102. Energetic Marketing: Haley Gray’s Secrets for Small Business Success

Hi, we're Cinthia Varkevisser and Michelle Walters, co-hosts of Mind Power Meets Mystic. Our weekly show is here to expand your mind to what's possible, to uplift your spirits, to move forward with confidence and joy, and to create a space for your collaboration with the invisible. Welcome to Mind Power Meets Mystic. Welcome to this week's episode of Mind Power Meets Mystic. I am Michelle Walters. I'm the mind power part of our podcast, and I am joined today with Cinthia Varkevisser, our show mystic, and my co-host. We are excited today to be speaking to our friend Haley Gray. Haley is many, many things, but primarily we are going to categorize her today as a mystical, magical marketing geek who has a lot of practical woo sense and brings fantastic marketing solutions and advice to primarily small business owners. Welcome, Haley.

Haley: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Michelle: I'm excited to be here too. I used to do marketing all the time, and now that I am in this space, I see how there are some similarities. But in a lot of ways, this is a very different world from when I did corporate marketing on a larger scale. So kudos to you, Haley, for figuring it out and bringing these services to the many, many people who need them, because it ain't easy work.

Haley: It is not easy work, and I think that part of it is that it's very tempting to bite off more than you can chew or should do, and it's really hard with some of the hype that you see going around to know what really makes sense to do in your business and what is hype. And you know, a lot of people get sucked into software they don't need, expensive solutions that bankrupt them, buying expensive funnels that make absolutely zero sense for their business, trying to do certain types of ads. So it's a really kind of interesting world where, yeah, you know, being the voice of reason a lot of times with business owners and talking them out of doing things is very much an anomaly.

Michelle: I can totally imagine it, because, as somebody who does a lot of this work for myself, like figuring out what to try and bite off versus what is too big to bite off is a very big challenge.

Haley: Well, and like, it's not even so much what's too big to bite off, but like, what's not even going to work in my business, or what's not right for the stage of business I'm at right now, like really not right or what's spending way too much money for something at this point where I'm at, you know, and being super practical with it, I feel like there's a lot of gaslighting. Well, you need to spend more on that website. You need to spend more on that funnel. Of course, you need to have a funnel. You don’t.

Cinthia: It depends on where you are, right. It depends on where you are, depends on the size of your business, your goals, and your reach.

Haley: It depends on your business, right? Yeah. You know certain types of businesses. If you're a restaurant owner, you don't ever need a funnel, you know, or, you know, if you are a solo coach, and you primarily get people through events and word of mouth, you actually need a whole big, huge funnel, or do you need just a simple landing page website? Maybe.

Cinthia: Exactly, exactly.

Haley: Well, I think, you know, coming as a, as a business owner, small, solo, solopreneur, for me, it was really hard to and I'm woo in business, you think of so logical, so 3D you know, your business, and you think of woo, it's, it's beyond emotions, especially, you know, so it was, it was hard to say, Okay, now, what is business? What is that I'm supposed to do? So every time people would talk about business, my ass would get all freaking tight, and I wouldn't breathe, and people could talk, they said, Wow, you look completely different as soon as you talk about business. Because I couldn't find a way to incorporate the two where I could be fully present and who I am in my business, because I was hearing do this many sale sales calls, do these many things, and it just didn't.

Haley: Exactly, exactly.

Cinthia: And so I was having a very hard time trying to find myself in all these places. The beautiful thing with you is that you put things to ease. And for me, and said, you know, you don't need this stuff, or, you know, this is, this is really what you want to focus on. And it made things really nice. I have a feeling, because I've talked to other people that you've worked with. One of them, Carolyn Piston, she's had a business for a very long time felt compelled to do something else, and you took her hand and helped her pivot beautifully and did some magical stuff. And I believe that she pretty much catapulted her new thing, which was writing a book and speaking from where she was. And I loved seeing that, that piece of her, and then seeing her confidence, after all that happened. I mean, she very solidly says, I'm a speaker, I'm an author, and this is what I do. It's beautiful, inspiring.

Haley: It's been fun to see, you know, and I think that everything was already there. She gave me a copy of her book and her book covers, and basically said, Go to it. I went and did my thing. But I will say at the end of the day, what I find is that I am a magnifier and a multiplier or a megaphone for whatever's going on with the client. So if a client doesn't want to get clients, or they're scared about getting clients, no amount of marketing I do is going to get them clients. It's all energetic. And if they are ready for clients, the marketing I do simply, you know, makes it exponential, and it's really fascinating, because I have a client right now that has a cleaning business, and she's getting ready to launch, this weekend, a webinar showing people how to start their own cleaning business. And she works with the Hispanic community here in the United States, so everything is done in Spanish, and her social media has tended to go viral, and we put up a sign up for a webinar this week. On for her, she did most of the work. I just showed her how to do it, and in the first 48 hours, she got over 200 signups. As of last night, she was at like, 460 signups. But, you know, realistically, it's, it's a reflection of, she was ready for it. She had the reach for it. She was energetically in that place to be able to do this at this point in time, at the price point she wants to do. And, you know, do that launch. And I've seen it with other clients, like, they will be like, I'm not sure I'm ready for clients. I'm going on vacation. I'm such and such and such, and we're gonna keep doing the marketing. And then they come back, you know, and they're like, I'm not ready for clients yet. And then as soon as they start thinking, I'm ready for clients. The doors open, and we have not changed a single thing that we are doing. So it is really the energy on the client that is being magnified in what we're doing.

Michelle: I absolutely love that, because I advocate all the time, and I think a lot of people maybe think I'm a little bit crazy, but it is about the energy. And it is, it is about the energy. And, you know, it's, it's part of the energy is the time that you're putting into it. Part of it is the openness. Part of it is the connections you're making. It's, you know, that energy can be channeled in a lot of different directions, but if there's not energy going into it, it's gonna die.

Cinthia: But the other thing too is, if you're also not open to receive right now, you're not gonna receive so anytime I have mentally said, Oops, I'm sorry. I'm not sure if I'm ready to receive this, everything shuts down. And as soon as I'm like, Okay, bring it back on, everything goes and opens right back up. And I've seen it with myself energetically, that when I'm in that, you know, close to receiving mode, I don't receive, and when I say I'm open to receiving, it all just flows. And it's kind of interesting how that, like staying open has to be a conscious, intentional decision too. So I can do every bit of marketing in the world, and it can look to be exactly the same on the surface, but the energy is just different.

Haley: Agreed.

Michelle: We have come to the middle of her program on Mind Power Meets Mystic, and we want to remind everybody that we are talking this week with Haley Gray, and as we told you all last week, Cinthia and I are doing something very special. We are running a promotion. We are asking our listeners to make a review for us and submit it with the form. You'll find the form in our social media and on the show notes and enter our contest. So you can enter our contest by submitting your review. You can get your friends to help get you more entries in the contest by submitting their review. Or they can submit their reviews and tell them they you came from them. It'll All Make Sense anyway. What you win if you win the contest is you win a Mind Power Meets Mystic project, a one-hour session with me and Cinthia to do a reading and a hypnosis so we are really looking for you to subscribe, to add us to your listening list, and to submit your reviews. What do you want to add, Cinthia?

Cinthia: It's a great it's a great thing. We just talk to Haley about this on another episode about how it can launch, it can launch you into the next energetic stratosphere, I think is the best way to say it. So it's a definite, it's a definite up level, and it's a $400 value. So it is nothing to sneeze at. You are getting a really, really lovely service from some amazing chicks. I cannot believe I just said chicks. I'm sorry, from some amazing…

Michelle: But you are amazing.

Cinthia: We like to be amazing. We like to be amazing.

Michelle: We are amazing beings. So please like us, review us. And back to Haley Gray. So Haley, yeah, we were talking about clarity in marketing. You were talking about the energy of it. So I'm going to be honest. I'm one of those people where I say, I'm the best, I'm all these things and then, and then I stop, and I'm like, Holy shit, people are looking at me. So you talked about clarifying in marketing, and I would love for you to talk a little bit more about that, like, What do you mean by clarifying yourself in marketing, so that people who are like me, who they want to pull the trigger, they think they're pulling the trigger, but they really still have the safety latch on?

Haley: Right. So when you have that safety latch on, it's going to be really hard for anything to work. I mean, it's going to take forever to build whatever it's going to you're going to hire somebody four times over, and you're going to get the results. So I think that there is a point where you have to go back to yourself and do your own healing, and do all of your own love and forgiveness work, and truly begin to believe that you are the best thing since sliced bread. And, you know, I've had men who will comment on my Facebook profile. They're like, well, you're always promoting yourself. You've got a really big head, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, No, I just know what I'm doing. And I'm not gonna, you know, listen to some Mandy, Pandy, who clearly barely has a business, who, you know, has a lower opinion of themselves. So I think that there's a lot to be said. And you know, there's a lot to be said for forgiving yourself and loving yourself and loving yourself first, and putting yourself first and putting your own oxygen mask on first. And then the other thing too is understand that there's going to be naysayers and haters and whatnot out there, and I kind of like to collect them, and I celebrate them every time I get one, and I throw a mini mental party, and I'm like, Yeah, you're the one that's arguing on my post, and you're just boosting it like I posted a thing the other night on my personal profile that a lot of people were costing themselves clients because they were posting some really politically charged and some really ugly stuff on their Facebook profiles. And I said, you know, because some of y'all can't resist the urge to keyboard warrior yourselves. And I got a bunch of people who came on and started arguing that, you know, I shouldn't care about money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they, they boosted my post nicely, got me a lot of really great reach on that post. So, I mean, I wrote ahead and, you know, you, you kind of showed yourself for being the butt that you are. So, I mean, it is kind of interesting. People will out themselves. And I find that if you can do that deep, deep self work, the naysayers are going to come out of the woodwork. We start celebrating them. I have one of my clients that that gets regularly, you know, kind of attacked for some of the spiritual work she does. And we've done a lot of work, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, energetically around what do you do when you put something on social media and people don't agree with you? And what do you do when you put up a book and people hate it or whatever, or you get a bad review on your book, or you get a bad review on your podcast or whatever? And there's that element of understanding that you have arrived and that you're always going to trigger somebody, and that triggering is okay. And to some extent, when you're marketing, triggering is almost desirable. As long as you are standing firm in your own beliefs and your own spiritual system, it's kind of desirable, because then you get more visibility on standing for the things that you believe in. I mean, and people, people show themselves as being who they really are, actually.

Cinthia: I saw that. I saw that post. Here's the thing that I loved, is that I saw where you're coming from. Personally, I did you see that post, Michelle? Because all sudden, hundreds of responses came in. It was…

Michelle: No, I didn't see when it had hundreds of responses. It was amazing.

Cinthia: I think by the time I saw it, and wasn't very, very, it was not it didn't take very long. I think I was at 300 responses by the time I was and I couldn't help but read through and I had all the feels. The thing that was amazing to me, is I, I took away from it that when you post right, it's really, yeah, it's really important energetically, where you're coming from, you can have whatever opinion you want, but you don't want to come from this hateful, fearful place. That's the way I took Haley's post, all this other stuff came through, and the thing that I loved so much is that Haley didn't respond. Haley didn't respond to any of these things. And if you did, I don't really remember seeing anything. She just let it go. And it was beautiful, because I was getting uncomfortable, but I noticed that you did not respond, because Haley said, what she said was a complete sentence. She didn't have to go any further, and all this other stuff shook out. And based on all all these things, I looked at all these people, and I went, would want to work with you, don't want to work with you. Would want to work with you. Don't want to work with you. It was really amazing in that way. So bravo.

Haley: It does people out of themselves. And I got the comment, you know, from people about, well, my family, you know, has been in the military for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, Okay, that's great, but so has mine. My, my grandfather served in World War Two. He was in the CIA his entire career. He ended up as CEO of Air America, and he flew one of the last, if not the last, helicopter out of Saigon during the fall of Saigon. And he helped manage the fall of Saigon. And he was there when the US was dropping bombs, and he was one of the few people who was there trying to manage that situation. And it was those Air America pilots who were evacuating people from Saigon. So I personally feel very deeply, and I have a very deep connection, and I have a child who, as you know, goes to a military boarding school and is likely going into the military. So when I see these comments, I'm like, You don't know my history, you don't know where I'm coming from. And I had somebody else who private messaged me something that they thought was funny about the Secret Service today, and I said, I personally find that deeply offensive and disrespectful. Don't Know What My history is and why I find that so incredibly disrespectful, because I know that these people have really dedicated their lives, and I understand that cost to the families, because I was raised with that. And, you know, I look at that and I'm like, you know, think about things before you say them in the online space. And I've had people say, Well, I feel like I'm being gagged. And I'm like, if you are a business owner, you are free to say whatever you want, and people are free to also not buy from you. We have a case here where I used to manage social media for a local restaurant, and she decided it would be a good idea to host forums of Republican candidates at her restaurant and invite the entire Republican Party in to her restaurant. And some of those people that were candidates for the local school board. One of the women in particular was a January 6 insurgent, and as you guys can probably guess, and you may or may not know, North Carolina is a very purple state, and we have a lot of people very much on the right and a lot of people very much on the left. And she was shocked when basically anybody who votes blue was boycotting her restaurant. As a result, I'm like you are perfectly free to express yourself. However, people are also perfectly free to decide how they want to spend their money. And you know, yes, there were people from the left threatening to firebomb her restaurant and everything else. And, Lord knows, I was dealing with that stuff in the online space, and it was a really good instruction for my, you know, my daughter who was helping me, you know, block and report people all over Tiktok and Facebook and Instagram and everything else. But you know, it's when you start showing yourself up like that. You know there are frequently consequences, and you can't stop somebody else from doing what they're going to do, and it's lovely for you if you can afford to only take clients from one political party, but understand that not everybody sees things exactly the same way that you do, and it may very well impact your bottom line, you know? And it just is, and it's been that way for a long time, and I...

Michelle: I do think it's been that way for a long time, Haley, but I think it's gotten worse, you know?

Haley: I think it's definitely progressed, you know, yeah.

Michelle: It's progressed, and social media has been part of this and that, you know, now brands have to think about these things. I mean, social media didn't exist when I was growing up, you know, you didn't know. I would have no idea. But now we have this whole other avenue of talking about things. And anytime you open another door to talk about things, you got to think about what you're saying.

Haley: Right. And you have to decide if you're willing to accept the consequences of saying something in particular. And you know, you have to decide if your brand or your business really stands a particular way or not, and who you're serving and what it's important to you to serve. And I mean, it's just the other thing too, is, no matter which side of the political spectrum you're on, you know you have to understand that there's a lot of people in the middle. And when you post violent rhetoric and you post nasty jokes and stuff, you're likely to offend everybody, or maybe not everybody, but you're going to offend a lot more people and lose a lot more clients.

Michelle: Yeah. But also to your point earlier, when you take a stand on things, that's when you stand out, right? So there's a lot of choices to be made, a lot of navigating, swamps and paths and highways and all the rest of it when you're in business.

Cinthia: I just want to bring it back, though, if we were to read, if you were to read Haley's post, it didn't specifically talk about the military. It didn't talk about anything specific, and it actually went very specific. And so the thing that I found fascinating, and believe that social media is actually making it worse, is that people tend to become polarizing in a way that's, it's it's not time to be polarizing just yet. Just take a look at the what is being posted and and look at it holistically, because there was a, there was a truth to it, which is, you know, come at it from a certain energy. Say whatever you want, but come at it from a certain energy. And then if someone responds in a different energy, they're going to, it's, you know, it's showing, yeah, it basically, you know, it just kind of, you know, they vet themselves out. So, you know, energetically, I find it I find it fascinating that people are willing to go to this very emotional space. When your post, it did bring up some feelings for me, but it was very holistic. It wasn't so specific, and the fact that it went very specific was a little bit alarming, a little bit made me uncomfortable. But again, I love the way that you didn't respond, because then it would have been a whole different conversation, you know?

Haley: Right? So, and I mean, I felt like there was a lot that there's no need to respond when people are being ridiculous. A lot of times the best response is no response, right?

Michelle: I agree, right? Because then they just, they hang themselves out to dry, you know?

Haley: And some people definitely hung themselves, yeah, out pretty far out there. And I'm like, wow. Okay.

Cinthia: Well, it's adding fuel to the fire I am...

Haley: Well. And the other thing I'm going to make a comment on is if somebody is stupid enough to be posting inflammatory stuff all over social media, how are they acting in the rest of their lives? Right? And do I want to be doing business with them?

Michelle: I mean, let's be honest. It's I have family that are, you know, my stepfamily. I love them. They have helped me in so many ways. They actually helped me so much when my mom was sick and dying, and I leaned on them in a way that I couldn't with my blood relatives. So they they have different political views, and so I have to, every time I see a political thing, I have to go back and say, This is the person who helped me. This is the person who, you know, go back holistically or change the emotional value, because, you know, because that's what's important, right, holistically. So my question to you, Haley, is, it's not about backing up, but what do you? What do you? How would you stay in integrity? I believe you stayed in integrity in your in your thing. So how would you recommend people make sure that they stay in integrity with their posts, because their post is a reflection of who they are, their business. Everything, right? Everything you do is a reflection of you. So how do you stay in integrity so that you are being full and honest. You're not being gagged and at the same time, you know it's not full of hate?

e anywhere between, you know,: 2500

Cinthia: That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Thank you so much for being on Mind Power Meets Mystic today. Haley, tell our listeners what you have coming up.

Haley: I have lots of really cool things coming up, but my favorite thing coming up are the round tables that we do. We do them three times a month. We do them on Monday nights, and then we do them on two Thursdays a month. And we get women business owners together, and we don't do them as traditional networking meetings. We get women talking to each other, engaging with other, each other, making friends and actually building lifelong connections. Because I'm a big believer that your network is your net worth.

Michelle: Nice, very, very nice. I have been, I know Cinthia has been, and you do run a great networking group. Thank you so much. We will have the link to Haley's networking groups in our show notes. Thanks for being with us this week, talking to Haley Gray on Mind Power Meets Mystic.