“We’ve been sold such a narrow idea of what a business can be — like you either coach or sell a course. But there are so many ways to build something rich and beautiful, something that’s actually yours. A business can give you so much more than just money — it can give you community, relationships, growth, and experiences.”
– Tarzan Kay
What would work look like if designed it around real humans, real relationships, and real choice?
In this episode of Flying the Coop, we’re joined by Tarzan Kay, a leader in consent-based business design and marketing. Tarzan shares how her thinking has evolved from traditional online marketing into a much deeper exploration of power, persuasion, autonomy, and responsibility.
This episode was extra special to me as I’ve been following Tarzan for the last decade, watching her evolve from self-dubbed “email marketing diva” into something much more expansive and inspiring (who still tells a mean story or three ’round the fire). What a total honor to have her on the show to explore:
- How classic business models limit creativity and possibility
- Why urgency and persuasion shut down critical thinking
- What consent looks like on a practical level in marketing, leadership, and community spaces
- Why businesses hold real power, and how to wield it responsibly
This convo smashes to smithereens the prefab version of success we’ve all been handed, replacing it with hope: expansive, relational, creative, and alive.
Action items:
- Look at your last big marketing campaign – where did you use urgency? Regardless of how well it worked, how did it feel to use that tactic?
- Take a moment to consider the power you hold as a business – how are you feeling about wielding it?
Listen anywhere podcasts roost (except Spotify).
- Watch on YouTube
- Learn more about Tarzan
- Register for The Girl Boss Apology Tour
- Subscribe to Tarzan’s newsletter
Subscribe for easy access to transcripts, show notes, our secret insider thoughts on the interviews… and the occasional goof reel.
Read the raw transcript:
[00:00:08] Anna: Welcome to Flying the Coop, a podcast about rethinking how business works and who it should work for.
[00:00:13] Janel: We are Janel and Anna, small business owners learning in public as we turn our company Strange Birds into a worker owned co-op. And today we are interviewing Tarzan Kay, whose work has been shaping how I think about marketing power and responsibility for a whole damn decade. So I went digging in my inbox – a Hazardous Pastime – and the earliest email that I could find from Tarzan was from November 21, 2017.
Back then, I was in the middle of leaving a very cushy, wearing all the hats content job in Barcelona startup, and my good buddy Anna Hetzel from across the pond and I were about to jump ship, go rogue as freelance copywriters. So I signed up for a ton of newsletters from people who seemed like they were actually, like, walking the walk. And Tarzan’s Yours was the only one that I always opened and it’s the only one I’m still subscribed to. I’ve watched you evolve from like, email diva. I’m quoting from that early email, glitter and all.
[00:01:09] Tarzan: Piles of money.
[00:01:10] Janel: Oh my God, the purple. Yeah, I’ve watched you evolve into this freaking powerhouse, leading the conversation about consent based business. Not just about how we market, but also how we design customer journeys, how we talk about power dynamics and entire business systems that aren’t reliant on pressure and manipulation, psychological loopholes. At the heart of your work, I would say, is a really simple but awfully radical idea that every business holds power over customers. Money, attention, identity, hopes, fears. And that means ethical business is not about being a nice guy. It’s about designing better structures of power.
So with that, it is truly an immense honor to have you on the podcast today. And I promise to do my very best not to drool on anyone’s boots.
[00:01:57] Tarzan: Wow, that was quite an intro. I don’t. Yeah, you’re one of my oldest subscribers. I started my email list in January 2016.
So you’ve been there for almost the whole time. And I don’t know if this is true, but is it the first time you ever bought something for me? Like, recently?
[00:02:15] Janel: No, I bought the Money Vault back in the day.
[00:02:18] Tarzan: Oh, my Lord. Wow.
Just a short, brief dalliance I had teaching people about money skills.
[00:02:28] Janel: Yeah, I did learn to keep a separate business account. God, this was when I was extremely green, so I got something from it.
[00:02:33] Tarzan: You learned some things. Yeah.
[00:02:35] Janel: It’s all right.
[00:02:36] Tarzan: Yeah.
[00:02:38] Anna: With a business and a customer here in this call, I feel like I have the perfect segue to get this conversation started. You’ve talked a lot about moving recently from persuasion to consent and about how consent is something that goes way beyond marketing tactics and into how the entire business is designed. When you look at the relationship between businesses and customers today, where do you actually see power living and what do you think most founders and business owners misunderstand about the responsibility that comes with holding that power?
[00:03:14] Tarzan: Wow. No easy questions today. You sure you don’t want to know how many sales emails to send or how to tell a story?
Yep. No, I got it. I’ve totally got this. I know where to start. I come from this online business world which let’s actually let’s call it Internet marketing. Because I feel like when we use Internet marketing, people automatically start to know, okay, like Tony Robbins, like those 10x guys, those like very hard selling big promising people.
And this is just our like great the, our capitalist programming. But we are wired to trust people with money who hold who have money, especially people that are trying to make money. There’s an assumption that they must know something that I don’t and I should sit at their feet and learn from them and not question them.
So like my I’ll just give you a little, a little story here. My business grew so fast when I started in 2016 and I really thought I am good at what I do.
[00:04:21] Anna: That’s a fact.
[00:04:22] Tarzan: I’m a good storyteller, I’m a good writer. Like I’m smart, I can pick up skills quickly. But I really was not conscious until several years in about all these aspects of my identity that gave me more power than my email subscribers, my students, things like my wealth, my access to money, whiteness, beauty, thinness, my charisma. Like all of these things. It was like a shock to learn that wow, I have all of these advantages and my most of my customers like they share some of those identities but not all of them.
So they are going to have to like the strategies that I’m using. Some of them will work and some won’t. So we like for one thing, if we’re talking about power, we do need to understand all of these aspects of our identity that give us power and then be aware of the trust that our customers are putting in us.
So I noticed, I guess it took me years to see that many of my customers were putting too much trust in me. They were putting more trust in me than they had in themselves.
So that means I can tell them what to buy.
I can tell them what businesses that they should try. XYZ and the Issue for the customer is that when it doesn’t work, they actually now they have to go and find someone new, someone else with more power to tell them what to do. Even this word that we use, like in the. This, you know, what Kelly Deals calls the female lifestyle empowerment brands, like the, the language back in 2016 was all about I will empower you to blah, blah, blah. There was this belief that like the people who had the power could give the power to someone else, which is just not how power works. Like people, in order for them to actually grow, they need to find their own power and their own answers. So my last five, six years have been really about trying to transition from being the person with the power and the person with the answers who’s giving it, selling it actually to someone else to be the sort of leader that helps lead people to their own power and to their own answers so that we can both hold power.
[00:07:04] Anna: I also started around that time, 2016ish. And the conversations that were happening then are so different than the conversations that are happening now. And I am so grateful for it because it was very much like, be a boss bitch and go do what you want to do, and you got it. And I’m like, that’s such a very specific lens. I’m queer and trans. And I would look at that and be like, none of that applies to me.
But it was the only thing that was out there and there was no nuance in conversation. So I just appreciate that you’re bringing a more nuance in conversation.
[00:07:37] Janel: When we think about the relationship between customers and business. And we can have the lens on your own, if you like, like, where do you find that the pressure points are like, where do people generally have the least leverage and maybe not even recognize it in their relationship with a business?
[00:07:53] Anna: Okay.
[00:07:54] Tarzan: I think where they have the least amount of leverage is maybe not okay. One sort of hinge point is actually their connections within the industry. And that’s one place I noticed very early on. And I’ll tell you a story. This is a great story. I was like in my second year in business and I was speaking at an event for the first time that was like a. There was like maybe several hundred people there. It was a really big deal for me to get the speaking event for my client who’s like very a list and very well known. And there were two other speakers there that were also very a list. And I was just like this up and comer and I.
So I go and do my talk and then I come into out into the lobby and someone’s giving instructions. Or there’s logistics. Like, there’s no speakers on stage at this moment, and I come out into the lobby, and the other three speakers are doing a photo shoot together.
And I’m watching them, and I’m like, wow, I was so green. Like, I. I couldn’t understand everything that was going on at the time, but I knew that it was about sharing power and who gets to come along. So these two speakers, like, they. These three speakers, they have an equivalent amount of power.
Therefore, they are willing to represent each other’s brands and share it, because it’s. I’m going to give you something that I know you will be able to give me the equivalent back. And I being someone with not a lot of subscribers, that someone like that person also took a chance on me to put me in front of her audience. That was an incredible opportunity. So I don’t want to downplay that. But also, it was very clear that I was not one of them.
So in that moment, I recognized both of those things. I was grateful, and I was also pissed. And so part of my something that I have always done, even in my girl bossiest days, when I was swimming in piles of money being photographed, I always was very careful to bring people along with me. My friend Ron Reich calls this riding the coattails.
And I rode the coattails of people who were more a list than me. And I brought a lot of other people along on my coattails because I realized, because it is just so important, it makes such a difference. Like when you’re trying to be an influencer, when you’re trying to be, like, a personal brand, someone who’s worth paying attention to. When other people who already have attention say, I’m paying attention to Tarzan, she’s worth listening to. That helps so much. When you’re starting out and you have no connections, nobody who knows you and is willing to point to you and say you’re interesting, you don’t have any followers, like, all of those things, just to get that engine going. Your contacts are so important, and that’s something that, like, we’re doing right here. Like, Janel, you are. Janel is a customer of mine. I said, when can I be on your podcast? So that I can also share this with my email list and bring the both of you along with me. And we need to do that. That’s like really flattening the hierarchy that I observed in those early days of online business. Observed but couldn’t understand. And there we could look at many other Examples of that. But that I think is one of the ways that I am using my power to share it with other people who have not. Not necessarily less power, but in that specific area,
[00:11:36] Anna: I am getting the sense that this entire interview is just going to be a series of just mic drop moments. Okay, so I think I’d like to move into a discussion on consent based marketing tactics, which is something that we care a lot about here in Strange Birds too. And I wonder if you could give like a basic overview of what that means and then we can maybe dive into more of the particulars.
Sure.
[00:12:01] Tarzan: Okay. I also really like that we’re thinking about consent beyond marketing tactics because it does go so much further. But this, the.
It’s really important that we look at the marketing because that’s the foundation of the future relationship. So if you start off with something that’s unbalanced, it will continue to be unbalanced as the relationship with these customers progresses.
So in Internet marketing, a lot. So the strategies that trace back to Dan Kennedy and direct response marketing, they are a lot about like all of these things combined, just to give you examples, Fast action bonuses, big red countdown timers, transformational promises, all of those sorts of things. Like when you put all of those things together and we’ve all been in this scenario where you’re like in a space sales funnel that looks like it’s like really tapped into your pain points and you really feel hopeful and you really want it to be the thing and this person is saying that they have the answers. And there’s also four different reasons why you need to decide in the next 20 minutes and you make that decision and then the next day you’re like, wait, why did I do that again? I can’t remember. It felt urgent, but I’m not sure why.
So the reason we get into those scenarios is because actually all of that persuasion layered on top of itself is shutting down people’s ability to think critically. So, like, effective, I’m using air quotes like effective marketing is the marketing where people make a decision and they don’t even know why. They’re just wrapped up in the moment, they’re not thinking critically about it.
So if we start from a place of that wasn’t actually even my decision to work with you, but now we’re in this relationship and I don’t even know why I’m here. It’s really hard to correct from there. It’s like I already chose the type of business, which is an enormous decision. Like I chose my business model based on who had the most persuasive marketing. Now I’m already off on the wrong foot because that didn’t come from myself. That just came from someone who had the biggest, reddest countdown timers.
[00:14:22] Janel: I was just talking with a product manager that I’m working with, where he was like, I just want to be efficient to get people from point A to point B. I’m just. I’m optimizing for efficiency. And so I. I don’t want to have any extra conversation. I don’t want to have to respond to every piece of feedback. I just want to get from point A to point B. I’m like, you’re missing the point. The work is bringing people along for the ride. And because if you just force it through as fast as possible to get to that point B, that conversion, or you’re shipping the thing or whatever, like, you’re not doing the work of building the relationship and bringing everyone in the state that you want to that point B to then build in a healthy way. So that’s your motivation for doing it slowly, doing it differently. Like, I think that one of the. The biggest roadblocks that I get when I start trying to fly this flag of doing business differently, doing it more ethically, whatever is. Is a very American mindset of we have to go up and to the right. We have to optimize at all costs.
[00:15:17] Anna: We.
[00:15:17] Janel: We have to make money. Business is business, right? And people don’t feel like they are incentivized to slow down. Like, why would I not use persuasion if I know that’s my jackhammer, right? Like, why wouldn’t I. Why would I try and approach it differently? And I think that there’s something of an answer in that. That it’s about relationship building.
[00:15:38] Anna: Yeah.
[00:15:39] Tarzan: Oh, there’s so many reasons. Okay. For one thing, many.
So many of my customers over the years, like, they just can’t bring themselves to do it that way. Like, we know when we look at it that there’s, like, something. Even if you can’t explain it, you’re like, ugh, I just don’t want to do that to people.
So, for one thing, if that’s the only model, it’s like, you’re going to be stuck. You’re gonna build your funnel and get 90% of the way, and then you can’t make it the last 10% because, like, actually your body is saying, no, we are not doing this. You won’t be able to solve the last technical hurdle or your copy will be all messed up. Whatever people Just can’t do it. But let’s say those who can. It doesn’t always work, but some people can and it does work. It works for me.
I also found though like now we have these issues industry wide of people don’t show up to the things that they purchased. It’s normal that completion rate of an online course is like 2%.
So it creates all of these other problems along the way. Whereas when you do things slowly like I in my, my the most expensive thing that I sell, it’s like about 12 or $13,000. Like last year I had an 80% return rate on customers that renewed for another year. And the reason I have that return rate is because I am building relationships with them. Like these aren’t people that I just forced into a decision to quickly like work with me because there’s some bonus available. Like we have been building a relationship through my email list for years and now working together in business like you end up like you will enjoy your business so much more.
You know what, the rules, I often say like the rules of consent in marketing also apply to the rules of consent in the body and with sex. So if you think like most of us, like we will enjoy sex much more with someone who is completely present, wants to be there and feels comfortable asking for their needs to be met, like that is the same rules in business is actually not that complicated.
[00:18:02] Janel: Yes. Yes. Hallelujah.
[00:18:04] Tarzan: Yes.
[00:18:05] Janel: It’s amazing how we layer like tactics upon taxes and just do it my 10 step way and you’re going to 10x your whatever. Instead of going back down to the basics of how do we want to treat each other as humans, how do we want to show up, what do we owe to each other? And that that may not be simple to implement, but that is a very simple foundational thing that can, that is like a North Star that can help
[00:18:27] Tarzan: guide you through very complicated decisions. Oh yes. And I have something important to add to this. So something Janel and I have talked about privately is like those of us who have wealth, like, who are comfortable, like I have many customers who for example, they have a partner who pays, who can handle most of the household expenses and they still get sucked into all this urgency and I must do it fast. But like those of us who actually can afford to go slow and it works better. So this does apply to most people. But like this is our responsibility to go slow and build it the right way.
[00:19:05] Janel: Like I want to get into the practicalities of it.
[00:19:07] Anna: Right.
[00:19:07] Janel: Because we’re talking about philosophical North Stars and how we know what’s right. What does this actually look like? When we get down to brass tacks, we. What kind of decisions are we talking about? How would we know an ethical, consent based business when we see one?
[00:19:21] Tarzan: Our bodies know. Everybody knows what that feeling is where you’re like hovering over the buy button and you’re like so nervous and you’re like, ugh, is it the right thing? Is it the wrong thing? My heart rate is like going. I’m like. Even if you’re like so sometimes it’s fear, but sometimes you’re like so excited just like noticing like what does my body, what is my body telling me? And the Internet marketing can really fuck with people and interpret their body signals for them and say if you’re uncomfortable it’s because like you’re at the edge of growth or whatever, trusting your own body. Get a therapist on to talk about that. But I gotta just say that it has to be like a lifelong mission that your body will tell you and you have to learn to listen to it and trust it. The second thing is like actually just having some, some clear boundaries. Like I, I will always sleep on a decision, so I’m not gonna buy anything before I sleep on it for 24 hours. Maybe you have a business partner or if you have this kind of relationship with your spouse, maybe you talk to them like, whatever it is, like some clear parameters on what you will do before you make a purchase.
And also being willing to like, yep, I might miss out on a deal. I have people ask me stuff all the time. I’m not comfortable with a subscription. Can I pay for a year up front? Like, of course we’ll do that. I need three more days to come up with this down payment for whatever thing. Will you still give me the bonuses? Yes, of course we will.
So is it coming back to consent in the body? Like knowing what you need and asking for what you need? Like, I think part of the conversation around like ethical marketing is us taking responsibility for ourselves because we’ve had this conversation about all the, oh, this person that like over promised and didn’t deliver. And then they sold my email address to five more people and then I bought all their programs too. It’s okay, you can see the machine.
We all know it now. Like the information is out there, the conversations are happening. So now it’s time for you to step back and really take responsibility. Like not only for what you’re going to do next, but like also for the times when you didn’t listen to your own body when you knew something was a bad idea, but you did it anyway. Like, you got to take responsibility to end that like shame loop that people get caught in. Oh, I did this wrong thing. And this wrong thing, you got to get out of that loop and back like into right relationship with you and your yourself, your body, your own decision making.
[00:22:01] Anna: Yes. And I just want to highlight something that, like one of the examples you said of like someone asking, can I have an extra day? And you saying yes.
I think that goes back to the beginning of our conversation about power when you, the business is holding a lot of power in the relationship in terms of this is closed, this is now open. No or yes. I think this conversation is making me think a lot about a big value that we have at Strange Birds is you only pay for what you need.
And so something that we take a lot of pride in is we directly tell our clients, you don’t need us for as much as you’re asking for. You don’t. Here’s why you should actually pay us less for less work. Because what you’re asking is something that either you have the capacity for, it’s actually more expensive to ask us to do it versus finding someone else, or it’s not needed right now. And so I think taking both as a consumer listening to your body, but also as a business owner, like listening and being like, is this what’s needed in this moment? Should I tell this person who wants to pay for my services no or not all of it. So I think that’s a really interesting conversation that I don’t see enough business owners having.
[00:23:10] Janel: And the thing is, this is actually an economically solid decision too because it builds relationships of trust and people come back to us and people refer us because like, we have those conversations where we’re like, we’re not going to sell you smoke. I don’t want you to pay for more than what the value that we’re actually delivering. And then they want to stay on with us. Shocker.
Do you see consent based practices as like a moral imperative, a strategic advantage, or both? Like, how do you generally package it when you talk to people about it?
[00:23:39] Tarzan: Do I see it as a moral imperative or a strategic imperative? It’s.
I can’t like, I don’t like the word ethical because I don’t like people going around saying what’s ethical and what’s not. And I also don’t want to go around imposing my own morals on other people. I want them there to be space. Like, I have lots of friends in online Business that use strategies that I would never use and they have great products, sometimes I promote them.
So yeah, I think we have to be careful about even using words like moral or ethical imperative.
But strategically, yes, before the reason I mentioned earlier, which is that it’s just, it is so uncomfortable to use those strategies. And that’s not a mindset problem that you know, especially the people who come through my world, like they’re often very mission driven. Like they want to be, they want to do something meaningful. They want to feel like they’re having a positive impact on their world and those strategies do not make them feel that way. So they are just not going to do it and then they’re going to be stuck and getting nowhere. So I think the more interesting argument for consent based marketing and just consent based business is actually strategic.
[00:25:04] Janel: Yeah, I completely agree with you. That’s how we think about it too.
This is a big ass question. So like it’s whoa.
Because I have been following you for a decade, I have been very interested watching your evolution. I think about my own coming from like super corporate world into I can build a container that that does this better, that takes care of the people within it and those intersecting with it. What do you hope for the direction that that businesses go in the future? Like I’m thinking more of smallish ones like ours, founder driven stuff and what we’ve evolved so much since those 2017 days. Like where do you hope we go?
[00:25:43] Tarzan: I really hope so. I started one of the things I have been investing in is a facilitator training and also like leadership development, that sort of thing which I’ve been in business for 10 years and the amount that I’ve invested in marketing versus being a good leader is pretty shocking. But I’m making up for lost time and what I really. So I started working this with this one company called Exchange and I got certified as like a Exchange certified guide. Not so much that I needed the label, but I just love their mission which is to help people transition from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side.
And that’s where I want to go. Like I’m thinking about my next our next program that we’re just really conceiving of right now. We’re not even building it. It’s called the school of consent based business.
And I was talking to a curriculum designer about, you know, what I want it to be. And the thing that felt most important is I want to be facilitating learning rather than teaching. So instead of giving people the answers like for to Be able to bring people together to find their own answers. And yes, I do have skills in email marketing, et cetera, that are teachable.
However, like really being more community builders. Like in online business, people talk all the time about building communities, but what they’re really talking about is building their Facebook group or followers on Instagram. Like, that’s not actually community.
And you can feel it when you go to Internet business events sometimes that it’s like we’re all here under the tutelage of the person, person on the stage. But there’s all this tension in the room, like people are trying to figure out the social order. Do you make more money than me? Are you more advanced in the program? Are you in this other higher level program? Like, we’re not actually, I don’t think that’s community. Like, for my experience of community is when I feel like the power dynamic is not there. It’s like I feel you have as much to teach me as I have to teach to you. So let’s share our information and get the answers together. And we might need to bring in an expert to facilitate a conversation. Not to give us the answers, but like really, truly being in community and being able to have complicated conversations and disagree with each other. To say, I tried the membership model but it really didn’t work for me. For X, Y, Z. Let’s like sit down together and talk about what worked for you and I’ll tell you what worked for me and like, maybe you could help me decide where to go next rather than just giving our power away to the Amy Porterfields and Stu McLarens of the world that have all of this wealth and power that we would like them to share with us again.
[00:28:48] Anna: Mic drop. Okay.
A few years ago I tried to do a program course thing and it was all about community design.
[00:28:57] Tarzan: Cool.
[00:28:57] Anna: I care a lot about community building. And I felt deep frustration about how people were using the word community, especially five years ago. It’s starting to shift a little bit now, but not enough, in my opinion. Bringing it back to this question of power, when someone starts a membership or a community part, one of the things that I taught in, I called it community camp, that I taught in community camp is understanding what your role is in that space as the owner of it. Right. What does facilitation mean? What does a leader mean? And I love what you’re talking about, that difference between investing in marketing and being a good leader. I think when it comes to things like masterminds and memberships and courses and shit, people are investing in how to sell it and. And they’re not investing in how to actually run it and how to actually be a good person inside of that space and honor the folks that are in it. Whoo. Now I’m getting all hot and spicy. But I think it’s a hard tension to balance when you’re trying to run a business and make money. So naturally you want to think about marketing, but what you really need in order to make a sustainable business is think about how to be a leader.
I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you personally have figured out how to make that balance work.
[00:30:21] Tarzan: Yeah, I’m definitely still learning.
So it’s 2021 and my business is, we’re running out of money. Our launch didn’t do what we hoped it would do.
So I get on a call with my number one. Her name is Sandra, and Sandra’s okay, let’s do a mastermind. That’s like a ten thousand dollar investment. And if we get ten people, like, we’re good for a couple months.
And I was like, okay, we’ll do that. And I got off the call with her and was like, wow, I can’t. I was in the middle of a divorce. I was like at the apex of negotiating my divorce. I was like in a new home, like trying to figure out how to be a parent, like feeding my kids, like exclusively frozen things from Costco. Like, I was not in a good place.
And I recognized within myself, like, I cannot be in leadership in that way right now. I can’t deliver on a $10,000 thing just because the company needs it. So that’s step one is like recognizing within yourself, like, actually, do you have the capacity to lead right now, really being honest.
Lots of leaders leading wonderful movements that you can just go support them. So in that time I stepped back and said, I, I actually, I let my team go. I severe, like seriously downscaled my business rather than sell the thing that I needed to sell to keep it going.
So then fast forward a couple years later. I was like feeling the feeling that pull to lead a small community in a deeper way for an extended period of time. I don’t know why call those masterminds. Let’s not get into the the that word. Another day, another interview. I’m ready. So I hired someone to help me design the facilitation. A very skilled facilitator and leadership trainer to help me design the calls, design the retreats, and also provide accountability for me and to be there for me in all of the like, complicated things that come up when you’re working deeply with people, like, how do I hold these people through the hardest moments and not swoop in and solve their problems for them? Like, those sorts of things. So I started working one on one and while keeping my eye out and for leaders and people that I would want to work with, that was. We worked together. I worked with that person for two years.
And then. And the program is now in its third year. So in the third year I took this new facilitator training and right now I’m just like about to join another leadership program. Like we. That investment is also strategic. So I would like to name that as well. That isn’t just like, if you. We can’t go around telling people they should be ethical, make this ethical choice because it’s the right thing to do. At the end of the day, I gotta pay child support, I gotta pay my mortgage. But so really, like when you like the best way to sell customer, to upsell, resell, whatever, retain your customers is like, really deliver something great.
And if you are in a leadership or teacher role, you’re not just born with that skill. Like, it’s not we. The culture that I, my business grew up in taught me that what you need for that job is charisma. And fortunately I had a shitload of it. So that was like, really? That was one of many reasons why I was very successful with that model without any training. But most people, including myself, we need like, facilitation is a skill.
Leadership is a skill and it can be learned. And yeah, fortunately there are like many programs and wonderful places available where we can learn it.
[00:34:25] Anna: There was always one full session in community camp. That’s just about facilitation.
And every single person who went through community camp had never actually thought about facilitation. So one of the questions was, what were communities or groups that you were in that just felt magical, like they were perfect, they were wonderful. It was like, that’s not magic. Someone is working really freaking hard to make it feel like magic. It is so much work. So if you want that magic, you need to understand that the amount of effort in to making a space feel truly wonderful. And I. Yeah.
And most of them were coming in from the charisma model, and a lot of them had that charisma, but they never had to sit and actually think about, oh, shit, can I actually lead a conversation?
[00:35:09] Janel: I think one of the toughest things is because of like, measurability. Right. It’s hard to measure, like, how human of a connection did you make with somebody? It’s very easy to know how many Facebook friends followers do I have.
And we all like to know how successful we’re being. We like to know how successful we’re being in comparison to the other guy.
And it’s really difficult to decouple yourself from that even to just take one step back and think maybe that number might go up a little bit more slowly. But I’m building something that is intangible perhaps, but, but fundamental to how I want to show up in the world. So it’s harder. It’s harder. The truth is always complicated, but I’m here for people who make space for it. Really?
[00:35:51] Tarzan: Yeah. I really important skill that I’ve had to learn is building my capacity to receive feedback.
And I been schooled in that like for 10 years. Like starting with writing complicated emails about complicated opinionated stuff and having to sit with my subscribers response to it and learn from it feedback about my programs. Like that’s not something that I hear people talk about. And part of the skill is just nervous system regulation.
It’s. It is hard to be able to see if someone comes back to you with something like which parts of this are theirs and which parts of this are mine.
And even if this is all there’s what can I learn from that? That’s part of consent is I’m opening it. It’s making sure it is safe to offer feedback and listening and responding to feedback. Because as we know like consent is not a one time thing. Like it’s not enough to say like you said yes to joining my program. Like it needs to be continuous and ongoing and it needs to always be safe for people to say no. And just a real business example of that is feedback. Like how do we receive feedback?
Do your customers, this is so critical. Do your customers feel safe enough to actually tell you when something’s not working for them if you’re not getting that feedback, you have not made it safe for your subscribers or your customers to tell you that or your clients, whatever it is. Because hundred percent guarantee there’s things that you’re going to mess up. Like you’re not going to deliver at a hundred percent.
So if nobody’s coming to you to say I’m not happy with how this is, like you have work to do there to make sure those channels are open and they know that you will listen and receive the feedback.
Hell yeah.
[00:37:45] Janel: I like that as a metric.
Take that on any day. I know we’re nearing time. I want to make sure. That I ask you about the thing that you are working on this year, the Girl Boss Apology Tour.
[00:37:57] Tarzan: Oh, my God, I can’t wait.
[00:38:00] Janel: Tell me more.
[00:38:03] Anna: Okay.
[00:38:03] Tarzan: So I really trust the. I trust my own vision. Building self trust, another skill for business owners. But I trust the vision and the voice of wisdom in my head. And a couple of months back in the fall, I was like jogging in the woods and this idea came to me for the Girl Boss Apology Tour.
And it. It was like a lightning bolt. It was like, this is what it’s going to be called. These are all the people you’re going to ask to be involved. This is. It was just like a gift, an absolute gift.
And so it is a virtual summit and it’s a. It’s a reckoning with girl boss culture, but not in the way that what I’ve seen already done is like a takedown of Internet marketing. These are the bad people, these are the bad strategies. And actually I see that doesn’t really help people. It makes them scared to be the bad guy. It makes them scared that they chose the wrong person.
So the Girl Boss Apology Tour is really about, like, where we have been, what. Where we need to get right with our marketing and our businesses and where we could be going next. And I’ve chosen really like some of the most influential people in the space who have. For example, one of our guests is Amanda Bond. She like is the. We wouldn’t have the word bro marketing in our lexicon if it were not for Amanda Bond. She like spotted these trends, like, I don’t know, in 2017 or something. So I have people that have been in the space for a really long time and they are coming on the tour to really be honest about where they came from, what’s broken about the industry and what they’re doing next. And there are a lot of people that are like, one of my guests, Chayla Davison, she was a business coach for 15 years and now she’s like starting a career as a comedian.
So there’s also people doing like really interesting pivots, like people that had success, like with a membership. And now another one of our guests is Zach’s buckler. And he. I like found him on TikTok, like doing this like sticker club. Like, he hand draws stickers and then they’re like die cut. And he like ships them out and he has like this like secret sticker business that. But actually people know him, like because he has a Facebook ads agency. So it’s also, hey, you guys look like you were sold this, like, very narrow idea of what a business could be. It’s, should I be a coach or should I have a course that is, like, infinitesimal? There’s so many options available to you.
And so I want people to come and listen. Not just to talk about the things that are hard, like, we’ll name those things too, but also to see, oh, my God, it can be, like, so rich and beautiful. Your career. And it does not require you to dress up and perform your life on Instagram. Not required. Let’s figure out how to do it your way and build the business that is like yours, that is uniquely yours. You both are such a great example of that. Like, every time I hear about your. The way that you both think about money, share power, share resources and revenue. Like, in my world and the people I meet, like, this is unheard of and so interesting and so rich. Like, your business will give back to you so much more than just, like, enough money to pay the mortgage or whatever. And that is. It’s. Oh, my God, you guys. You don’t even know. Like, you’re too. You’re. All you can think about is, like, your six figures or your seven figures. Like, what? That’s so small. You could be, like, growing and making friendships, like, lifelong relationships. Like, having experiences, like, as a leader, like, as someone who is being led by others. Like, this is, like, amazing, the things we can do. And I want to bring some of that energy back rather than just like, this sad conversation about what’s ethical and who’s not doing it right.
So that’s the Girl Boss Apology Tour. It’s. We’ll start registration on March 30, and the actual tour is April 13 to April 17. There’s, like, about 12 speakers. It’s going to be intense. Like, we’re going to have, like, live calls where people can get together. We’ll have, like, speaker panels.
[00:42:22] Anna: We’ll have.
[00:42:23] Tarzan: I’m going to do, like, a healing circle where we can just let go of some of the things that we’re feeling guilty about that we’re angry about.
Yeah, I think it’s gonna be so amazing. I’m not sure. Cause I’ve never done a summit before, but I think it’s gonna be great.
[00:42:39] Janel: Oh, my God.
[00:42:40] Anna: Sounds amazing.
[00:42:42] Janel: I am so hyped. Like, Anna, I’ve got visions floating in my head of, like, our previous conversations of queering business stuff beyond, like, business beyond the binary that we talked about with Elijah. Oh, my God. Yeah. I need to go back and cross reference what we said with him because.
Holy shit.
[00:42:55] Anna: Yeah.
[00:42:56] Janel: Thinking about infinite potential and your business could be so much more than this is just really exciting.
[00:43:01] Tarzan: So much more. Yeah.
[00:43:02] Anna: Yes. So April 13th through 17th.
[00:43:05] Tarzan: April 13th through 17th. And I don’t have the URL yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be found at the Girlboss apology tour dot com.
[00:43:12] Janel: Brilliant.
[00:43:12] Tarzan: Let’s assume that domain is probably available.
[00:43:16] Anna: Amazing.
[00:43:17] Janel: This was the freaking best. An immense honor. I think I. Yeah, I learned stuff. That’s what I came in to do. I laughed. I got ideas sprouting in my head. Thank you. Really, it’s been a moment.
[00:43:26] Tarzan: These were the hardest questions anyone’s ever asked me. So you guys win.
Yes.
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