386: Putting Yourself Out There- with Alane Boyd

[00:00:17] Lori Highby: Hey everybody. Lori Highby here. Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast. Our show notes are found at socialcapitalpodcast.com. To you, the listener, I want you to know that I appreciate you and I'm thrilled to have you here for another amazing episode.

[00:00:48] If there's ever anything that I can do to support you, please reach out. LinkedIn is a channel that you can find me on. Just search for Lori Highby. You can simply click the follow button as I post daily information about marketing strategy tips, all podcast episodes and any upcoming events you might find me on. If you'd like to connect, make sure to send a note with your connection request that references Social Capital. I can't wait to hear from you.

[00:01:11] Social Capital Podcast is sponsored by Keystone Click, a strategic digital marketing agency that believes in order to successfully market to your ideal customer, you first have to understand your customer. Learn more at KeystoneClick.com.

[00:01:25] The topic of relationships ties in very closely to marketing. That's why I am bringing on experts in a variety of backgrounds focused on networking, marketing, relationship building for you to learn and grow from.

[00:01:38] Today's guest is Alane Boyd. She is the co-founder of BGBO Company, an operations and growth strategy agency utilizing AI and automation to improve efficiency for their clients.

[00:01:53] In 2022, her company launched Arvo, an AI powered visual documentation software for creating standard operating procedures, training documents and company knowledge. Alane has been written and featured in Entrepreneur, HuffPost, south by Southwest, PBS, Femme Founder, and many more. Welcome to the show.

[00:02:13] Alane Boyd: Thank you. What an introduction.

[00:02:16] Lori Highby: Well, it's a wonderful one that you've got here. Extremely impressive. And I love chatting about AI.

[00:02:21] Alane Boyd: I've been looking forward to this.

[00:02:23] Lori Highby: Yeah, it's definitely gonna be fun. Let's dive into the relationship side of things a little bit. So you live about an hour and a half outside of Nashville. How do you build meaningful professional relationships?

[00:02:34] Alane Boyd: This one took me a little while to figure out, 'cause I moved here from San Diego and for a long time I ran my company in San Diego and I opened an office here and I went back and forth and it was just so natural in such a big city. But here I realized that I actually had to put some effort into it and figure out how to have professional relationships I started using LinkedIn and connecting with other owners and people either in my industry or industries that I like to work with.

[00:03:04] And not even having a sales approach to it, but just, Hey, do you wanna connect kind of approach. Then the other one is I went through a Goldman Sachs program called 10,000 Small Businesses, and I was able to connect with other business owners in the state of Tennessee. I was feeling very suffocated until I was there and I was like, oh my God. Now I've got this huge network and I've been able to really pull myself out of what I was kind of falling into a negative head space into such a positive one that I live in an amazing area.

[00:03:34] I have so much land and waters coming out of the ground, and now I've got this huge network of people that I'm always connected to.

[00:03:41] Lori Highby: I love that. And I think that's how we actually both originally connected was that I was part of the 10 KSB program as well.

[00:03:48] Alane Boyd: That's how I found you and reached out 'cause I loved what you were doing.

[00:03:51] Lori Highby: Oh, well thank you. That's so fun. Yeah, I think that's a fantastic program and I would be an advocate for anyone that is a small business owner. I think you have to have a minimum of three or four FTEs To be. eligible to participate but there's great knowledge sharing. But I'd say from my perspective, that community is so powerful within that organization.

[00:04:13] Alane Boyd: Yeah, me too. It has just continued to give back even after years after I've graduated.

[00:04:18] Lori Highby: Love that. So how do you start positioning yourself as an expert or a credible resource in your industry? This could be anyone that's just getting started, but also someone that's been doing this for 20 years.

[00:04:30] Alane Boyd: Yeah. I really struggled with this for a long time because I was looking at the work we were doing. We are doing amazing things and our customers love us. I finally realized we weren't telling anybody about it. Even when we would do these big case studies, we weren't sending them out enough in a bite sized piece.

[00:04:48] No one's gonna know that you're an expert unless you're telling them, and you're not gonna be credible just because you say you know how to do something. You have to tell stories and do them short, where people's attention span can still follow along with it.

[00:05:01] And also very clear. So they say, I need that. You can do that so easily now with social media. And I have found that has really turned a 180 for me until where I was just going, Hey, I'm an expert. I'm over here. People are coming to me because they see me as an expert.

[00:05:15] Lori Highby: Yeah. I always, when I'm giving presentations, I know you do, a handful of speaking as well, when we're talking about marketing, I always reference, if you build it, they will come. Field of Dreams. Build a business and assume your customers are like gonna come to you magically. You gotta be loud and proud and let people know you exist and can help solve certain problems.

[00:05:34] Alane Boyd: And you can't just do it once. It's an ongoing initiative that you have to put into place so that the right person hears that right message that they're seeking at the right time, that they need that specific solution to whatever their challenge is. Where are you falling into the customer journey with them? They may not be ready for what you have to sell, but that doesn't mean they're not gonna be in two years. I love that you just said the Field of Dreams 'cause I say that so often. If I'm in a consulting relationship where, especially with software products, every single software owner when they get started, they honestly believe it's gonna be the Field of Dreams. They think Instagram launched and it just went wild in a month. They don't realize that guy was working for 10 years on Instagram before it was Instagram. It is going to be a lot of work to get customers. It's never an overnight success. You only know about the company because of years of work they went into it for you to know that company.

[00:06:27] Lori Highby: A hundred percent. And there's, this like smoke and mirrors of like, oh, this Instagram magically showed up and they're worth, all this money. And they were just acquired by Facebook. Good job for him. That took time and tweaking and it wasn't perfect the first time, the first launch. And there's lots of evolutions, and it's a hard initiative to have a successful business that you get found and you're attracting the right type of clients to find you.

[00:06:54] Alane Boyd: It's definitely an iteration as you go through too, 'cause you don't wanna be everything to everybody. You wanna, you wanna be a niche.

[00:07:00] Lori Highby: So I've noticed on your LinkedIn posts, you tend to just keep putting yourself out there. Can you talk more about that and your thinking behind it?

[00:07:07] Alane Boyd: It's one of the big mindset changes that I made. It happened with my son. He was four years old. He had never slept well at night and I had been trying all kinds of things. And I got this meditation book for kids, and one day we're driving in the car and he was like, Mommy, I do not like those meditations. Can we please not do them anymore? And I'm like, well, you know what? Those aren't really for me either. You can write your own meditations and I will read those to you at night. So they're about things that you like and stories that you like to hear. And he is like, sure, whatever. He's four, so he's just going along with it. We had just built a planetarium and so he was learning about stars and constellations. That he wrote this meditation and it was so from the heart of a 4-year-old. It was adorable. And this is going through COVD My, Father-in-Law sent me an email and he was like, Hey, this guy, his name's Chris and he's in San Francisco. He's like, Hey, he created a newspaper for kids and they can publish their stories and it's to build community and happiness while we're going through this horrible thing. And he's like, maybe Fletcher can submit his meditation he wrote and I was like, yeah, sure. Lemme talk to Fletcher 'cause I make Fletcher do all of his own emails. And he's like, yeah, you know what, I'll do that. He emailed that to him. And they loved it, they published it.

[00:08:19] And, you know, we're so excited. We think this is the end of the road. Like, man, he, he just got published in this kid's newspaper and a couple weeks later NPR contacts the editor of that newspaper and he's like, my name's Annie. I'm with NPR and I'd like to interview Fletcher on a upcoming podcast. Could you put me in touch with his parents? They had to write Fletcher an email and be like, Hey, can we get in touch with your parents? I was like, Hey Chris, this is Alane, Fletcher's mom. I help him with his emails and they put me in touch.

[00:08:49] And anyway, he gets on this podcast and he goes viral and 3 million people listen to his podcast. They interviewed him after his fifth birthday. He's just this little sweet voice. And I read the meditation and then he repeated after me and then they cut me out of it. So it sounds like him and this little sweet voice read in his meditation. I started realizing in 2020 that if you keep putting yourself out there, people are gonna find you. That scenario hit home with people and my son didn't care about what other people thought. He didn't know that he was being vulnerable. He was just putting himself out there. He touched so many people's hearts, and so that's actually the catalyst for me that said, I just need to keep putting myself out there just like he did.

[00:09:33] And I do that a lot because we all get so scared. What are people gonna think of me? Am I gonna get hurt? And I'm like, no, I'm gonna be Fletcher Lee Johnson and I am gonna put myself out there and I'm gonna keep doing it. 'cause you don't know what's gonna happen.

[00:09:49] The more that I do that, the more amazing things come my way because people know me. They know my voice, the type of work I like doing. And so that's how he taught me that.

[00:10:01] Lori Highby: I love that. I love that and I'm definitely a big fan and advocate of that thinking of the philosophy is, you gotta put it out into the universe, 'cause otherwise the universe doesn't know that this is what you're seeking. And definitely a big fan of that, and I've spoken, on a similar topic to other, entrepreneurs and professionals in the past and have had great experiences. Sometimes you just put it out there without expectations, but as long as it's out there it doesn't happen magically, overnight. But, like we talked about, you just keep putting it out there and consistency and then something's gonna happen. It's gonna be great.

[00:10:34] Alane Boyd: Yeah. It's from a snowball effect. He got to be on radio lab because he wrote a meditation. Then he gets published and then he gets beyond this.

[00:10:43] So it's all these connections and they keep snowballing on top of each other. If you just start one day, maybe not everything's gonna happen in line with that, but you keep doing it and you're gonna get that snowball effect and you're gonna one day meet the right person that's gonna make you explode.

[00:10:59] Lori Highby: Yes. Which is awesome, but you gotta be consistent and accept the unknown too, right?

[00:11:06] Alane Boyd: Sometimes I think my greatest idea no one else cares about, so I have to just go with it. This wasn't the home run that I thought it was gonna be. One day, maybe it will be, but I'm gonna keep putting myself out there.

[00:11:18] Lori Highby: Love that. So, I'm curious and I would love to hear more about your AI software.

[00:11:23] Alane Boyd: Oh, yeah. So we launched that for companies to create internal process stocks, SOPs, training manuals for their team, and it's all digital.

[00:11:33] We were looking at it from a perspective is a lot of stuff out there, a lot of platforms, they look like glorified text documents. We just thought nobody wants to learn like that. Everything is meant to suck you in longer and also for short attention span.

[00:11:48] So that's why we built Arvo, to be really digitally appealing. And then we added AI earlier this year and we've got a couple of new AI features coming out too. We thought, what a great use of AI to help write processes. If you could have AI write 90% of a process for you, and then you tweak it for your business, that could be saving you hours of work. We've got some things coming down the line that I'm really excited about with AI too.

[00:12:13] Lori Highby: I'm just fascinated with it and it's moving so fast right now. It's really hard to stay on top of everything that's happening with AI. There's so much opportunity for creating efficiencies in all aspects of your business. One of the pains that I hear constantly is that process documentation. So that sounds really fascinating. I'm excited to learn more about that down the road.

[00:12:34] Let's change it up to something fun now. If you could go back to your twenty-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of, less of or differently with regards to your professional career?

[00:12:43] Alane Boyd: Gosh, well, probably a lot of things, but, I don't wanna complain about anything that led me to where I am now.

[00:12:48] I think I was on the perfect path to figure things out. I think more of my changes would be around health and healthy eating. I was always Overweight growing up and didn't really learn how to eat right. And when I went to college, I ate a lot of Easy Mac.

[00:13:02] So I think that, you know, When you take care of yourself and your health and you get good night's sleep, then you're able to do more. And I think instead, I adapted bad habits around stress. I still have to work through being overly stressed, 'cause I never really learned how to deal with that.

[00:13:19] So I think those are the main things I would've told my twenty-year-old self is like, Hey, get yourself together. Learn how to cook healthy foods, get a good night's sleep so you're prepared and not stress the next day.

[00:13:30]

[00:13:30] Lori Highby: I love all of that. those are critical things that I wish my twenty-year-old self was paying attention to. So hopefully someone listening can act on that.

[00:13:39] Alane Boyd: Those young people out there, this is how you need to change.

[00:13:42] Lori Highby: A hundred percent. So I'm gonna give you the opportunity to interview me. What's something you'd like to ask me?

[00:13:48] Alane Boyd: I would actually like to hear what you would like to change for younger self.

[00:13:53] Lori Highby: Oh boy. That's a good one. I think one of the things that I would look at when I was in, college I would've paid more attention to creating relationships with the various professors and the students that were in the class. And anyone that I met on a professional level from a mentoring relationship opportunity, a networking opportunity, to build a strong, positive network. I think that would've been really important. And then, pay closer attention to the things I was doing to take care of me first instead of focusing so much on what everyone else was doing.

[00:14:26] Alane Boyd: That one's such a hard one to learn, especially when you're young. I'm still trying to learn that as an adult with a child, I have to remember to take care of myself.

[00:14:34] Lori Highby: Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much. If anyone is interested in getting in contact with you, what's the best way that they could reach you?

[00:14:40] Alane Boyd: Definitely LinkedIn. I love being on there, connecting with people.

[00:14:44] Lori Highby: Cool. We'll include, that information in the show notes. Any final words of wisdom you'd like to share with our listeners?

[00:14:51] Alane Boyd: If you get anything from you and I talking today is what is something that you really enjoy in life, and start putting yourself out there. You never know what's gonna happen.

[00:15:01] Lori Highby: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Alane, for being on the show today.

[00:15:04] Alane Boyd: Thank you for having me. I loved this.

[00:15:07] Lori Highby: Yeah, super fun.

[00:15:08] This wraps up our episode of Social Capital. A huge thank you to Alane for taking the time to connect with us.

[00:15:13] If you have a burning marketing or relationship question, just reach out. I'd love to answer it on the show. And as mentioned before, let's connect on LinkedIn. Connect with me, connect with Alane. We'd love to connect and hear from you. I hope you enjoy today's show, and I encourage you to go out there and get noticed.