Authenticity vs. Professionalism when you're the FACE of your business - Shiny New Clients!

Podcast Summary: "Authenticity vs. Professionalism When You're the FACE of Your Business"

Podcast Information

Title: Shiny New Clients!
Host: Jenna Harding (Warriner)
Episode Title: Authenticity vs. Professionalism When You're the FACE of Your Business
Release Date: June 30, 2025

Introduction to Authenticity in Business

In this episode of Shiny New Clients!, host Jenna Harding delves into the delicate balance between authenticity and professionalism for entrepreneurs who serve as the face of their businesses. Jenna emphasizes the critical role that personal personality plays in attracting and retaining clients, especially in a digital marketplace saturated with generic content.

The Guest's Journey: Lessons in Authenticity

Jenna introduces a guest who shares a compelling story about their initial foray into creating an online course. The guest recounts a pivotal moment of frustration when unsaved work led to the deletion of their comprehensive, jargon-heavy material. Reflecting on this experience, the guest realized that "none of those things are why people work with me. They work with me for my personality" (03:30).

This revelation underscores the importance of personal connection over purely informational content. The guest highlights that in a world where "everything out there that we sell can be generated by AI... there is still a market for what you do for people, because the way that you say it is different" (05:15).

Balancing Authenticity and Professionalism

Jenna discusses the concept of "commoditizing yourself", where service providers must showcase their unique personalities to stand out in their industry. She acknowledges that for many helpers and healers, this approach can feel "weird, can feel narcissistic, it can feel self-serving" (09:45). Jenna reassures listeners that maintaining personal boundaries is essential to prevent burnout while still engaging authentically with their audience.

Building Authentic Connections

The conversation shifts to the psychological aspects of building trust and safety with clients. Jenna explains that shared interests and relatable interactions make clients more comfortable and more likely to engage. She illustrates this with anecdotes, such as finding common ground over a favorite TV show or shared experiences, which "people feel safer with you when they know that you have similarities" (14:20).

Setting Boundaries for Authentic Engagement

To help entrepreneurs navigate the fine line between sharing and oversharing, Jenna introduces practical strategies for setting personal boundaries. She suggests creating a "made-up benchmark" to decide how much of oneself to reveal online. For instance, choose specific areas of your personal life, like only bringing people to your porch rather than your bedroom, to control the level of intimacy in your interactions (20:10).

Jenna emphasizes the importance of a structured content strategy, where business owners decide in advance what personal topics they are comfortable sharing. This approach allows for authentic engagement without feeling exposed. She advises starting with rigid protocols and gradually allowing more natural conversation as confidence grows, making interactions "as natural as that, even if we started with some really clear boundaries" (25:30).

Clarifying Authenticity

Jenna addresses common misconceptions about authenticity, arguing that being authentic doesn't require revealing every aspect of one's life. She compares it to everyday social interactions, where it is acceptable to share appropriately without divulging personal tragedies or excessive details. Jenna insists, "You can be transparent and open and honest with people without bearing all and bearing darkness and trauma, dumping and all of those things" (30:45).

Conclusion

In wrapping up, Jenna reinforces that building a successful business on social media does not necessitate sacrificing one's personal boundaries. By thoughtfully integrating personality into their professional persona, entrepreneurs can create meaningful connections that foster trust and loyalty among clients. This balanced approach ensures that business owners remain authentic without feeling overexposed or drained.

Note: This summary excludes promotional content and focuses solely on the core discussions and insights presented in the episode.

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Transcript

A (0:00)

Welcome to Shiny New Clients, the marketing podcast that helps you attract shiny new clients to your business. We'll talk about social media, what makes people buy, how to go viral, and marketing psychology all in 20 minutes or less. Whether you're a coach, a stylist, or a wedding planner, if you've got a service based business to sell, this is the show you need to fill your calendar. I'm Jenna Warner, your new marketing coach and this is Shiny New Clients.

B (0:33)

I remember this moment so clearly. I had spent the entire afternoon holed up in this grimy little Queen street cafe, ordering coffee on coffee on coffee because I was determined to create my first online course. I remember the feeling of satisfaction. I remember the feeling of doing it and finally getting out there and building the thing like everybody had told me to do. You have to get into this online course world. And I remember when my stomach dropped and I realized as I had been chaotically creating all of this material for three or four hours in this cafe, finally getting all of my ideas out of my head and into the computer, that with every time I exited a chapter of this program, I had simultaneously deleted all my work. So with every yes, continue. Yes, continue. Yes, continue. I was throwing my work away. And it wasn't until the very end of the day when I realized I hadn't saved a single thing cut to me on the phone with customer service trying to figure it out. Nope, all of that is gone. If you don't hit save, it disappears. Now listen, I could talk for days on my journey of building a highly successful online program, but that's actually not what this episode is about. This episode is about how I'm so glad that that program got deleted. Because what I had done that day was fill these pages with information. I filled them with text and how to and step by step and tutorial, theory and jargon and academia and come to later find out many years later that none of those things are why people work with me. They work with me for my personality. They work with me to hear things described in a fun way. People work with me for the same reason that they work with you, because they want you to talk to them. Like yourself, everything out there that we sell can be generated by AI. Everything out there that you teach is. Can be googled. It doesn't matter. There is still a market for what you do for people, because the way that you say it is different. And when we talk about being the product that we're selling as service providers, how you are commoditizing yourself, this is what we mean, and yes, my friend, it can feel weird, it can feel narcissistic, it can feel self serving, especially the first time someone says to you, hey, did you know you are the product? Did you know that you are gonna have to jump on camera and be on Instagram? Because the way that you say things is your industry advantage, is your unique marketing angle. I know it's weird to wrap your head around, especially if you're like a helper and a healer or, you know, a teacher or guide or a mentor or coach or a practitioner or someone who's out there trying to help others. And the reason why you do what you do is to help others. You're like, this isn't about me, it's supposed to be about them. Yes, don't lose that. That is also really important. But if you want to build this business and you want to stand out from the competition and you want people to remember you and want people to feel safe working with you and interested in you, then we've got to bring your personality to the playing field. It always makes me laugh when I use any semblance of a sports reference because I don't actually know what I'm saying. I know nothing of the sports. Let me sell you a little bit more on this concept to make sure that we're on the same page, because I know it can be a bit of a shift from when you first maybe started your business and went to Instagram and tried to look corporate and got a logo made and made all these fancy graphics where your face was nowhere to be seen and you thought that that made you look professional. Have I hit the nail on the head? Let me know in the comments. You can leave comments on my podcast on Spotify now, just so you know, and I love to hear from you, so I'll sell you on it a little bit more and then let's talk about what it really means and boundaries that you can set up to help yourself survive it. And, yeah, ways to make it feel a little bit easier and intuitive and natural and especially if you sort of give away a lot of your energy, a way to. To be the face of your business without it eating you alive. All right, that's where we're going today. Have you ever been on a sales call with somebody and you're chit chatting and then you leave and somebody asks you how it goes and you said, yeah, I feel like they just get me. So I think I'm gonna go with it because we really vibed, we laughed. We have a similar Sense of humor. And I think that they just get me then, you know, you have now proven that personality is a big part of the buying decisions that we make. So you can look at it as simply as that. Someone needs to feel safe with and trust you and vibe with you, and it's going to make their buying decision easier on them. So if you go into a sales call acting like a robot or pretending to be what you deem is super corporate and professional because you think you're supposed to act like that, and then you don't show any of your personality and you don't talk in a normal way that makes someone feel comfortable. They're not comfortable enough to buy. Now you don't get to help this person. You feel. Have you ever been following someone on social media for whatever reason and found out that they like something super niche that you also like? Maybe it's a TV show or a clothing brand or a store, or maybe you live in the same place. Has that ever happened to you? And you go, oh, my gosh. And you want to tell them, right? You rush to comment, you rush to DM them, and now you have this, like, unbreakable connection to this person. You just because you have that one thing in common. Oh, I sometimes wear this Boy Meets World T shirt that I got at a thrift store because that was my favorite show growing up. Did it age well? Not particularly. Boy Meets World, if I listen to it now, I'm like, this is. It's definitely not what we consider to be progressive. But I loved it growing up. I loved my TGIF Friday night lineup of tween TV shows. And I sometimes wear this shirt. And of course people are going to be like, oh, my gosh, Boy Meets World, what a throwback is that. Ben Savage, et cetera. People feel safer with you when they know that you have similarities. It's psychological when you have something in common. And people will only buy when they feel safe doing so. That's why we have refund policies. The refund policy is a sales tactic. If it wasn't, they would only tell you about it after the purchase. Having the policy and telling you that before you buy something, that there's a policy is a sales tactic. Same with guarantees, all of this stuff. Okay, so how are we going to handle this? Because if you're already a giver or even if you're not showing all the parts of you and being like, completely free and saying whatever you want online, like, that's a slippery slope and it can be hard to manage so what I like to tell my clients in my program, which is called Magic Marketing Machine, which is a program where I help service based business owners get clients from Instagram, look amazing on Instagram and run your account in just a few minutes a day, we use your house. So you're going to set some boundaries. You're going to do it right now. It's a very easy exercise. You're going to decide how close you want to bring people in. Okay, so I'm sitting on my porch right now. I could decide. I only want to bring people to my porch. So I'm only going to have porch conversations with them. I don't mean let's actually talk about butterflies and gardening. I mean that's how close I'm going to bring them. Maybe you are a little bit more open and you're down to bring people right into your kitchen. You can have kitchen conversations with them. They can see a little bit more of you. Maybe you want to bring them right into the bedroom. Like maybe you are no holds bar, bathroom I would say is even farther. Or on the other side of the spectrum, you can decide to only meet people at the cafe on the corner. You don't even need to bring them to your house. We're just going to use that as a benchmark in our head of how much we want to share. Because you can still connect with people at the coffee shop. You can still talk about things that you're a nerd for. You can still bring personality into your content. You're just going to stay a little bit more reserved so that you stay comfortable and consistent with that level of showing yourself. Okay, so take a second right now. Decide on your made up benchmark to do with your house. How close are you going to bring people to you? Perfect. Now we've set that boundary. Next up, this one is a little bit more concrete. So we have this personal space kind of boundary and then we're going to decide on a few topics that you're willing to share about. So for instance, I post a lot on social media, I post a lot on Instagram stories. I bring people along with what I'm doing all the time, but I actually don't post the most important things. It took me me forever to even bother sharing my wedding photos. And they're beautiful. I shared like one, maybe two and but there's hundreds. But that was so personal to me that I didn't bring my audience along for the ride for that. Usually if something's really, really important, I put my phone down and if it has to do with my family, if it has to do something that's really important to me, really emotional, I don't share it. Or if we're going out and we're doing something solely for the experience. Like today I actually went to a foraging workshop, left my phone in the car. I. I didn't post about it at all. I didn't take any photos. I, like, was intentionally out living my life, and I did think of good content ideas while I was out there. So sometimes it's hard. I'm like, oh, maybe if I had brought my phone, I actually could be doing this. But I wanted to connect with people, real people. I wanted to literally touch grass. So I was really, intentionally left it at home. So you don't need to show all parts of you to open your heart and be open and honest and authentic with your audience when you are the product in a way. So what you can do if you want to, is be really structured about it. What are you going to share? In my program, we would probably build this into your content strategy. When you have the consistent content strategy that my clients use, you know exactly what you're going to post every single day, and you sit down and brainstorm it all. And you make all your content ideas in one afternoon. And then it's just about batch creating and getting that stuff out there. Or while leaving room for magic. If something cool comes up in the moment and you want to share, but you don't need to because all your content would be scheduled out and super strategic. So in this process of brainstorming, you could decide, I'm down to share that I'm a horseback rider and I go to the stables every week. And you're going to film some B roll on your horse. You're going to talk about it, you're going to make some metaphors to do with the horse, like, whatever. You can do that. And then you're going to have these pieces of you where you. You're probably going to be really fun to listen to because when people talk about things that they're into, they're really fun to listen to. Like, it's a great way to break through to your audience. If you feel like you're really awkward on camera or you get nervous on camera. If you can hear screaming, it's because kids are tubing out on the lake. Not because kids are being okay, because kids are being attacked over here. They're having fun. If you can't hear screaming, maybe I'll edit that out. Maybe I'll Just leave it in. Basically, you choose the topics in your life that you're willing to be super open about and sew into your content so that you can share pieces of you without feeling overexposed. And eventually, once you practice that in a very. Let's call it rigid. Let's say we start a little bit more rigid with that. And then as you get more comfortable with it, you're going to start doing it as naturally as you speak to strangers in public. You know the thing that you would naturally just tell someone when you bump into them at the mall? You know, you don't need to, like, think, okay, wait, am I in my living room? Am I talking about my horse? You just express. You just talk to them. And eventually talking to your audience on camera and on Instagram and on social media is going to feel as natural as that, even if we started with some really clear boundaries and some rigid sort of protocols for it. Now, I think sometimes I choose topics on here because. No, I know I do this. I choose topics on here because I get miffed about stuff. And one thing that I get miffed about is when people throw around the word authentic and they're talking about wanting to be authentic and then labeling all sorts of things as inauthentic. Like, I can already hear someone arguing me now, talking about how this strategy is somehow inauthentic when. When really it's just smart. So if that is you, listen, we can still be friends. But I would encourage you to deep dive the word authentic and what you're making authentic mean and what you really mean by that word and what you see it as and inauthentic. Same thing. If you run into somebody at Costco and you had a really bad day and they ask you how your day was and you barely know this person, is it inauthentic to say, fine, how are you? And not tell them that your dog just died? Like, that's not inauthentic. That's socially acceptable and not burdening that person with your drama, is it not? You can be transparent and open and honest with people without bearing all and bearing darkness and trauma, dumping and all of those things. That doesn't mean that you're being inauthentic. And you are absolutely allowed to decide, and you should decide how much of yourself you're sharing with people and not just go like, pouring everything out there and showing every angle of you and then shaming yourself, because that wasn't authentic. We are still building businesses here. Instagram is still a business tool. And you are Still a good person. Even though you have secrets that you don't share with your audience. That's normal, that's good. That's the way to do it. Before I let you go, I wanted to tell you that Freebie in a Weekend was a huge success. I just ran a two day event where small business owners started Saturday morning, went until Sunday afternoon and created an entire freebie funnel, tech setup and all in that time. It was awesome. And about half the people who bought tickets actually only bought it from for the replays. So we have the replays up now. There's replays of the lessons, some replays of some hot seats where people got coaching, and videos that are our tech tutorials that are edited nice and tight and like the main tech tutorial is actually under 10 minutes. That's how long it takes you to set up this funnel. It doesn't take long at all. So if you want to grow your email list with a super low lift freebie funnel, which also gives you a system and a strategy to create multiple freebies and test them all and see what works really, really quickly, you can get Freebie in a Weekend from the link below this episode and watch all the replays and we're going to continue to edit it and tighten it up and add to it as we go. But that was, yeah, that was a really cool event. It's not legal or good to promote something based on an outlier result. So you know when you, when you sell something and you have testimonials, you're sharing social proof about results people got. You're not supposed to talk about one person that got huge humong longest results if that wasn't the average. So before I tell you this, know that this was not the average, but one person created a freebie and then had this wild viral moment like two days after freebie in a weekend and got 7,000 names on her email list. Isn't that wild? 7,000 people opted in. That was so cool. For a while there she actually got banned from commenting because her robot was like commenting back to people. So that was awesome. But I've had other people tell me the results so far. Another person was nervous she was going to get banned from commenting because she got I think more comments than she had ever gotten before. People made freebies that they were really happy with. This is based on a formula that I have been using in my business to get rapid list growth just using content from Instagram and really low lift freebies. So if you're interested in that, there's more info on freebie and a weekend below this episode. And with that, I will see you in the next one.