Hey now, welcome to another edition of the Inside BS Show. Today, we're talking about how you can create a fantastic brand for yourself and how you can deliver wisdom to the ideal audience for you. My guest today on the show is Susan Sharp.

She's an author, a speaker, and a consultant, and she's gonna share with us the way she's created her personal brand. She has made herself into an expert and she's gonna share how she did it. So those of you who are out there, who are in professional services, or maybe you're a professional speaker, and you wanna learn how to become a brand, how to stake out a position in a market niche, this is the exact person to help us with that.

Please join me in welcoming Susan to the Inside BS Show. Susan, thanks for joining us today. It's great to have you here.

Thanks so much for the invite. All right, so give us your background. Tell us how you got started.

Bring us up to date and tell us where you are now with your career. Sure. Well, I spent many years, over 20, teaching in higher education as a theater and public speaking professor, and I got really burnt out, and so burnt out I say I was crispy as chicken.

And so I waited too long to really be able to have clarity in what my next move was, and so I was sort of forced into this crap. I have to do something different, and I have to do it now, but I'm not sure what to do. So I made a lot of mistakes in the process of pivoting, and I finally got clarity on what I wanted to do.

I wanted to write more books, I wanted to speak more, and then COVID happened. And every, well, not podcast, at least I was on podcast still, but every speaking engagement, every book signing, every event that I eked out to sort of replace my income, suddenly was gone, and I had to pivot yet again. And I did not, I still was so tired that I did not have, I didn't know what to do.

This was like we were all like zooming for the first time. And so I think what I have come to, how I've come to think about this time in my life is it was the great experiment, and I threw everything I knew at the wall to see what would stick, and some things did, and some things didn't work at all, and I eked through my savings pretty quickly. But the point is that I'm still here, I'm still breathing, and you find ways that work, and you find a way.

And if you really care about what you do, if you really care about your message, you find the way. And so that's what I eventually did, but I really learned so much about burnout, and what not to do about burnout, that it sort of accidentally become my platform. And so I had written a book just prior to COVID called Midlife Wisdom, in which I was talking about, moving into the best part of your life.

And there was a little bit of a disconnect, cause I sort of felt like a train wreck. I felt like I was like going through imposter syndrome, because everything that I was saying wasn't working in this new COVID era. So it just was a matter of just throwing things away that weren't working, and adopting new things, and reading a lot, and talking.

I think what we found during COVID was we all had to pivot in some way, and we really relied on each other. So that's sort of what came out of this, me leaving my professor gig to do something different cause I was burnout. Okay, great.

So there are people listening right now who are thinking to themselves, well, that's exactly the way I feel. So Susan, what did you do to overcome that feeling, and to reignite your passion? Well, I tried to identify what was it that was about my professor gig that was like ad nauseum for me. Like I couldn't do, I couldn't direct one more play.

I couldn't teach one more class on whatever. And when I found out what I didn't want, it's much easier to gravitate towards what you do want. So I think for me, resting was key.

I really needed to mentally rest, and I needed to give myself the grace to just say, I don't have it figured out, and in six months, I'm still not probably gonna have it figured out, but I'm still able to function right now, so I'm gonna do what I can. And of course, I would make different decisions now, but in the moment, that's all I knew, and I didn't have some guru guiding the way. You've talked on your show in the past about the importance of mentoring, and having someone to mentor you, and had I gone back, I would have done that.

I would have sought out help much earlier for that, but what I learned about myself was that just to stop judging ourselves, and just be, you can't keep judging yourself, and having all those voices in your head, criticizing yourself when you're trying to do something new. And let's face it, anytime we try to step out and do something new, it is scary, and we are gonna make mistakes. So we don't need, the rest of the world is gonna be critical of us.

We don't need to be that for ourselves. We should be our best cheerleader. Oh man, that is a message that people need to write down right there.

Everybody else is gonna provide you with the negativity. You gotta be positive for yourself. I love that.

So Susan, tell us what your focus is now. So today, who's the person that comes to you that can help you, and where do you do your best work? That you can help, and where do you do your best work? Yeah, well, a lot of people come to me because they're just stuck. And they know that I got over this.

They know that I got to the other side, so they look to me to sort of get unstuck. And so people that come to me, they want to know how to get over the burnout, and how to be better. And I always say that it's just, you have gifts that I don't.

I have gifts that you probably don't. So it's just our job in life to point each other in the right direction when we see things in people's lives that aren't working for them. And I would want someone to do that for me.

So that's what I try to do. Honest conversation about what I'm seeing, what I'm experiencing, what's resonating with me, having gone through it. I wrote this book, Midlife Wisdom, largely to help people process what's going on in midlife.

I don't think most people go through a crisis. I think we sort of go through an awakening. For some of us, like women in particular, we remember the girl in third grade who pulled our hair, and we're still holding this unforgiveness, right? It's like, get over it.

And so I think when we get to midlife, we need to grasp onto something different for what I consider the best half of our life. We go into midlife with a lot of wisdom, maybe some disposable income, certainly a whole laundry list of things that we shouldn't do. So people that come to me are really looking for my honest feedback.

Some people are coming to me for skills like public speaking and encouragement. But lots of different people make their way to me. I'm never sure quite where they come from, but they want to help get unstuck, and that's what I can do for them.

That's perfect. I love that. All right, so Susan, I'm gonna ask you this question.

I want you to take a minute and think about the answer. And the question is what are the two or three things that you want people to be ready to share with you? What do you want to know about them so that you can determine, you can use those fresh eyes that you bring and determine what's gonna help them get unstuck? So think about maybe the first two or three questions that people can start asking themselves, and hopefully they'll reach out to you, and you will ask them, and they can have the answers ready. But give us the first two or three questions that you would ask someone who comes to you who's stuck so that they can begin the process of figuring out, hey, what am I gonna do to get unstuck? So think about that for just one minute.

And while you're thinking about that, I'm gonna remind folks that we're brought to you by Sandrowski Corporate Advisors. So for over 35 years, Sandrowski has helped privately held businesses and families of affluence, and they've helped them with tax planning, with advisory on setting up a family office, with dispute advisory, business valuations, litigation support, forensic accounting. They do the same things that a big four accounting firm would do, except that they do it for this mid-market area.

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Great example is I was talking to Harry Sandrowski a couple of weeks ago when I was with him, and he said to me, Dave, I had a client who was selling his business. It was a manufacturing business, and he was gonna sell it for $49 million. We were able to save him $10 million in capital gains taxes because we reorganized his business in such a way that he qualified for a small business stock exemption.

Now, not every business qualifies, but in order to qualify, you need to look at the criteria, and Sandrowski are experts at doing this. They can also help you structure your business so that you do qualify. If you're interested in something like this, or you just wanna save money on your taxes, give Sandrowski a call today.

You can call them by reaching out at 866-717-1607, 866-717-1607, Sandrowski Corporate Advisors. There's a CPA, they're a CPA firm with a different perspective. It's so funny.

Every time I look at the phone number, I wanna say you can dial 866-717-1607, but nobody knows what that means because we don't have phones with dials on them anymore. We're also brought to you by my Revenue Roadmap Guide. That's right, the guide that I use to coach my clients on business development.

I wanna give it to you for free. Here's what you need to do. Go to revenueroadmapguide.com. All those words together, revenueroadmapguide.com. Enter your contact info there.

You can immediately download your guide to business development. You can customize it for your professional practice. It'll help you grow your business.

It's my gift to you for watching and for listening to the show. We're speaking with Susan Sharp. You can reach out to Susan at the phone number 309-868-2253.

309-868-2253. I'm also gonna put her email address down in the show notes. All right, Susan.

So before we went on that quick little break, I asked you a question. What are some of the questions that you would ask someone who's stuck and they come to you so that you can help them diagnose the reasons why they're stuck? And what are those questions that you would ask them? What do you want? And what are the obstacles to getting that? And once we get the answers to those, then it becomes how to make the new roadmap. But we have to know what we want.

And I think in a world where we have infinite choices, I mean, when you and I were in elementary school, we had some career choices, but they weren't nearly what we have today, right? So podcast hosts was not quite in your elementary curriculum, was it? Right? So we have so many choices today and we have so many choices right from the luxury of our own homes, frankly. So what do you want and what's the obstacle? Not the perceived obstacles, but what are the actual obstacles? And I always hear money. Frankly, if you want something bad enough, the money will come.

So I just wanna get that right out of the way. Don't ever say money's the issue because the money will come. Just trust me.

If you're clear on what you want, the money comes. So, and then after we find out the questions to those two things, we can start to make a roadmap. And I think if somebody hasn't currently left their job, there are things to do to sort of ride that out a little bit longer so you have that income and you can maximize those benefits.

I think most of us, when we were working in a job where somebody else provided the health insurance and the benefits, we don't maximize those and we really should. There's often free mental health counseling. There's often a lot of different things you could do prior to just saying, I'm done.

So we need to maximize those before we leave. But so that's what I would tell people to try to get unstuck. And then of course, to surround yourself with encouraging people and lots of different reading and whatnot to help you sort of start to retool where you wanna be.

That's great. All right, Susan, I wanna shift gears a little bit and I wanna ask you about writing books, right? How has writing books helped you grow your business and describe for us the process that you went through to write, let's take your latest book, Midlife Wisdom, the process you went through to write your latest book. Start with how has writing a book, writing books, several books, helped you grow your professional business, your professional practice? Yeah, I sort of wrote the book that I needed to read because I wasn't finding that book on the shelf that I needed, sort of like recovering from your past, embracing your future.

It just wasn't out there in the form. So I sort of created this unique journal essay format in one, and I just have never seen anything else like it out there. But that ended up becoming really, because it's 60% journal, it ended up becoming sort of a conversation between the book and myself.

And I actually think what it brought was quite a lot of healing and clarity. And so I think the same thing happens for people that pick it up. It's a conversation between them and themselves, really.

And so again, I didn't set out to be an expert in midlife, but here I am, and it seems to be the thing that why I get so many invitations for different things. And because I think my message is resonating with people that midlife doesn't have to be, put your head in the sand, life is over. I actually think it's the best time of our life.

So that, I think, use what the good Lord gave you. And so here I have this message of just my utter burnout. If more people would just use what life has given them as their platform, people wouldn't be striving so much.

So just tell your story. Everybody has a story that the world needs to hear. So that's really what it became.

It ended up becoming a brand because I had spectacularly lived it. I had all of the failures and joys that go along with it. So it ended up sort of becoming part of my brand.

That's great. Tell us about being on the set of Orange is the New Black. What was that experience like and how did that happen for you? Yeah, I would say it's a little bit of good timing, a little bit of dumb luck, and a little bit of strategy.

I had just done a marketing campaign for my Etsy shops and that's where they bought the art that appeared on the set. And so the timing with the marketing campaign, I just don't think can be overlooked, but why they bought from my shop, I'll probably never know. I asked as many questions as I could without being a pest, but it seemed like it just, the art that they bought to put on the set seemed to fit the decor and it was sort of fun watching the show to sort of see my stuff on the set.

So I definitely think the marketing campaign had something to do with it, but I also think it was probably just my SEO and my tags that I was doing at the time. And it's given me a lot of leverage that has gotten me a few art shows. It certainly is fun to see famous people standing in front of your art, but the timing was really good for me.

So you created the artwork and they were out surfing for a particular type of artwork. And did they go to Etsy or did they see the art in the Google images and were like, they clicked on it and it took them to your Etsy shop. They went to Etsy specifically? Yeah, it looks, I actually had a brief conversation with the set designer and he said that he just loved Etsy.

So he was spending, he was trolling time on Etsy that day and wandered, but he bought from both my Etsy shops. So that was really nice. He crossed over and there your marketing works with your backlinks and whatnot.

So that was sort of fun to see that he had bought from both shops. And I was only able to find two of the four pieces they bought for the show in the footage. So the rest must have gotten scrapped, but it was still fun.

Yeah, but you never know that that set designer could show up on another show somewhere and may need another piece and he's bookmarked your site now. So you're in with them, that's great. Talk to me about that actual, that as a business then.

Now you also, I think I saw on your site, don't you teach people how to make Etsy work for them as well? Yeah, I have, again, spent a lot of time tweaking my shops and trying to get more traction and sales. And so I rank currently like in the top 6% of Etsy sellers nationwide or worldwide. So I've had some success.

And so I help people try to get out of the 0% sales up to get their sales up. And a lot of it is just trying to understand the algorithm that Etsy uses until they change it again and trying to find out what's working for other people. And a lot of times it's just simple things like switching your photography up.

Bad photos don't sell good art. So you have to have good photos and understand how people are searching. So sometimes it's just simple things.

Yeah, so now your artwork, you were doing that, were you doing that when you were a professor as well and it was like a side hustle for you? Yeah, I have never ever done one thing. In fact, I would say that my research into creativity shows that the things that I love to do actually all inform each other. They all feed off of each other and encourage the other.

And so I think there's many of us out there that would consider themselves highly creative. And I don't know any highly creative person that just does one thing. It's almost like your brain can't just focus on one thing.

So at the same time I was building sets and teaching theater, I was working with interesting materials and I started to ask, well, what could we do with these materials? So one of the signature pieces that I make is actually a piece of an old billboard that I got from a billboard company. And I painted an abstract painting on it and cut it up into pieces and started to weave it together. And that's actually the kind of art that was on the set of Orange is the New Black.

It was a woven piece from an old billboard. So my theater training informed my art and even though I'm self-taught, the materials that we use, you start to think about them in new ways. So give some of the creative folks out there some advice now, right? So there are people out there who are artists, whether they're musicians or they paint on a canvas or they're sculptors or they're performers, they're actors.

Give creative people advice about business development, about marketing. What would you tell those folks about the importance of business development, about the importance of marketing? Yeah, I think most creatives only wanna do the creative part. And that's great if you can afford to hire out the rest, but most of us can't.

So you have to spend time on the stuff that you don't like. You have to spend time on marketing. You have to understand SEO.

You have to understand the algorithms and that's stuff we don't like. That's not in our wheelhouse because that's not creative and pretty and experimenting, but that's probably more of your job as a creative than actually creating. So when digital stuff started to become really popular, I learned how to manipulate my artwork digitally that gives me an infinite product line, right? But I needed to spend that time learning what I didn't consider to be very glamorous or creative stuff.

And now it's at least half my sales are digital products based off of my hard work of being in the studio and painting. But yeah, I would say actually it's probably 60, 40, not so fun stuff to fun stuff. And most artists don't wanna hear that.

Most creatives don't wanna hear that. They want more time for the fun stuff and that's fine. Then be really good at that and then hire everybody to do the boring stuff for you.

But there's your motivation to get more sales to get better at your art so that it will allow you to hire out the stuff you don't like. Okay, so if you wanna see some of Susan's work, you wanna see all the things that she can potentially help you with, you can go to her website, asharpdifference.com, all those words together. There's a link to that down in the show notes.

All right, Susan, so here's what we're gonna do now. I'm gonna ask you to give us three things we should take away from our time together, three things you want everyone to remember. While you're doing that, I'm gonna remind folks once again that we're brought to you by Sandrowski Corporate Advisors.

So you heard me talk about privately held businesses and how Sandrowski can help privately held businesses. Now, I'm talking to you, lawyers who are out there who have a case where there is a financial valuation and you need an expert to do the valuation for you. How do you select that expert? I'm gonna give you two criteria.

First, they have to be outstanding at what they do and they have to be very highly regarded. They have to be experts in their field. So you want people who've done valuations for years and years and years and are highly regarded.

Sandrowski checks that box. The second thing is something you may not have thought of. The person doing the valuations, the person who's going to review the financial information for you, either in front of a court, in front of a judge, or just really bring you up to speed, they need to be able to explain the financial information in a way that makes non-financial people comfortable, in a way that's easy for non-financial people to understand.

Think about the judge or perhaps a jury or even you and your team. You want the CPA who's done your valuation to be able to break it down very simply for you. Well, Sandrowski can do that.

The folks who head up their valuation division, they're college professors, so they have experience sharing complex subjects, breaking them down, making them really easy to understand. So if you need help with a business valuation, you need help with litigation support, you have to give Sandrowski a call. Reach out to them today, 866-717-1607.

866-717-1607. Sandrowski Corporate Advisors, they're a CPA firm with a different perspective. We're also brought to you by My Revenue Roadmap Guide.

You heard me say it before. Why haven't you downloaded your free guide yet? Go to revenueroadmapguide.com, enter your contact info, download the same business development plan I use with my clients. It's my gift to you for joining us today.

Revenueroadmapguide.com, enter your contact info, download it now. We're speaking with Susan Sharp. She's an author, a speaker, and a consultant.

So if you want Susan to help you get unstuck, or you're an artist and you need someone to put you on the right track from a business development, from a marketing perspective, or you just want some inspiration, give Susan a call. You can reach out to her at 309-868-2253. That's 309-868-2253.

You can visit her website, asharpdifference.com. All that info, as well as Susan's email address is down in the show notes. So you can reach out to her. Okay, Susan, what are the three things you want us to take away from our time together today? Midlife is your best life.

You know a lot, and so you need to leverage it. I think creativity, number two, creativity is not optional if you're in business. So even if you don't think of yourself as creative, you need to get creative with how you are doing business, because it's not business as usual anymore.

And the third thing I would have you take away is that we each have a story to tell. And so instead of spinning your wheels and trying to figure out how you can compete, just start figuring out how to tell your story the best, because people want genuine connections. People want somebody that has lived a life and can speak from their own experience.

So learn how to craft and tell your story, which is part of writing. And I think writing is such an important part of business these days. So learn how to tell your story.

That's fantastic, Susan. And we enjoyed hearing your story. We enjoyed hearing how you could help us.

Thank you so much for being with us on the Inside BS Show today. Thank you so much. Alrighty, folks, if you wanna reach out to Susan Sharp, again, her phone number's 309-868-2253, 309-868-2253.

Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Dave Lorenzo. We'll be back here again with another Inside BS Show tomorrow.

Until then, here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.