Five Questions with Fin Wycherley
We’ve got a brand new series for you, we’re chatting to some of our favourite speakers about their businesses, the challenges they’ve faced and how they overcame them. All in five questions (sometimes more if we get over excited)
This time we spoke to Fin Wycherley, the social media expert responsible for Supersize Media . She is also Facebook’s only official trainer in Scotland and has been awarded awarded both ‘Woman of Inspiration’ and ‘Outstanding Contribution’ by ASB for my work with SME businesses and charities, along with being named one of Enterprise Nation’s Top Five Business advisors in the UK. Honestly, the list of reasons Fin is great could go on and on, instead why not read her advice on business, social media and how to avoid burnout?
What advice would you give young women starting writing business in the business world?
So there’s a number of things. Firstly, don’t give up the day job until you’re earning enough money to actually say goodbye to your nine to five. People think that ‘Okay I’m going to start my business. I’m going to hand in my notice next week.’ They do that, invest in all these courses and then just run out of cash flow within three months. Meanwhile, they haven’t even got the website up and running because they’ve been having all kinds of arguments with the web designer and they’re still trying to work out how to use Facebook ads and things like that.
You need to do your nine to five until such time as the business is making enough money and a sustainable amount of money to be able to quit. You might have a good period of six months or so, but then it all goes pear shaped and you have to pivot. So basically, don’t quit your day job until you’re absolutely ready to bring someone else in to help you.
It’s one of those pieces of advice you never see. Everybody’s like do it, do it, do it, and I’m hundred percent about do it, do it, do it. But you have to make sure that you’re doing it in a way that’s sustainable. You don’t want to turn around and you’ve lost your house, your kids have walked out on you and everybody is calling you a complete failure, or you feel like a complete failure because you haven’t realised how much learning there is in order to get started.
Another problem is if you’re really successful from the gate. Then everything you touch as far as you’re concerned turns to gold, but you don’t actually understand the key factors that made you so successful. So, when you try to replicate it without understanding your strengths and weaknesses, it’s all going to come crashing down. I think that when women go into business they’re a lot more cautious anyway. Guys that are a lot more gung ho about it, they’ll invest everything they’ve got into it. That’s why you have such a high failure rate, within a very short period of time. Everybody, especially women have to set up business, because it is a true Liberator but you have to make sure you’re doing it in the right way.
So, do your nine to five but do your five to nine as well. Run your business in the evenings as much as possible. Use that time to build your website, learn how to use social media, how to do search engine optimization, work out the best way to get a website done. Just going around and speaking to a couple of mates is not going to get you a good website either — that’s going to be an absolute nightmare.
As a marketing agency, one of the main problems we have when clients come to speak to us is that they’ll want to do a marketing campaign to drive traffic to the website. But when we look at the website it’s bollocks. They won’t have a fast loading speed, or it doesn’t navigate well and it has to be usable to get people to come back. There’s so many parts of business that business entrepreneurs have to learn on the hoof, they often have no idea the scale of the mountain they’re climbing. They’ll go in with a lot of enthusiasm — and a fair dose of desperation for some — but you just need to learn to pace yourself. It takes a while to learn how to do the finances; it takes a while to learn how to do the bookkeeping; it takes a while to learn how to do your tax returns — it takes a long while for that. I’m numbers illiterate, I look at a number and I start to come out in hives. So when people talk to me about how they’ve got problems with marketing, I can relate because I have that thing when it comes to numbers; and other people have that thing when it comes to marketing. You’ll always find, people have got a thing about some aspects of the business but there’s no page R or anything, it can be so tricky. So I think you need to have a reasonable expectation of what you can achieve within three years rather than trying to get everything done within a year.
Do you think it’s probably almost easier for people came up, or started their businesses pre the internet, pre marketing, and were able to grow from that?
I think it’s a lot harder for them, because that’s the majority of people who are in business right now. They genuinely look at online as just an additional channel to sell their products or services. So they have no idea of the sensitivities, or even the relationship building or the two way environment, or the very basic social aspects of social media that are necessary to build a brand. Those brands and organisations that have very old school feeling about them online, nobody relates to them and their engagement rate is low. Therefore, anything they try to do online is going to be very, very expensive, because if they don’t know how the algorithms work and if they are not getting engagement, they’re not going to get the reach. If you don’t get engagement on an organic level, it’s going be even more expensive. Then they start putting a budget behind it, because their marketing strategy is wrong from the get go. So therefore when they try and replicate that into an ad strategy, it’s still going to be half cocked and very expensive. We get a lot of people come to us who have spent literally thousands on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and Pinterest ads and they have nothing to show for it because they are missing out on the basic elements of their relationship with their customers online.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?
Tony Robbins said that ‘you will always overestimate what you could achieve in one year, but you will always underestimate what you could achieve in 10’. Doing business can be really frustrating because you feel like you can be working so hard and you’re not making any progress. Sometimes you could go through the days, and the weeks and you’re like ‘what the hell have I done?’
People often go into business for the wrong reasons, they want to have a sense of freedom and work on their own time, they don’t want any boss telling them what to do. But the reality is that when you go into business, if you’re going to be successful, you’re going have to work 16 hours a day. The idea that you’re going to be working less and you can chill out because you don’t have your boss shouting at you anymore is not necessarily the reality. Fair enough you can have days off when you want to but it’s not about having all the freedom that you imagine it’s going to be. So productivity is often an issue, especially when you’re starting out. Focusing on the long game, and really building something that will last instead of the immediate will really help.
For women and girls, especially women who have children and babies, starting a business of your own is a no brainer. When I started off in business, I already had five children, and I needed to build a career, but there was no career that was going to support me and I wanted to be able to support my kids at the same time. So the only way I could actually continue earning good money was to set up a business and build that business around the needs of the family. It was very important for me to be able to give the kids all the support they needed, but then I would take time out when they were sleeping or when they were at the park to really build the business.
When I knew that I had the agency I always made it a priority to hire women and young women with children so that they could also have the privilege of being able to keep on developing their career, whilst keeping the flexibility to have the best of both worlds. Even if the baby is ill, or you had to sit in the hospital for two days or something like that, as far as I’m concerned that’s fine. Everybody knows what the deadlines are, everybody’s got their stuff to do, as long as they do it the time they do it in is flexible. That philosophy of being able to support women, women with babies or children or young women is very strong for me. That’s the number one reason why I recommend that women should all have a business either as their main business, or a side business, or part time business, or in between jobs kind of business that they can pick up as and when. It’s an absolute no brainer and it will follow you for the rest of your life and it will just continue to grow because you will keep nurturing it.
What do you think makes a great social media account?
A great social media account is one that has a very strong sense of the end user.
When you have a company that has built the environment around their end user you can tell, from the way that space feels to the way the space is laid out, even from how the door is designed. That attention to detail extends to the online environment, you have to have a very strong sense of who you are talking to, that buyer persona has been nailed right down. You’ll have lots and lots of useful inspirational and engaging content which is well grounded, well branded, and well thought out. But the number one thing is that the content has to be engaging, if you’re not getting people liking, commenting, sharing, clicking through, that’s not social media.
A lot of people traditionally go into social media because they’ve got some kind of tech background, or they have some sort of journalism or English literature background. But that’s not marketing. Marketing means you make people take action. You’re either changing people’s perceptions, or behaviour, or you’re making them do something. If you’re creating stuff, that doesn’t have an action in mind, that is not social media either. So you’ve always got to have an objective of how you are pulling people further down the sales funnel or whatever it is you’re trying to achieve. Are you getting more people to support your cause, are you getting more people to buy your products? Tailor your content to reflect that end goal.
The traditional marketing mindset is very to the point, the focus is on ‘Here’s who we are. This is what we do. This is why we’re amazing. This is some of the case studies that we’ve done. Here’s us doing our staff away day’. That is totally totally rubbish, who’s going to share that? It’s not appropriate. For example, I work with a lot of lawyers who just want to share their latest property update, but it’s not appropriate, it’s marketing for another channel but it’s not social.
You have to think about where people are on the sales journey, you have to get them to be aware of who you are, because you can’t get them to go onto the next stage where they pay for this service or buy the product etc. if they don’t know who you are. The final stage is actually making the purchase, helping them over the edge of making that commitment. Can you put in there to make it a no brainer for them to sign up for that purchase?
So with social media you have to be able to find all those narrative stories that you can bring in, and you can draw the hero’s journey through them. If you’re working on the founders story, What motivated them? What are the difficulties that they’re going through? Especially with Corona. Are they dealing with environmental issues? How are they dealing with equality and Black Lives Matter? Are they paying attention to trends? That’s where a hero’s story can be a great thread to use as part of the marketing campaign for some businesses. Similarly, issues to do with the products and services and all those narrative stories. Because storytelling is the magic of social media. It’s the kind of Voodoo witchcraft that comes in for that, and stops people in their tracks because it makes them think rather than just kind of blasting information that you just scroll through.
What was the biggest challenge you faced when you’re starting out and how did you overcome it?
Finance was a big problem for me, and also social media. When I started out, nobody really took their social media seriously, so there was nobody interested in paying for that kind of service. But they all wanted it and they all wanted it for free. So I had to figure out how to get them from needing a hand, and getting success, but then not not wanting to value it, to being paid for it.
I had a background in law, traditional marketing copywriting and journalism for a radio show that focused on small businesses. One of the recurring questions I would get were related to social media and how it could help small businesses. Eventually, a lot of businesses that came on the show were like: ‘Okay you seem to understand what you’re doing with social media’. Because we had it on the podcast and on all the social media platforms, so they would ask me to give them a hand. I would be totally delighted because I was just winging it, working out as I went along. But then the ad agency started asking me to help them because the traditional ad agencies at that time only knew about graphic design and big three month campaigns.
I decided to get trained up by Mari Smith — one of the world’s biggest social media experts at the time based out in San Diego. She trained me up on all the proper tools of marketing on social media. Then she gave me loads and loads of clients who were prepared to pay good bucks for the support. They were all companies in America and Australia and Canada, because those guys are like three years ahead of the UK. It wasn’t until about three years later, that Britain started to wake up and say, ‘Okay, fine. I think we’re going to need to bring in an expert to do this because it’s just not working for us anymore and our intern can’t make it work’. Because that was the problem, small businesses had the mentality of thinking because it’s tech, kids could do it, because they’re on their phones all the time anyway. They didn’t value it and because so many of them were not getting any results out of it. They couldn’t work out what the disconnect was. Then there was a problem of working out how they could afford to pay an expert their real value without bankrupting the business. It took quite a lot of fine tuning to make sure it was a win win for everyone.
The other problem was being an older female in digital, there’s a lot of prejudice about that. I don’t know how many clients I’ve actually spoken to, but about 90% of them are like ‘you must be so lucky to have young people in your team to keep you right.’
So they’re hiring me not because I’m the expert, not because I’ve got all the qualifications, not because I have all the experience; But because I’ve got young people on my team that can keep me right. The other part of the prejudice, is that the traditional marketers want to work with young guys who’ve got beards. Because that’s what they think tech and marketing is about — if you want to work with a real expert it’s got to be someone with a dick, and someone with a beard. For them if you’re choosing to work with a woman who’s got, you know, years of international experience and qualifications and awards it’s like their chart chargeable choice. They’re being compassionate. Whereas the guys are charging double what I charge, and don’t get the results. Because the business owners tend to be male and they only want to go with other males. It’s been pretty hard and really brutal to see some 25 year old with a beard, who’s got a degree in Geography deciding to set himself up as a social media expert and he’s picking up all the contracts. We’ve had all the years of experience and we get all the results, we’ve got all the track record, all the case studies, but I’m not looked at because I’m too old. If I get one of my young members of the team to actually step up and do the sales well maybe we’d have a chance, but I’m like: ‘I didn’t set up a business to be defined by fucking young white or old white men. You’ll have to wake up, you know? Black folk are here, Asian folk right here. Older women are here, and we’re not moving away.’
It means that, I recognise that 90% of our customers are going to be women because they’re very inspired by my journey, and they regard me as an inspirational person in the business community. Obviously I’m fully committed to them getting great results, it’s a virtuous cycle. That’s how you work with all the prejudices that are out there.
How would you see breaking out of that cycle, do you think you would ever be able to break out of it?
Oh, man. It’s difficult I mean how do you break down prejudice? I mean, it’s patriarchal, the way that women are treated in so many aspects of our society, determines that particular viewpoint. Eventually more and more women will be in business so therefore the pot will be stronger. Right now still it’s 80% of the businesses run by the white guys.
So, You have to work within the system, take down the patriarchy from inside.
Yess!
That’s why women need to be in business because we can beat them in numbers like ants, you don’t pay attention to us because we’re small, and we are insignificant but when we work together we pull down the fucking mountain.
My last question for you is, how do you stay motivated to keep pushing forwards in your career?
So I love what I do and I love seeing the results for the clients and I love the enthusiasm that my team have for working in the business as well and the support that they get. So all of those are a no brainer. I love that social media is constantly changing because I like to be always on my toes and incorporating the new changes that are happening, and then fitting them out to everybody. It’s not a problem with motivation, I guess the only problem is maybe burnout from time to time just because I tend to work too much. About two years ago, I didn’t realise how tired I was to the core of my being because of my ‘I will overcome type of mentality’. Eventually, I hit the wall. I didn’t realise what happened until I did a four day Tantra massage course. I did this four day massage course and right at the end of it, I was so wiped out — like every single piece of tension that has ever been stored up in my body over the previous 30 or 40 years had been squeezed out of me. I was like a wet dribbling rag. I didn’t even know what my name was after that. All I wanted to do for six weeks was just sleep. I’d go, I would do the work, then sleep, and then get up and go to work, and then come back to sleep. I did not realise how much sleep and how much tiredness and how much stress I had been carrying over the years. Since then, I’ve become a massive fan of Tantra massage, Tantric Yoga, Tantra meditation, and this is now my Bible. I’ll do it for two hours in the morning before I even get started. So that I’m in that total Zen space, and then everything is totally easy.
