Episode 260 with Kendra Corman: Smart Business Strategies and AI Tools

In this episode of the 'Ready Yet' podcast I’m speaking with Kendra Corman, a seasoned marketer with over 10 years of experience helping small businesses and nonprofits. We discuss her journey from the corporate world to running her own successful marketing firm, along with the challenges of restructuring our businesses post-pandemic, the importance of managing meetings, and balancing work to avoid burnout. Kendra shares how AI has revolutionized her workflow, allowing her to save countless hours. We also delve into the emotional aspects of delegation and the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance. This episode is packed with insightful strategies and mindset shifts essential for any entrepreneur looking to optimize their business.

GUEST RESOURCES 

Kendra Corman is the founder of KendraCorman.com and H2H Consulting, leveraging her vast marketing expertise to support small businesses and nonprofits. Kendra made her mark by leading campaigns for the iconic Jeep brand and significantly contributing to a top insurance wholesaler as their marketing director. Her journey reflects a passion for meaningful change and the power of strategic marketing. Holding degrees from Penn State University in Advertising and Public Relations, a Masters of Accounting from Oakland University, and an MBA, Kendra's love for learning and teaching shines through. 

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https://courses.kendracorman.com/5-ways-leverage-AI-in-marketing 

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Transcript

Episode 260 with Kendra Corman: Smart Business Strategies and AI Tools

Transcribed by Descript 

Erin Marcus: All right. Welcome. Welcome to this episode of the ready yet podcast. So my guest, Kendra Corbin, and I have just been having this conversation as we've been catching up before we hit record about what are we doing? And lo and behold, there's something in the water because we're both really doing. the same thing to our business.

Erin Marcus: And it's something we see people struggle with all the time. So I can't wait to dive into an official conversation with you about it. But before we do that, how do you tell everybody a little backstory, who you are, what you do, all the good stuff. 

Kendra Corman: Sure. My name is Kendra Corman and I have been helping small businesses and nonprofits do better marketing more efficiently and effectively for over 10 years now.

Kendra Corman: Before that I was in the corporate world. So I was the Jeep advertising manager, the SRT marketing manager. My claim to fame is that I learned to drive a Viper on the Rolex 24 course at Daytona. Not well, by the way but I learned to drive on and so I've. I've worked for some of the biggest brands in the world and some of the smallest single person organizations.

Kendra Corman: And I love what I do because I like helping people make a difference and a bigger impact. 

Erin Marcus: Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. That's so awesome. So diving into what we were talking about, like we're both in this phase of our business. Where I call it, I've been taking a blowtorch to my business of looking at what is working, what is not working?

Erin Marcus: What do we want? What is, what do we not want? And taking this hard line approach to what we're doing and how we're doing it. So I'm curious I know what my trigger was for that, but I'm curious, like, how did you get to the point where you're like, I, because you're doing good, right? We're doing all these great things, right?

Erin Marcus: It wasn't necessarily a problem that got here. But so what? Mine was more of a medic physical breakdown. So for 

Kendra Corman: me, there's a couple of different things. So first off, I was in a group with some other solopreneurs, small business owners, and we were chatting and having what I call therapy sessions.

Kendra Corman: And. I said, Oh my gosh, I'm like the problem that I have right now is I have so many meetings. I am in meetings like eight hours a day and there's no time to do any work. And this is coming off of 2020 and then 2021. So this is 2022. This isn't too long ago. And in 2022, I was packed with meetings.

Kendra Corman: So in 2020, I added all these meetings because I wasn't seeing my clients. They weren't out doing things. And so we added more meetings because we were constantly twirling, pivoting, whatever you want to call it, adjusting what we were doing to make a difference and an impact and keep everybody afloat.

Kendra Corman: And then nothing changed. COVID was done. Things were coming back to normal. The meetings became the new normal. And so I, I had hit a breaking point and one of the women in the group who runs her own business and she's yeah, just tell them you're not doing that anymore. I'm sorry, what? I know, right?

Kendra Corman: She's just tell them that you're going to move to every other week. Tell them you're going to move to once a month, tell them we're going to move to a meeting when you need one. And I'm like, you can do that. Okay. I'm going to try that. So I tried it. First client. That's what I tell them.

Kendra Corman: And they're like. 

Erin Marcus: Yeah, sure. No problem. They didn't want to be there any more than you did, right? I'm like, 

Kendra Corman: oh my goodness. So it was crazy. So I reached a breaking point with time, basically availability. And then now it's been. I want to take my business in a different direction, but I'm buried in the stuff that is now legacy.

Kendra Corman: And so I get frustrated easily and it's just not leaving me to be quite as happy as I normally am because I love what I do. I love what I do all day, every day. I could do it all day, every day. Typing a task in Asana, I don't like. Sending a follow up email on, Hey, did you approve those social posts yet?

Kendra Corman: Again, not something I want to do. I want to send an email that says, Hey, So that, you know what, there's some social posts you need to approve. If you don't approve them, your business suffers, not mine. 

Erin Marcus: Let me know when you're ready. Maybe that's the next email you send. But so there's number one, absolutely.

Erin Marcus: I think we get into the habit of something and we make it normal without ever double checking why we're doing it that way. I absolutely agree with you that we came off, there's so many COVID related things that never went away. Supply chain problems, for example, ridiculous prices, and Zoom calls 24 hours a day.

Erin Marcus: But it used to be we had nothing else to do. And what is the outcome of your experience? Like, how are let me back up and ask this question first, because I'm having this also. How are you keeping your promises to yourself? and not just falling back into what's automatic. 

Kendra Corman: So it's hard. I could I feel like I want to say I'm in recovery because I do slide back every once in a while.

Kendra Corman: A couple of weeks ago I was like, huh. Yep, no needs to be my new word again because I was saying yes all of a sudden to everything. But I have a few hard and fast rules that I hold to. There's no recurring meetings on Mondays or Fridays. I don't have meetings before 10 a. m. 

Erin Marcus: It's so crazy. I have the same exact two things.

Kendra Corman: And Okay. So I do have twice a month I have a networking meeting that I joined, 10 years ago and I enjoy the group. So I do go there at seven. There's one other group that's at eight or whatever. But again, it's not recurring, a ton. It's not every week. It's not multiple times a week.

Kendra Corman: And that has really helped me. A lot. And I've seen the impact that had. So I actually had somebody that was 100 percent dedicated to my schedule. Just my schedule. That was her only job. She helped me get it into shape. Once we had it in shape, now it's just up to me to hold true to it. And I do. I got an email a couple weeks ago.

Kendra Corman: We had a family emergency in my family where we had to take my sister to get some tests and things like that. So luckily enough, I have the flexibility in my job that I can do that. And I was happy to do it, and still am, and my schedule's a little bit up in the air. A couple people have reached out to me, said, Hey, I'm looking for this, and I'm looking for that.

Kendra Corman: And I'm like, Sorry, my schedule's a little too up in the air right now. Do you want me to introduce you to somebody else, or do you want to wait until I know a little bit more about my schedule? Because until we get test results and a diagnosis, we have no idea. And they're like, Yeah, sure, no problem. I'll wait.

Kendra Corman: They've been putting it off 

Erin Marcus: this long before. They're not dying for it. Wait, everything in our head is such a big deal. I did the same thing. I do have an appointment on Monday afternoons, but other than that, I almost never have appointments on Mondays. That way, if I want to slip something in there, I do.

Erin Marcus: I 99 percent of the time don't work on Fridays. I don't, I only have two meetings in its internal team. They don't care what I look like. But, nothing starts before 10am, and I'm done at 4. And I'm just, right? I'm moving my schedule in, the borders in, tighter and tighter. And nothing's not getting done.

Kendra Corman: Wrecked. Work expands the time you allow for it. So when I was working seven days a week, I wasn't getting more done. I don't actually know what I was doing because all the stuff is actually, I think more is getting done now because I'm more focused and I'm more present and I'm batching my time. So I'm going from meeting to meeting and then I got a big chunk where I can do work without being interrupted on thought.

Kendra Corman: It's amazing. 

Erin Marcus: It is amazing. So why do you think more people don't do this? Head trash. so hard? 

Kendra Corman: Head trash, 100%. That is our problem. We think we should or we think we can do it. And therefore, that's why we do it, right? We think we should. Or that's how it's 

Erin Marcus: supposed to be. I said this a long time ago.

Erin Marcus: Busy is the new fine. How are you? I'm so busy. So now your brain has to go about proving you right by making sure you're so busy. 

Kendra Corman: My one of my friends, she actually says one day she told me, she's Oh, I'm I've been really busy this week. She goes, normally, my schedule is full. This week, it's busy.

Kendra Corman: But I'm like, I like the shift in attitude to full. I have a full schedule. I always have a full schedule. I will, I cannot imagine myself not having a full schedule. Even if I am on vacation in Mexico. I will have a full schedule. It might be leading, laying by the pool, but it's scheduled. But it's written down.

Erin Marcus: It's scheduled. I say put it on the calendar, live by the calendar, put it on the calendar, live by What I do. You'd be amazed at what's on my calendar, right? There's things where you say, the assistant, just don't even ask. It's on the calendar to me. So 

Kendra Corman: what's your objective here? So my objective is I want more time.

Kendra Corman: I haven't decided what I'm going to do with all the time I'm finding. Yeah. 

Erin Marcus: And I think that's, I just 

Kendra Corman: want the flexibility to choose. 

Erin Marcus: The freedom to choose. I think a lot of people don't create more time in their schedule for two reasons. One, their priorities are backwards, but two they don't know what to do with it.

Erin Marcus: They wouldn't know what to do if they had the time, right? Because busy is almost an addiction that allows us to not face what calm and quiet might allow to pop up for us. 

Kendra Corman: I love to learn. I can fill time. Like you would not believe with. With with education, like reading books, reading trashy romance novels when I needed, a mental break.

Kendra Corman: This is my 

Erin Marcus: role. This is my role. Education and inspiration in the morning, trashy romance is from 7 p. m. on. 

Kendra Corman: Okay. Oh my gosh, because so one other, one other change I made. So I made the change to the 10 a. m. start of all my meetings and nothing earlier because I was going to go to the gym. So that's funny.

Kendra Corman: And that didn't happen, but I was going at, so now my husband is an early riser, grew up on a farm. In central Pennsylvania, he gets up at 4 o'clock in the morning whatever, and we carpool to work. While he goes to work, I drop him off between 7 almost every day. So I'm at the office between 7 and 7.

Kendra Corman: 30. I used to just jump into work. No, I don't start before 8 anymore. I grab one of my education books, I read a couple chapters, I set a little timer, I chill out, I orient myself, and then at 8 o'clock then I can look at my email and my calendar. But until then, I won't look at it. 

Erin Marcus: I'm doing the exact same thing and it's amazing the effect that it's having.

Erin Marcus: I got a reclining chair for up in my office. Because there's a lot of times where, no, there's no appointments, but I'm working, but I don't have to necessarily be sitting upright it's just an entirely more comfortable approach. Because here's the other thing, if you're not, nobody can do their absolute best, most amazing work if they're stuffed to the gills with got to do this, got to do this, got to do this, got to do this.

Erin Marcus: You're just not, that's not how our brains work. 

Kendra Corman: If you don't have time to think. If you're not rested with time to think, you can't write. And then that means in today's day and age, that means you can't communicate. That means you can't sell. That means you can't grow your business. That means you can't build relationships.

Kendra Corman: That means that you will be doing this forever. And that's not what I want to do. No, it's the, 

Erin Marcus: it's the bang your head against the wall version of business. And I've really anything that makes me feel rushed doesn't happen in my life anymore. Anything that makes me feel like I'm chasing anybody is not the way that it's happening in my business anymore.

Erin Marcus: Because that's the great thing about the whole entrepreneur world is you actually can decide how this works for you. 

Kendra Corman: So again, I had a family emergency last week. I didn't post on LinkedIn for a week. I replied to some people's comments and things, but I didn't have the energy to come up with my own posts.

Kendra Corman: I didn't actually think about it. I didn't my business didn't suffer. I had three people reach out to me on LinkedIn anyway. So looking for me to help them. It's. A lot of what we do, a lot of how we spin our wheels, it's all head trash. And if you can think differently, don't think about it as spending, look at what it is and see if it's an investment.

Kendra Corman: And I used to judge it as an investment with something that would make me money. Not anymore. An investment is, yes, something that would make me money because that would be nice. An investment is also something that's going to give me time. Yes. I 

Erin Marcus: never, and I know you come out of corporate, and I think this is something that really helps us, because so do I, is one of the tools you learn in corporate, because it's just the way it is delegating.

Erin Marcus: I never had the whole have to do it all myself. I've never had that, because I don't, I didn't learn how to do work that way.

Kendra Corman: I think a lot of people coming out of corporate because they don't have the infrastructure, they do, they suffer with it thinking that they have to do it all in the beginning because they're not bringing in enough money or whatever that happens to be. So I think some people do struggle with it. They struggle with that delegation because they're building their baby, right?

Kendra Corman: This is, your business is your baby. It's something that you've made. You own it. It's going to be a reflection of you and It's important that you own so much of it, especially in the beginning, right? That I think that's where people get stuck and then they're doing it. It becomes a normal, a norm, whether it should be or shouldn't, and then we can't change off of it.

Erin Marcus: We don't know how to get out of it. And I also think that personal attachment to it is not I get it, but it's not setting you up for success. 

Kendra Corman: It isn't. And we were talking earlier about a couple of books I'm reading, but one is, one I just read was Buy Back Your Time. And it's interesting because this has actually come up several times for me recently I always used to think about that Eisenhower matrix, where they talk about important and urgent and not important and urgent and all those other things.

Kendra Corman: I could never put things in those quadrants for whatever reason. It just didn't go for me. And, Someone said earlier this week, they said to me, yeah, that's because you're emotional about your tasks. And I was like, oh, that makes sense. But Buy Back Your Time has a different methodology and a different matrix that allowed me to keep the emotion and put it other places.

Kendra Corman: It's based upon what lights you up and what makes you money. Like that, I can still keep the emotion into the fact that this is important and it's urgent. Trust me it's got to be because I've been doing it forever and I can still keep that mentality with it while I'm putting things in these box, in these different boxes.

Kendra Corman: Again, what lights me up and what makes me money, that's easier for me to see. That's easier for me to write down. And yeah, so it's pretty cool because, again, when you're talking about the emotion tied to it, I think that's the hardest piece of everything for us. 

Erin Marcus: Absolutely. It's why it's so dangerous to build your business in a bubble and not go out and vet your offer.

Erin Marcus: I think the more you focus internally on yourself and what you want to sell and what you want to do for your clients as opposed to what they want to buy and what they actually need, and you put all that time and effort and emotion into it, and then nobody buys your baby, it's crushing. And so you have to have that separation, at least in some way.

Erin Marcus: If the goal is to be a business owner, if it depends on what the goal is. If the goal is to have a business, businesses exist to solve problems, right? People make an investment to solve whatever problem it is that they're trying to solve. And in addition to making sure there's that separation.

Erin Marcus: So you're not trapped in something that the market doesn't want. It's very hard to pivot when the market changes. When you're that attached to your way of doing it, or if you change , when it's time for you to take your next step, you can get very stuck. 

Kendra Corman: The one of my favorite tools is ai.

Kendra Corman: Right now AI saves me three plus hours per podcast episode. Oh, amazing. That doesn't even inc, that doesn't even include the time that I save by delegating some of the stuff that's more routine to my assistant. 

Kendra Corman: , 

Kendra Corman: um. AI can save me 30 to 40 hours a week if I'm using it right. It's crazy, right?

Kendra Corman: And again, it was all stuff that was low level stuff that I didn't necessarily need to be doing and AI can do for me now. But one of the interesting things is someone was asking me about Google's, one of Google's AI tools, Gemini, and I said, nah, I don't really use it. They're like And I was like because Google had.

Kendra Corman: AI and chat based AI before anybody else. And they didn't want to roll it out because they didn't think that we could handle it responsibly. Now, I'm not saying that I don't agree with Google, but you get to, you, you don't get to make that choice for us, right? You don't get to hold back something, like Kodak did with the digital camera because you're trying to protect another piece of your business.

Kendra Corman: You've got to evolve. You've got to move. Otherwise you're going to end up. And secondly, you'll 

Erin Marcus: end 

Kendra Corman: up like Blockbuster Kodak, we can go on and chat GPT outperforms all day, every day, Google's Gemini because people are using it because they came out to the market first and they weren't trying to protect other business.

Kendra Corman: And I really think, that pivoting, that ability to not be emotionally tied, to rationalize why people can or cannot have something, is extremely important. You don't want 

Erin Marcus: to, yeah. That was one of the horrifying things I learned. So when I got my MBA, because of where I live, the school was. Just right in the middle of a pharmaceutical row, right?

Erin Marcus: Baxter, Decatur, all that stuff was right there. So a lot of the people that I went to school with were scientists and high level people in those industries that needed the business side of it. And the entire pharmaceutical business is run by buying better drugs than what's on the market and shelving them so that they don't lose their market share and their profitability.

Erin Marcus: And I know right now that is. how they do what they do. You just, karma, right? You just can't convince me that's not going to come back around at some point in some way. It's gonna. And take these companies out of the game, some of them. Yes. So what's next for you? 

Kendra Corman: I'm loving AI. I'm doing a lot of speaking on AI, a lot of training on AI, especially to get people, help people get their feet wet.

Kendra Corman: So that's fun. So let's 

Erin Marcus: stop there for a second because this is what I, one of the mistakes I'm watching people make. And I, and for me, this was a very We use AI for efficiency all over the place. We use AI for iteration. I call it to get rid of my writer's block. I'll have a topic and I'll ask it for give me 10 things, blah, blah, blah.

Erin Marcus: And I'll go back through and I'll like, Oh, I like these two. And then I'll expound on them. I'm not using AI for creation and we have a very noisy marketplace. We have no barrier to entry in our marketplace. Most of us, if you have a phone and an internet connection, you can start a business, right? I've literally.

Erin Marcus: But it's making everybody sound the same. Which to me is fantastic, because I just moved all my long form content to YouTube.

Erin Marcus: It's really not hard. And so there's some mistakes I see people. 

Kendra Corman: Oh, there's a lot of mistakes. People are phoning it in. That's not an excuse. AI is here to help you make, save you time and help you make a better product. Correct. Not mediocre product. Correct. So I actually just got stickers and I don't have one at my desk right now.

Kendra Corman: It says AI is co pilot. Not autopilot. Oh, my God. I love it. So it was a quote that I did in one, it's a quote that I did from one of my solo podcast episodes and someone wrote, this should be a bumper sticker, making laptop stickers with those on it. And I did. And but the thing is yeah, I, I'll use it.

Kendra Corman: I really just use it to edit my stuff. Like I'll create it. I'll have an edited. I don't use the word delve. I was starting to use the word ethos and I was embracing that for a little while, but every chat GPT result was giving me was delve and ethos. Let's delve into the topic. No, I'm not delving into anything.

Kendra Corman: I don't delve. You don't delve. And like people all over LinkedIn are complaining about AI generated comments and I'm like, it's not AI. It's the lazy people that are phoning it in and copying and pasting. Like I had a way that never worked 

Erin Marcus: before. So it's not going to start to work now. And the people, here's the other thing.

Erin Marcus: Someone's always going to have to push the button. Humans are not going to be, I, and I'm old enough at this stage. I still, I was actually filling in during a holiday break as a receptionist. This is going to age me right here, but it was hysterical. I was filling in for as a receptionist in my cousin's law firm for a month off Christmas holiday break when the fax machine came to town in Chicago.

Erin Marcus: So no, it wasn't like middle of nowhere town, but so I remember. specifically when they were saying that robots were going to eliminate the workforce and then computers were going to eliminate the workforce. And I don't know if you've seen the workforce, but people are working more than ever before.

Erin Marcus: AI is never going to eliminate the workforce. 

Kendra Corman: A. I. 's given me the courage to show more of my personality. 

Erin Marcus: That's interesting. 

Kendra Corman: My emails to my email newsletter that goes out every Thursday to my database and stuff. It has more personality. My podcast. is having a little bit more personality. All of it is getting bumped up because there's so much of the same.

Kendra Corman: And I know I can be different, and I know I'm engaging because of my style. So I don't mind saying, a swear word in an email or putting some asterisks and stuff in place of it. But I don't mind, talking about the office or likening something to something that I came across when I was watching a TV show.

Kendra Corman: I don't mind the pulp. Having the pop culture references. I don't, like if my brain goes off someplace, I just go with it now. And yeah, AI might edit it a little bit, might help me with it and focus it. Then I edit what AI does again, but it just helps me refine. And that's it. Now I do teach part time, I'm an adjunct faculty at a local university.

Kendra Corman: AI has done amazing stuff for my students. Yeah. Because I, I encourage them all to use it. My students, where English is their second language, I can read all of their papers and they make sense. It's their ideas and I can tell it's their ideas because I know them because I've been teaching them for four years now.

Kendra Corman: And but it's great because they're putting out a level of work that I don't have to penalize them for grammatical errors because AI is helping them. 

Erin Marcus: And it's not, it's the thing about school, right? School's taught, teaches people how to be a good employee at a factory. That's when our school system was created and it still functions the same way.

Erin Marcus: Like, why wouldn't you let kids use AI tools in college? They're going to use them when they get out. 

Kendra Corman: They don't know how to use it when they get out, they're behind. And so I need them to be on top of it. And so I'm encouraged. They're like, Oh, it's cheating. I'm like, okay, let me. And then I pull out my podcast process.

Kendra Corman: We walked through it. I'm like, how did I cheat? They're like, 

Erin Marcus: because it wasn't hard enough. Oh, this is how we're teaching people that if it's going back to where we started this conversation. We teach people that everything should be really hard to accomplish in order to have value.

Erin Marcus: And there's certain things, I'm not saying hard work doesn't pay off, but you don't have to make it hard in order. First of all, hard work is no guarantee, and it doesn't have to be hard.

Erin Marcus: And right back where we started, if you go through your list of what's actually effective and pick what lights you up and pick what makes a difference. It's amazing how everything that you cut out with a blowtorch was the hard part. 

Kendra Corman: 100%. There's an email that I haven't wanted to send for four days now.

Kendra Corman: And so I was on the phone with my assistant and I said, Hey, I said, I just don't want to do it. Can you just draft it for me? She's done. 

Erin Marcus: Cause she doesn't have the emotional attachment to it. She doesn't have 

Kendra Corman: emotional. I just don't want to do it. 

Kendra Corman: You don't want to do it and it's just, it's so powerful.

Kendra Corman: It sounds silly. It sounds like, Oh, I should be able to send that email. Yeah, I should. I don't want to. It's

Kendra Corman: that easy. I'm not gonna. Yeah, exactly. Get rid of the head trash. Do not come into anything. With a preconceived notion of what needs to be done or what needs to happen because you will be blown away when you push back on it a little bit, how accepting people are of it. It's amazing. Totally. 

Erin Marcus: So if people want to continue this conversation with you, what is the best way for them to get a hold of you?

Kendra Corman: So best way to get ahold of me is to connect with me on LinkedIn, Kendra Corman with a C. But if you want to check out my book on AI, cause if you want to start figuring out how you can start saving time, you can visit kendracorman. com slash AI book. And you can get a free copy, a free e copy of the book that I wrote earlier this year on mastering AI and communications.

Kendra Corman: And then you'll have my email and you can just reply and ask me any questions that you want because I love chatting with people. 

Erin Marcus: Love it. And we'll put the all the links in the show notes so that you are just one click away, especially that book. I think that's a huge tool. People don't know where to start.

Erin Marcus: So that's absolutely amazing. So thank you for sharing that 

Kendra Corman: and 

Erin Marcus: thank 

Kendra Corman: you 

Erin Marcus: for spending time with 

Kendra Corman: me. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Awesome. Awesome.