EMILY MCGUIRE: FLOURISH & GRIT AND EMAIL MARKETING

07/14/20 • 79 min

I call Emily McGuire a Relational Marketer. Not only is she a guru of email marketing but she also is growing her one-person business to include copy writing and even business coaching. Emily and her company, Flourish and Grit, is the perfect person to talk about the coronavirus havoc on business, particularly small businesses.

It takes grit to be a solopreneur as Emily and so many people are finding, people who have pivoted their careers away from corporate jobs to working for themselves. Even amidst the pandemic, with layoffs across industries and companies, scores of people are looking to hang a shingle and rely upon their own abilities and passions to earn a living.
But wait, how do you do that?

Emily started Flourish and Grit just under three years ago primarily focused on helping clients take advantage of their databases through reaching out with email marketing. Emily takes the pulse of her clients current database and marketing efforts and helps refine based on the client’s goals.

Yet Emily is much more than that. She has become wise as a business person in understanding the nuances of creating long term clients through careful vetting, establishing boundaries and being authentic. She is who she is and she advocates for her clients to do the same.

So who is she? I met Emily in January at a gathering of business people and solopreneurs who were looking to find their marketing voices through understanding who they are. The event was co-hosted by Janelle Reichman, who was my guest on Interesting Humans Episode Two, whom you’ll recall owns her own website design firm.

Emily learned through constant observation and practice what to do and what not to do as a solopreneur. In the process of building her business she experienced the reverb of some personal trauma from her younger years. We touch on it some in our conversation and Emily is pretty transparent about being excommunicated and shunned by her family and how the experience has served her as a solopreneur and a person today.

Our conversation is both deep into the trials and tribulations of owning your own business and broad about the person behind it. I hope you will enjoy meeting Emily McGuire.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcguireemily/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flourishandgrit/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/flourishandgrit/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/flourishandgrit

Website:

https://www.flourishgrit.com/

Freebie:

Action Guide: Boost Your Email Open Rates ASAP

flourishgrit.com/open

Website: https://christianrward.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christianrward/

Website:

https://www.flourishgrit.com/

Freebie:

Action Guide: Boost Your Email Open Rates ASAP

flourishgrit.com/open

Website: https://christianrward.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christianrward/

Previous Episode

KENDRA STANLEY MILLS: humble beginnings and the art of capturing people being themselves.

If you saw Kendra Stanley Mills’ photographs you’d be impressed but you would have no idea of the story of how this incredible artist found her place behind a camera lens.

Kendra is a combination of extreme humility and equally big artistic talent. It might have something to with the way she was raised, having spent some time in rural Kentucky as a kid with her “hippie, Mother Earth News” parents living in a one room house with no running water and no toilet, that instilled in Kendra an ingenuity and a stubborn persistence to stay with things and make due with what’s there.

As Kendra says, “I’m certain that the way I grew up has a direct correlation to why I became a photographer. My childhood was part “Little House on the Prairie” and part Woodstock. I had an outhouse, no running water, a milk cow, a wood cook stove and no television until middle school...We told stories, listened to old vinyl records, had chores (a lot of chores!) and more adventures than I can count.”

She has such fondness for those times that she and her husband Jon Mills moved the log cabin she lived in in Kentucky as a little girl to the property they live on in Montague, MI.

From these humble beginnings Kendra eventually became a photojournalist for the Muskegon (Michigan) Chronicle and today is a portrait photographer of unique talent. Kendra’s photographs are infused with artistic elements, lines, geometry while still putting her subjects in the spotlight. The geometric elements are done so well and so deliberately yet so subtly they become elegant backdrops that enhance images rather than overpower.

Our interview was conducted last February pre-coronavirus at her studio office in North Muskegon, the same town where she go her start as an intern for the Muskegon Chronicle. You might hear some hissing—that’s the steam running through the pipes that heated the building.

Kendra won the internship just out of college even though as she recounts, “the editors thought others had more talent” but loved that she had a kind of courage. Over the course of her 13 years as a photojournalist Kendra refined a personal style as a newspaper photographer. Sometimes it was uncomfortable documenting the tragedies and hardships of her subject about which the reporters were writing. Kendra recounts the irony of her current business as a portrait photographer because when she started her editor told her her portraits were the weakest work she turned in.

“So he made me go out and do every portrait photo assignment I could get so I could get better,” she says.

In addition portrait photography where she shoots weddings, families and individual portraits, Kendra works as a full-time photographer for Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI.

Kendra also explores some aspects of the business of being a photographer and shares a couple important tips for anyone looking to create a business out of their creative endeavors. Hope you enjoy today's conversation with Kendra.
Links:
Kendra Stanley Mills Photography: http://www.kendrastanleymills.com/about/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kendra.stanleymills
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kendrastanleymills/
Pinterest: https://www.instagram.com/kendrastanleymills/
Metcalf County, Kentucky: https://metca

Website: https://christianrward.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christianrward/

Next Episode

ELIN WALTERS: MAKING INSIDE SPACES 'EXACTLY'

Flow. Details. Impact. These are the hallmark words in Elin Walters' world. She is the owner and curator at Exactly Designs, an interior design firm she founded a little more than four years ago.
As Elin says on her website, "I was once asked, “how do you feel when you walk into a room? What do you notice?”I replied, “I just know visually and emotionally if it is exactly right, if the room has realized its full potential. I’m always finding ways in my mind to make a room better.”

The lane Elin has chosen is the midcentury modern and modern aesthetic. She loves to incorporate color and whimsy in spaces as well as move walls. When she approaches a design project she's looking for that hinge, a particular element on which to build a space her clients will love. As she explains in our conversation that one piece--a piece of furniture, a paint color on a wall, a section of flooring, a window that offers a certain light--can be the determining factor for everything that is built around it. And, despite what you might think you might know about what it is that interior designers do, Elin points out several instances where her work involves way more than picking out nice pillows or dropping a $20,000 rug on a floor and calling it good.

"Design is design, not decorating," she says. The projects she gets the most excited about are the ones where spaces are completely reimagined. She often works hand in hand with her clients' contractors to ensure design is incorporated into the renovation process. If it's not, well, I'll let Elin explain that part.
We dive into her approach as well as how her upbringing with artistic parents in Williamsburg, VA and Goshen, IN subconsciously influenced her eventual path to doing design for a living.

Elin reveals some challenges that have impacted her business and her personal life as well in this far ranging conversation that I hope if you are a solo entrepreneur might help you.

I applaud Elin for being willing to be my guest as she is also my wife. It took me a couple months to convince her to come onto the Interesting Humans podcast and she agreed if I promised to ask more about interior design and her work than about our lives together. And, truth be told, she and I have very similar conversations almost every day about both professional and personal topics so what you're going to hear is a lot like the two of us sitting down over coffee. I hope that warm vibe comes through.
I'm lucky to be married to such an articulate and engaging person as Elin. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Links:
Exactly Designs website: https://www.exactlydesigns.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/exactlydesigns/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/exactlydesigns/
Atomic Ranch feature, May 2020: https://exactlydesigns.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AR-Argyle-Exterior-3.pdf
Seen Magazine, Interior Design accounts to follow on Instagram: https://seenthemagazine.com/instagram-accounts-for-home-design-and-decor-inspo/
Midcenturyhome.com: https://www.midcenturyhome.com/interior-designer-elin-walters-midcentury-home-renovation/
Elin's parents and their work in Goshen, Indiana:

Website: https://christianrward.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christianrward/