The Germany Expat Business Show
A podcast that shares knowledge, stories and inspiration for anyone starting, running or growing a business as a non-German in Germany.
The Germany Expat Business Show
Mastering the Art of Leadership as a Munich Transplant with Gretchen Nemechek
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Leaving the warm beaches of California for Munich? Gretchen and her family did just that. The result is an inspiring story of her career evolution from a CMO in the B2B software industry to business founder and entrepreneur.
In this conversation Gretchen and I talk about the whirlwind of relocation, unexpected career detours and the growth that comes with such a bold move. We also discuss:
- The decision and backstory on moving to Germany based on a major opportunity for her career (rather than her husbands)
- How her substantial business acumen informs her approach to leadership consulting
- Why she's passionate about helping leaders become the best versions of themselves so they can lead their teams to do the same
- How and why she transitioned as a successful CMO into a consulting business owner and entrepreneur
- How she developed a proprietary tool and team development method
- How she built up a LinkedIn audience of over 5k followers
- Whether it's better to use accounting apps and services or a professional Steuerberater
- Why sometimes the best thing you can do is just throw some money at a problem!
You can find this episode and all episodes as well as show notes for each at https://thegermanylist.de/the-germany-expat-business-show-podcast/
Starting or running a business in Germany as a foreigner? Already running an online business in Germany as an expat? Wanting to grow your German-based business? Working as a freelancer in Germany? You'll love my guide with over 30 resources for expat business owners in Germany.
Hi, I'm Eleanor Meyerhofer, a native Californian designer and digital strategist. In October of 1999, a few years after graduating from design school, I flew from San Francisco to Munich with a fistful of Deutschmarks, a dial-up connection and an extremely vague plan. 20 plus years later, after a 10-year stint at a global agency freelancing and launching two online businesses, I'm still here. Now I'm talking to other expat business owners to share knowledge, stories and inspiration for other non-Germans running businesses in Germany. So I am here with Gretchen Nemechek and I am going to ask you I'm going to start with a question I ask everybody on this podcast, which is who are you, where are you from and can you give us the two-minute version of how you ended up in Germany?
Speaker 2:Yes, so thanks, eleanor, it's great to be here with you. I am Gretchen Nemechek. I am from California. I was raised in San Diego, went to university in San Luis Vizpo and spent the last years of my sort of career professional life in Santa Barbara. I have spent my whole career in the B2B software industry in various roles and go-to-market, from customer service to product marketing, product management, sales enablement and also marketing strategy.
Speaker 2:And the two-minute version of how I found my way to Germany. My husband and I had been actually thinking about moving overseas for a number of years and had actually tried it two previous times with different companies, and both of those times were supposed to be to the UK. Both of them in the end, did not turn out to be the right timing and it was a really. It was sort of the universe looking out for us that that was not the path that we should have been on and years later this opportunity came up to join a really great company here in Munich. They were looking for somebody with my unique set of skills and background and it felt right from the beginning. And when things felt right, they just they seemed to flow and everything flowed very quickly, very smoothly, into us deciding to move to Munich within Spent really two months.
Speaker 2:I had my interview with the company in March and we were they offered. By the time. I landed back in Santa Barbara and we had made the decision to move by the middle of April and we were here by June. Wow, yeah, it was fast.
Speaker 1:Okay, I actually have a couple of questions about that too. The first one is what was I mean? Not everybody is like, hey, I want to live overseas. I find that's kind of a unique personality profile? Is it? What was your motivation for that?
Speaker 2:I had run global channel for the software company that I kind of started my career at right out of university, and one of the amazing opportunities I had a couple of years into working there was to lead our global business development initiatives through our reseller partners, and that gave me the opportunity to travel the world in a very short period of time and it was extremely exciting and very eye opening and and my husband had traveled a bit overseas, but not much.
Speaker 2:But one of the things that we recognize through my travels is just how big and small the world is at the same time and that it's really easy to sort of be stuck in your own little everything that exists outside of it. And we thought it would be a tremendous opportunity for us to have that experience to be expats and to live overseas and then also to give our daughter an opportunity to see the world a bit more broadly than had.
Speaker 1:We sort of stayed put in Santa Barbara, so that's, we just had this edge, I think, okay okay, and so you guys came also for an opportunity that you had and that, I'm assuming, means that your husband I'll call it the accompanying spouse- and usually we don't like the term trailing. We don't like trailing anymore, I know, or at all, whatever. But usually I mean, I can't help but notice that is usually. Those roles are usually reversed yeah usually yeah.
Speaker 1:So how was how did your husband also get working? I mean, you're both not German, like how did you work that out?
Speaker 2:It's a great question. So, yeah, my husband has always been incredibly supportive of my career and what that meant for us as a family in terms of our opportunities. This was a tremendous opportunity for us to live overseas. He had actually, coincidentally, just accepted a job that was kind of one of his dream jobs, just about 90 minutes north of where we were living at the time, and so we're already at this kind of crossroads in our lives where you know we were.
Speaker 2:We were going to do something new and different regardless and when this opportunity presented itself. You know, one of the things that we talked about is if, if he were able to find a role to step into and we could come as a family and both be gainfully employed as we came here because he's an extremely brilliant and talented and very active and busy human he would not be satisfied to be an accompanying spouse without a purpose or a job. We said if that were something that would work out then then we would go forward with it. So part of my recruitment package was working with the company that was hiring me to have them help find him a role somehow, whether it was in the company or through their networks, because he was actually had a very successful career in public service in city and regional planning, which is not really it's not very portable to do yeah, right, right.
Speaker 2:Given language limitations like that. And you know, sarah, and Dippitously, they were starting up a new department inside this organization and his background instead of skills even though not a direct match were very attractive for what, what they were building and and so he was also recruited into the company and we both started our jobs on the same day at the same company and, funny enough, I left a couple of years ago and he's still there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm at my little different, but I met my husband at work and I left it. He's still there too, yeah, so you left Now, let's, let's talk about that. So you left and tell us about what you're doing now.
Speaker 2:So I left in 2020 from SAP. So the company I was recruited into was acquired by SAP about one year later. So that was a big change within the scope of 12 to 18 months of us being here, going from working with a mid-size, high growth startup to being a part of this gigantic global machine. Liffew a very well-established company and had a lot of great opportunities. After the acquisition. It was a very different place to work. It was a big culture shift, process shift, but I learned a lot in the process and I had a lot of really amazing opportunities there that I would not have otherwise had being at that place at that time in this transition in the company's history. So I was very grateful for that. But I never expected to be there as long as I had been. I'd been there for just about eight and a half to nine years, going on nine years by the time.
Speaker 2:I left, and that was a long time. It was the longest, almost second longest I had ever been at a company before, and not that I'm a person who believes in changing jobs every few years. I just also think it's easy to get very narrow in our view when we stay in one spot for too long.
Speaker 2:And I definitely saw that as being a risk that I was taking by staying much longer in this role of that company and wanted to do something different. And I made the decision really about six months before COVID hit, and so it was a really great timing, if you will, to have left and moved out of a very high pressure role as the pandemic hit. I was able to while everybody was pausing. It was really easy for me to pause Because I wasn't focused on global reorgs and things like that, so that was a good timing for me. When I left SAP, I really started thinking about what I wanted to do next, and a natural reflection point for me was well, what has made an impact and what did I like doing? What brought me energy? What drained me of energy? Where do I feel inspired? And I really started evaluating that in relationship to what I want the next stages of my career to look like. And it came to me, having worked so many years and go to market, that everything that I focused on with respect to the functional aspects of my job was temporary and ephemeral and could be undone with a change of strategy or an acquisition or a big budget change that all of those things could just be wiped away instantly, and I really found that the only thing that was truly impactful, that had a lasting impact, was the impact I had on people and in the building of the teams that I built and the people I mentored, the people I coached, the people whose careers I helped to build. That was, for me, the impact that I had, and that was the impact that felt purposeful and felt easy. Do you know what I mean? It felt effortless to me, it felt like something that I just really loved doing and it gave me a ton of energy. And so I knew, when I started thinking about my next step, that I wanted to do something that allowed me to really tap into that aspect of what brought me joy and brought me energy. And that's where I came up with the idea of building my leadership consulting business, and so that's where the idea of OpenRE was born, kind of late in 2019, early in 2020.
Speaker 2:And I, you know, took my time during the pandemic, enjoying the pause period that most of us were taking, and was about to start building the business when I was then recruited by a software company to come and be their chief marketing officer, and that was an exciting opportunity to work for a smaller organization again, to work in a non SAP environment, because SAP is a very unique culture.
Speaker 2:You know processes etc. And it's really its own organism. And working in another organization I thought was a great opportunity to kind of reconnect to those kind of mid startup to mid size roots and as a part of my leadership is consulting business. I want to work with companies of all sizes so I felt like that was a good, natural fit for both my skills and go to market and also what I wanted to do in the future, and so I went to join them as the CMO for predetermined period of time. It was never meant to be forever and it was always meant to go back to building my business, which I founded it at the end of last year and I launched it middle of this year.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you I mean, when you took this opportunity at the at the as the CMO, was your business open, re in like the kind of idea stage and so okay. So it's not like you had a roster plans that you put on pause.
Speaker 2:And so, no, it was really very early in the idea stage. I was formulating the business plan, formulating kind of my approach, getting certified on a couple of the methodologies that I work with. So it was really in that very early planning stage. And then this opportunity came up and and I'm one who says yes to opportunities when I think they're interesting and feel like they're meant to be in some way, you know, and when I say that it's that Things sort of flow in a very effortless way and there's not a lot of friction I don't have, you know, I trust my intuition a lot and things just sort of lineup and fall into place in all the right ways. And this was one of those situations and so I said yes and followed, followed the breadcrumbs where they were leading me, and it was a great opportunity. I'm very glad that I did that sort of in between the idea and then starting my business. It was, it was the right decision.
Speaker 1:Okay, so there was no conflict, like oh I'm just starting this thing, I don't want to get sidetracked.
Speaker 2:It just felt like you said, it just felt like the right thing and I had agreed with the CEO when I joined that this was ultimately my passion project was going to be to go back to building this leadership business and and that for that reason, we would choose, you know, a timeline for my being the CMO and really work within that timeline to get the things done that the business needed done. And when I had fulfilled that, it was a great time to move on and they were very supportive of me leaving and moving on to go back to, you know, building this thing, which is my passion.
Speaker 1:So Okay, I have a question about. You mentioned when you were at SAP what had the most impact, and it was the mentoring you did, the coaching you did, and this is very different from your kind of hard skills like as a CMO. Can you just tell me what that mentoring, what did it look like and like what? What kind of like was it? What team members, what kind of people? What was the profile of people that you were mentoring and what did you like about it?
Speaker 2:I joined them to build out this team, and so my first order of business was building a team. I had one person in the organization who was sort of doing product marketing before I joined and my job over the you know, the next year or so was to grow this team, and then I started to get established a practice of product marketing inside the business, create that framework across the line of business, and so part of my job as a leader obviously was high finding the right talent, hiring that talent, cultivating that talent, helping them grow in their careers, helping them grow and their skills and helping them be, you know, the best team possible as well. You know, I view my role as a leader as helping people be the best versions of themselves inside the role that they have, I'm not just helping them grow inside the role that they're in, but also helping to prepare them for whatever they want to do next.
Speaker 2:I know that you know I don't view the relationship between a leader and the person that works for them is transactional, and so you know the opportunities that I had over the course of the eight years that I was there to build this amazing, high, high performing team that really function like a team not just a collection of individuals but really a team and then watching their careers blossom and watching them evolve as human, watching them develop professionally and personally, was so fulfilling. And then also for my own self, evolving my own style and approach as a leader, my own maturity as a leader, my own self awareness and how to be better, how to be low ego, how to not get hooked by politics. I mean, I had my share of all of that. Getting you know, getting hooked in for years and I had to grow myself. So you know, going through that experience both you know with my own growth and development, and then also helping drive that within the team, was just so deeply satisfying to me.
Speaker 1:That is so interesting. I have a follow up question, but I also, just for the folks listening at home can you just give a quick definition of what product marketing is?
Speaker 2:Oh sure, so product marketing is is a group of people that sits within an organization and it depends on the organization where they sit. Oftentimes they'll sit in in marketing as a sort of sub function of a marketing organization. Sometimes they sit within the product organization, sort of as a partner organization to the development team or the product management team. And the product marketing team core mission really is Helping to find the messaging and the content around a solution to end the value propositions of any given solution to help marketing and sales take those products to market in a more successful way. So working with the product management teams to understand what are the capabilities of the product that we're bringing to market, how does that translate into benefits, what do those benefits do for our buyer or for end user and customer? And how do we create, both internally facing and externally facing content and tools that helps that product to be successful?
Speaker 2:Okay that's a great definition?
Speaker 1:Yes, totally, that's very helpful, and my follow up question is that seems like a pretty demanding task. And then, on top of that, I just find it interesting because I had to manage like smaller design teams here and there and I just hated it.
Speaker 1:I hated it, I hated it, I hated it, I hated it. I liked working on teams and I loved I mean I really do appreciate the value of having a good leader and I like there's nothing better than working under a good project manager or a leader, but like dealing with all of people's stuff that always just struck me as like a thing on top of the task that you had to do. This is like why I'm not doing that kind of job, but for you it didn't feel like another thing.
Speaker 2:No, that felt like the thing, to be honest, like for me. The task in hand and the execution of those things are all possible when people know how to show up as the best versions of themselves. All of those things work because people have, most of the time, the skills, the expertise, the education, the know how. Maybe they need some training here or there, but that's part of the development process. The biggest thing that gets in most people's way is their is their baggage and their, their inability to show up consistently as the best versions of themselves, and so it's this kind of dysfunctional, unproductive behavior. That is the stuff that you were just articulated, that you just don't want to deal with, and that's okay. Not everybody wants to deal with that and not everybody should deal with that. For me, that felt like the most important thing that I could do was help people understand that.
Speaker 1:And I'm assuming that you didn't have a background in in the kind of skills necessary to do that Did you just find you had a talent and an ability to, to mentor and bring out the best in people?
Speaker 2:I think. So you know, my background is in communication, so I got my degree in university and communication. You know, we are constantly in this mode of having to engage with people and most of us aren't taught these skills in a very conscious or intentional way. We sort of learn it in our families of origin or upbringing or schools, but there's no, there's no curriculum that really teaches us how to do it, so most of us are pretty crappy at it. You know, we don't develop the skills needed to be successful communicators and successful, I think, humans a lot of the time, and so we're operating on autopilot most of the time, and those programs that run for us on autopilot are often pretty dysfunctional.
Speaker 2:So when I started to kind of dive into this topic through through school, I understood the impact of communication. I understood the impact of of communicating with clarity, of of being empathetic, of understanding, of connecting with your audience. You know, and a lot of this just goes back to, goes back to, you know, people like Aristotle really understanding what is persuasion look like, what is persuasive communication look like, what does logic and empathy look like? And you know, and that became such a foundation of my education in school and then coming into the business environment. I found that I was really able to translate that into how I worked together with people and I think it was. It was less intentional than I, than it really sounds, it was really more serendipitous and accidental along the way, but I think that's part of my persona, of just kind of why not? Let me try this? And and going where, going where life takes me in that way, do you know?
Speaker 1:what I mean. So let's segue that into open Nari and what, how you're you brought those skills into to that business and what that business does.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so funny. But when I was ideating the business back in, you know, late 2019, early 2020, one of the things that one of the things that I got stuck on actually was is kind of what you articulated around not wanting to deal with with the thing, like the people, personalities and things like this One of the things I realized was that really helping leaders become the best versions of themselves so they can lead their teams to do the same. It's a tricky proposition because most of us not to be like too extremist in the viewpoint, but most of us are a bit broken. You know, from our lives. We all have a lot of baggage and and that baggage becomes how we show up productively and unproductively in a work environment. And maybe that baggage means we had difficult childhoods, or maybe that baggage means we've had a slew of really difficult managers who have been, you know, creating psychologically unsafe environments or or, or. You know, all of these things kind of add up to contribute to how people show up in the workplace, whether consciously or unconsciously. And I started thinking about I really want to help leaders be the best versions of themselves. However, I'm not a psychologist. I don't want to be a psychologist, and part of understanding how people can fix some of these things. I wanted to be able to do that without having to unpack childhood trauma like just to put it the most plainly, the most succinct way I could think of it when I was struggling with how do I do that without having to go that deep.
Speaker 2:And one of the things that came to me is I actually did this with my team when I was at SAP. I had brought in an external consultant who works with a third party tool which is all around understanding people's motivational identities, and it's one of these 15 minute surveys that gives you an output and an assessment. Well, I have to tell you, eleanor, it was probably the most useful five pages of content I've read in my life and really, really accurate. At least my assessment of myself, or their assessment of me and my motivational identities, was so crazy accurate. It just opened up my eyes to a whole different way of looking at myself and looking at why I behave the way I behave, and so I brought this consultant in to also work with my team, and when I did this with my team, I found that every one of the people in the team had the same experiences I had, which was they found it to be so extremely accurate, eye-opening a little, not painful, but I say pinch, like some of the feedback, pinches a little bit.
Speaker 2:So you're like ouch, ok, that might be true and I don't want it to be true, but it might be true and that was consistent across everybody that I did this with and it was funny. I don't know why I had been in the back of my mind but as I started thinking about my business, it finally dawned on me that the answer to this question around not wanting to have to unpack childhood trauma lied in this third party tool that I had used with my team at SABE, and I swear I would never lead another team without having this knowledge about my team members again, because it was really that accurate and really that actionable.
Speaker 2:And so this became one of the cornerstones of the open-ary method, of the methodology that I built for helping leaders and teams be the best versions of themselves, and so that was one of the things I got certified as a coach to facilitate this motivational identity profiling and workshop and coaching around this, and that's really a big part of what I do.
Speaker 2:The other pieces, which kind of came into formation around that same period of time, as it became and also sparked by a lot of people's behavior during the pandemic, I became really interested in how our nervous systems respond to the input around us and to what, how we react and how we show up in different situations. And what's the what's the physiology of it, how do we physically hold ourselves as a result of these experiences, what is our embodied experience of our self look like? And so it's really these three pieces that motivational identity assessment, the neuroscience and then also what is called the field of somatics or somatic principles. That is all about what's happening inside our bodies, what's the expression of certain behaviors in our physical bodies as well, that I bring together as a part of helping people, helping cultivate greater self-awareness in people and what that means for how they show up in the workplace or how they show up in their careers overall or how they show up in life.
Speaker 1:So that's kind of the open-art method, if you will, and in that shell and so is the the way you work as you go into organizations, companies and do you you said leadership consulting do you just consult with leadership teams or also different teams or individuals? Like how, and do you have like people trained in your method? Is it you Like? What does it look like?
Speaker 2:At the moment it's me. I'm looking in 2024 to expand that out to some additional consultants who will join as as team members who can help facilitate more workshops as we're starting to scale up. I only launched the business in June of this year, really officially launched it. So you know, you have to get a little bit of traction in order to in order to scale, but I already have some people in my network who are excited about the prospect of joining the team when the time is right. So so that's exciting. In terms of how I work with companies, I'm working both with companies and with individuals and.
Speaker 2:I work with. You know individual leaders and their teams.
Speaker 2:I'll work with just the leader if you know, they feel particularly stuck and you know they're struggling to get traction in their career or to lead better. I'll work directly with them and then work with their team as well, so that they can have this awareness of their team members and their team members can also kind of operate from these same principles of you know, how do I be my best self and how do I avoid being what Carl Jung calls shadow? Basically, how do I show up in their workplace in the most productive way possible? So I'll work with leaders and their teams to kind of create that foundation, working with executive teams as well, so that we can kind of trickle that behavior throughout the organization. And and also, as I said mentioned, working with individuals.
Speaker 2:A lot of my individual clients are in some form of transition in their career. Either they're in a role that they're struggling with, they're trying to kind of get to the next level and not really sure why they're not, you know, you know leadership material or material for the next step. And then I'm also working with a lot of people who either have been recently laid off or are, you know, just trying to figure out how do I move into something that is more satisfying and in alignment with what I want to do and where I want to be, and so you know it's, it's very interesting. I actually didn't anticipate so many of my clients being these sort of in transitions or individual contributors or leaders, but you know, I go where where I'm called to go, and this seems to be a big need in the market, particularly right now, with all of the layoffs that have happened in late 2022 and 2023.
Speaker 1:It seems to me it would be a real benefit for you or a real kind of selling point that you also have a strong business acumen. Yes, like you are coming in, you understand, like, what it's like to lead these big teams Absolutely. And a question I'd have around that is like, do you niche down, do you, like, only do this for software companies, or? Is it like any kind of organization.
Speaker 2:You know it's interesting.
Speaker 2:I would say, yes, a big selling point is my business background, because and I and I hesitate often to use the word coach in in a lot of in the ways I describe myself, although a lot of what I do is coaching because I have such a strong background in go to market inside various sizes of software companies that a lot of what I'm doing with leaders is not just sort of this best self behavior consulting, but how do they use that to create better collaboration, cross functionally, or how do they use that to launch products, or how do they use that to help their teams be better at executive communication or executive presence?
Speaker 2:And you know so I use this on total of my life and work experience to bring this you know, unique offering to my customers and and I think that's actually what it's all about for everyone in their career. I hope that most people get to the point where they have this really interesting background of experience that they've collected over the life of their careers, combined with the things that they really enjoy doing, that are also natural strengths for them, and they package that up in a way that allows them to do something and bring some contribution to the world that only uniquely they can, and that's, you know, what I'm very fortunate to feel like I have found is how do I combine that 25 years of experience in the software space with these you know skills and capabilities that I have and also happen to love doing, and do that in a way that's useful for people. So, yes, I definitely leverage that. There was a second part to your question that I'm trying to now remember.
Speaker 1:It was just.
Speaker 2:If you niche down into like I would say that as a default, in a way, I am, because that's where a lot of my network exists, right. So as I start to go, you know, broad into my network, most of the people I know through my years of business experience are in this B2B software space. So in a sense, yes, is it only applicable in this space? Absolutely not. There are life skills that really any type of business or person can leverage, which is why it makes it hard when people say, well, who's your ideal customer? What is your ideal customer profile? Honestly, my answer is a willing one. You know, anybody who is willing even just a little bit to open the door, to showing up better in the world and in their workplace and understanding what it takes to do that is a good customer, right, they're willing to make those changes and willing to look with intention at how they can be better, and that can be anybody in any environment.
Speaker 2:Really, as a sort of second niche that I am kind of working in, I started my career the software company that I worked for when I left university was in the hospitality space, and it was funny because I had no software or technical experience. I came from a communication background, but my first job was in customer support and I was like taking apart computers and putting them back together, and I learned all of that on the job. But it was in a space that I understood because I worked my way through university in hotels and restaurants. So I understood the industry very well, having worked in, you know, as a waitress over the course of you know, all of my young adulthood, and so one of the industries that I'm finding my way back to which I am really excited about is also in the hospitality space, because, when you think about it, very little is done to invest in sort of frontline hospitality workers for these types of life skills. These are often very temporary jobs, unless you're in Europe where it is more of a profession. I mean, people actually go to school to train to be in the hospitality industry. That's not the case in the US. You know it's just sort of a job you fall into.
Speaker 2:But the most important aspect to any hospitality business is the service that they provide, and in order to provide excellent service, people need to be able to show up as the best versions of themselves, and most service is bad when people aren't. And so I woke up one day with this idea that what better way to help you know service workers which is a really an industry that's struggling right now to attract talent that will stay and take on those roles is to also invest in those people's skills beyond just the practical skills of waiting tables, but help them build life skills. I think that builds loyalty with the business they're working for and it also builds a better relationship with the customers that these businesses are trying to serve. So that's another niche that, because of my background in that area, I also have a lot of relationships in that space and I love it. I've always loved the hospitality industry, and so that's another area that I'm focusing on as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, interesting, you mentioned your network and relationships a couple of times, so let's talk about that as we bring things to a close. So you've been in Germany several years. You've worked at least two. You know well a mid-sized organization that became a big organization, then a mid-sized company. How, like, what does marketing look like for you? Like sales and marketing, you're a B2B business, you're selling into organizations, so is it a lot of just leveraging your network here in Germany?
Speaker 2:Yeah, at the moment it is, and I would say what's ironic is, as a career marketer I do my marketing is very rudimentary, for the business as well, and I think the part of that is that my real focus is on connecting with people and trying to figure out how to help them solve whatever is challenging in their career, in their lives or in their businesses, and so I haven't invested much in the way of email marketing or these types of things, and I know that's something that is necessary for 2024 and it's on the plan.
Speaker 1:But is it if you have a? I mean, isn't it if you have a B2B business? What would I mean? And I'm not saying I have the answer, but what would email marketing look like?
Speaker 2:What email marketing would look like is creating a captive audience from sort of my LinkedIn community, let's just say An audience that I own.
Speaker 2:This is a challenge with LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn as platform. It is, I would say, 100% of my channel strategy at the moment, which is dangerous and great right. The danger of having all efforts go into this single channel is that when LinkedIn makes serendipitous and whimsical changes to their algorithm, they do a lot. You see, your reach sort of plummet. And the interesting part about that is since the beginning, or since, I would say, late spring of this year, I've grown my community or I hate the word follower so I really avoid using it and I've grown my community from like 3,500 people in my follower community to just over 5,000.
Speaker 2:And that's been a lot of active, intentional outreach activity to kind of build that community. The challenge is that on any given day a post might reach 300 people right, so less than 10% or yeah, less than 10% of the audience that I've built and that's not through part of it, I think is whether or not the content resonates. But it's even hard. Like I study the analytics, I really like to get geeky in the data to see okay, why is this post for porn, why isn't this for post?
Speaker 1:I have no idea. I have no idea. No rhyme or reason. I look at my. I'm like why that one and not this one? I just don't even try it.
Speaker 2:I feel like sometimes it's like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what's gonna stick.
Speaker 2:You're like, okay and in, even like a post that performs in one particular day, I'll wait a few months and I'll repost it because, even though I know that it hasn't reached the full scope of my audience and my audience has grown in the time doesn't perform at all right, so there's no rhyme or reason to it.
Speaker 2:So, coming back to the original question of why email marketing, part of it is building a subscriber audience that is opting in to hear things from me and will get that content from me, regardless of what LinkedIn does with their app. Yeah, okay, so that I can share knowledge or useful tips around leadership and team building, these type of topics, and know that the people who are in that audience are actively wanting to be in that audience and then hear what I have to say. And that's a part of the nurturing up of a lot of new connections that I make people who don't know me, and a lot of my clients right now are from the network of people who know me or people who know me right so it's that first degree, second degree of separation.
Speaker 2:Well, as they start to grow, the community I'm getting out into third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh degree of separation where they don't know me and my background and I haven't built sufficient authority and credibility with them to start having a meaningful sales conversation with them.
Speaker 2:So, they need to. I need to build that trust, I need to build that relationship and it's difficult to do that on LinkedIn when people aren't seeing your content consistently. It's very hit or miss and very haphazard right and I hate having to like actively push content to people inside of LinkedIn because I don't know if that's what they really want. I don't know if they really want to see it. So that's part of why I think email marketing is an important next step for me in 2024 to build that more captive audience who is?
Speaker 2:interested in the free knowledge that I'm sharing without being constrained by the filtering mechanism.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, yeah. So two questions. Can you talk a little bit about how you grew your community from up to what? Did you say Like 20?
Speaker 2:Just over 5,000. Yeah, yeah, just shy, of 5,100.
Speaker 1:Yeah, OK.
Speaker 2:So I think some of it has been organic through. Just I try to post consistently. And it's hard, but I do, you know. I would say most consistently four days a week. I really always try to get up to five days a week.
Speaker 2:Very occasionally on the weekend only if some sort of silly inspiration hits me and I decide, oh, I'm just going to post this right now. So through consistent posting, I would say. But honestly, the majority of my new connections is coming through actively building lists of people who I think are good audiences for my content through LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, and so I have to build lead lists. In Sales Navigator. I look for interesting profiles, particularly in customer facing roles, people in sales or in customer service.
Speaker 2:I also have been expanding my Munich network just you know, I think that's how you and I came into contact with one another, just growing that Munich-based network as well and seeing if people bite. I mean a lot of people accept connection requests, which is surprising to me in a positive way. I'm always surprised at how many people say yes, but now I follow up with thanks for saying yes. I'm curious I'm pretty sure you don't accept blind outreach what made you say yes? And let's say, if I send 100 connection requests, let's say 30 or 40 of them are accepted which I think is not bad and then when I send that follow up, a good 5 to 10 will reply why they decided.
Speaker 2:So it gets down to that narrow where I've got at least a couple more people who are willing to engage in a dialogue and then it's just about getting to know people and so the audience of like 5,100 has grown because of that kind of intentional approach to outreach and I've made some really neat connections over the past few months with that. Incidentally, one of the people I reached out to in Munich this is a funny story I started this Munich outreach and people accepting, et cetera, et cetera. And then about a week later I was at a birthday party for a neighbor. I was sitting at a table with other people from our neighborhood at this birthday party and all of a sudden one of them turns with me and goes hey, you just connected with me on LinkedIn. So he actually was my neighborhood, lived like two doors down that we had not met yet because we had moved to this neighborhood last year in May but we hadn't yet met all the neighbors and so it was funny because we had just met on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've had experiences like that too, and I also use Sales Navigator and I really like it and I use it for all kinds of things. Like a lot of my clients are on LinkedIn and then I can just do a quick scan and make sure that I'm sharing and engaging with their content and just keeping in touch. I find it really great to use our interface a little bit clunky.
Speaker 2:But what I don't like is how messaging is so separated so I have to go into two different messaging platforms. Messaging never really once you're kind of, I would think once you're connected and you have that first communication it should move into your regular messaging.
Speaker 1:I actively don't do the messaging through Navigator because I always feel like I'm going to lose the thread if I have to go back in there and check. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But now I just treat it as two separate messaging platforms and then I think now, once I get to a certain rapport point, I move that conversation into LinkedIn. Traditional messaging OK, or email or anything like that but it is a weird interface but it's super useful. And you know what else I love about it just is a funny sidebar. I like being able to look people up without them knowing that I have looked them up.
Speaker 1:You're like speaking at their profile?
Speaker 2:Yeah, because sometimes you just want to see OK. Well, what's this person about? You don't necessarily want to expose that you're actively looking at the profile and so in Sales Navigator you can do that a little bit more on the slide.
Speaker 1:Stealth mode Right.
Speaker 2:That's handy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ok, one, well, two last questions. So do you do work exclusively in English, or? I mean, I know all your marketing in English? Ok, and have you felt that's a hindrance, or is it fine?
Speaker 2:Well, maybe it's a hindrance, I don't know. I think it's fine Because most of my clients are global and that is the target and, to be honest, I'm not sure if most of the very traditional German companies and German career professionals are receptive to this work that I do. Yet that's my statement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, OK, now I have a whole nother podcast on that. No, I do understand. I mean, I think one of my very first, when I was at Sapient for 10 years and when I was like a junior designer. One of the first accounts I was on and this was a long time ago it was T-Online, and I remember being like this is weird, it's a very different.
Speaker 1:Everybody was here and frown and this I mean it very well. May not be like that anymore, but then I started. I went to Vodafone. I would say it was in Telcom for a lot and that was like international, although it was a totally different vibe. Yes and yeah, that was just very noticeable to me.
Speaker 2:Yes and also, and just from a very practical perspective, the assessment tool that I use is not translated into the data at this point as well. It's one of the things I'm working with them on to come over the budget of what it would be required, but it really does require a decent command of the English language to understand the questions and then understand the assessment. It's not that it's complicated, but it's above a fifth grade reading level. It requires a little bit of English experience. So it's really global businesses is my target for that.
Speaker 1:OK, and also that my German is not that good. Ok Also. Yeah, well, Also that Lifelong learning in German. So just to wrap up, I would ask you what advice would you give anyone who's either starting or running a business in Germany?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. I would say get help. I found the two pieces of advice. First is get help. I found that the bureaucratic, just like the whole process of finding the business, was extremely complex. But I had made the decision early on to work with a third party who specialized in helping startups navigate the complexities of finding the notary and setting up the business paperwork and doing all of the things that needed to happen in those steps. I outsourced that and I was very, very glad that I did. It was worth every penny that I paid to do that Because that experience was so good. I also used the same company, who has a large network of other service providers to find a lawyer who could help me with some of my contract stuff, to find an accountant, et cetera, et cetera. I leveraged some of their other ancillary services to work with their other partners. It was fine for the lawyer where the accountant was concerned. That turned out to be a huge mistake huge. It set me back for quite a bit working with a faceless AI driven which I didn't know that that was the case at the time large accounting firm that specializes in startups but was the most atrocious, problematic experience that I had had, so much so that I ended up really getting stuck and then calling around just to different accountants here locally in Munich to try to find somebody who would, out of the kindness of their heart, take me on as a client, Because also right now it's difficult to find accountants because there's no underwater with
Speaker 2:all these changes in the tax code. It's a hard time to be an accountant and it's a hard time to find an accountant. So I would say, don't wait to do that. Start that process immediately when you decide that you're going to open your own business, really actively seek to find a qualified accountant who speaks your language, who understands what you're trying to do in your business and who can be a real relationship partner for you. Because that was a real problem for me and I learned that lesson very, very much the hard way.
Speaker 1:Okay, you just did me a huge favor because I have a Stoja Brogatter. But I sort of was thinking and he's fine, they're great, it's all good, but there's a lot of these tools now and I was like, well, maybe I'm spending thousands of euros on this guy and they do the book haul, doing everything, but maybe I could just use one of these apps. So maybe I also know how hard it is to find somebody. So I'm like I don't know, I should not. And he took me on because of a friend of mine. He's like, okay, I'll take her on, and my brother-in-law did it before and he had done it for years. Anyway, I'm just like I think I'm probably a fool if I let go of my Stoja Brogatter.
Speaker 2:Really, because even these tools require a fair amount of work from your part and they may be cheaper, but in this case, I think it doesn't translate really into time savings for you, and this is one of those moments where, a long time ago, a friend told me actually we're moving to Germany. We had all these logistics, things to manage.
Speaker 2:And I was like I want to hold a yard seal to get rid of our stuff and do all this. And my friend was like Gretchen, throw money at the problem wherever you can. Yeah, Like find those things and like don't, and think about every hour that you spend as money as value that you can be delivering elsewhere. And that's where I look at these things like accountants and lawyers and think, okay, that's not my area of expertise. I could invest a lot of time to get okay at it, but I'm never going to be that good and it's always going to cost me more money from time from my business than it will. The money that I'm going to pay them to do it and the peace of mind is worth so much so yeah, yeah, it's true.
Speaker 1:I feel like there's a lot of paperwork, even when you hire somebody to do it? Yes, but that's always going to be the case, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So that's my advice for new business Okay, okay, great, start early. Throw money at the problem wherever you can. Okay, well, on those words of wisdom, I will say thanks so much for coming on the podcast, and it was really great talking to you. It was a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, you're welcome.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. You can find this episode and all other episodes of the Germany expat business show at my website at wwwellonormiohofercom. That's wwwellonormiohofercom. See you next time.