Laura Roeder is the founder of LKR Social Media, which now is a team of six. Laura offers strategic consulting in the form of videos that you watch in your own office, on your own time, at your own pace. She has spoken at some of the most well respected events in her industry to include South by Southwest Interactive, BlogHer, and The Social Communications Summit. Laura has also been quoted in big name publications such as the LA Times, Bloomberg, and CNET.
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Resource Mentioned:
- Your Big Idea: Successful Entrepreneurs have One Big Idea. Follow JLD’s FREE training & you’ll discover Your Big Idea in less than an hour!
Success Quote
- “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.” – Annie Dillard
Business Failure
- Laura hates failure, and she doesn’t view anything she has done as failure… only mis-steps. Considering perception is reality, I would say this is a great attitude to have. All things being equal, she has a great lesson for us here.
Entrepreneurial AHA Moment
- Wake up, trade my time for money. Wake up, trade my time for money. Wake up, trade my time for money. Learn how Laura broke this vicious cycle.
Current Business
- LKR has some exciting things happening. Can you say… membership site?
Lightning Round
- Laura had the #1 “I’ve made it” story I’ve ever heard. It involves Richard Branson, animals, and Africa. You simply have to hear this.
Best Business Book
- Double Double by Cameron Herold
Interview Links
- LKR Social Media Marketing (Sorry! This link was active when this episode was first published in 2012. This resource is no longer available.)
Killer Resources!
1) The Common Path to Uncommon Success: JLD’s 1st traditionally published book! Over 3000 interviews with the world’s most successful Entrepreneurs compiled into a 17-step roadmap to financial freedom and fulfillment!
2) Free Podcast Course: Learn from JLD how to create and launch your podcast!
3) Podcasters’ Paradise: The #1 podcasting community in the world!
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Full Transcript
John Dumas: Hire Fire Nation and thank you for joining me for another episode of EntrepreneurOnFire.com, your daily dose of inspiration. If you enjoy this free podcast, please show your support by leaving a rating and review here at iTunes. I will make sure to give you a shout out on an upcoming showing to thank you!
John Dumas: Okay. Let’s get started. I am simply pumped to introduce my new guest today, Laura Roeder. Laura, are you prepared to ignite?
Laura Roeder: I am!
John Dumas: Nice! That’s exactly the response that I was looking for. So Laura is the founder of LKR Social Media, which is now a team of six. She offers strategic consulting in the form of videos that you can watch in your own office, on your own time, at your own pace. She’s spoken at some of the most well-respected events in her industry to include South by Southwest Interactive, BlogHer, and the Social Communications Summit. She’s also been quoted in big name publications such as LA Times, Bloomberg and CNET.
Wow! Those are big hitters, Laura.
Laura Roeder: They are.
John Dumas: Listen, I’ve given a little bit of an overview of yourself, but why don’t you take us to in-depth about who you are and what you do?
Laura Roeder: Yes. So my company teaches small businesses about how to market using social media. We do that, like you said, through online classes. So it’s not in-person workshops. It’s basically like having a workshop on your own time, on your own computer.
So I’m not a typical consultant. I actually don’t do any one-on-one consulting. I actually believe that a business should learn how to do social media itself. I don’t think that social media is something you can just write a check to another company and have them do it for you. Even if you’re getting outside help, I think you really need to understand the strategy yourself. So that’s what I preach and that’s what I practice in my business.
John Dumas: Great! Did I get your numbers right? Are you still a team of six right now?
Laura Roeder: That’s correct.
John Dumas: Wonderful! Well, let’s transition into the first part of our show, which is the success quote. Because here at EntrepreneurOnFire, we like to get the motivational ball rolling. We like to get people excited and ready for the rest of the interview. So Laura, why don’t you start us off with your favorite success quote?
Laura Roeder: Okay. Well, I have to admit I’m not really a quotes person. So when I saw you wanted a quote, I did have to dig a little bit. There is a quote that I read recently that really stuck in my mind. It’s kind of simple. I hope it’s motivational enough. The quote is from a writer named Annie Dillard, and it’s “how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.”
John Dumas: Very nice. What I’ll tell you is that most entrepreneurs’ first reaction is, “Man, I have so many success quotes! It’s so hard to choose! How can I possibly do that?” So it’s different and a little refreshing, and maybe it was good for you to go and dig a little bit and find a success quote because that definitely was a good one. How do you apply this to your everyday life?
Laura Roeder: To me, it’s a really nice reminder that the kind of mundane every day is our life. If I’m not enjoying what I do every single morning, then I’m not building a life that I enjoy, because I think we tend to focus on the highs and lows. Like the big wins or the big successes or the vacations or the big upsets or the big failures, but actually those are only little, tiny snapshots of our life. The vast majority of our life is just what we do every day, day in and day out.
John Dumas: True words, Laura. Very true words. So our next topic is failure. We’re going to really delve into this topic because it’s really the essence of everybody’s entrepreneurial journey, and EntrepreneurOnFire is all about the story. So let’s go back to a time when you’ve experienced failure. Start off by giving us the events that led up to that failure.
Laura Roeder: Okay. This is another area where [Laughs] – I don’t know if I’m a bad interview subject for you. I have an answer to this question, but I always have trouble answering this question when I get interviewed because I don’t look at my journey and see like the failure.
There has been loads of mistakes that I’ve made along the way, and I don’t know if it’s just how I interpret things, but to me, failure is like everything crashing and burning, and to me it never gets that bad [Laughs] because you can always sort of pick up and start where you left off and there’s no mistake that you can’t recover from.
So I was thinking I’ll just talk about a mistake that I have made, but I don’t really think of it as a failure.
John Dumas: Okay. Take your time in doing this. Again, this is kind of refreshing because what I typically hear from entrepreneurs is, “Oh my God! How could I choose one failure? I’ve had so many.” They do look at it as failures, which on some levels they are, but on other levels, it’s all about how you perceive things. Perception can be reality. So I like how you perceive your past mistakes. So let’s go into one or two, but let’s really flesh these out.
Laura Roeder: So one that comes to mind is waiting too long to scale a really core part of my business. I would say for me, a theme in developing my business has been scaling and figuring out how to scale more and how to scale faster and how to jump to that next level.
So when I first started my business, I was doing web design for local businesses, making them websites and some print materials, and that was just me doing everything. Doing the design for them, having one-on-one client type of business. After doing that for just about two years, I really saw the ceiling that I hit. That I couldn’t have a business that made as much money as I wanted doing that, because I only had so many hours a day, and realistically, there’s only so much that you can charge for a website.
So after doing that for about two years, I thought, okay, I need to start over. I need to start with a new model that can scale the way I want it to, that can build a multiple six figure or seven figure business. So at that point, at the beginning of 2009, I switched over.
At first I started doing social media consulting, sort of trying to find my way and what I would do next. Then I made my first online course. It was my first info product. For me, I really felt like I found my flow as an entrepreneur then. I felt like I found the model that worked that was a lot easier for me than consulting that sold better and that could scale, because I can make a class and I could sell that same class to thousands of people instead of doing the one-on-one work.
So that went along for a few years, but then I kind of more recently – really just really in the past year – saw that failing as well. Because at first I was doing the one-on-one work, and then I hit that ceiling. Then with my online courses, I was teaching all the courses myself, and because I do social media, you have to update and redo the courses all the time because it’s constantly changing.
So I found myself on this hamster wheel of redoing my courses over and over again. I had lots of ideas for new courses I wanted to do, but I only had so much time to create and edit and record them, and I was getting a little bit sick of it. I was starting to not look forward to recording a new course, instead of it being something that I was excited about.
So I had this idea in my head that I had to record all the courses myself. I’ve really built my business around my brand and my personality and my name, and I thought it had to be me doing all the courses. I think I really limited myself for way too long because I’m a good delegator and I had hired out other areas of my business like customer service and project management and building websites and technical things. I had hired all that out, but I had this idea in my head that I had to hang on to this one last little thing, which was recording the courses.
About a year ago – really a little less than a year ago – I finally let that go and brought in some help creating the courses as well, and other people actually teaching the courses. And now my business, now that I don’t have to record everything, now I can just scale so much bigger than I could before. I think I could have grown my business even faster than I have had I let myself kind of go to that next level earlier.
John Dumas: So you were cruising along, and then you hit a ceiling. At what point did you start to bring people into your business? Tell us about how that area unfolded.
Laura Roeder: So for me, it was something – first of all, my business was totally bootstrapped. So every dollar that’s gone into my business has been earned by my business. So I think this is an interesting topic. This is something people ask about a lot because it can feel like a real catch 22 when you’re bootstrapping because you don’t have thousands of dollars sitting around to hire salaried employees. I’ve grown my team very gradually. Basically, whenever I have the money, I hire someone new.
But when you are bootstrapping, you’re probably not going to be able to go out and get sort of a technical fulltime employee at that salary. So I’ve done it a variety of ways. A lot of people have started out with part time work for me, and because I’m an online business and because they can work from home, they can set their own hours, they can work whenever they like, I offer a lot of other benefits besides just pay.
So what I’ve done with most of the people that work for me is they start out at a reasonable rate, but definitely on the low end of the scale. A low, flat monthly rate working part time, and then some of those people have evolved into being fulltime employees as my need for them has grown and the business has grown and the revenue has grown.
John Dumas: Let’s talk about scalability versus trading time for money. I really love this topic. It’s so true to the Internet world. But I would love to hear your journey to actually being at a scalable place.
Laura Roeder: It’s something that I have really tried to keep my eye on relentlessly because it’s something really important to me in a business. My goals for building a business are building a business that I can step back from and that I can let other people run. I like to travel a lot and take a lot of time away from the computer. So I need to be able to build something that I can be off the computer for weeks or months at a time, and they can still go without me.
I’m not totally there yet right now in my business. It will go without me. It might not grow without me [Laughs]. It might stay about the same. How it is now. So it’s something that my team and I are always working on and evolving.
I just made another change just about a month ago that was a huge change in scalability. This is another sort of a mistake story. You could view it as a mistake. So something that I did when I started my business is like I said, I had a course, and then I added another course. I started with a course on Twitter, and then I added one about making a website and one about Facebook, and people bought them individually. They were all standalone courses.
But we were having this problem because we specialize in helping people that are new to social media. People are always coming to us saying, “Well, you offer a Twitter course and a Facebook course, but how could I possibly know which course I’m supposed to take? That’s why I’m coming to you, right? That’s why I’m going to your website. So you can tell me, do I need to be on Twitter? Do I need to be on Facebook? Do I need to blog?”
So we had this sort of weird situation where it’s like you almost didn’t know what course you needed until you already bought it, and we were getting a lot of requests for a package where you could buy everything. In the past, we made it really hard to buy more than one thing because we didn’t even have a shopping cart. We had individual order forms. So if you wanted to buy more than one course, you would just have to fill out your billing info over and over again. We really, really didn’t make it easier or streamlined at all.
So in January or February, we were working on – it was actually at the time it was just going to be a one off special promotion where we offered a bundle of all of our courses. So we’re working on this promotion and how are we going to deliver it and how are we going to market it. As we get more and more into that process, we suddenly realized, why isn’t this just our business? [Laughs]
What we’re selling, what we’re thinking about offering is one little promo. That would really simplify everything because something that I saw happening with a bunch of different courses, well, if you’re doing it right, that means you also have a bunch of different landing pages, a bunch of different marketing sequences. Each course obviously is worked to build out and to update and to deliver, and then you have all the marketing that surrounds it as well.
I try to be good about things. Like if people opt in for three different things, I’m not sending them 20 emails and getting in 20 different sequences. So the more stuff you build, it gets really complicated, setting up all these rules for which promotional materials are getting and not getting, and not getting to the same sequence at once, related to different products.
Our plan was to grow our business by adding more products. So as far as scale goes, I looked into the future and saw that was going to become this kind of tangled web. So we decided, well, let’s just make this our whole business. Let’s drop our individual courses and instead, we’re going to have one site that you can subscribe to monthly, and that will contain all of our previous courses, new courses, social media updates, a forum where people can get help. Sort of like everything that our customers always wanted all in one site. That’s what’s called Social Media Marketer. That’s what I launched in July this year.
That was another one of those big steps to help my business scale, because now the marketing is so much simpler because now we have one program that we sell.
John Dumas: Looking ahead is very valuable, especially when you have a situation like the one you foresaw. So I definitely commend you for that.
Laura Roeder: Yes. I think that’s a really important scale. It’s kind of looking at what you’re doing. I always talk about that in marketing. Is the marketing that you’re doing, will it just sort of keep your business at the same place, or will it actually get you much further ahead in five years?
John Dumas: We’re going to transition into the next topic right now. I’m very excited about this one because you’ve been so contrarian up to this point. I really can’t wait to hear your answer to this one, because as we’ve spoken about many times, an entrepreneur goes through a journey, and we’ve touched upon some not so-called failures but mistakes you’ve made in your past, and you progressed forward.
You’ve already touched upon a couple smaller aha moments that you’ve had where a light bulb has come on. You’ve seen the future, you’ve seen where your business is going. Let’s really take one and build upon that. Let’s talk about an aha moment that you had where you just saw the light, the light bulb came on, and you said, “Yes. This is me. This is what I want to do.” What were the events that led up to that moment?
Laura Roeder: So one that I had was about my newsletter. So in early 2009, late 2008, that’s when I fired all my web design clients. I decided I couldn’t do web design anymore. I wasn’t going to do it. I was going to do something totally new. In the beginning I didn’t know exactly what shape that would take, but I knew that it had something to do with social media and social media marketing.
So for my new business, I knew that sending out email was really, really important to market my business. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I have tried to do an email newsletter and I had failed miserably. I tried to do a monthly one for my web design business. Some months, I would get it out. I usually wouldn’t. It was never very good. I didn’t really know what to write about.
I thought, well, if I’m going to make this new business take off, I really am going to make a commitment. I want to have a weekly newsletter and I want to publish it every single week without fail. I started thinking about, okay. If I’m going to do that, I have to have a plan so that it’s realistic, because I knew that if my plan was to write a full article every week – and by the way, I think newsletters have evolved a lot in the past few years since 2008, 2009.
John Dumas: Very true.
Laura Roeder: When I was making this change. So at the time. I think we’re a little different now. Actually, there’s a lot of them that have used my model. It’s become quite common now. I’m not the only one to have thought of it, but I was one of the early ones.
At the time, newsletters were mostly lists of very long articles where people would have a newsletter that was either one long article, or often it would be one to five really long articles all in the newsletter because you were supposed to give people a lot of really meaty content.
I do not like to write. I like to talk and I like to do videos, and writing articles is really tough for me. Really slow and really painful. So I’m like, man, I don’t know how I’m going to do a weekly newsletter. I can’t write these articles. So I thought about newsletters that I read and what I like and what I don’t like, and I thought, well, I really never read all these articles anyway. It would be awesome to have a newsletter that could give me just one little tip every week instead of the long article. Like just cut it down to the meat and just tell me what to do every week.
So with that idea, I started thinking, okay. Well, I should base that on questions my customers are asking. That would be the great content for the newsletter. Then I thought, no, that won’t really work because the questions people ask are too simple, because the kind of questions I was getting from my customers were things like, how do I leave a comment on a blog? I don’t know what forms to fill out, or how do I upload a photo to Facebook, or how do I friend with someone on Facebook?
Really, really simple things, and I thought, no, I can’t put that in my newsletter because everyone is going to think it’s silly. I thought about like social media people reading my newsletter and being like, “Well, why is she telling people how to leave a comment? Everybody knows how to leave a comment.”
John Dumas: [Laughs]
Laura Roeder: But I knew that my customers didn’t because they were asking me [Laughs] how to leave a comment. It was confusing them. I would say my aha moment was when I realized that I wasn’t writing for my peers. That I was writing for my customers, and that I was never going to win any emissary awards on some groundbreaking new piece of content, but I was telling my customers what they wanted and what a lot of other people weren’t telling them because they were trying to come up with something more impressive or more unique.
I feel like that was a huge aha for me that shaped my newsletter and a lot of other decisions I’ve made in my business. I used that format for my newsletter, which I see a lot of people use – the sort of one tip a week. Since then, it’s been a backbone of my business. I started it the first week of January of 2009, and it’s gone out every single Wednesday ever since.
John Dumas: When people could expect one tip a week, that really means something. On a much smaller and different level, that’s why I’m having my success quote every episode of EntrepreneurOnFire, which is five days a week, is because your audience was looking forward to this specific tip they knew they were going to receive, just like my audience looks forward to an entrepreneur that they admire with their favorite success quote.
So I definitely see where you were going with that. It’s definitely been a success. You have over 30,000 subscribers. That’s an enormous number. So congratulations for that.
Has LKR, or have you as Laura Roeder, have you had an “I made it” moment?
Laura Roeder: [Laughs] Have I had an I made it moment? Yes, yes. I think I have. What comes to mind for me is I got to go – okay. Well, I’ll tell the whole story. So there’s a woman named Marie Forleo that I used to run a business with. Marie still runs it. It’s doing really awesome. So Marie’s business, it’s a business for entrepreneurial women. It’s called “Rich, Happy & Hot.” We ran a program together called Rich, Happy & Hot B-School,” which was an online program that taught women how to have online business.
Marie and I, I guess at that point, we had done B-School just once, and she had gotten connected with Virgin Unite, which is the charitable arm of the Virgin Group of Companies, Richard Branson’s company. I knew that Virgin Unite, I had heard that they did these special trips an entrepreneur has got to go on where you do some charity work and you meet other entrepreneurs and you get to meet Richard Branson and he’s there. I knew that Marie was meeting with Virgin Unite. She was excited that she was having this meeting, and like I just knew that something good and something exciting was going to happen.
I remember she called me. I remember I was in Las Vegas for a conference. She called me after the meeting and she told me that they had invited us to go on what’s called a Virgin Connect trip to South Africa. So we were going to go on safari with Richard Branson and go to the Virgin Center for Entrepreneurship in Johannesburg and…
John Dumas: Wow!
Laura Roeder: Yes [Laughs]. Oh my God! It was the ultimate dream for me because I love all the entrepreneurship stuff, I love all the nonprofit stuff, I love Richard Branson, and I’m a huge animal lover, and I had always wanted to go on safari.
John Dumas: This is the best trip ever!
Laura Roeder: Yes! It was like the best. The best trip ever! So we said yes on the spot. In order to go on the trip, you have to make a big donation to Virgin Unite. Like way more money than I had ever donated before, and I was – I’m only 28 now. This was, I don’t know, a year or two ago. I guess two years ago. So I was very young. I wasn’t that far along in my business, and it was just an instant yes. Like we have to do this. It doesn’t matter how much it costs. We’re in. When making that decision and being there, I really felt like, Wow! This is really cool. This is so many things that I’ve always wanted in my life kind of all culminating at once. So that was an amazing experience.
John Dumas: That is, by far, the best I made it moment that EntrepreneurOnFire has had. So thank you so much, and you no longer have to feel bad for not having failures or not liking success quotes or all of those things. You have just blown it out of the water.
Laura Roeder: Excellent. I made it up in the end.
John Dumas: So let’s talk about your current business right now. You’re rolling along in your current business. You have a team of six people. You’re working on scalability. You’re thinking of the future. You’re doing all the right things. What’s one thing that is really exciting you about LKR Social Media?
Laura Roeder: Well, it’s such a fun time right now because as I said, we’re really in the beginning stages of this whole new undertaking in our business. So actually, the first month just went through. So anybody who’s ever done a subscription knows that that’s kind of the big moment because you can do a special offer. We did a big special offer for the launch and you can get people in the door, and we had a very successful launch and got a lot of people. But then we were kind of crossing our fingers like, okay, they’ll buy it. But does anybody like it enough to stay in?
I’m happy to report, [Laughs] it’s doing very well.
John Dumas: Nice.
Laura Roeder: It’s doing very well and we’ve had a great retention rate. So it’s a really fun time because there’s so much to play with. We spend a lot of time planning what all the content was going to be. I’m really good at being organized and planning things in advance. So we kind of have, as far as running the site and maintaining it and generating the content, that’s kind of locked and loaded. So we really have the freedom to really dive in to the site, spend a lot of time on the forum, getting to know the entrepreneurs that are there and just brainstorming, how can we make this really fun? How can we make this really cool? How can we make it more educational and more enjoyable for the people that are inside the forum?
So I think that’s always a really great place to be in your business, where you have sort of the baseline established, and now you get to plan and make it even better.
John Dumas: For a lot of our listeners today, they look at entrepreneurs and they say, “What the heck do these guys do on a daily basis?” Now, I know that your day changes from week to week, from month to month, from day to day, but let’s pull the curtain back a little bit. There are definitely commonalities that you have during the course of each day. So give us two tasks that occupy a good part of your day seemingly every day.
Laura Roeder: For me, a big part of it is writing. Basically, my role in my company right now is marketing. I mean, I kind of lead and run the company, but I also have a project manager that really runs and manages a lot of the day to day. So my job is marketing. I had no idea when you do an online business, how much writing you’re doing all the time. I feel like that’s all I do. I mentioned that I don’t like writing articles, but I do like writing marketing. I really like writing email marketing campaigns and putting together sales pitches and opt-in pages and things like that.
So two things that I do every day, I’m always working on some sort of marketing. Like an email campaign or tweaking an opt-in page, looking at ads and how they’re converting. That’s a new thing for me because I never did advertising the first few years of my business, and this year we’re trying to put more money in advertising to see if that’s a way that we can scale faster.
So basically kind of – well, for me, marketing, and then like I said, right now I’m going into Social Media Marketer and talking to people. Helping people out and seeing what people are excited about, what questions they have.
John Dumas: Okay. In 30 seconds, share with us something that’s really exciting you about the future of the online world as you see it.
Laura Roeder: Something that’s really exciting me about the future of the online world is I think people are getting more creative, and I know that that’s something that’s always been important to me. So something you see a lot in the online, and any industry, is kind of there’s one head guy, and then everybody else kind of does the same thing. So you see the same types of programs and the same websites and the same newsletters.
When I was researching how to put Social Media Marketer together, I kept finding all these stuff. Like there are three types of membership sites and this is the only way to do it. I kind of thought, no, that’s not really the only way to do it. I feel like now that online marketing and online businesses have a little bit of a footing, it’s still a new thing, but online businesses – it’s 2012. We’ve been going strong for 10 years now, at least.
Now, people are starting to branch out and to explore a little more. I love to see when people get creative and they do new types of programs and new types of structures and new types of marketing. That’s what I would like to see a lot more of.
John Dumas: I’m definitely looking forward to seeing that develop as well. So we’ve now reached my favorite part of the show. We’re about to enter the Lightning Round.
Laura Roeder: Oohh…
John Dumas: [Laughs] This is where I’m going to provide you with a series of questions, and you’re going to provide us with a series of amazing and mind-blowing answers.
Laura Roeder: [Laughs] Alright.
John Dumas: Does that sound like a plan?
Laura Roeder: I’m ready!
John Dumas: [Laughs] No pressure, of course. What was the number one thing that was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?
Laura Roeder: I was really worried about how young I was. Well, I was really young, and I look and I sound even younger than I am. I was convinced that no one would listen to me and no one would take me seriously, and that did happen to a degree. But I did it anyway.
John Dumas: What is the best business advice you ever received?
Laura Roeder: Something that I learned from Eben Pagan that I always think about is “People don’t fail. Systems fail.” What that means is that whenever you have a problem, a mistake, a breakdown, instead of looking at the person and saying, “You did this wrong,” you need to look at what system did we have messed up, or more likely, what system did we not have in place at all that caused this to happen? Then you can fix the root of the problem.
John Dumas: You might have just found your favorite success quote.
Laura Roeder: Oh, maybe that is. I didn’t even realize that.
John Dumas: [Laughs]
Laura Roeder: [Laughs]
John Dumas: What is something that’s working for you and/or LKR Social Media right now?
Laura Roeder: Something that’s working for me right now is – oh, what should I pick? What should I pick? It’s boring, but email marketing. Email marketing is always my favorite. It’s always the winner. It’s what I always go back to. Something that I’ve been digging into is I’ve been writing a new sequence of really detailed long, long emails. Kind of like those newsletters [Laughs] that I was complaining about earlier.
So I don’t know if it’s like a trend going back around, but I’ve been writing emails that are just – not articles, but just like I’m talking to someone, sort of telling them everything I know about how to get more views on your video on YouTube or how to get more followers on Twitter. Just written really casually, just advice like everything I know about this topic, and people are loving that. It’s been working really well.
John Dumas: That’s great. I mean, you now have over 30,000 passionate, devoted subscribers. So you can get a little more in-depth because these people feel like they know you and they want to hear what you have to say.
I can kind of compare that to one of my buddies, Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, who writes these very long, detailed, intimate emails that really resonate with the audience. So I think that if that’s the kind of email that you’re getting into, it’s a great path to take.
Laura Roeder: Yes. I love his stuff too.
John Dumas: What is the best business book that you’ve read in the last six months?
Laura Roeder: My favorite is “Double Double” by Cameron Herold. Cameron is the one who has been a mentor to me and taught me a lot about business and I learned from Cameron about how corporate culture is something that applies not to just big businesses, but small online businesses like mine. Double Double is awesome because it tells you exactly what to do. It’s a very, very actionable book, a very easy read. I would highly recommend it to everyone.
John Dumas: Great! Thank you. We’ll have that in the show notes so people can just go and click the link there.
So this is the last question. This is by far my favorite question. It’s kind of a tricky one, so take your time. Think about it, digest it and give us the best answer you can. If you woke up tomorrow morning and you still had all of your experience and knowledge that you currently have, but LKR Social Media had completely disappeared so you essentially had a clean slate, which is how a lot of our listeners find themselves right now – with a clean slate – what would you do in the next seven days?
Laura Roeder: Oh, in the next seven days? I wasn’t expecting it in that way.
John Dumas: That’s the twist.
Laura Roeder: [Laughs] It is a twist! I mean, I guess if I had a clean slate, I really love my business. I love so many things about my business. I love my model. I love that it’s all online. I love that we don’t have an office. I love working with small businesses. They’re my favorite people to work with because I think they make a big difference in the world, in the economy, and the stuff I teach them can make a huge difference in their bottom lines. So it’s really rewarding.
So I would start a very similar business to what I have now. The only thing that I might change to make my life easier is like I mentioned before, when you do social media, you have to repaint everything constantly. Whenever Twitter comes out with a new look, which they love to do all the time, we have to update our videos, because otherwise it confuses people if they’re following along with something that’s out of date.
So I think I would start something that was the exact same. Maybe instead of doing social media, I would just do kind of business advice, marketing advice that’s more evergreen. Kind of how I’ve built a business and my philosophies about it, which I’m always kind of sort of sharing anyway and spreading through the business that I do. So I think I would start the same kind of online business. Maybe make it a little easier by not doing social media.
John Dumas: Great! Great answer. That’s going to do it for this interview. So Laura, thank you so much for joining us today. You’ve given us some great actionable advice, and Fire Nation is definitely better for it.
So give us one parting piece of advice, and then give yourself a plug, and then we’ll peace out.
Laura Roeder: Alright. Sounds good. My parting piece of advice would be that you can’t predict the future. This is something that I’m always telling small business owners. You don’t know how anything is going to work out, ever. So you just have to give it a shot and you just have to give it a try, because so many people get stuck spinning their wheels and not moving forward because they say, “Well, I want to start this program or service, but I don’t know if anybody’s going to buy it.”
You have to remember that you’ll never know if anybody’s going to buy it. There’s never going to be that moment in your life where you get psychic ability. Maybe that’s true for you. That’d be pretty awesome if it was. So you just have to jump in and do it. So that’s my parting advice.
You can find me at lkrsocialmedia.com. I would love to chat with you on Facebook at Facebook.com/lkrsocialmedia, or on Twitter, @LKR.
John Dumas: Awesome, Laura. We’ll catch you on the flipside.
Laura Roeder: Thank you.
