Marketing Your Business - Marketing Strategies for Business Owners

Most of us wait until we've got the whole thing figured out. Carrie Green opened her doors with one month of content ready, a rough plan for month two and an idea for January. And in her words, "Beyond that, I had no idea." Thousands of people joined over the years, and 13 years later it's still going.
Carrie is the founder of the Female Entrepreneur Association and the author of She Means Business. She was also my very first consulting client, so this one goes way back.
She had the idea for FEA in 2008. Then for a few years she did what a lot of us do. She bought domain names, set up websites and did nothing with them. In 2011 she finally went for it, and for the next two years she gave everything away: interviews with women building businesses, a weekly email, a weekly video, and a free digital magazine where she interviewed people like Kim Kiyosaki and Gabrielle Bernstein. By the time she opened the doors, she had 18,000 people on her email list and about 50,000 fans on Facebook.
And then she started with one month. She'll tell you why, and money wasn't the biggest reason.
Today she's building a list of people who actually buy, with small offers she makes herself with AI, and one of them sold to over 700 people in a small promotion. She also opens up about what happened to her community when she pulled back after having kids, and the question every ambitious person gets to eventually: when is enough enough?
In this conversation, Carrie and I break down:
- The real reason she started with one month of content
- What was in that first month, including the printout she says "looked dreadful"
- The guilt that kept her from charging anything for two years
- Why "ready is not a feeling"
- What she learned about why people really stay
- What she puts on the thank-you page of every freebie
- How one small promotion sold to over 700 people
- When is enough enough?

FREE RESOURCE: The three frameworks from this episode, one page each. The One-Month Start, The Buyers List, and The Sticky Part → https://podcast.stu.me


CONNECT WITH CARRIE:
- Female Entrepreneur Association: https://femaleentrepreneurassociation.com/ 
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamcarriegreen/ 
- Instagram (FEA): https://www.instagram.com/femaleentrepreneurassociation/ 
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCraEIu_mORQKKo8eV9pk6Cw 
- Podcast, She Means Business Show: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/she-means-business-show/id1199101868 
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FemaleEntrepreneurAssociation/ 
- X: https://x.com/iamcarriegreen 
- Planners and stationery, Carrie & Co.: https://carrie.co/ 
- Book "She Means Business": https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/601650/she-means-business-by-carrie-green/ 
- TEDx talk "Programming your mind for success": https://youtu.be/MmfikLimeQ8


CONNECT WITH STU:
- Website: https://stu.me 
- Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz 
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren 
- Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me 
- Membership.io: https://membership.io


Subscribe if you want to build something that keeps going, even when life gets busy. That's what we work on here every week.

An 11-year-old boy in Sweden sent Ryan Trahan a DM. He'd never been able to try Ryan's candy brand, Joyride, because it isn't sold there. His one birthday wish was to finally taste a pack.
Ryan got on a plane.
Tyler and Rebecca join me to talk about kindness as a marketing strategy, not as a nice-to-have, but as one of the most effective moves available to any business right now.
In this episode:
- The founder who tracked down his single best customer and handed him his credit card
- Why simple gestures, like calling a customer just to say thank you, create moments people never forget
- The storytelling lesson hiding inside a viral "hopped on a train and built a business" video
- The honest debate: is being kind for the sake of marketing manipulative, or does sharing it just spread more of it?
- A billboard war between two ice cream and beer brands that turned into free advertising for both
CONNECT WITH STU:
Website: https://stu.me
Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz
Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren
Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me
Membership.io: https://membership.io
Subscribe for new episodes every week.

There's a free workshop coming up where Stu is showing exactly what's possible when you start something today. Secure your spot: https://membershipworkshop.com
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Attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to just 7.2 seconds today. The average workday only allows about 4.5 minutes of real focus before an interruption.
Rebecca, who leads our TME brand and has been a friend of mine for over 35 years, joins me to break down what these numbers mean if you teach, coach, or sell anything digital.
In this episode:
- Why we rebuilt our core program around the "Core Four" lessons
- TME Sidekick, the AI tool one of our team members built that became one of the most used in our toolbox
- Why shrinking attention spans don't mean people stopped wanting depth once you've earned their trust
- Why Instagram just opened up 3 minute reels while Substack paid creators $510 million
- The one stat that took course completion from 42.6% to 65.5%
- How a shared launch date got around 150 people marching in the same direction
- Simple ways to build community that don't depend on you teaching more
CONNECT WITH STU:
Website: https://stu.me
Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz
Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren
Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me
Membership.io: https://membership.io
Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Susan Bradley went out for a drink with her husband and decided, right there, to shut off a million dollars a year in sales. It was most of what her company sold. The business scaled from there, and she later sold it a year ahead of her own plan.
Today she sells about $300,000 of coaching calls a year inside her membership and keeps roughly $5 of it. The coaches get paid, 19 Zoom accounts eat the rest, and her retention has sat at 95 or 96% ever since. That trade is deliberate, and it is the clearest example of how she thinks about every business she has ever run.
She has built, bought and sold multiple companies. She decides what the numbers have to look like first, then works backwards. When she bought her shoe company she hired an accountant, told him the price she wanted to sell it for, and asked what the numbers would have to look like to get there. She gave herself five years. They sold it in four.
Before that came what she calls "20 years of torture," a business she scaled to a million dollar year and a small chain of retail stores. Eight straight years of growth ended with one down year, and that Christmas her mother announced she had finished all her shopping online. Susan closed roughly a million dollars of wholesale revenue on purpose and went all in on selling direct.
Today she teaches thousands of ecommerce store owners through The Social Sales Girls. Her first paid course was $97 and sold exactly one copy.
In this conversation, Susan and I break down:
- The question she asked her accountant on the day she bought the company
- Why she closed about a million dollars of wholesale revenue on purpose
- Her own one sentence explanation for why the $97 course sold one copy
- What changed between 68 members and 180
- The tick box on her opt in pages that 50 to 70% of people check
- Why the podcast is the only front door she funds, and the 15% number underneath it
- The three numbers she checks before she calls anything a failure
FREE RESOURCE: The three frameworks from this episode, one page each, nothing to sign up for
→ https://podcast.stu.me
CONNECT WITH SUSAN:
- The Social Sales Girls: https://thesocialsalesgirls.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/socialsalesgirls
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesocialsalesgirls
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2GHerESs_5Kd0c0dhKvH6g
CONNECT WITH STU:
- Website: https://stu.me
- Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren
- Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me
- Membership.io: https://membership.io
Subscribe for new episodes every week.

There's a free workshop coming up where Stu is showing exactly what's possible when you start something today. Secure your spot: https://membershipworkshop.com
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You don't need to be a developer anymore. You just need to be a builder.
In this episode, Tyler and Bex join me to talk about AI agents and workflows, sub-agents, orchestrators, and tools like Claude Code. But the part that actually matters isn't the technical stuff. It's what it means for anyone with an idea.
My son had no coding experience, no design skills, and an idea for a dog walking business. Thirty-five minutes later, he had a poster, a working website, and a live domain. Not because he was technical. Because he just asked.
In this episode:
- What AI agents and sub-agents actually do, explained simply
- The dog walking business built start to finish in 35 minutes
- Why the gap between having an idea and having the thing has never been smaller
- One warning worth hearing: how easy it is to fall down the rabbit hole
CONNECT WITH STU:
Website: https://stu.me
Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz
Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren
Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me
Membership.io: https://membership.io
Subscribe for new episodes every week.