We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful ZenChange Marketing. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with ZenChange below.

Hi ZenChange, thanks for joining us today. Do you take vacations? Why or why not?

I do take vacations and encourage my team to do the same.  Over the years, I’ve learned that there never really is a good time to get away, and it’s especially tough when you’re just starting a business, but it’s such a good test for your processes and team training.  You’ll quickly identify the areas that need more process attention according to anything that may have pulled you back in while you were on vacation.  It’s so important for a leader to take breaks and return fresh. You’ll never turn your mind off of your business, but you may have some wonderful “aha” moments while you’re at the beach!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My career began in corporate America over 30 years ago, which gave me the opportunity to experience how companies work at scale and to rise to larger leadership roles quickly. I have consulted with 30 of the Fortune 500, and it has been such a tremendous education in scaling processes, organization structures, and how different executives lead.  After spending a couple of decades moving from city to city every year or two or living out of hotels, I decided to leave that lifestyle and launch my own business in Miami. Over the years, I have grown ZenChange Marketing into an agency committed to bringing best practices and innovative thinking to help small enterprises get found and grow profitably. I also launched a more boutique agency called Alchemy Firm focused on startups and venture-backed companies, where I offer fractional CMO consulting and scalable marketing delivery services so they don’t need to hire an in-house marketing team. I’ve been the CMO on over $28 million in exits there, so that’s a pretty good feeling.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

I have spent a lot of time building my network over the years, which has paid off. Networking remains our number-one source of leads. I have seen the law of reciprocity in action, so I aim to provide one business referral or one strategic connection to someone in my network weekly. By really getting to know other leaders, and what they are looking for to grow their business, I have been able to make my networking much more meaningful than working the room at a local chamber event.  That’s still a great way to make contacts, but you need the one-on-one conversations afterward to really make it work.

We also invested heavily in content early on, so we continue to have business owners reach out to us because they found us on Google.

LinkedIn has also helped clients find us. It’s still one of the few platforms where you can gain traction organically by posting thoughtful content and engaging with others.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice

I’m very bullish on NFTs and on Web3 in general, and I’m working extensively with projects in that space through one of our VC relationships, Open Access Ventures. Business owners need to really educate themselves on what is happening there because it is set to turn how you attract and engage with customers upside down. If you still think that an NFT is just an overpriced JPEG, then you have some catching up to do. Think of an NFT as a digital asset, like a piece of art, a video, or written content, that someone can actually own and sell for a profit. But NFTs can also be member passes or tickets. I get into this in a lot more detail in one of the recent episodes of my Entrepreneur podcast, but ultimately, NFTs could replace QR codes for event entry, access to gated educational content, entertainment, and so much more. My advice is to open a Metamask account, then go to Opensea and buy something to experience it. Start with one of the larger communities like Veefriends or World of Women.  Head over to their Discord and experience the camaraderie, support, and education their communities offer.  There is an entire social ecosystem and a way people interact with brands that is welcoming, supportive, and collaborative.  The shift that happens when people connect with a brand because they want to and are financially incentivized to do so, rather than having ads pushed at them, is quite amazing.

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