Do you remember having a boss? Someone to impress for the sake of one day, receiving a great year-end review that also led to a pay increase? 

Whether you were a salaried employee or a hourly employee, every little extra dollar or increment meant that your life could be lived just a little sweeter. 

I think of that Dane Cook movie, Employee of the Month, where there was a new car at stake as he tried a little harder to impress the managers Glen and Glen, but altogether, was just a great, honest person at the end of the day who was motivated by a few different goals. 

You don’t have to impress Glen or Glen, because I know you have worked so hard all year making the most out of your days. Innovating things like recession-proof business strategies, attending CEO Days each month (cough cough*), and asking powerful questions. 

Most of all, you have stayed intentional each week about something new, because you have been following along here. 

So, my question is: when are you going to pay yourself MORE for the work that you are putting in? 

This may look like working LESS or simply raising your prices. Remember, you don’t have anyone who believes in your more than you could yourself. 

If you don’t feel like you are valuable enough, none of your customers and potential new clients will.

 Feeling valuable also may not change overnight. It's a practice of thoughts, beliefs and actions. One of the biggest you can do is start to change your internal talk, and visualize your raise and that you already have it using the power of manifestation!

If this week, you can start feeling into a 5% something more that you know you deserve, what could that look like for you? 

I’m sitting on my resort-style balcony in California, lounging while staring off into the beautiful scenery. I know that more time with my family and vacations like this fill me up and make me feel extra worthy as I take time to reflect on how hard I’ve worked all year. 

What does this look like for you? 

I write this because it’s one of the most self-sabotaging thing in business to undercharge and burnout. Where other places, bosses are happy to compensate for impressive performance, we practice not doing so for ourselves and that is a bad habit to begin. I would love to have you continue to believe in yourself, your worth, and allow the market to be guided by your powerful message. 

RETREAT ALERT:

Our upcoming CEO Days Retreat is taking place on January 14th- Plan out your RAISE and what it looks like for you!

Powerfully declare what your year will be in a word or phrase.

Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful celebration reflecting on 2021! Do you feel ready to “TURN ON” your most impactful year yet in your business?

My power word for 2022 is “MASTERY”
I know this past year tested me in so many ways and although my profitability and performance weren’t anything to put on the shelf, I’m beyond grateful for the lessons that helped shape a new direction for me to focus on in 2022.

I want to fulfill all of the things I’ve started with an approach to master the skills, the intentions, and the systems that I had initiated over the last 2 years and make more prideful & profitable results from my efforts.

How about you?

If you are someone who just can’t get with the idea of mapping out a giant complicated, multi-layered plan for your marketing or your business, you may want to take a small, very small, effort to set a powerful direction for yourself.

Words are powerfully linked to our subconscious and conscious mind

If your brain hears a certain word, you assign meaning. You recall experiences. And you feel what that word means emotionally and physically in your body.

What if each day you can wake up and make a small statement or phrase around ONE word that you wish to assign to 2022?

How can that one word said every day give you a nudge in the direction you desire to think/feel/ act on?

Select ONE word and make a commitment to using it regularly

To start a brand new year, I want to give you one challenge- pick a single word to name 2022.

Next, each morning, each start of the week, or at the beginning of each month, create a phrase that assigns meaning around that word. Make those your written verbal, and visual pledges to yourself that you can use to stay in alignment with what you desire the year to be.

Use these words + phrases in your marketing

Have you heard of the Law of Attraction? It’s about pulling inward what you desire, who you desire, and manifesting outcomes that help make anything possible!

What you are putting out there is what you are going to receive back. Using the MKTG Dashboard Process, a MKTG Brand Strategic tool, you can plug your words and phrases as themes and sub-themes into your marketing plan, making your intentions front and center of everything you are talking about.

The best part about being consistent being clear, and being communicative about the things and words you are sharing is that people will receive this, understand this about you, and start to associate that powerful word or phrase with your branding. It’s such a beautiful thing!

Being Intentional

Keeping your intentions small and bite-sized, like using just one word at a time, is what I hope to encourage empowerment and confidence in you so that you can be all that you need to be in order to live out your business + life’s mission this year.

If you’d like to learn more about setting regular intentions, make sure to subscribe to the Sunday Intentions newsletter!

Disclaimer: Written by a brand new mom of a 6-Day old, please be kind with wording or logic that may seem cloudy or not make much sense.

Friendships are not just for fun and games, but they are the secret to why successful CEOs and business owners create opportunities for themselves that no other resource could ever offer an equivalent level of support for you and the experience you are having as a business owner.

Did you notice tonight’s Super Bowl Commercial about building a FRIENDSHIP with almost everyone and everything you’ve seen? Humans doing human-like things. This is no secret that these are the most iconic, effective, and impressionable clues on marketing. 

Inspired by the Super Bowl’s personification of the Turbo Tax desks that looked like animals (connecting non-human things to a somewhat animal-like character), and the CEO of Oatly to build trust and likability of a brand beyond the quality or taste of milk- society likes to feel like they can relate human-to-human in the way they build brand value in their minds. 

For example, with the Oatly CEO playing a keyboard in an outfield- I reflected: CEOs are the new mascot/personification of our culture. People want to befriend these brands of our world knowing and trusting the CEOs. It’s what connects something humans need: connection. 

One of the things I miss most about not being in college during the Superbowl is not having the pow-wow to analyze commercials in advertising classes. So, I guess I can break down the Oatly commercial with you about the lesson of gaining trust, building a brand, and putting your CEO personality as a symbol of the front person of your band. The objective: just make friends with you!

I’m in the business of assisting entrepreneurs to make meaningful relationships, friends rather! 

To break it down: My job is not to guide you on how to get in front of people using branded content, but also, really emphasize the importance of growing your community: engaging, being intentional about who is invited/ who isn’t, and keeping people completely connected with you on a regular basis to add value to your relationship. 

Do you have friends around your business? 

Friends are so important. They are genuine, they pick you out of the crowd to be on their team, and they may disagree with you, but always support you. 

In a business setting, we owe it to the people who have treated us like real people, real friends, when our businesses were opened on Day 1, when we had NOTHING, and when our ideas were sounding way too crazy to make sense in a business setting.

They asked us questions, they spent time with us to get to know us, and they provided honest and truthful feedback when we needed to see a new perspective on something. 

Friends are more than just people to provide resources for us- but they make life what life is most meant to be- ENJOYED! Friends give us smiles, hugs, laughs, and moments we never could replace with the most amount of money in the world could ever buy. 

So- the biggest question Ask yourself about the friendships you’ve created: do you feel like the people surrounding your business would drop you like it’s hot when the going gets tough, or stick by your side with loyalty? 

Or as I like to say: "People you'd want to go on a vacation with for a week- those are the community members you want to attract. Or else, what’s the point of hanging with people you don’t like or with those who don’t want to be around you?”

The fact of the matter is- we may not be the ONLY people who do what we do. 

No doubt about it- your business is not unique, but you definitely are. Including each of the relationships you have. There is a lot of competition out there and yet according to CBInsights, the “#1 reason why businesses fail is there’s no market need.” What could create more market need than selling YOU of your business more than anything else!? 

If you aren’t developing friendships, your personality and business can easily fall flat, can be less enjoyable, and provide dead-end deals when you only focus on treating people like transactions, not like true, genuine friends. 

Do you build a business making friends, or making leads? 

CEO’s have a really amazing opportunity nowadays. We aren’t the people sitting behind a glass office in a highrise, but we can truly be the face and the personality behind an incredible community, a movement, and business that really represents something more than transaction building. 

As we see it today, we do not have to follow the stigmas of traditional workplace culture. We can truly just focus on building friendships. We all struggle, we are all feeling alone, we face the fears of failures every day, and we do things really courageously to make business decisions that shouldn’t be such a harsh judgment of our character

 If you aren’t being intentional about the way you build friendships inside and around your business as you do in your personal life- you are missing out on a huge opportunity to truly make a bigger difference, more enjoyment, and effectively increasing your CEO journey with partnerships and connection over isolating yourself into a list of people who truly don’t care about you, your success, your mission, or if you fail in your endeavors. Do you agree it can be this drastic of a statement to make? Let me know what your thoughts are!

Dana Magnus

“When things aren’t adding up in your life, start subtracting.”
~ Anonymous

The entire month of September is all about “being” instead of doing in business - this really struck me hard.

This really got me to reflect on this question: why does it throw me off so much to take an additional day off, and an entire weekend to relax? To add this day to my personal “bank” and subtract it from my work “bank.”

Some of you who are business owners have zero problems with sprinkling in time off and I admire you for that. Others are struggling a bit to create this level of empowerment in their business to be able to subtract and not feel at a loss. Read that again.

I shared a little video reflection a few weeks ago and wanted to talk about it in today’s Sunday intention- getting rid of, making space, and subtracting the things in our business and in our life that doesn’t bring much value at all to our life. 

That’s the first part.

The second part is being totally okay, overjoyed, and almost to a euphoric state of celebration that you subtracted.  What I mean by this is saying no, unfollowing, and creating more distinct boundaries with yourself and what you allow in your day to day. 

Here are a few examples:

• Going through your entire social media feed on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram and unfollowing, unfriending, and removing the connections of those who bring more angst and negativity to your life. Including other business pages, groups, and reporting ads that you do not want to be bothered with. 

• Start wrapping up the “COVID Emergency Plans” where you took on work & projects that you know weren’t profitable or sustainable for you and declare the end date and move forward.

• Don’t work on the weekends- at all. And do something for yourself instead!

• Or completely turn off notifications altogether and start deleting events off your calendar if you want to be where I’m at! 

• Take it even a step further and subtract a working hour each week from your schedule and put that 1 extra hour toward something in life you truly enjoy like gardening, cooking, hosting a gathering, volunteering, reading, or doing research on your most passion-driven nonprofit. 

Some of these are examples of what I’m experiencing as my February is going to entail a brand new role for myself- being a new mom! 

I have to make space to welcome one of the most important roles in my life I could ever dream up and I cannot insert that tile of motherhood without allowing space in my life to do so. 

As I continue to focus the rest of this month on projecting my plan for what 2021 is going to look like in my life and business, I have to start making space. T

his is going to allow more amazing things to come true and I already know whatever I decide, it won’t be a LOSS, it will be a complete deposit of my time, energy, skillset, contribution, & addition to a better version of the business, of me, and so much more.

Having the time to think about what I am going to “subtract” is going to allow me to focus on what better additions to The MKTG Brand, to Dana Magnus as a person, and to my entire community.

What can you subtract this week?

This exercise is going to skim the fat and grant you a more clear outlook for how to use the best use of your time to “be” and stop “doing” what you really shouldn’t be.

Think to yourself what is up and coming for you in 2021- is it being so much more efficient in your work? Being more connected to your community? Sharing more time in the spaces in the world where you feel your most wholesome-self?

Can you take away wasted time on social media with all of the fake news and propaganda, ads, and negativity to open up time for yourself to enjoy more, share more; and receive more? 

I’d love to hear about what you are subtracting in the Your Ethical Business Community Group- feel free to start a post in reflection of this Sunday Intention!

Until next time-
Dana Magnus


PS> Have you heard of CEO Days? We are being proactive about your month ahead with accountability, planning, and a bit of networking at this FREE meet-up! Check it out>>