor-intensive tasks like writing customer-facing documents and accelerating research to understand new clients. Want all of our suggestions on how to save yourself time while building a deeper connection with your clients? This is the episode for you.

Interested in attending our AI workshop? Sign up for our waitlist at lisalarter.com/ai to be the first to know about the investment, format, and details. Mary and I can't wait to help you start experimenting with AI in your business.

We had a lot of fun recording this series together, and we hope you're inspired to jump into this next phase of business operation with the help of your AI personal assistant!

• Experimenting with AI for business improvement 
• Personal and business relationships AI cannot replace
• AI-generated user guides, onboarding documents, etc.
• Importance of inspection to ensure AI tools maintain brand integrity

Visit lisalarter.com/e167 for all resources from this episode. 

Welcome to the fourth episode of our Leveraging AI series! Mary Fearon and I are back to share our perspectives and experiences using AI in our businesses. Missed the introduction to this series? Go back and listen to episodes 163, 164, and 165! In today's episode, we talk about one of AI’s most common uses—content creation. 

Valuable Content is Never 100% AI

Anyone using AI will usually input the same prompt and receive the same generic response. To turn that response into something that is actually valuable, you must inject your opinion, perspective, and wisdom. Stand out from the massive amount of AI-generated content that is currently saturating digital spaces by using it as a tool to brainstorm and develop strong content faster instead of letting it do all your thinking for you. Using AI should speed up the process but never replace your voice. 

AI Is Not An Easy Button—Here Are Smart Ways To Use It  

Mary and I discuss how we use AI as a springboard to come up with ideas to write about. We ask AI to condense writing into social media posts, bios, or website copy with a set character limit. Sometimes, we ask it to provide different versions of already-written copy using more persuasive or pithy language. Listen in to hear how we even use AI for more effective SEO when writing blogs or web pages!

We'd love for you to join us for the AI in Business workshop Mary and I plan to host. For more information, sign up for our waitlist here: lisalarter.com/ai.

• Strategies for optimizing content length using AI
• AI for creating website starter copy and headlines
• Finding the balance between AI and personal voice
• Warning against overreliance on AI
• Adding personal value and perspective to AI-generated content 

Visit lisalarter.com/e166 for all resources from this episode.

Welcome back to week 3 of our 5-week series, Leveraging AI: Proven, Practical, & Tactical Approaches to Using AI in Your Business. Today, we're diving into how we use AI for idea generation and our top tips for writing powerful, time-saving prompts.

This series is in collaboration with my friend and colleague, Mary Fearon.  Mary, if you have yet to hear in the previous two episodes, is a fellow marketing agency owner. She is the Founder and CEO of OnPrPose, a company that helps entrepreneurs and businesses tell their stories effectively, both internally and externally.

If you just found this series, go back to our introduction episode, AI: Introducing Your New Unpaid Team Member. 

Today, we are focusing on how to be the best “creative director” so that whatever AI tool you are using can give you usable, valuable ideas as a brainstorming partner. The magic all lies in your prompts.

When using AI, you have to shift your mindset around how you request information. With a search engine, you would input strings of keywords and find pretty relevant search results. When using AI, you have to expand your prompt to give context and background for the work you're producing, just like you would to a member of your team.

By taking the time to craft thorough prompts, you're limiting the amount of back-and-forth and getting hyper-relevant copy or ideas in response. Listen in for our top tips on how to frame a thorough prompt for AI!

As marketing agency owners, Mary and I use AI to do a lot of the heavy lifting that once took hours for our team to do. For example, Mary uses AI for competitive analysis. Instead of having to comb through several websites and social media pages, AI can give you an overview. 

In this episode, we go over many more ways we use AI in marketing, including creating and writing in our clients' voices, creating client avatars, and even ideas for increasing engagement on social media.

AI allows you to take an idea, cuts down the drafting time, and gets you to a place where you can apply your expertise, style, and perspective in just a few minutes. Mary and I have had so much fun finding different ways to use AI in our businesses, and we hope you're getting inspired on how to start using it in yours!

If you'd like more information about the AI in Business workshop Mary and I plan to host, sign up for our waitlist here: lisalarter.com/ai.

• Shift from traditional search queries to conversational prompts for AI usage 
• Mary and Lisa's experiences using AI to generate fresh ideas for podcasts, newsletters, and workshops
• Viewing AI as a tool to deliver more value without replacing individual perspective and expertise
• Using AI for competitive analysis, establishing a client’s voice, and creating avatars or personas for targeting content to appropriate audiences

Visit lisalarter.com/e165 for all resources from this episode.

Mary Fearon and I are back with the second episode of our AI series! In this series of conversations, we deep-dive into how we use AI in our businesses, and today's episode is all about how we use AI in meetings. 

If you missed it from last week, Mary is the founder and CEO of On Prpose, a company helping entrepreneurs and businesses tell their stories effectively. With a keen eye for uncovering hidden narratives, Mary and her team excel at distilling complex information into compelling, relatable content. 

Mary and I both run marketing agencies, and it goes without saying we attend a lot of meetings every single week. There are lots of meeting notes to keep up with and action items to implement, so it is imperative we have reliable meeting notes. Having AI take those notes and summarize our action items has been a huge time saver, but there has been a learning curve as we get used to using this tool and find our favorite AI notetakers for our needs. 

Let's Compare & Contrast 

Mary and I go over the AI tools we started with, got rid of, and our overall favorites for making our meetings more productive and our implementation even faster. We hope our experience and advice help you decide which one to try for yourself in your next meeting. 

We Cover Privacy & Productivity 

Mary and I also go over our thoughts on privacy within our businesses and with our clients when using AI for meeting notes, before we end the episode with a great time-management AI tool suggestion that has helped alleviate stress in Mary's company. We hope this was useful for you to begin seeing the value of using AI in your business! 

Next week, we will discuss how AI helps us with idea generation and even how to craft effective prompts. Stay tuned for the rest of the series, which will cover using AI for content creation, customer service, and more! 

If you'd like more information about the AI in Business workshop Mary and I plan to host, sign up for our waitlist here: lisalarter.com/ai. 

• Overview of AI tools for recording, transcribing, and summarizing meetings
• Translating meeting information into implementation effectively
• Establishing protocols for using AI in meetings and respecting privacy and confidentiality agreements

Visit lisalarter.com/e164 for all resources from this episode. 

Welcome to the first episode of a new season in collaboration with Mary Fearon!  For this series of conversations, Mary Fearon and I will be talking all about AI.

Mary and I both run marketing agencies, and we've started introducing AI into our team workflows and personal lives. If you're a small business looking to learn how AI can help you save time and effort, this is a great introduction.

With AI, we've been able to streamline our processes, freeing up more time for what we do best! 

Mary is the founder and CEO of On Prpose, a company helping entrepreneurs and businesses tell their stories effectively. With a keen eye for uncovering hidden narratives, Mary and her team excel at distilling complex information into compelling, relatable content. 

Mary has helped hundreds of companies in complex industrial and technical businesses, including agriculture, manufacturing, mining, construction, engineering, and more. Varied experience has honed her ability to find and communicate the essence of a business or industry, no matter how technical or nuanced. She believes in the power of storytelling to capture complexity while making it interesting and relevant to the audience. 

The Number 1 Way We Use AI  

AI has saved us from blank-page syndrome—it’s an amazing brainstorming partner. When starting a new project or wanting to create something from scratch, we both have noticed how quickly AI can take us from an abstract idea to something to work with. It eliminates five hours of coming up with a rough draft and instead gives us that time to focus on refining the copy, adding a brand voice, and focusing on the end result. 

Where to start with AI? 

There are many AI options to choose from and each one has its own benefits and drawbacks. Pick one, get to know it really well, and then you're more able to make a judgement on how you like using AI in your business and what features you may be looking for in other AI options. 

In this episode, we also discuss increasing the quality of your prompts. The better your prompts, the better and more effective your results will be. Instead of thinking about how to search for a result, picture how you would give context and instructions to a coworker. 

Tune in to hear all about some fun ways we've used AI outside of work! It has helped us come up with dinner ideas, gift ideas, or even how to track macros. There are so many ways to use AI and save valuable time. 

The biggest takeaway for business owners who are hesitant to begin working with AI is that it is a tool. While AI helps us do our work faster and more efficiently, it will never be able to replace the wisdom, culture, and perspective humans bring to our work. The relationships, inspiration, and ideas fueling our business will never start with AI but can be developed and come to fruition much faster with its help. 

If you'd like more information about the AI in Business workshop Mary and I plan to host, sign up for our waitlist here: lisalarter.com/ai. 

• How marketing agencies use AI 
• Enabling speed and reducing refining time
• Resistance to AI and “AI snobbery”
• Fun ways to use AI in your personal life 

Visit lisalarter.com/e163 for all resources from this episode. 

Adan was formerly the Marketing Team Manager and Marketing Strategist for the Lisa Larter Group and once served as a special guest host for six episodes of "She Talks Business" with our current Team Manager, Cass Bald. In this episode, Adan puts me in the hot seat for one of my favorite types of episodes where she gets to ask me anything! 

Adan co-owns The Small Business Marketers and serves a few businesses as a Fractional Sales Manager. Her mission is to bring corporate-style marketing and sales teams to small businesses.

In 2020, Adan began her marketing career by helping brick-and-mortar stores go digital during the pandemic. Over the past four years, she has helped over 75 small businesses implement effective marketing and sales strategies.

Outside of her professional life, Adan is dedicated to raising awareness about mental health and ADHD in the workplace.

Navigating Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace 

In this episode, Adan and I discuss how an employer should approach working with an employee with ADHD, anxiety, depression, or other mental health conditions. 

Adan thinks of her ADHD as her superpower—she loves talking to clients, and that's what she does best. We agree that open communication is a must for deciding where an employee can excel based on their individual superpowers. What do you think?

Cultivate a Winning Environment for Your Employees 

Do you view your role as an employer as being part of your employees’ journeys? When you give your people an environment where they can be honest about their goals to move on to entrepreneurship, or whatever the next step is in their journey, you will foster a relationship of trust and empowerment.  

In this episode, we also cover the importance of marketing, whether it's for lead generation or credibility, and focus on sales skills. We end off with a fun discussion on which designer bag means you’ve “made it.” Thanks for listening in! 

• How to accommodate employees with ADHD or other mental health conditions 
• Sale skills for small businesses 
• Best way to view employer/employee relationship 
• The role of marketing in your business 
• Which designer bag means you’ve "made it?" 

Visit lisalarter.com/e162 for all resources from this episode. 

We are so lucky to have an amazing woman who also happens to be an incredible businesswoman join us on the show this week! Amber Vilhauer and I started our businesses only one year apart in 2007 and 2008, so I wanted to ask her some questions focused on longevity and what she believes are the reasons she's stayed in business for 17 years and counting. 

Amber is a Books & Business strategist, multi-bestselling author, speaker, and Founder of NGNG Enterprises (No Guts No Glory), an Inc. 5000 top marketing agency. She is the author of Infinite Impact and co-author of The Long Forest Trail with her son, Clay.

Since starting NGNG in 2007, Amber has helped thousands of entrepreneurs align their businesses with their core talents and desires, empowering them to build the business and life of their dreams while naturally scaling revenue and impact. 

Among her clients, Amber has a reputation for getting quality work done quickly. She and her team routinely get in the trenches, implementing custom marketing strategies that attract qualified leads, launching bestselling books, and growing engaged followings that convert. Her strategies are comprehensive, deep, and built to align every aspect of her clients' businesses with their ultimate visions.

No MBA? No Problem. 

Amber and I do not have MBAs and we didn't plan to have our own businesses when we first entered the workforce. We learned the skills necessary to keep our business growing and profitable, but it's not finance, marketing, or other technical skills keeping us in business. Amber believes consistency and her non-negotiables around how she treats clients and the quality of her work truly make a difference. 

Get Over Perfectionism & Get Scrappy 

Amber has great advice on how to shift your perspective on getting work done. By letting go of perfectionism, we can better help people in need of our services. 

Don't underestimate the value of being scrappy as an entrepreneur. When we live in an age where we can learn about anything with just a few searches and countless resources, there is no excuse to let, "I haven't done that before" or "I don't know how to do that," stand in your way.  

Find A Balance and the Right Fit 

As a single mom, Amber lets us in on how she's able to be a present mom AND a successful businesswoman. Her priorities are always top of mind. She even lets us in on her process of deciding if a client is still in alignment with her values and if they still light her up when working with them. If they don't, she lets them go in a gentle but straightforward way. 

As you'll hear in our discussion, Amber and I agree that treating your clients well, prioritizing your energy as a business owner, and confronting your perfectionism will help you go the distance. Happy Listening! 

• Non-negotiables and consistency lead to longevity in business 
• Prioritize effort, energy, and intention over perfectionism 
• How to let a client go 
• Running a business as a single mother 
• Word of mouth is the most powerful piece of marketing 

Visit lisalarter.com/e161 for all resources from this episode.