Shine Online Show

Lou Bowers

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Entrepreneurship
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Welcome to the Shine Online Show with Lou Bowers. This is the show where we talk about visibility without gimmicks, marketing without burnout, and showing up online in a way that actually works. If you’re building a business, a brand, or a reputation, you’re in the right place. I’m here to remind you that social media isn’t dead and that you can shine online. loubowersmarketing.substack.com

6d ago

Is Your Business Running on Coffee and Sandwich Crusts?

Have you ever hit that mid-afternoon slump where your brain decides it’s finished working for the day, even though your to-do list has other plans? You know the feeling. Everything seems to require a little more effort, your creativity has gone on vacation, and another cup of coffee starts looking like a pretty good idea. Well, apparently, the answer might be a sandwich. I recently invited my longtime friend and nutritionist Amanda McKean onto the Shine Online Show to talk about something that deserves a lot more attention in the business community: how the food we eat affects our energy, focus, and ability to show up for the work we do. Amanda runs Inspired Eats With Amanda here in Kamloops, and she’s also someone I’ve worked with personally to improve my own eating habits. I love how she approaches nutrition because she makes it feel manageable. She’s interested in helping people build habits that work for their actual lives, which is a pretty refreshing approach when we’re all juggling approximately a million things. One of the things Amanda said during our conversation really stuck with me. Calories are a measure of energy. I know. Groundbreaking stuff, right? Except think about how we’ve been taught to look at calories. For so many of us, they’re something to count, restrict, avoid, or feel guilty over. Meanwhile, we’re expecting our brains to produce brilliant ideas, solve problems, manage clients, remember approximately 700 things, and keep our businesses moving forward. Amanda explained that when we haven’t given our bodies enough energy throughout the day, that afternoon crash can be a very predictable response. We’re asking our brains to do all this work, and we need to make sure we’re supplying the fuel they need. One of her recommendations is to plan a snack around two or three in the afternoon, especially if that’s when your energy tends to dip. She suggested pairing a protein with a carbohydrate, fruit, or vegetable. Something like a hard-boiled egg and crackers, or another combination that gives you some energy and helps you feel satisfied until dinner. I particularly enjoyed the part of our conversation where Amanda admitted that sometimes she wants chips in the afternoon, and she eats the chips. She’ll often add some protein alongside them. Imagine that. Eating something you enjoy and thinking about how to make it work for your body instead of turning it into a moral dilemma. We also talked about hydration, because apparently we’re all complicated houseplants who need considerably more attention than we’re giving ourselves. Amanda drinks herbal tea throughout the day because she doesn’t enjoy cold water on her sensitive teeth. She pointed out that hydration can come from a variety of places, including the foods we eat. Oatmeal, soups, fruits, vegetables, all those things contribute. And here’s some news that I was particularly delighted to hear: your morning coffee counts toward your hydration. According to Amanda, coffee’s reputation for being terribly dehydrating is overblown, particularly for people who drink it regularly. I feel like that information alone made the entire podcast episode worthwhile. Of course, drinking coffee at six in the evening might still interfere with your sleep, so don’t go using me as your excuse for that. Another part of our conversation really resonated with me because it goes beyond food and into something I talk about all the time in business: building habits that actually fit into your life. We talked about that dreaded five o’clock moment when you’re exhausted, everyone wants dinner, and the drive-through starts looking incredibly appealing. Amanda explained that our brains love familiar routines. If picking up takeout has solved the dinner problem before, our brains are going to keep suggesting it because they already know it works. Cooking at home might take less time than driving somewhere, ordering, waiting, and bringing everything back, but if it isn’t part of your routine, it can feel like an enormous amount of extra effort. Her suggestion was to start ridiculously small. Maybe you buy one meal kit during your Sunday grocery shopping and cook at home one evening a week. You do that until it starts feeling normal, and then you add another evening or try preparing something from scratch. I love this approach because it makes room for being an actual person with a business, a family, relationships, responsibilities, and the occasional day when everything goes sideways. We spend so much time setting these enormous goals for ourselves, whether they’re around nutrition, exercise, marketing, or growing a business, and then we get frustrated when we can’t maintain the whole elaborate plan. Amanda talked about how even a seemingly small change can bring up unexpected emotions. That reminded me of when my son was a baby. He had some pretty serious food allergies, and while I was nursing him, I had to eliminate certain foods from my diet, including dairy. I remember being in Scotland with family and seeing someone order this gorgeous, cheesy, gooey pizza. I wanted that pizza so badly that I actually went into the bathroom and cried. It sounds funny now, but I was genuinely upset. Food is tied to our memories, our relationships, our routines, and the things that bring us comfort. Changing those routines can be emotional, even when we understand why we’re doing it. Amanda sees that with her clients all the time, especially when people arrive wanting to lose weight and she starts by encouraging them to eat more consistently throughout the day. She explained that people sometimes spend the whole day under-fueling themselves and then feel completely out of control around food in the evening. There can be a biological reason for that overwhelming hunger, rather than the lack of willpower people often blame themselves for. And that brings me to one of my favourite things Amanda said during our conversation. Her goal for clients is often simply to do something more often than not. More often than not. I LOVE that. At my house, I have these adorable little jars with lids, and occasionally I get myself beautifully organized and prepare a few servings of chia pudding or what we call faux cheesecake. It’s cottage cheese, yogurt, and fruit blended together, with a little granola on top. It’s delicious, and when I’ve made it ahead of time, breakfast is incredibly easy. But sometimes I do it for two days and then completely lose interest. In my head, that’s usually the moment when I decide I’ve failed at meal prepping. Amanda’s perspective is that if I managed two days last week and three days this week, I’m making progress. If I can eventually do it four days out of seven, that’s pretty fantastic. There doesn’t need to be a dramatic declaration that from this day forward I shall eat a perfectly balanced breakfast every single morning until the end of time. Thank goodness, because that sounds exhausting. The more we talked, the more I started thinking about how much of this applies to the way we run our businesses. We want to be creative and productive. We want to have enough patience for our clients, enough mental energy to make good decisions, and enough enthusiasm left at the end of the day to enjoy the people we love. And yet, how often do we treat taking care of ourselves as something we’ll get around to when the work is finished? I eat at my desk far more often than I’d like to admit. Amanda challenged me to take even five minutes to sit and eat without checking emails, listening to a podcast, or doing something else at the same time. Five minutes to let my brain have a little break. I can already tell that one is going to take some practice. The conversation also made me think about how easily we separate our personal wellbeing from our business goals, as though they’re competing priorities. There’s our work, our families, our relationships, our health, and all the things we’re trying to balance. Sometimes it feels like every one of those things is standing in line demanding to be first. But if I’m taking better care of myself, I’m also putting myself in a better position to show up for my business. I can think more clearly, be more present, and have the energy to create the things I’m excited to share with the world. That’s a pretty compelling reason to pay attention to how we’re fueling ourselves. What I appreciate most about Amanda is how completely free of shame her approach feels. I’ve had moments while working with her when I’ve gone down a little spiral over my own eating habits. Instead of making me feel worse, she’ll check in, ask how things are going, and help me figure out what might make things easier. Within ten minutes, I usually feel like I can approach the whole thing again. She also makes the practical side of feeding yourself much easier. Through Inspired Eats With Amanda, she offers nutrition coaching, workshops, and freezer meal prep gatherings where she does the shopping, supplies the containers, and helps you prepare meals to take home. She also has a growing collection of over 100 freezer meal recipes, which feels like a pretty wonderful resource for those of us who would like dinner to stop being such a production every evening. You can find her at inspiredeats.ca, where she shares her workshops and ways to work with her. And if you’ve been finding yourself staring at your computer at three in the afternoon, wondering why your brain has stopped cooperating, I really encourage you to listen to our full conversation on the Shine Online Show. You might discover that your next great business idea begins with a snack. And possibly a little less time eating lunch over your keyboard. I’ll be working on that one too. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit loubowersmarke
Oct 7

What If Your Budget Worked With Your Brain Instead of Against It?

I went into this conversation expecting to talk about money, but I did not expect to feel personally attacked by the unfinished online course sitting in the back of my brain. Sherry Andrew was explaining how ADHD can affect the way we manage money, especially as entrepreneurs, and she mentioned the very specific experience of buying a course because you are convinced it is going to solve something for you, only to barely make it through the lessons. At that point I had to stop her because I currently have a course with something like 80 lessons in it and I have completed three, so apparently we were diagnosing me live on the podcast. That part made me laugh, but it also opened the door to a much bigger conversation about how often we blame ourselves when the systems we are trying to use were never designed for the way our brains work in the first place. Sherry launched Money Mindset Financial Coaching after losing the career she had been in for almost 17 years. At the time, getting fired was a shock, but looking back she sees it as what she calls her “two by four moment.” There had been signs that the job was no longer right for her, but she kept pushing through because that was what work looked like to her. You went to the job, collected the paycheque and eventually retired, while loving what you did was never really part of the equation. Losing that job forced her onto another path, and eventually her own ADHD diagnosis changed the direction of her business again. She started looking at the financial systems that worked for her and realizing there were reasons they worked. Some helped with out-of-sight, out-of-mind thinking, while others helped with time blindness or follow-through. That eventually became the focus of her work: helping people with ADHD manage money in a way that fits how their brains operate. This is where our conversation got really interesting for me, because so much traditional financial advice is built around rules about how much you should save, what percentage you should spend on housing, what you should never spend money on and what you should always be doing. Sherry pointed out that telling someone with ADHD they should always or never do something can be one of the fastest ways to make their brain rebel against the whole thing. On top of that, the standard percentages and formulas do not necessarily line up with the life somebody actually wants to live. You might care deeply about travel and be perfectly happy driving an older car so you can spend money on experiences instead, and I can relate to that one because I drive a 2014 Hyundai. On one of my recent vacations I spent hours sitting on a beach picking through rocks looking for sea glass, which is basically garbage hunting and somehow turned out to be incredibly soothing for my nervous system. Someone else might want the water parks, the amusement parks and the big shiny experiences, while I am very happy sitting on a beach looking for tiny pieces of old glass. Neither one is wrong. The point Sherry kept coming back to was that your money should support the life you actually want. Her core rule is pretty simple: find a system that helps you spend less than you make, then decide where the money goes based on your own priorities. That felt so much better to me than building your life around somebody else’s idea of what a “good” budget is supposed to look like. We also got into the financial advice that Sherry really does not agree with, especially the extreme restriction that shows up in some popular debt-payoff approaches. One example she brought up was the idea that if you have high-interest debt, you should avoid restaurants entirely until the debt is gone. That sounds tidy on paper, but it becomes a different story when paying off that debt could take years or when you have ADHD and there are days when you are so overstimulated or overwhelmed that ordering food is the only realistic way you are going to eat. Sherry’s point was not that you should ignore your debt or spend with zero intention. Her point was that a plan has to be sustainable enough that you can live with it. That brought us to what may be my favourite analogy from the entire conversation. If you really want a cheeseburger but you have decided you absolutely cannot have one, you might start by eating the carrots, then add some yogurt and crackers, trying to convince yourself that one of those things will scratch the itch, only to end up eating the cheeseburger anyway. At that point, you have eaten everything else and the cheeseburger. Money can work the same way. When you build a plan around absolute restriction, you may keep trying to find little workarounds until eventually you spend the money on the thing you wanted in the first place. Sherry would rather see people create some room in the budget for impulse spending or less intentional purchases so one decision does not make the entire plan feel ruined. That idea became even clearer when we started talking about the perfect-budget cycle. You sit down, make a beautiful plan and feel wildly responsible and organized for a minute, then your car makes a weird noise and suddenly there is a $500 repair that was nowhere in the plan. Now the whole budget feels broken, so you abandon it, go back to winging things for a while, feel bad about that, hyperfocus on fixing it and eventually create another perfect plan until something unexpected happens again. Sherry sees that cycle all the time, and one of the biggest shifts she encourages is planning for the expenses that feel unexpected even though we know they are eventually coming. Cars need repairs, homes need maintenance, holidays happen, people buy gifts and vacations cost money, so when those things are completely missing from the plan, they have the power to derail everything. When you put aside a little bit over time, the experience is completely different. One of Sherry’s clients recently had a $500 car repair and already had $700 sitting in the account they had been building for exactly that kind of expense. Instead of panic, there was excitement because the system had worked. Sherry talked about how important that win can be, especially for an ADHD brain, because you get the dopamine hit of seeing that something you set up actually helped you, which makes it easier to keep going. Another client had variable income and loved to travel, so Sherry helped create a simple rule. There was a baseline amount the client needed to live, and whenever income came in above that number, the difference went toward travel. One week, that amount was $79.26, and her client was thrilled to put that exact amount into the vacation fund because the extra money had somewhere to go before it could disappear into everything else. I loved that because we tend to think a financial plan has to feel restrictive to be responsible, but so much of what Sherry talked about was creating clarity around what your money is there to do. Some of it keeps the lights on, some of it protects you when your car starts making that suspicious little noise, some of it helps you pay down debt, and some of it can absolutely be there so you can go somewhere wonderful, sit on a beach and spend three hours hunting for sea glass if that is your idea of a fabulous vacation. By the end of our conversation, I told Sherry that talking to her had made my whole nervous system feel more regulated around money, and that is probably the biggest thing I took away from this episode. A good financial system should make your life feel steadier. It should give you enough structure to know what is happening with your money while leaving enough room for you to still be a human being. Sherry has free resources for entrepreneurs and people with ADHD, including a budgeting tool that does the math for you and helps you think through some of the expenses that are easy to forget when you are making a plan. She also works one-on-one with clients through Money Mindset Financial Coaching. I have a feeling this will not be the last time she is on The Shine Online Show because I could have kept talking to her for another hour. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit loubowersmarketing.substack.com
Sep 23

Thinking About Starting a Podcast? Start With These Two Questions

I am still very new to podcasting, and I absolutely love hosting the Shine Online Show. That said, there are definitely moments when I look at people who have been doing this for years and think, “Oh wow. I am an amateur.” That came up in my conversation with Shannon Warner, podcast strategist, producer, founder of Resonant Collective, and host of Speak Mother. Before we even started recording, I had mentioned that I still feel like I am figuring things out, and she immediately reminded me that this is exactly how she started too. No big podcasting boot camp. No perfectly mapped-out plan. She had an idea, followed it, and let it grow into something much bigger over time. That was reassuring on its own, but then she said something that shifted the way I was thinking about the whole thing. Let it be fun. It sounds almost too simple, especially in business, where we are constantly being told to optimize, strategize, track, plan, and make every single thing pull its weight. The second we decide to start something new, we tend to jump straight into logistics. What microphone should I buy? How often should I publish? Should I interview guests? How long should the episodes be? Which platform should I use? Meanwhile, we may not have stopped to think about what would make us actually want to keep doing it. Shannon’s advice was to start there. What would make podcasting enjoyable for you? Maybe it gives you an excuse to talk to fascinating people you would love to know better. Maybe you like the idea of sitting behind a microphone and talking the way you would send a long voice note to a friend. Maybe you want somewhere to share what you are learning while you build your business. Once you know what feels good, you can build from there. Of course, if your podcast is connected to your business, fun is only one piece of the equation. Shannon also said something else that really stayed with me: give your podcast a job. That does not mean squeezing every ounce of joy out of it and turning it into one giant sales funnel. It means understanding why you are putting your time and energy into it in the first place. Your Podcast Does Not Need a Million Downloads When people talk about making money from podcasts, the conversation often goes straight to sponsorships. We imagine getting a huge audience, racking up millions of downloads, landing sponsors, and somehow turning the show into a little money machine. For most business owners, though, the value of a podcast is probably going to show up somewhere else. It might help people discover your services, deepen trust with potential clients, or give your audience a better understanding of how you think and work. It can support a workshop, program, membership, consulting business, speaking career, or whatever else you are building. Once you look at it that way, the measurement changes too. Instead of obsessing over how many downloads an episode got, you can look at whether the show is doing the job you created it to do. That feels much more useful to me. If part of the Shine Online Show’s job is to help business owners see me as a trusted marketing resource, then that naturally affects the guests I invite on, the topics I talk about, the questions I ask, and the stories I choose to share. It gives the podcast direction without making it rigid. And that part matters too, because Shannon was very clear that we are allowed to change our minds. Your podcast can evolve as you do. You can change the tagline, play with the format, introduce solo episodes, stop doing solo episodes, or shift the direction altogether if the show starts feeling like it needs something different. We have a funny habit in business of treating every decision like it has been carved into stone forever, when a lot of the time the only way to find out what works is to start and pay attention. Podcasting Creates Space for Thought Leadership Thought leadership is a big part of the work I do with clients because I want people to see your content and understand that you know what you are talking about. Podcasting gives you a really interesting way to build that because you have room to think out loud. On social media, you might have a reel, a carousel, or a caption. A podcast gives you 20, 30, or 60 minutes to explore an idea in a way that is harder to do in a short post. You can explain how you got to an opinion, tell the story behind a lesson, or bring someone else into the conversation who adds another perspective. During our conversation, Shannon talked about the idea of building a body of work, and I loved that phrase. A body of work feels very different from constantly trying to feed the social media machine. It gives your ideas somewhere to live. Podcast episodes can keep being discovered months or years after you publish them, and Shannon sees that happening in her own work. She shared that older episodes still get found because the topic happens to be exactly what somebody needs in that moment. She also talked about one of her clients who had barely published this year and still saw her downloads triple. Something she had already created was continuing to work. As a marketer, that gets my attention because we put so much energy into content that disappears from people’s feeds almost immediately. There is something very appealing about creating work with a longer shelf life. Then There Are the Relationships This might be the part of podcasting I am becoming most obsessed with. The relationships. While Shannon and I were talking, we realized that we had both interviewed Bianca Sprague. Immediately there was another connection between us and another shared point in our networks. That happens naturally with podcasting. Someone might listen because they already know your guest, then end up discovering you. You might appear on someone else’s show and get introduced to an entirely new group of people. A conversation that starts as a podcast interview could eventually become a collaboration, referral, friendship, speaking opportunity, or something neither person had planned. I joked during our interview that there is almost a little Mean Girls energy to it. “You had WHO on your podcast?” But underneath that joke is something I believe pretty strongly about business. Relationships create opportunity, and podcasting gives you a very natural reason to build them. You get to sit down with someone interesting, ask good questions, learn from them, and share that conversation with other people. That is a pretty great way to spend half an hour. You Do Not Need to Feel Completely Ready At one point I asked Shannon what she would tell someone who wants to start a podcast but is still stuck at the “What do I even do first?” stage. Her answer came back to starting before you have everything figured out. Pick a topic and record something. If you want guests, begin with interesting people already in your world. If you want to start solo, talk about something you know well and see what comes out. You do not need four people reviewing your script or a voice that sounds like it belongs on national radio. You need enough room to play with it and learn. That felt very familiar to me because I say a version of the same thing to social media clients all the time. People get so worried that a video might be awkward or that someone might judge them, and I have to remind them that one reel does not define their entire business. If the reel flops, you can make another one. The same is true with podcasting. Your first episode does not have to represent the final version of your show. Your tenth probably will not either because your voice gets stronger as you use it. You figure out what works because you keep showing up long enough to notice. We Are Also Much Harder on Ourselves Than Anyone Else Is One of my favourite parts of the conversation was hearing Shannon talk about producing podcasts for other women. She told me that incredibly smart, magnetic women will record something and then immediately tell her, “I don’t know why I said that. You can cut that part out.” Meanwhile, Shannon is sitting there thinking that was the best part. That was the thing worth keeping. I loved that because we do this to ourselves all the time. We say something naturally, without rehearsing it or polishing it for three hours, and then assume it could not possibly be valuable because it came out too easily. Meanwhile, someone else hears it and thinks, “I needed that.” I have gone back through old content of my own and had moments where I thought, “Damn, past Lou. That was actually really good.” Sometimes we are standing too close to our own knowledge to recognize that something we consider ordinary could be incredibly useful to somebody else. Podcasting gives those thoughts somewhere to live, and one of them might land in front of exactly the right person months from now. Strategy and Intuition Can Work Together Another thing Shannon said that I keep coming back to is that strategy and intuition do not have to fight with each other. I obviously love strategy. I want content to have a purpose, and I want a podcast to have a job. It helps to understand where your audience is going and what role your content plays in your business. At the same time, I also want people to enjoy the businesses they are building. If somebody hands you a strategy that makes you want to crawl under your desk and never create anything again, there is probably another way to get where you are trying to go. There are so many ways to build visibility, authority, and trust. You can listen to experts, learn from what has worked for other people, and still decide that one particular tactic does not fit you. Then, if you change your mind later, you are allowed to do that too. None of us need to be trapped by a decision we made six months ago because we thought it was the “right” way to do business. There is a lot more room to experiment than we give ourse
Sep 16

What Does It Mean to Find Your Way Back to Yourself?

I had my very first in-person podcast interview recently, and I got to do it with my friend Lisa Magisi. Lisa and I met at a business dinner for women, where I sat down beside her and basically went, “Hi, I’m Lou. Who are you?” She looked mildly terrified. I promise I was friendly. Since then, we have crossed paths many times, and I now consider her one of my business besties. What I expected to be a conversation about Lisa’s business turned into something much bigger. We talked about addiction, recovery, women losing themselves inside roles and expectations, asking for help, learning to use your voice again, and what it takes to find your way back to yourself. Lisa’s business has changed a lot since we first met. When I originally knew her, she was building a life skills consulting business. She ran workshops, made good money, and by most outside measures things were going well. Then the business tanked. Lisa eventually realized that the problem was not necessarily the business model. She had lost interest in the work itself. So, like many entrepreneurs, she did what seemed logical at the time and started chasing the money. She moved toward corporate leadership training because she had experience working in large organizations and could see plenty of opportunities to help businesses improve their management and employee relationships. There was money there. There was also very little Lisa there. Someone she was working with finally called it out. Whenever Lisa talked about corporate leadership, everything felt flat. But when she started talking about women, women’s groups, relationships, and the work she was doing with the women around her, her whole energy changed. That was the clue. Lisa had spent a lot of her life learning what happens when women lose their voice. She grew up with alcoholic parents and experienced significant trauma throughout her life. She talked openly during our conversation about abusive relationships, addiction, and being taught to keep things to herself rather than speak up. Eventually she reached a point where she knew she could not keep living that way. Getting sober was brutal. Lisa described spending months crying on the floor because she did not know how to handle all the feelings that were suddenly there without addiction to numb them. She stayed sober anyway. Once things started to feel a little steadier, she began journaling. She wrote about what she was feeling, what she was learning, and what recovery looked like in her everyday life. That journaling continued for ten years. Eventually, it became her book, Journey Back to Love. What really struck me was that the book was never supposed to be a book. Lisa was writing because she needed somewhere to put what she was experiencing. People started reaching out to her and saying, “Me too.” They recognized themselves in her story. Some told her they had never said their own experiences out loud before, and that reading hers helped them feel less isolated. There is something incredibly powerful in that. We talked quite a bit about the relief that comes when you finally meet someone who understands a piece of your life that has always felt strange, heavy, or impossible to explain. I know that feeling personally. I grew up with a seriously ill sibling, and my sister eventually passed away. For a long time, many of the experiences I had growing up felt like they belonged to this tiny little universe nobody else could really understand. Finding other people later in life who had lived through similar things changed something for me. The circumstances do not have to be identical. Sometimes hearing “me too” is enough to make you feel a little less alone. That idea is woven through Lisa’s work now. She talked about women becoming lost inside the labels we collect. Mother. Wife. Partner. Employee. Caregiver. We get very good at meeting expectations and looking after everyone around us, and somewhere in there it can become difficult to remember who we were before everyone needed something from us. Lisa described her work as helping women find their way home again. That line stuck with me. Because finding your way back to yourself does not always look like blowing up your whole life. Sometimes it starts with saying, “That doesn’t work for me.” Maybe it means setting a boundary at home or telling your family that everyone needs to start participating in the chores. Maybe you stop automatically arranging your life around everyone else’s schedule. Lisa and I also talked about the idea of de-centering the men in your life. That does not automatically mean ending a relationship. For some women, it can be as simple as making plans with friends without first organizing everything around a partner, or remembering that the other parent is also capable of parenting while you go do something for yourself. I have seen women make these small changes and suddenly realize, “Oh. I have a life again.” Lisa has been doing some of this in her own life too. She has started going to women’s events and making plans that fill her up. At home, she looked at some of the things that were draining her and decided she did not have to keep doing all of them herself. One of those things was cleaning. Her solution was wonderfully straightforward. She hired a housekeeper. Her partner was not picking up enough of that work, so she essentially said that if he was not going to contribute the labour, they were going to pay someone to help. I deeply support this message. My house cleaner comes once a week. There are things I can do very easily in my own zone of genius that someone else finds difficult, and there are household jobs I will avoid for six months even though they technically take twenty minutes. This is one of the reasons I love bartering in certain situations too. No, I cannot barter everything because my bank remains annoyingly uninterested in accepting haircuts or baked goods for my mortgage payment. But there are times when trading something that comes easily to me for something that comes easily to somebody else makes a lot of sense. The bigger idea is figuring out what you can take off your plate. Maybe that means paying someone. Maybe it means trading skills. Maybe you have a friend who loves walking dogs and would happily take yours out sometimes. The point is to stop assuming you personally have to carry every single thing because you always have. That idea connected to another huge part of our conversation, which was asking for support. Lisa talked about how important her friends have been through some incredibly difficult periods in her life. We also talked about how hard it can be to ask for that support when you have spent years believing you should handle things yourself. I have a friend who has a signal with me. We text, “Do you have eight minutes?” It basically means, “I am about to lose my mind and I need you to listen.” It does not always stay at eight minutes. Sometimes it becomes half an hour. But knowing I have a person I can go completely off the rails with is invaluable. I also had to learn that the moment my brain says, “I’ll cry this out myself. I don’t need anyone,” is usually the exact moment I probably need to call someone. Lisa has people like that too. She talked about having a friend who knew that if Lisa called without texting first, something was very wrong and she needed to answer. Those relationships are gold. And sometimes support does not even require advice. Near the end of our conversation, I told Lisa about a group of moms I used to meet with every Friday. We had something called “heavy and gold.” Everyone shared the hard part of their week and the good part. While one woman was talking, nobody jumped in to fix her problems or tell her what she should do. We put our hands up and wiggled our fingers. We called them twinkle fingers. It was basically our way of saying, “I hear you. I see you. I’m here.” Lisa immediately connected with that because so many people do not need someone to solve their problem. They need somebody to listen. That is a big piece of what she wants to create through her own community for women. She is building a place where women can talk openly, support one another, share resources, and even connect with other women-owned businesses. I loved hearing her talk about eventually creating something like a directory so women can find a bookkeeper, service provider, or another business owner inside the community. There is something really lovely about building the thing you once needed yourself. Lisa’s upcoming program also grew out of that same idea. She created an eight-week online program that women can move through at their own pace, because some of the topics can bring up a lot of feelings. If it becomes too much for a day, you can close the computer and come back tomorrow. Lisa is there for support through the process. Her hope is that women start finding their voice again, even if the first version of that voice is, as she put it, “a little tiny squeak.” I think that is such a realistic way to look at change. You do not suddenly wake up one morning with perfect boundaries, a beautifully balanced household, a totally clear identity, and the confidence to tell everyone exactly what you need. Sometimes the first win is noticing what you need at all. Then maybe you say it out loud. You practice. You get a little stronger. Eventually your life starts looking a bit more like yours again. Lisa’s book, Journey Back to Love, came from ten years of journaling through recovery, trauma, grief, and finding her way back to herself. It is written as a daily reader, so you can pick it up one page at a time rather than feeling like you need to consume someone’s entire life story in one sitting. You can find Lisa Magisi on Instagram and Facebook under her name, and her website is journeybacktolove.ca. And if there is one thing I took away from sitt
Sep 9

What Is Scrappy Marketing

One of the things I was most excited to talk to Bianca Sprague about was her approach to growing a business in 15-minute chunks. That caught my attention immediately because most business owners I know do not have an empty Tuesday afternoon waiting around for “business development.” We are fitting this stuff in between client work, emails, school pickup, appointments, laundry, dinner, and whatever other chaos decided to join us that day. Bianca knows that world very well. She is the founder of Bebomia, an educator, author, activist, and doula who has been working in birth advocacy since 2007. Her path into entrepreneurship came at a time when she was caring for a brand-new baby, financially vulnerable, and trying to get herself and her daughter into a safer situation. She described that version of herself as scrappy. I love that word. To me, scrappy means you look at what you have, piece it together, and figure out how to make something happen. Bianca did exactly that. She built a successful doula business at a time when Facebook business pages were not even a thing yet. Social media was still the place where people posted updates like, “I ate yogurt for breakfast,” and Google was still figuring itself out. There was no magical algorithm waiting to send her a pile of clients, so she built relationships instead. And she is still using many of those same skills now. Bianca told me that whenever she forgets them, her business drops. Then she has the little realization of, “Oh right, I need to go back to scrappy 2007 Bianca.” I think a lot of us could use a little bit of that energy. We have gotten so used to waiting for the algorithm, hoping something goes viral, or trying to figure out why someone else’s reel got 80,000 views when ours got 612. Meanwhile, some of the most effective business-building work is still incredibly human. Bianca has an email list of around 24,000 people and uses sophisticated automation software. She also goes through that list, sees who has been opening her emails, and sometimes writes to those people personally. Not a fancy funnel or an automated “Hi [FIRST NAME]” pretending to be personal. She sits down and types the message. That stood out to me because I live in the digital marketing world too, but I also run an in-person networking event every month. I believe deeply in showing up online, and I also know what happens when you sit across from someone, hear their story, laugh together, and become an actual person to each other. Technology can support that connection, but it cannot replace it. Bianca has been navigating that tension for years. Her organization moved doula training online in 2013, long before online education felt normal. She talked about how clunky the technology was back then and how much work it took to make a touch-based, human profession feel personal through a screen. That challenge forced her team to get creative. Instead of trying to recreate a classroom perfectly online, they focused on helping people think, do, and feel inside the digital experience. That same idea applies to marketing now. AI, automation, social media platforms, and all the fancy tools can absolutely support us, but as Bianca put it, we need to get back to the humanness because people are craving it. So how do we do that when our schedules are already packed? This is where her 15-minute approach gets very good. Bianca suggests starting by thinking about where your clients already go. If you are a doula, your pregnant clients may also be talking to realtors, prenatal massage therapists, chiropractors, yoga teachers, dog walkers, meal delivery companies, or people who install car seats. That gives you a starting point. Set a timer for 15 minutes and find the local businesses, professionals, or organizations that serve the same people you do, then stop when the timer goes off. That part is important because we all know how quickly “I’m going to spend 15 minutes researching Instagram accounts” becomes “Why am I watching a video of someone reorganizing their fridge?” Social media would very much like your entire afternoon. You do not have to give it one. Once you have found some potential connections, spend another short block of time seeing whether there is genuine alignment. Bianca is very clear about her values. Her business is anti-racist, anti-oppressive, pro-choice, and committed to creating safer spaces for queer, racialized, and fat clients. So before she collaborates with someone or sends people their way, she wants to know whether her clients will be safe there. Your values may show up differently, but the principle still works. You are essentially asking whether you trust this business enough to connect your name and your clients to it. Once you find people who feel like a fit, you do not immediately jump into their inbox asking them to promote you. This part needs to be said because we have all received that message. “Hi, we have never met, but would you please share my flyer with your 15,000-person Facebook group?” Bianca has a word for that kind of behaviour. Crappy. You are asking someone to hand over access to a community they have spent years building without showing any interest in them first. A better approach is to start paying attention to their work. Comment when you have something genuine to add, share something useful with your own audience, or let people know about a sale or resource that genuinely helps them. That is generous, and small business owners notice. I know I do. When a new person starts showing up regularly in my comments, my curiosity is immediately piqued. I want to know who they are and what they are doing. That is how a relationship starts. From there, you can begin thinking about what a collaboration might look like. Bianca talked about giving herself time to imagine possibilities instead of forcing an idea on command. Maybe it turns into a drive, a blog series, an Instagram Live, a zine, or something neither person would have thought of alone. She plants the idea and lets it simmer while she is gardening, walking the dog, or taking a shower. I love that because creativity rarely arrives because we put “be creative” on the calendar from 10:00 to 10:30. The other part of Bianca’s approach that I loved was how she enters business conversations. She imagines all of her future clients standing behind her. She is not walking into the room asking, “What can you give me?” She is deciding whether she would trust this person with the people she serves. That completely changes the energy. If you are new in business, it is very easy to feel small when you talk to someone who has been around longer, has more clients, or has a bigger audience. You can start slipping into your Oliver Twist business era. “Please, could I have some of your clients?” Bianca’s approach puts you back into your own value. You have people you care about serving, even if your audience is still small. You also have standards and something useful to bring into the conversation. That does not mean you walk in acting like you own the place. It means you show up as a participant instead of a beggar. There are also times when the fastest route to building those relationships is to get out from behind your screen entirely. Bianca is a huge fan of volunteering. If there is a trade show in your industry, volunteering can put you in the middle of conversations you would never have otherwise. You do have to approach it with integrity. Do not show up and secretly promote yourself while everyone else paid thousands of dollars for a booth. Go there to be useful. Help vendors find where they need to go, support the event team, meet people, learn what they do, and have normal conversations. Then follow up afterward. Bianca built a huge part of her original business that way. She sat on a board, worked with public health nurses, helped people, and became known as someone who was useful and connected. Referrals followed because people knew her. I have seen this happen in completely different industries too. One of my clients has been running a community cleanup around Earth Day for years. He supplies gloves, garbage bags, and those grabber claw things, and people show up to clean the community together. That one simple event has led to local media coverage, podcast interviews, television spots, and a whole lot of goodwill. He is doing something helpful, people know him because of it, and the visibility keeps coming back around. That is scrappy marketing. It is also community. And then there is competition. Bianca told me that earlier on the day we recorded this interview, she had sat down with one of her biggest competitors in the country. Instead of guarding their ideas and glaring at each other across the internet, they talked about their industry and found ways they might be able to work together. That does not mean comparison never creeps in. Bianca admitted that she still looks at other doula organizations sometimes and thinks, “That is such a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that?” Very relatable. She also knows those thoughts get louder when she is tired, stressed, hungry, or dealing with life. So maybe that is not the moment to make decisions about your business worth or your competition. Go eat something. Take a walk. Dance around your kitchen. Then come back to the idea when your nervous system is not trying to convince you that everybody else has figured out business except you. There was so much in this conversation, but the part I kept coming back to was how simple most of Bianca’s advice is. You can move your business forward by paying attention to the people who already serve your clients, supporting them in a genuine way, and allowing those relationships to build before you ask for anything. You can also get involved in your community, volunteer where it makes sense, and use 15-minute chunks of time to keep the whole thing manageable.
Sep 2

How to Start a Podcast on Substack

There are roughly 900 things a business owner could be doing to market themselves at any given moment. Instagram, LinkedIn, email, networking, video, podcasting, Threads and whatever new platform everyone is suddenly talking about this week can pile up pretty fast. So when Blair Kaplan started talking to me about podcasting on Substack, my first thought was basically, absolutely not, I do not need another thing. And then she showed me how it worked. And I paid her to build mine. Blair is one of my hiking besties, a PR expert, a grief and resilience expert, and the person who taught me pretty much everything I know about podcasting and Substack. She is also one of those people who likes to test things instead of sitting around wondering if they might work. She had already been podcasting traditionally for years, with a podcast manager, editing, hosting and distribution. Then she got curious about Substack’s podcast feature and realized there really was not much information out there about how people were using it. So she decided to figure it out herself. She started a podcast called How We Navigate Grief and made the episodes short, usually around five to ten minutes. The whole idea was for them to feel more like a voice note to a friend than a highly produced podcast episode. Some she recorded in the voice memo app on her phone, and lately she has been experimenting with recording directly into Substack. She has played around with having an intro, then not having one, changing the format and paying attention to what people respond to. And what happened was pretty interesting. Before she had even hit 30 episodes, she had around 5,000 downloads. During our interview, she mentioned an episode she had published less than 24 hours earlier that was already heading toward 500 downloads. She also has a client who started with almost no existing Substack audience and has reached thousands of downloads. That got my attention. I am not saying everyone who opens a Substack account tomorrow is going to wake up to thousands of listeners. Blair has a strategy behind what she is doing, and she was very clear about that. What grabbed me was how much simpler the whole process could be. Traditional podcasting always felt like A LOT to me. I pictured recording, editing, show notes, hosting platforms, distribution and a collection of tiny technical tasks I had absolutely no desire to learn. I already have enough tabs open in my brain. The idea that I could create an episode through Substack and have it distributed from there felt far more manageable. There is also another piece that I really like. You are building an email audience while you are building the podcast. People can discover your work inside Substack, subscribe to what you are creating and then hear from you directly. That gives you a different kind of connection than putting everything on social media and hoping the algorithm feels generous that day. I am still very much a social media girl. I am not abandoning Instagram and moving into an email bunker. I do love having another place where people can find me, listen to what I have to say and stay connected to my work. Blair and I also talked a lot about repurposing because this is one of those places where business owners can make marketing wildly harder than it needs to be. You do not need a completely original idea for every platform you use. Blair takes things she is already thinking, writing and talking about and finds different ways to use them. A social media thought might have enough meat on it to become a longer Substack article, while something she has written could easily turn into an audio episode. A podcast conversation can also give you several smaller pieces of content to use elsewhere. That feels much more realistic than sitting down five times a week and demanding that your brain produce another brilliant original idea. She also uses AI as a thought partner to help organize and optimize some of her writing. I like that distinction because the thinking still belongs to her. You can hear Blair in it. Her experience, opinions and personality are all still there, with AI helping on the packaging side rather than trying to impersonate the person who had the idea. If AI removes everything interesting about you from your content, we have missed the point. One of the biggest takeaways from our conversation was how little your podcast needs to resemble the polished production you might have in your head. Blair is recording episodes on her phone and experimenting with recording directly into Substack. There is no requirement for a studio, a perfect radio voice or hours of editing. You can stumble over a sentence and carry on because, shockingly, that is how humans speak. She is intentionally testing content that feels like you are listening in on a conversation between friends. And people are listening. That makes sense to me because I think we are getting tired of content that has been polished within an inch of its life. Sometimes hearing somebody talk through an idea in their own words for eight minutes is far more interesting than listening to something that sounds like it took twelve meetings and a production team to approve. Of course, adding another platform still means adding something to your workload. There is no tiny Substack fairy who comes to your house at night, records your podcast and folds the laundry while she is there. Blair’s advice was to figure out how Substack can fit into what you are already creating instead of turning it into another enormous marketing project. Something you have written could become an audio episode, and an idea you talked through on Instagram might have enough substance for a longer podcast conversation. If you already have a podcast, you can also use Substack as another place to distribute it while building your email audience at the same time. And if you want the strategy but absolutely do not want to figure out all the setup yourself, you can hire someone. That is what I did. Toward the end of our conversation, Blair said something I think a lot of business owners need to hear. Don’t wait until it’s perfect. Try it and see what happens. She also shared a little mindset trick she had heard recently. When something new starts feeling intimidating, add “for fun” to the end. You are starting a podcast for fun. Maybe you are experimenting with Substack for fun, or trying a completely different type of content and seeing whether anyone cares. I kind of love that. There is so much pressure in business to know whether every decision is going to work before we make it. That can turn a fairly harmless experiment into something that feels like it should come with a board meeting and a five-year projection. Sometimes you can try the thing, pay attention to what happens and decide what you think afterward. As Blair said at the end of our conversation, let’s make cool shit happen. For fun, obviously. You can find Blair at blairkaplan.ca, on Instagram at BlairFromBlairland, and on Substack through her podcast How We Navigate Grief. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit loubowersmarketing.substack.com
Aug 26

How to Network Like a Boss Without Being Weird

I have back-to-back networking events this week, two nights in a row, so networking has been very much on my mind. I happen to love networking, but I also know there can be a little bit of panic that comes with walking into a room full of business people who all seem to know each other already. First of all, they probably don’t. Second, you are almost definitely not the only new person in the room. And if you have no idea what to do with your hands, put a drink in one of them. Beer, water, coffee, whatever works. Problem solved. The bigger thing I want to talk about is how we approach networking, because somewhere along the way a lot of us were taught that networking means meeting as many people as possible, explaining our business as fast as possible, and handing out enough business cards to wallpaper a small bathroom. It can start to feel a little like speed dating, except you are handing over your LinkedIn profile instead of your phone number. That is not how I think networking works best. To me, networking is the beginning of a relationship. A few months ago I was at a business mixer and met a lovely university student. She was smart, ambitious, prepared and clearly had been taught to perfect her elevator pitch. She had done a very good job of it too. Within a few minutes I knew her education, her experience, her skills, her accomplishments and her career goals. The only problem was that we had not really connected yet. We had not found any common ground. We had not shared a laugh. We barely knew anything about each other as people before we entered what felt like the LinkedIn-profile portion of the evening. I don’t blame her at all. She was following advice that people have been given forever. Sell yourself. Be prepared. Make sure people know exactly what you do. The trouble is that this advice can turn a networking event into a room full of very small sales presentations. A conversation does not have to lead anywhere immediately to be worthwhile. Maybe the person you meet becomes a client later. Maybe they introduce you to someone. Maybe you collaborate someday. Maybe you become friends. Or maybe you have a perfectly nice ten-minute conversation and never see each other again. That is allowed too. You do not need to convince someone to hire you before they have made it to the cheese tray. When you walk into a room actively hunting for clients, people can usually feel it. You start listening for openings instead of listening to understand the person in front of you. You can also catch yourself mentally sorting people into categories. Potential client. Possible referral. Useful connection. Probably not relevant. I try to remind myself that people are not leads with name tags. Walk in curious instead. You should absolutely know how to explain what you do, especially if your job title or service is unfamiliar. But your introduction does not need to include your entire professional history. I might say, “Hi, I’m Lou.” If someone asks what I do, I’ll tell them that I wear two hats. I’m part of the team at Standard Office Space and I also run a marketing agency. Then I stop talking. This is the part people sometimes forget. You can let the other person respond. You do not need to immediately add your awards, your packages, your entire service list and the story of how you started your business. Give them enough information to understand you, then let the conversation happen. The same thing goes for asking questions. We have all heard that people love talking about themselves, so we should ask questions at networking events. That advice is fine, but it gets weird when you are asking questions while mentally waiting for your turn to speak again. Ask because you are interested. You can ask what brought someone to the event, how they know the host, what they have been working on lately or what part of their business is getting most of their attention right now. Then listen to the answer. If someone tells me they own a bookkeeping company, I do not need to immediately explain all the ways I could market a bookkeeping company. I can ask who they work with, how they got started or what they enjoy most about the work. There will be time for me to talk too. Now, there is another networking situation that needs to be addressed because I know it keeps people home. Getting trapped in a conversation. You start talking to someone, you have a nice chat, and then neither person seems to know how to end it. Forty-five minutes later, you are still standing there while your soul slowly exits your body. You are allowed to leave. You can say something like, “It was so good to meet you. I’m going to grab another drink and say hello to a few people, but I’d love to stay connected.” That is completely normal. You do not need to invent a bathroom emergency. Although if you truly need an emergency exit, “I have diarrhea” is an excuse very few people are going to challenge. While you are talking to someone, give them your attention. We all know what it feels like when someone is looking over our shoulder every few seconds to see who else has walked into the room. Maybe they are waiting for someone specific, or maybe they think another conversation might be more useful. Either way, it does not feel great. If you want to move on, finish the conversation you are already having and then move on. There is also no rule saying you need to meet everyone in the room. I would much rather have three good conversations than introduce myself to thirty people who will not remember me in the morning. You do not get a tiny trophy for collecting the most business cards. When you spend a little more time with someone, you get past the job title. You find out what they care about, who they know, what they are working on and whether you have something in common. Those are usually the details that people remember anyway. The follow-up matters too. Please do not meet someone at a networking event and immediately add them to your newsletter. Giving you a business card is not the same thing as agreeing to receive weekly promotions until the end of time. Your follow-up can be really simple. You can say it was great meeting them, mention something you talked about and send along anything you promised. That is plenty. You also do not have to suggest a two-hour coffee meeting or ask for an introduction to their biggest client when you met twelve minutes ago. Let the next step match the relationship you actually have. A LinkedIn connection, an Instagram follow or a quick message can be enough. Another thing I think people overcomplicate is being memorable. You do not need a gimmick. This is coming from a woman who had blue hair for four years, so I am absolutely in favour of doing something fun if it genuinely feels like you. Wear the sequins. Put on the giant earrings. Tell the funny story. But people are usually not going to remember you because you delivered the most impressive list of credentials in the room. They remember how the conversation felt. They remember that you listened. They remember that you made them laugh or introduced them to somebody. They remember that you noticed they were standing alone and made them feel welcome. That feeling gets attached to your name. And that carries a lot of weight in business. I also think your reputation is built in the conversations you assume do not matter. People pay attention to how you move through a room, especially when you think nobody important is watching. If you suddenly check out of a conversation because you realize someone is not a potential client, that says something. So does the way you treat volunteers, servers, students and event staff. The same goes for follow-through. If you offer to make an introduction, send a resource or connect someone to a person you know, do it. Yes, the person you dismiss today could be running a company in five years or could already know someone you would love to meet. But even if they never become useful to you in any business sense, they still deserve to be treated like a person. Before your next event, decide what would make the night feel worthwhile to you. For me, three really good conversations would beat collecting a pile of business cards every time. You might also go in hoping to connect two people who would genuinely benefit from knowing each other, or use the night as a chance to get better at explaining what you do without turning it into a pitch. The point is to give yourself a simple focus so you are not wandering around trying to “work the room.” Try walking in with the goal of making three people glad they met you. I think that changes everything. You listen differently. You stop trying to collect people. You relax a little more and allow an actual relationship to begin. And for the love of the cheese tray, please do not read anyone your entire resume. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit loubowersmarketing.substack.com
Jun 19

How shortform stories should be told...

Today, I’m going to tell you when to climax. Not like that. Behave. I’m talking about the climax of your story. When you’re creating short-form content, it needs to show up a whole lot sooner than most people think. Here’s what I mean. I could tell a story like this: 2 years ago I was trying to figure out how to grow my business and uplevel my credibility. I asked my friend Blair for help, sidenote she was named after a facts of life character. She suggested I put on an in person workshop. I was so nervous to have people pay for my advice… blah blah blahOr I could tell you a story like this: I filled the last two seats of my first workshop at 9pm the night before. I was already 75% full and that would have been ok. Especially for my first in person event. But I was feeling the energy and the challenge to get bums in all the chairs, so I started sending DMs… A lot of business owners tell stories the way they actually happened. Which makes complete sense. That is the natural order of things. You set the scene, you introduce everyone, you build toward the moment. Eventually, somewhere near the end, you get to the part that actually changed something. Traditional storytelling has room for that. A novel has room for that. A conversation with a close friend over coffee has room for that, because your friend has chosen to sit there and she genuinely wants to hear how you found parking. Your Instagram audience has made no such commitment. They have a thumb, a busy feed, and approximately zero obligation to wait while you work your way to the point. When the most interesting part of your Reel arrives thirty seconds into a forty-second video, a lot of people are already gone. So here is the shift: bring the strongest moment forward. Lead with the result, the realization, the mistake, or the sentence that changed how you saw the situation. Give people a reason to stay, and then take them back and explain how you got there. Think about the difference between these two openings. “Last Thursday, I went to a networking event downtown. I nearly stayed home because I was tired, but I got ready, drove across town, found parking, walked inside, grabbed a drink...” That could go anywhere. The listener has no reason to care yet. Now try this: “One sentence from another business owner made me realize I had been creating content for the wrong people.” Now there is somewhere to go. You want to hear the sentence. You want to know what changed. Once you have people’s attention, you can mention that you almost skipped the event, that the conversation happened next to a slightly sad charcuterie board, that it was a random Tuesday. Those details give the story texture and personality. The key is that they land so much better once the audience already understands why the story is worth hearing. The climax gives people a reason to follow you into the rest of it. I want to be clear about something, though. This is not about manufacturing drama. You do not need to open every video with “This changed my life” before explaining a moderately useful scheduling tool. Your opening still needs to be true. What you are doing is choosing where to enter the story. You are moving the strongest part forward instead of making people wade through six paragraphs of setup to find it. A strong opening can be surprising. It can be specific. It can be a little uncomfortable or a little tender. It just needs to give the audience enough to sense that the story is going somewhere. “I learned something important today” is not a climax. That is a fog machine. Tell us what you learned. “I realized my best-performing content had almost nothing to do with trends.” Now we are somewhere. “My client didn’t need a better caption. She needed to stop hiding behind her logo.” There is a whole story waiting behind that sentence. The opening does not need to be shocking. It needs to create enough interest for someone to stay with you while you explain what happened. Back to my workshop story, because I want to show you how this works in practice. If I open with “I filled the last two seats of my workshop at nine o’clock the night before,” you already sense something happened. There is a result, and you want to know what it took to get there. From there, I can give you the context. Four seats filled. The decision to keep going instead of calling it close enough. The direct outreach, the pajamas, the nine o’clock replies. And then where it landed. Not just that the workshop sold out, but what I understood differently afterward. Which is that we often stop pushing before we have any real reason to. We decide it’s too late, or too much, or not worth one more ask. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is send the message anyway and see what happens. That is the lesson the audience gets to carry with them. That is what makes the story useful beyond the moment. This is especially worth paying attention to in short-form video, because your retention data will tell you exactly where people are leaving. When most viewers disappear before you reach the strongest part, the idea is probably fine. The entry point is slowing it down. One Reel underperforms and suddenly the conclusion becomes “nobody cares what I have to say.” That is a heavy thing to pull out of one video. Sometimes you have a good message sitting inside a structure that is making people work too hard to find it. Move the strongest line forward. Trim the setup. Let people understand the stakes early. The same principle applies to carousels. Slide one should give people something to hold onto. “A little story from my week” does not do that. “I spent three hours fixing a problem that one question could have prevented” tells us a lesson is coming. You do not need to announce the framework. Your audience doesn’t need to see the beams holding up the house. They just need to feel that the story is going somewhere. Here is your action step. Open one Reel draft, caption, or carousel idea. Read the first sentence. Then scan the rest of it for the line where something shifts. Look for words like realized, learned, decided, stopped, finally. That line is probably your real opening. Move it to the top. Read the new version out loud. When the first sentence tells people what changed, what surprised you, or why the story is worth hearing, you are done. Clear will serve you better than clever almost every time. You may already have a great story sitting there. It might be wearing six paragraphs of unnecessary setup like an oversized winter coat. Take the coat off. Start with the good bit. For more help creating content that sounds like you, grab my free workbook, All Eyes On You. It will help you strengthen your visibility and stop being the best-kept secret in your business. Have an amazing day, and I’ll catch you in the next episode. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit loubowersmarketing.substack.com

Welcome to the Shine Online Show with Lou Bowers. This is the show where we talk about visibility without gimmicks, marketing without burnout, and showing up online in a way that actually works. If you’re building a business, a brand, or a reputation, you’re in the right place. I’m here to remind you that social media isn’t dead and that you can shine online. loubowersmarketing.substack.com

Creator

Lou Bowers
Years Active

2026
Episodes

24
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© Lou Bowers
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