Welcome to Milestone Moments, the show where we explore the journeys that lead to success.
I'm Sheila Slick, your host and founder of Five Milestones. In every episode, we will bring you
insights from the minds of entrepreneurs, leaders, and experts who will share not just their expertise
but the milestone moments that have reshaped their journeys and led to significant achievements.
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milestones that mark the path to success.
Welcome to another episode of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. I'm Sheila Slick,
your host, and today my special guest is Wayne Mullins, founder of Ugly Mug Marketing, creator
of the Freelance Accelerator, and author of Full Circle Marketing. Welcome to the show, Wayne.
Thank you so much, Sheila. I'm excited for our chat today.
Yes. So Wayne, you've been described as an out of the box thinker and you've built a highly
successful marketing agency, Ugly Mug Marketing. What inspired you to take such a unique approach
to marketing and how has that contributed to your success?
Yeah. So for me, my journey actually began in sales. That was what I pursued as soon as I got my
degree. And I spent the first three years in corporate advertising sales. I was actually
selling billboards for the nation's largest billboard company. So the big signs you see as
you drive down the road, I was selling what appears on some of those. And what I discovered
during that time was that when I started, Sheila, I was absolutely horrific at this thing called
sales. I would knock on doors. I would get doors slammed in my face. I heard a lot of nos,
but over time I kept studying, kept learning, kept growing, and I actually got good at this
thing called selling. And this interesting thing occurred. The better I got, the more rapidly
I was bringing in income or revenue for the company that I was working for. And so that
that if you think about like a chart, right, that line graph, that number, that dollar figure goes
up pretty rapidly as I got better and better. But the other side of that was my pay and my pay did
not increase as rapidly as the money I was bringing in for the company. Yes, it was increasing,
but not at the same rate, not the same proportions, I guess you could say. So I had this very
dangerous idea of what if I actually went and did something for myself? And that led me to start a
London landscape company. Again, I'm in Louisiana, so that business really operates about nine months
out of the year here where there's green grass to be cut, there's landscaping to be done. It was
over the course of a three year period that I took that from startup to a successful exit. And it was
during the course of that, that people started coming to me and they started asking, we see you
have grown, we see how you've gone from one crew to two crews to three crews to four crews. What
have you done? Like how have you done this? And the answer was marketing. We took a very unique,
very different perspective to marketing. And after I sold that company, I did consulting for a while
before I decided just to jump in with both feet and pursue it as a full-time career, I guess.
Sales is important. So what's the difference between marketing and sales? Just to clarify.
Sure. So what I believe to be true is that marketing's job is to make sales unnecessary.
And what I mean by that is when something is marketed well, let's take, for example, I'm
a hold up this, this is the iPhone, right? Within something is marketed well, like maybe an iPhone,
if you use iPhones, when you go into the store to buy it, or you go online to buy it,
they don't have to convince you. They don't have to sell you on buying the iPhone. They don't have
to sell you on buying the iPhone. They just have to take your order because marketing has done its
job. It's made sales unnecessary. So that's the way I love to think about marketing. Its whole goal
is to bring you to the point where you're willing and ready to pull out your wallet
and hand over money. Now, sales, on the other hand, I believe sales takes them two roles. Number one,
that is that of an order taker, right? Somebody who is ready to take your money, to fill out the
order form, to make sure you get the exact right iPhone that you need. The other side of that is
a salesperson whose job is to actually do marketing, right? Meaning their job is to convince you
of the need or desire for the product or service that you sell.
Thank you. Cause some people, you know, they kind of struggle with it and
they think it's all in one. So thank you for your clarification. So Wayne, you've personally have
trained over 20,000 marketers and you've helped launch New York Times bestsellers. What do you
believe are the key elements of a successful marketing strategy in today's digital landscape?
So we give you four specific things. Number one, you have to get crystal clear
about your audience. We love to call these people strangers. So who are the people who need, won't,
or desire not the product that you sell, but the solution or the outcome that your product or service
will provide. So you've got to get crystal clear on the who, what we would call the strangers.
Your next job is to convince those strangers to become friends of yours. And there's two things
you have to focus on. Number one, you have to get them to know about you. Pretty obvious, but then
number two, you have to get them to actually like you to like your products, to like your service,
to like your company and what you represent. And then once they're your customers, I'm sorry,
once they're your friends, you have to get them to become customers. And to do this, you have to
think about trust. How can I convey trust in the company? How can I make can trust in our product
or our service that we provide? So when we think about moving people through marketing,
we start with those elements. We start with the strangers. How do we get them to become our
friends? Then how do we take those friends and convince them to be our customers? So those are
the core elements when we move people through, if you will, a marketing funnel or a marketing system.
So as the creator of freelance accelerator, you've helped many freelancers and entrepreneurs to grow
their businesses. What common challenges do you see they face and how have you helped overcome them?
Absolutely. So one of the most beautiful and fascinating things about having a marketing
agency is I get an email from a friend of mine who is a freelancer and he's like, Hey, I'm
not a freelancer, I'm a marketing agent. So I get an insider's perspective on so many different
industries because when we're brought in, we're brought in for typically one reason, and that is
they want to increase sales and they want to increase revenue. In doing that, we often have
to get in behind the scenes. We have to understand how the operations are working, how other channels
of marketing or sales are working. And so we get a behind the scenes perspective in terms of the way
businesses work. And here's what I've discovered over, you know, I've been doing the agency now
for almost 16 years full time. Before that, I was doing consulting for about five years before that,
specifically around marketing and business growth. And here's what I've discovered that all
businesses, regardless of industry, go through five phases. In other words, there's five phases
to scaling a business. The very first one is what I call the me stage. And this is where you,
as the entrepreneur, have to learn to trust yourself. You have to learn to trust your
decisions. You have to learn to make wise decisions to build your company to that next level.
The next phase that you go into is what I call the we stage. So we, as in you start building out your
team and you start learning to trust those people, not just trust them, but to trust them with key
functions within the company or within the business. The third stage that you're going to go into
is what I call they, and these are systems and processes. So as you bring people on and as you
have people taking over key roles and key responsibilities, you quickly discover you need
systems and processes to ensure that things aren't falling through the crack, that policies and
procedures are being upheld, et cetera. So you move into that stage. The next stage beyond that
is what I call the machine. And this is where you have to get your systems and processes to work
to work in unison with the people, with the team. And this is a huge friction point. This is a
massive friction point, particularly for entrepreneurs, for founders, because by default,
entrepreneurs typically hate structure. They hate systems and processes. They're all over the place.
They're chasing the next big idea. They're jumping from thing to thing. And so often they don't want
to be held accountable. They don't want to be held to systems and processes. They believe rules are
made for other people, not for them, which on the one hand serves them so well in the early days of
growing their business. But to truly scale your business, you have to buy into those systems and
processes. And you have to get the people and the systems and processes to work in unison and work
together. I completely agree. That was wonderful. So you have transitioned in your careers. What is
your next milestone? Well, Sheila, this is going to be the most unappealing, boring answer you've
probably ever heard for this one. But I am becoming more and more of what I would call an
incrementalist. And so in the early days of my entrepreneurial journey, and just for context,
you know, I have been out in quote unquote, the working world now for over 20 years. And during
my 20 plus year career, I only spent about two and a half to three years actually working for
someone else. The rest of that time, I've been an entrepreneur, I've been responsible for my own
income. But during that transition for me as an entrepreneur, I started out, you know, with the
traditional entrepreneurial ambition, big ideas, grand ideas, conquer the world, take over the world
stuff. But what I've learned over the years is that when I focus on incremental improvements,
not just in business, but in every area of my life, that the compound effect of those decisions
is profound. And so with my team, for example, we're not talking about, you know, 10Xing revenue,
which I know 10X is a phrase and a term that gets thrown around around a lot. And it's a very sexy
sexy phrase and thing to talk about. What we're talking about is how do we get just a little bit
better each day, right? If we're responding to clients or customers, and let's just say that our
current response rate is three hours, how do we get that down to two hours and 55 minutes, right?
And so if we just embrace this mentality of incrementalism, just small, small adjustments
over time, what happens is in a year, in two years and three years, where we end up is so drastically
different than where we are today. So that is my next milestone. Although it's further out,
it's this milestone of a daily incremental improvement.
So which improvement would you focus on? Or would you prioritize? Or is it that you're choosing,
you know, to be better in different little aspects all together?
Yeah, for clarification on that. So I believe for me, it's in multiple areas of my life, right? So
relationships with my wife and my kids, with health, my personal health getting better,
incrementally better in those areas, with relationships with friends and colleagues
outside of work, outside of family. But if we're thinking just in terms of business and where I'm
focusing here, I would say that the incremental improvements that me for a leader are focusing on
the most would be incremental improvements in our culture, the culture that we have.
As you know, and anyone listening to this would know that we live in a very volatile world,
right? A world of uncertainty, a lot of, hey, what's going to happen tomorrow? What's going
to happen next week? We don't know. It's very chaotic world. But what I believe to be true
is that I think it was Peter Drucker who originally said this, that culture each strategy
for breakfast. And so when we think back a few years, when the world was all of a sudden
shut down, right, locked down, you could have had the most brilliant strategy plan for that year,
for 2020, right? You could have spent millions of dollars, all kinds of tech research, developing
the absolute perfect strategy for your business and your company. But the minute the world changed,
that strategy goes out the door. And what comes into play, what makes the difference between how
much you succeed is the culture that you have in your organization. So for me, that is the focus
within ugly mug marketing. It is making sure that we're getting better with our culture.
Where can the listeners find you online or where can they learn more about you?
Two places. So the simplest place is our website. That's just ugly mug marketing.com, email
addresses, phone numbers, all that kind of stuff. You know, you can find out more about our services
there. And then on Instagram, I'm somewhat active there. Personally, I share more leadership and
all that kind of stuff. And my Instagram is at fire yourself. F I R E like fire like you're fired.
All right. So before I get to my last question, you're coming up with these unique names are very
catchy, right? Your company's called ugly mug marketing. How do you come up with these names?
Or what's the significance? I'm curious. Yeah, absolutely. So ugly mug marketing,
it comes from a quote by this gentleman of the name David Ogilvie. David Ogilvie immigrated to
the U.S. back, I think, in the late 50s, if I'm not mistaken. And he came over here with 40 bucks.
And he was determined to build the world's largest ad agency. And he did that. He built the world's
largest ad agency. They're still in the top 10 in the world. But one of his quotes was this,
I would rather you show me an ad that's ugly and effective over one that's beautiful, but isn't.
And so our name stems from that quote of this idea that we want something that's effective
over something that's beautiful, although we don't mind something that's beautiful, right?
If it works. So that's where ugly mug comes from. At fire yourself or fire yourself comes from this
notion that the biggest obstacle in any endeavor in our lives, whether it's business, whether it's
relational, whether it's finance, is not external factors, but it's rather the person who looks
back at you in the mirror every single morning. That is the biggest obstacle you have to overcome
and learning to lead that person well is what matters most. So that's where that comes from.
I love it. I knew there was meaning behind the names.
So before we wrap it up, your leadership style is described as passionate and heart driven. How do
you maintain this approach in your business and what advice can you share to other leaders looking
to lead with purpose? I would say that, you know, when we think about leadership, it's easy to get
wrapped up in, you know, principles or techniques or tools on how we should go about leading, how
to be an effective leader, all of that stuff. There's so much great material out there.
And I'm certainly a student of it all. But at the end of the day, I think it boils down to this
simple thing is that we are dealing with human beings who have different motives, different
desires, different struggles, different pain points than we may have. And the more that we can
learn to be in tune with the person, either across the table, across the screen, on the other side of
the phone, the more that we can truly learn to listen to them, to feel where they're coming from,
the more effective we'll be in all of our leadership. Because at the end of the day,
as who, I don't know who says this, somebody, some great leadership person says this,
leadership is really just about influence. And if you truly want to influence people, you first
must understand who they are and where they're coming from.
Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, she love enjoyed our chat.
And thank you to everyone that tuned in to another episode of Milestone Moments in Business and
Leadership.