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Erin Mitchell: The Worst Marketing Client She Ever Had Was Herself

Erin Mitchell was leading a marketing team at CVS Health when the company laid off one percent of its workforce in a single day. One percent was five thousand people, and she was one of them. She had always known she wanted to be an entrepreneur. That morning she had to decide whether she actually meant it.

Three years later she is a fractional CMO with a client roster she chose on purpose, a seat on the Forbes Coaches Council, and a brand she is in the middle of rebuilding. In this episode she shares the rebrand from BETotal Solutions to Grow Giants before it was public, including where the name came from, which was in the shower, and what it took to admit that the business she had built was drifting somewhere she did not want to go.

Erin is unusually candid about the parts most consultants smooth over. She was applying for jobs and chasing clients at the same time and getting nowhere, because they required two different mindsets and two different sets of materials. She built her first website with none of the discipline she sells to clients, and she says if she had seen it as a consultant she would have asked who exactly it was talking to. She has invested zero dollars in her own marketing for three years while telling clients to spend five percent of revenue on theirs.

In this episode:

• The difference between "we need marketing" and "we need a growth system," and why she says the biggest part of her job is saying no
• The same-day appointment campaign she delayed because both physicians went on vacation, and why a campaign is a promise to a community
• Diagnosing the real bottleneck, including the client whose entire problem was that nobody was answering the phone
• How to build a roadmap that survives contact with a business that cannot stop to plan
• Why marketing gets cut first in a down economy, and what a century of research says about the companies that protect it anyway
• Bridging the classroom and the workplace for graduate students at the University of Illinois Gies College of Business, and what Gen Z is teaching her about the future of work
• Coaching her own daughter in the pool, coming down too hard after a disappointing meet, the apology that followed, and the state title that came after

Erin's answer to our title question: Making More Giants.

Connect with Erin Mitchell on LinkedIn to follow the Grow Giants launch.

Find Billy on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bigeyedfisch/ or visit his website, billyfischer.focalpointcoaching.com.