Leveraging Email Marketing To Build Strong Businesses With Jason Resnick

Jason Resnick:

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jennifer. I’m excited to be here.

Jennifer Bourn:

So as Paul Jarvis would say, you’ve been a Company Of One for 12 years. That is a great run. Not a lot of businesses make it that far. And during that time you’ve become a dad, you’ve got two little boys, you’ve got a podcast, and you pivoted the focus of your business.

I’d love to hear a little bit more about your journey as a freelancer and how you got to where you are today.

Jason Resnick:

Yeah, so that’s a long story. But where I’m at today really started with a conversation that my wife and I had. My oldest at that time was about two months and we were in an apartment — month-to-month lease, the landlord was great — but we were looking for a house. We needed the yard, we needed a consistent driveway parking spot, and we just need a bigger space.

And so what wound up happening was that at the time, my wife’s job… Their business was acquired during her maternity leave, and at the end of her maternity leave when she came back, her boss who was on the acquisition side, basically said to her, “Look, your job is sort of redundant.” And told her on a Friday, that if she wanted to come back in on Monday, that’s great but she’s not going to hold the same position.

And it was like the most adult conversation that we had because we were in the process of getting a mortgage, we just had a baby, like, you know, health insurance was a real thing. Right? Everything was through her job. And while I had the business and things were working great, banks looked at me as still a guy on the couch. They were like, you know, bank statements look great, but yeah approval for a loan and all that kind of stuff was eh…

Jennifer Bourn:

It is so hard to do anything when you own your own business in terms of mortgages. They make it so brutal.

Jason Resnick:

And to be honest with you, it was one of those things where it was like, she enjoyed her job, she was a director, she had 19 people underneath her. She, you know, she enjoyed it, but she didn’t look at it like I look at my business. Like, I love what I do every day. She looked at hers as a job.

Now, while she made a fantastic salary, had that benefits, 401k, the whole nine yards through that, what she really wanted was to be home. The commute was an hour and a half one way from where we were at. And so I just said to her, “Look, I’m home with TJ all day long and that’s great, but it’s hard for me to take meetings sometimes and really get down to focus work.”

Not, you know, his detriment or anything, it’s just the way that it is.

I said, “If you are home with TJ, then I can scale the business a lot faster and a lot more to where we want to be. Yeah, it’s going to suck at the beginning because we’re losing half of the income and all the benefits and all that stuff, but I could get there faster than you sitting in a job that you really don’t want and you’re only going to see our son maybe an hour a day.”

Um, and so she goes, “Well, what is going to happen with the mortgage?” I said, “I don’t know, but I want to bet on us not bet on somebody else. And so if you take the job, then you’re betting on your job still being there. We have no, if you’re redundant, are you still going to be there in six months? Who knows?”

So we just had that conversation on a Saturday night, Monday morning, she just called up — she said nice, “Thanks but no thanks” and we went on our way. We wound up getting a house. We now have a second son. Uh, I’ve certainly pivoted the business — that was in the transition period of pivoting the business to be honest, and yeah, life is great.

I mean, like you said at the beginning, like, I’m able to design my business around the kind of life that we want. You know, being able to go outside on a random Tuesday afternoon because it’s awesome outside. Right? And just to be able to do those kind of things. If she was still working where she was working, we couldn’t do those things. So, my life right now is family life is first. That’s my compass. That’s the compass for the business and our lifestyle.

Jennifer Bourn:

It’s so interesting — those pivotal moments when you have those tough conversations — thinking about mortgages and supporting our families.

We had a similar conversation when Brian was leaving the fire department, and our fantastic healthcare, and benefits, and all of the things that came along with that. He was stepping into my business and now we needed the business to support everything — the mortgage, the family, the food, the benefits, all of it.

And you’re stepping into and making that decision together as a couple. “I’m going to lean into this business and we’re going to have this business support everything.” And that can be a really, really tough, stressful situation on top of pivoting a whole business.

How did you manage that along with family life and everything else? I mean, we took months. For you, this was what, a weekend? I mean, holy moly! How did this play out?

Jason Resnick:

Yeah. So coming to that conversation, like, it wasn’t the first time that she had given me that support. But like, in lack of a better term, the brownie points leading to that, she had the trust that at least if I’m rolling the dice there, it was an educated decision to move forward.

You know, there was no guarantees on anything obviously, but I was confident enough that we weren’t going to fall flat on our face and be out on the streets somewhere. Right? But even before that, like before I even met her, I was certainly an educated gambler. Meaning, I definitely weighed pros and cons.

I mean, I left the corporate world in early two thousands when I was working for a consultant firm, and basically the whole.com thing imploded in on itself, and I was like, “Now’s the time to do freelancing. I have the skill of a web developer at that time that people need.”

And so I went out on my own only to find out 18 months later that I had no marketing and sales skills or any of that kind of stuff. And I was just like, “All right, I gotta go learn that stuff. I’m going to go back and get a full-time job.

Jennifer Bourn:

Well, and I want to touch on that a little bit because I’ve shared on episodes of this podcast and in my blog, about my own backyard breakdown moment, where I finally admitted out loud that I hated the business that I built and I wanted to quit. Right?

I was making fantastic money and was the picture of success on the front end of things, but behind the scenes, I had no systems to support anything I was doing. My business was totally out of control. It was running me ragged. I was exhausted and I know you found yourself in a really similar position with your development company around the time that you got engaged.

Tell me a little bit about what was happening in your business at that point, because that was before your pivot. What was going on in your business and what happened that made you realize things needed to change?

Jason Resnick:

Yeah. Um, things needed to change because of the symptoms that I was getting myself as someone who has battled depression and burnout in the past. And I was up like 20 hours a day. I was basically putting out fires left and right from clients — running ragged in that term.

And for me, it got to a point where I was like, “Okay, I’m working 20 hours a day, and yet there are two bills on the counter and I’ve got to pick which one I’m paying.” Right? And I’m like, this doesn’t make any sense.

And I was stressed to the max. I wasn’t sleeping. I was basically working on the couch, you know, all day and all night in my apartment, and I just was like, “All right, I gotta go back, get another job because that was the second time.

So, the first time I went back and got a job, I learned all the sales and marketing and stuff that I thought I was missing only to find myself again, in the same scenario two years later, after I decided that I was going to make the switch and I had a conversation with, my then girlfriend.

Uh, basically she said, you know, that’s not what you want I know that. And if I know that, then you know that as well. And so, we’ll figure it out one way or the other, and then she was like, I’ll just pay these other two bills. Right?

“But we just got engaged I can’t put you on this rollercoaster. It’s one thing if I’m on the roller coaster, but I can’t do that to you.” Right? And so she’s like, “We’ll figure it out. Whatever.”

So I said, “If I have that support, I need to figure this out.”

And I poured over my notes, poured over my client roster, all the projects that I was working on. And I basically found that I was not niched enough. I wasn’t specialized enough. And I was basically chasing my tail every six months.

And that was the first big pivot in my business — to say, “Hey, I’m going to do this now. I was a general web developer, but I’m going to put my whole business into WooCommerce and even WooCommerce Subscriptions.”

And I saw what came out of that. And I was like, “Oh, marketing became easier.”

All of these systems that I could put in place — every client was going to go through the same proposal, they were going to go through the same onboarding, and I know what to expect, and I know how to ask the same questions, and I can improve upon my sales process. You know, it’s not different every time somebody comes through.

And so that was my first realization that I have to work on the business sometimes. I can’t just do business. Like, I can’t just have 37 bosses. Like, let me figure out the business and push that another direction. And even then, when I started to pivot the business away from web development and more in email, I was always…

Human nature always interests me. I had minored in psychology in college and I flocked towards e-commerce way before Amazon was around. At that time, putting a credit card in online was a problem. Like, that was interesting to me. As a developer, if I could solve those problems, then I become a cog in that company’s bottom line.

Fast forward several years, it was hey, now I can marry email data with the website data.

And so we know somebody clicked on this link in an email, or we have some information on which products they purchased or what their interests are. Let’s reflect that back on the website in proper calls to action. Like, let’s not show them the things that they bought already. Or hey, we could just swap out the hero image on the homepage to the thing that they’re most interested in or most likely to buy.

And so I started doing those sort of things and my clients were just like, “Hey, how could we build better automation?” and that’s when I started to say, “Oh I could do that.” Like, the web developer mind that I have, as well as the, human aspect of it for me, it made total sense.

And I started moving the business more towards email marketing and automation because that’s what I was being asked for not so much the web development side of things. And so two years ago, that was the last web development client that I had.

I started pivoting in 2016, really pivoting the whole business towards the email marketing side of things, and it’s been great. I love all the challenges, you know, especially with how society in the world has been over the past, like, even just a couple of years. Like, all the market shifts and everything else. It’s just real interesting projects with my clients and trying to get them to have their businesses designed around the lives that they want to live.

Jennifer Bourn:

I think it’s really important to point out you realized that the biggest problem that you had was that you didn’t have systems in place and you weren’t focused enough — you weren’t specialized enough. But you took action.

You took action to focus, and niche, and really look at “How can I make things easier in my business?” And that ah-ha experience — when you first realize how much easier everything gets when all the projects you’re doing are similar — gives you the opportunity to hone your message and hone your craft and just make little tweaks to get better, and better, and better.

And I really love that you took cues from your audience, from your clients and what they were asking you for, and what they were interested in. And you said something, very quickly, but tying what you’re doing to their bottom line. That makes you more indispensable.

And let’s be honest, email marketing is all about driving back to that bottom line, right? A lot of that is how do we help people who aren’t ready to buy right now, stay in touch so that we’re there when they are ready to buy later?

Now you’ve shared that 90% of your sales today happen through systems and processes that are automated. So I want to know a little bit more about this and the role email is playing.

Jason Resnick:

Yeah. So, one regret that I have in business is that I didn’t start email soon enough. Right? And so it’s ironic that the email guy, you know, that was the thing. But I had to learn sales and marketing that fit me. Right? I’m not the guy that’s going to knock on the doors or call people. That’s just not me.

I had to figure out “How do I get sales? And how do I market in certain ways?”

And so when I niched down, it was Drip that I was really focused in on, and it sounds pretty simple but as a one-man show, if I’m doing work, I can’t be out there marketing.

So, what I wound up doing was, “Hey, I’m just going to put my developer hat on. How do I find drip clients? Well, people complain on Twitter all the time.” I mean, social media, I think was built for people to complain on. Right?

So I just created a simple Zapier recipe that anytime Drip was mentioned — the brand drip was mentioned — it would just ping me. At first, it was on my phone. Now it’s in Slack. It’s still something that I use to this day. It goes into Slack and then I just scroll through the slack channel whenever I have some time before a call or after a call or at the end of the day to just see, “Hey, is there a conversation that I could jump in?”

And to be honest with you, Drip was slow on their socials and so that’s how I got a lot of business. I jumped into those conversations saying, “Hey, here’s this link, this article, or you might want to try this, or whatever.” Right? And then Drip would come in maybe 48 hours later and say, “Hey, it looks like Jason’s got you solved.” Right? They would just kind of like confirm it.

Jennifer Bourn:

I absolutely love this because I think so many people can relate to you saying, “I’m not the cold call guy,” and finding a sales or a marketing approach that works for you. That is so relatable.

And this is such a great approach because you’re not out there hawking your wares and pushing your offers, you’re just joining in the conversation and helping when people are talking about it already.

Jason Resnick:

And naturally, what then happens is that people start identifying you with that platform.

So, now I do ConvertKit. People identify me as ConvertKit. People ask, “Hey, anybody know a converted expert,” I’ll get a ping on it. It happens maybe every other day. Right? And so it’s the same philosophy. It’s just being out there being helpful.

And for me, that was the biggest thing as far as avoiding the feast or famine cycle.

When you’re a freelancer, when you’re down in the weeds of projects, and then you come back up and then you have nothing in your pipeline to get another project, then you’re like, “Okay, it doesn’t hurt today but it’s going to hurt next month when I don’t have that funds coming in.” Right?

So that was one of the components for my marketing. Like, at the bare minimum, there’s pings going out there and you can at least add to the conversation on a nightly basis, even if you’re busy all day. And it’s still part of my marketing system. Right?

I’ve kind of tailored it. You know, yes, ConvertKit people ping me. My sales bot pings me. I even have certain phrases now that I’ve added into it that people ask about that I know that I could specifically send them a link to a YouTube video that I’ve made and things of that nature. So that’s part of the whole system and so that draws a lot of people in.

But then on the back end of it is email. Email is at the heart of everything that I do.

And I don’t have a large list by anyone’s imagination, but it’s a list that I consistently communicate with — provide value too — but based on the behaviors of the individual subscribers, if they’re clicking on certain things, then certain automations that are built in the back end, pull people out and essentially, “Hey, let’s get on a call.” Or, “Hey, I think this product that I have for you might work.” Right?

And so these systems — it’s not like an overnight thing — but piece by piece, when you put them together, they just basically, you know, do my marketing and sales for me.

Jennifer Bourn:

So email has made a huge difference in your business and in the businesses of the clients that you work with. But there are a lot of different parts. There are email newsletters, and now people are talking about evergreen email newsletters and automated newsletters, and there are follow-up sequences, and welcome sequences, and all of these different things to keep track of.

For someone who has been doing email marketing badly and decides this is something that they want to improve in their business, where should somebody start?

Jason Resnick:

The question that I always ask is, what is the goal? What do you want from email?

So for me, what I really want is people to book a call with me. I have some smaller digital products, and yes, you can go ahead and buy them and things of that nature. But really, the goal is to get the call and I design automations that circle around that.

But also the emails that I put out are really storytelling. That for me has worked.

Prior to October of 2020, I sent an email out every Tuesday and sometimes on Friday. And it was really a curated newsletter of links and articles and podcasts and so on and so forth. But I saw the benefit that my clients got from daily emails.

Some of the clients that I worked with wrote daily, they wrote stories, it was quick, and I was like, I want to do that, but I don’t know that I have that much to say.

Jennifer Bourn:

I think that might be a concern for a lot of people.

The minute you said daily, I’m like, “Oh my gosh!” I know how much work it is to do a curated newsletter once a week, and then daily, holy moly.

Jason Resnick:

Right. And so for me, it was like, “How do I write that much?” And I was like, “You know what, I’m going to do it for 30 days.” Let me try it. Let me see if I could write that many. And it wasn’t daily. I picked six days a week, took off on Sunday, and I also put constraints around it.

I didn’t want it more than a two-minute read time. I wrote it with a cup of coffee, the first cup of coffee every single day, ’cause I was like, if I go to write daily, I gotta carve that time out or I gotta batch it or whatever.

So for the first 30 days, that was the habit that I was trying to create for myself. And I did it. And I was basically like, “I didn’t burn the list.”

Like one of the things I was worried about was like, “What is going on with Jason? Like he’s too much I’m gone.” And you know, that didn’t happen.

In fact, it was quite the opposite.

People were replying more. They were like, “Hey, these emails are great. This is fantastic. Makes total sense.” And I was getting a lot of more feedback, like legitimate feedback, not just clicks, opens, and sales, but I was getting actual conversations. And I mean, I have data around all of this., As a data geek myself, I was just like, “Unbelievable.”

And so I’ve been doing it six times a week since October of 2020, but I’ve tailored it and it’s been massaged in the format and all that stuff. Still two-minute read time. I keep to that. I still do it with a cup of coffee.

But hey, if six times a week is too much drop it down to a weekly. And so a Saturday is a newsletter-like thing, a digest if you will, of what happened during the week.

Because I look at it this way. Someone gave you their email address, so they want to hear more from you. Whether that’s free, whether that’s paid, they resonated with you enough to allow your voice in their personal space, which is the inbox. So, I take that with such respect that I’m treating that email list like humans.

And so I have this phrase: treat your email list like humans and amazing transformations happen.

So, if people don’t want to hear me six days a week, they could dial it back to weekly and they get it on Saturday. And that’s fine. So there’s a small percentage that do that, you know, to each his own and I don’t want to presume that this is the only way to do it. It’s easy enough to just dial it back and give them that option.

And likewise too, like I further segment based on customers and non-customers and what their interests are. And, you know, I don’t pitch people that aren’t interested in a certain kind of thing. Right? And so all of those segmentation data points go into creating email marketing.

And you asked where does one start I always say whatever the goal is that you want for your email marketing, start broadcasting out to that with that goal in mind, and see where the list shakes out. If you have a current list, let’s see how they respond to this.

And I’m pretty blunt on my email too.

Like, when I shifted from that Tuesday to six times a week, I just told them. I said, “Hey, look, I want you around, but this is where this is going. These are the goals of the emails. This is what I’m going to help you out with. If this doesn’t fit for you, here’s the unsubscribe link.”

I don’t want to invade, you know?

I don’t want to create any more noise in anybody else’s world. And that honesty — that brutal honesty — works so well on email because it’s that personal touch that people are looking for. They’re not looking for, you know, another ad in their face or another social media post that kind of flies by at eight seconds. They’re looking for some, personal high touch there that takes them further down that funnel.

And like you said, email gives that connection — that longer sales cycle, if you will.

Then, “Hey, yeah, I wasn’t ready to buy the first week that I was here. But after learning a little bit more and getting more of my questions answered, I’ll go ahead and buy.” Right? And so it’s just that longer sales cycle and then further nurture them off of that and email does a fantastic job of it.

I laugh every time there’s a headline coming out: Email’s dead, email’s dead, email’s dead.

Jennifer Bourn:

People have been saying email is dead for, I don’t know, 15 years?!

Well, I love that you were just right up front and open with your audience about the change that you were making — the shift that you were making — telling them what your goal was and the fact that you put a constraint around your time. Right?

A two-minute read.

Sometimes, I think we delay starting something or we delay something that we know we should be doing because we think that it has to be something really big and complicated and complex. Or it has to be this newsletter with 14 different sections and upsells and cross-sells. But it really could just be as simple as a personal heartfelt note or story that just takes a few minutes to read, but makes that personal connection.

Jason Resnick:

Absolutely. And I have two lists, so I basically write 12 emails every single week.

And so when you come right onto my list, you’re immediately greeted with my son’s face and you know you’re going to get a personal touch and it’s going to resonate through the email. When you get on my list, you’re going to know who I am, what I’m about, how I teach, what you are going to get from being on the list, and what I hope you can accomplish.

Jennifer Bourn:

So, you’ve mentioned personalization a couple of times. Right? Of really making sure you’re sending the right message to the right person, and that’s a matter of being really proactive about segmentation. And I know that segmentation is the key to unlocking a lot of the magic that happens with email marketing.

Where do you start with segmentation? Is it first, really knowing who you want to be joining your list? Is it trying to figure out who is and making some guesses and having people tell you?

Jason Resnick:

Yeah. I always work from the back — from your customers. So, what is it that you sell, and who is that customer, and work backward from there? And what I mean by that is I ask the question that can easily identify the majority of those customers. And most of the time that’s a question on level or status.

Look, you can be a career coach and ask how long is your career? Are you just starting out? Or are you mid-career or end of career?

If you sell TVs, the level is your customers. Is it going in a bedroom? Is it going in a studio apartment? Or is it going into a media room? Those are levels.

So what is the product you have that you can identify the majority of the customers that you want? And that’s the first question that you ask, because then when they answer the question, you know where to put them through, right?

You define that critical path to getting them to become your customer. And that’s the first step. Then, I usually say ask three to five questions and you can sort out demographic data and behavioral data.

Behavioral is like: What’s their motivation? Like, do they need this today? Need it tomorrow? What’s their emotional state with it? What’s their full desire to actually get where you want them to be? And so if you could figure out what those three to five questions are, that’s the segmentation that you can have. Right?

And so a classic example that I have even in my list is identifying who you are. So in the beginning you said, course creators, coaches, digital product creators. Right? Who are you? What do you call yourself?

Now, I have automations on the back end.

If you say, “I’m a coach.” Okay, great. I never call you a creative again. I call you a coach. And I just basically have code in emails that swap in that identifier that you’ve told me, and that immediately personalizes every email that goes out the door.

Jennifer Bourn:

That is so cool. You laugh and you’re like, “This is easy.” But I’m thinking “Holy Moly!”

Something like that — to be able to personalize it right to your subscriber — immediately, the messages that you are sending will hit home so much more than, “Hey, here’s this comma-separated list of the 10 people that I serve. Maybe you’re one of them.”

All of a sudden, it’s tailored more towards me and I’m feeling like you get me better than anybody else might get me. So it’s a little thing but it can be so powerful.

Jason Resnick:

That’s why a lot of people say “Hi first name.” That’s the first step. If you’re not doing that, then I don’t know what’s going on.

You need to take it a step further because the platforms, whether you use ConvertKit or something else, they give you the tools to do it. And if you know your customers and who they call themselves, then let’s just take that extra step. Let’s identify that.

You know your business, you know your audience, you know who customers are, and if we can identify them, it does make a huge impact on the conversions later on.

Jennifer Bourn:

Now, you offer a free call where you map out an evergreen plan for doubling someone’s revenue. You said the majority of all of your email marketing and everything drives people in to get them on a call with you, which I love because I know once I get somebody on a call, the chances of them becoming a client are high.

You have a 15-minute Action Taker call where you map out an evergreen plan for doubling someone’s revenue. Tell me about this call and how it works.

Jason Resnick:

Yeah. So it’s really a call to figure out if evergreen is for you. Now, I will say it fits 98% of the people that come through because I’ve found that people that take me up on this call already do some level of email marketing.

They’re already sending emails at some level. They’re collecting email addresses. They’re doing the 101 and 201 level work to bring emails in, they’re just not sure how to get it to the next level. Maybe they’re doing manual launches, maybe they have some segmentation, maybe they’re collecting leads from Facebook and they’re trying to figure out how to get them into a webinar training or something. Right?

That 15 minutes is me asking a lot of questions around what they’re doing today and then telling them, “Hey, look, I think an evergreen model will work for you.” And I talk a little bit about a Salesperson Campaign, which works for everybody, and it’s just something that sits in the background waiting for clicks to happen on the front end. Again, pulling people into that personalized pitch.

And that 15 minutes is them telling me that they are ready for evergreen. Like, I’m not telling them that they need this they are telling me that they’re ready for it.

And then we move into a 45-minute call where we’re really sorting out that scope of work on a custom project. I want to know what your conversion rates are and I want to know what your investment is today in email marketing and ads, and so on and so forth, cause I want to get you an ROI as quickly as I can.

But sometimes people aren’t ready for that and that 15-minute call allows me to still help them. And so I have a book-a-day service that basically is me in their ConvertKit account or Drip account for one full day.

Jennifer Bourn:

I love the book a day. Get Jason working in your account and doing magic for a whole day. That sounds amazing.

And it’s clear that email marketing, when used properly, can completely transform a business so it supports a rich, fulfilled, satisfied life. But I need to know, besides email, what tool can you not live without?

Jason Resnick:

I would probably say Tweet Hunter or Notion. Tweet hunter is a new tool that I’ve used to help schedule my tweets. But it’s more than that. It’s basically a CRM tool for Twitter. So it’s something that helps me stay on top of conversations that I want to stay on top of, and schedule and not have to be on Twitter all the time. And it’s just made my Twitter experience that much better.

Notion is the other side. Everything goes into notion — planning my weeks, client work, tasks. All my email writing happens in notion and then I move it over to ConvertKit.

Jennifer Bourn:

That’s cool. And you also have your own podcast. tell us a little bit about your podcast and where we can find that

Jason Resnick:

Yeah, my podcast is Live In the Feast. It’s designed by seasons to help freelancers basically figure out how to stay out of the feast or famine and really engage in stories with other freelancers. And each season is based around a topic. So we have a season on pricing. I have a season on marketing, how to handle clients, so on and so forth. That’s sort of on a hiatus but yeah, I mean, it’s something that I enjoy doing.

I went through this insane challenge to do a YouTube video for 90 straight days. Video has always been one of those things for me that has been, uh, a stopping point because I’m a little bit of a perfectionist.

Jennifer Bourn:

Samesies.

Jason Resnick:

And so podcasting has always been my medium of choice and people are like, “Hey, you need to do video. You’re doing the audio why don’t you just do the video?

Jennifer Bourn:

Everybody’s like you gotta do video.

Jason Resnick:

Yeah. So I don’t know. I mean, again, like I’m in this room that has 14 windows in it, so I have no control of light and I’m like, forget it. So yeah, I love podcasting and I’ve never said this before, but I’m in planning for another podcast centered around email automation.

Jennifer Bourn:

Nice. I love that. And I will look forward to listening.

Now, everyone defines and measures success differently. I measure it by how satisfied I feel in my work and my life. Am I waking up inspired by what’s on my calendar? Am I feeling satisfied with everything that’s going on?

So I’m curious, what does success and the idea of satisfaction look like to you?

Jason Resnick:

Yeah, it’s a great question because one of the things that I always strive for as a father is I don’t want my boys to think that He’s home, but he is always working.

Right now my wife and I have a split schedule. I work from about 6:00 AM to 10:00 or 11:00, and then I watch my three-year-old for a couple of hours while she does work. And then I take from about 1:00 to 3:00/4:00 in the afternoon. I go back and work.

I love that time. It’s like a reset for me. We play, we go outside, we have lunch. Like, those are the kinds of things that I want for my family. Success to me is the quality time that I spend with my family and how I feel about that.

So I mentioned that I’ve got Notion. And every day I basically have this traffic light system. I give it a red, yellow, green on certain attributes — family, work, and a couple of other things. So, if I start to see a trend towards the yellows or the reds then I start to say, “Okay, what’s going on here?” I start to pay attention a little bit more.

And I did it in notebooks before Notion because I found that I would just work through a lot of stuff and depression and burnout would sneak up on me. And I didn’t want, like, I mean, I went through it twice and I was like, “Okay, I can’t do this. Like, I’m getting older. I have to start figuring out what are the signals that start pushing me there.”

And so I developed this quick little system to check myself from time to time. And so I just make sure that that green light is there as much as humanly possible. And if the green lights are there, then for me, that’s what a successful day looks like.

Jennifer Bourn:

I love that because it’s simple. That check-in — red, yellow, green. It’s simple, it’s doable, it’s something that you can look at trends and you can notice when things are changing. That is a great little thing that anybody can do.

And I love that you check in at the beginning and the end of the day because if I started my day on green and I’m amending my day on red, we know there’s something that happened today that we’re going to need to evaluate.

Jason Resnick:

Absolutely. And the thing that I found was that the morning time check-in, at the beginning, I was like, it’s always green. I always feel fine. I’m just waking up. But then as I started to reflect when we sleep, our brain’s still doing some stuff.

We have dreams, and worries, and stuff like that. So, I started to wake up and be a little bit more mindful of what was I thinking about before bed.

And so that it gave me like this 12 hour, check-in And, it was definitely worth doing,

Jennifer Bourn:

Well, it is about making sure that as a business owner, you’re building a business that supports the life that you want and being really intentional about that.

I’ve said it several times, but that’s been a running theme through all the conversations that I’ve had so far for this podcast — being really intentional with how we’re showing up and where we’re focusing time, and making sure that when we are working, we’re as productive and as focused as possible so that we can not be working more often.

And you’ve said that email marketing is a tool that can help people build businesses that support their dreams. I would love to know one thing you want people to walk away with about email marketing and the impact it can have on their business.

Jason Resnick:

No list is too small. People think that they have to collect thousands, hundreds of thousands of email addresses to start an email list. And it’s just complete garbage.

If you have a customer or you have had a lead, you have an email list. Communicate to that individual because even if they don’t open every single email that you have, they’ll open up industry average says one in five.

So, if you send out five emails, they’re going to open up one.

If it’s a lead and you’re in their inbox and they’re evaluating a project: “Oh, Jason’s here. I don’t know. I talked to some other people last week and I haven’t seen anything from them. I don’t even remember what their name is. I’m going to go with Jason.” Right? Same thing with customers. If you want to increase customer lifetime value, keep talking to them.

Jennifer Bourn:

I love that no list is too small. One person is a list and sending it is always better than not sending it. Now, Jason, where can we find more about your services, how you can help about your free call where should people go if they want to stay in touch and learn?

Jason Resnick:

Yeah, you could go to NurtureKit.co — that’s where I do everything email marketing related. At some point on that page, I will ask you for your email address and then we can stay in contact that way. Or find me on Twitter. I’m @rezzz with three Zs and my DMs are open and I’m happy to have a conversation there as well.

Jennifer Bourn:

Fantastic. thank you so much for joining me and sharing your journey of seeking satisfaction.

If you enjoyed this episode of Seeking Satisfaction, subscribe for new show updates at Jenniferbourn.com/seeking-satisfaction, and hey, please leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform.

If you would like to hear more from Jason Resnick and get his Automated Salesperson Email Campaign that sits waiting in the wings for a new subscriber, ready to ask questions, share stories, and make it easier to sell your products and services, check out the Seeking Satisfaction Extra Minutes Membership.

Members receive extra minutes from podcast guests like Jason that provide valuable insights and training to help you do better business. You can find the details about the Extra Minutes Membership and Jason’s training in the show notes.

Until next time, may you live inspired, embrace imperfection, seek satisfaction, and have a fabulous day.

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