EP.8 Sue B. Zimmerman | MODERN ONTRAPRENEUR

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EPISODE 8
SUE B. ZIMMERMAN: SUEBZIMMERMAN.COM

Also known as #TheInstagramExpert, Sue wears the moniker well as creator of the online Instagram course “Ready Set Gram.” She's passionate about teaching entrepreneurs and marketing professionals to easily leverage the power of Instagram to get tangible business results. With her extensive knowledge of social media and 30+ years of business experience with companies including SueB.Do, Boxer Rebellion and Sue B. Zimmerman Enterprise, her mission is to teach, mentor and empower others to be highly successful entrepreneurs.

IN THIS EPISODE

Instagram isn’t just for product-based businesses. It’s adaptable to any business — even consulting. Sue has long advocated for the social media platform as a marketing tool. She hit $1 million in sales her first year of running Boxer Rebellion by marketing on the ubiquitous photo platform. As attention spans get shorter and shorter, Sue continues to master visual storytelling to expose her authenticity and that of her countless satisfied clients. During her much-anticipated visit at MODERN ONTRAPRENEUR, she shared that wisdom with ONTRAPORT CEO Landon Ray.

JUMP TO TOPIC

1:03 - Be Confident You’ll Fail
Channeling this energy has carried Sue through 18 different businesses.

2:48 - From Consumer Products to Online
Sue harnessed the power of Instagram to skyrocket her Cape Cod retail business.

4:18 - Instagram and Consultancy
Every business has a visual story, and Instagram is your vessel for telling it.

4:54 - Finding your Entrepreneurial Center
The key to a low-stress business is found in processes and prioritization.

6:44 - Kitesurfing
Even an East Coast entrepreneur can make time for a new hobby.

8:01 - A Mother With No Burnout
“No one’s gonna fire you if you’re an entrepreneur.”

10:20 - Overcoming Camera Fright
Get over your looks; it’s the content people want.

12:00 - Follow the Trends of Teenagers
Only by adopting the latest trends will you be competitive in the battle for attention.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

LR Welcome to MODERN ONTRAPRENEUR. Today we have Sue B. Zimmerman who is the Instagram expert and the creator of online Instagram course Ready, Set, Gram. She's passionate about teaching entrepreneurs and marketing professionals to easily leverage the power of Instagram to get tangible business results with her extensive knowledge of social media, 30-plus years of business experience with companies including Sue-B-Doo, Boxer Rebellion and Sue B. Zimmerman Enterprise. It's her mission to teach, mentor and empower others to be highly successful entrepreneurs. Thanks so much for being here.

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SUSAN B. ZIMMERMAN

Instagram was the jam of getting people in the door at my store, hands down. All my employees did it. I had a team of seven. People would walk in and say, "I want to buy this." They're like, "Yeah, I saw it on Instagram."

SZ You nailed it.

LR Okay. You guys didn't see that I had to do that four times. Let's just dive in. Your unique skillset, what do you think it is and how has it contributed to your success?

SZ I think being an entrepreneur from a young age, like 13, and having confidence. Like confidence to walk into any situation and not worry or care about what people think about me but just being my authentic self and the energy around who I am.

LR What does that get you, confidence? Apart from being willing to put yourself out there, how does that impact your results?

SZ Because I think when you are willing, like the confidence to try something new and understand that you're going to fail and learning from what you don't know. For me, because I've had so many different businesses, I've had 18 different businesses.

LR Eighteen.

SZ Yeah, and I just kind of had the confidence of knowing when to stop, when to move, when to start and just...it's worked to my advantage.

LR Yeah. I totally agree. I think that confidence is absolutely the crucial thing. I feel like I don't know if it's something that you can create in somebody.

SZ It's in the DNA, yeah.

LR I feel like I was just lucky. I don't know what happened, but for me it's felt like that it's kind of willing to take a risk, be willing to look stupid, to ask the stupid question and just being willing to ask those questions and not know and be wrong kind of has allowed me to progress where I think a lot of people stop.

SZ Yeah, and for me it's always progress, not perfection. I don't cross the T's and dot the I's. I spell words wrong and go back and edit. It's okay. It gets me to the next place. Yeah.

LR Yeah. Interesting. You've grown your business now to a significant size. How long have you been doing this one?

SZ This online space, I knew nothing about it four years ago.

LR Four years.

SZ When I say online space, prior to that consumer products. I had my first million dollar business when I was 22.

LR Twenty-two?

SZ Printed boxer shorts, selling them all over the college campus, to Disney and that ... Yeah, it was a really fun business. I wore boxer shorts all day. It was great. Just moving into the next trend and opportunity. I'm kind of like Malcolm Gladwell with the tipping point. I know what's happening next before mainstream. I see things before they happen.

LR Interesting.

SZ I knew that Instagram was going to be a big thing before other people took it on as a social platform. Because of that I also knew that I wanted to teach it because I had success using it in my store. I had a store on Cape Cod that I used it at. The past four years I've been committed to teaching other business owners how to have the same kind of success that I've had in my store.

LR Yeah, that's your primary way of getting customers now too, I presume.

SZ Yeah, Instagram was the jam of getting people in the door at my store, hands down. All my employees did it. I had a team of seven. People would walk in and say, "I want to buy this." They're like, "Yeah, I saw it on Instagram." I knew that it was powerful. I was teaching social media when I didn't have my store on the Cape off-season.

LR Does it work for businesses, I mean it makes good sense for hard goods business and ...

SZ Every business.

LR Every business. You're talking about a consultancy. How do you use Instagram in a consultancy?

SZ You show company culture. You show visually, everyone has a visual story. I like to say it's kind of like your magazine of your business. The energy around your business visually.

LR Yeah. Interesting. Looking back, you could say four years with this business or even farther back as an entrepreneur in general, we all learn so much. I certainly look back and say, "God, I could have done this so differently and been so much farther along if I had just known then what I know now." What is that thing for you if you could kind of whisper in your own ear 10 years ago, what would you have done differently?

SZ Understanding systems, really systematically approaching things and having a step-by-step process, like the processes around it. Because I'm definitely the entrepreneur with 100 ideas and I want to do them all and they're all in different places and they're not organized and I don't know which one to prioritize because I want to do all of them. I think just really understanding modern systems especially.

LR How would that have helped you? How would that change your results?

SZ I don't know if it would have changed my results because I always hire people to do what I just am not good at. I think I'd be even more productive, more organized, maybe less stressed, a little bit more centered, a little bit more presence because I was always having my hands in different things and I didn't necessarily need to always do that. This is the conundrum of an entrepreneur, I think, in general.

LR Which is how to balance ...

SZ Just how to balance it all. I think balance, letting go of certain things, having systems, believing that there are other people that can take care of it and take care of it for you so that you can focus on what you're good at.

LR Yeah. It's interesting you just said I'm always hiring people, and the person we had on our last episode talked about what she mentioned she would have done differently is to hire earlier. It sounds like, what are your thoughts on that?

SZ I've been really lucky. Morgan who works for me who's certified in ONTRAPORT who was here last year, she is, she has a degree in engineering and a Masters in Management Engineering. She's someone that I knew, she was my daughter's best friend when she was 10.

LR I didn't know that was even a thing, management engineering?

SZ GW, she's brilliant. I hire really well and so I have the team that takes care of the things that I'm not good at.

LR All the things.

SZ She's my ONTRAPORT gal, yeah and teaches me a lot.

LR Yeah. Very good. That's kind of what you have learned. What's next? What do you want to learn next in your life?

SZ Next in my life? I'm really inspired, I heard someone talking about kitesurfing.

LR Kitesurfing, like ...

SZ That sounds fun.

LR Like John Kerry.

SZ I used to teach water skiing. I'm a good skier. I have great balance. I've never gone kite skiing.

LR I haven't either.

SZ It looks fun.

LR It does.

SZ It's a California thing I think.

LR They're all over the place out here.

SZ I'm an east coast girl, so that's just something I've never done.

LR Do you feel like, do you invest a lot of time in learning still?

SZ Yeah, absolutely. I am a lifelong learner and I am constantly listening to podcasts. I don't listen to the radio much.

LR Really?

SZ Yeah. I always think there are other people that know so much more than I do and there's always room to grow and improve and scale my business, scale my business. This is the business that has the most scalability of any business that I've had because of the automation of it.

LR Yeah, everybody needs it. Not everybody needs boxer shorts.

SZ Everyone loves boxer shorts. The problem with the boxer shorts is that it got saturated. The industry got saturated.

LR Everybody had all the underwear they needed.

SZ I was right there with Joe Boxer. It was him and I. We were the forefront of the boxer. It was called Boxer Rebellion.

LR Boxer Rebellion.

SZ It's a big deal. Yeah.

LR That's awesome. You've got 18 businesses under your belt. You've got to start thinking about what's it all for?

SZ Yeah.

LR What do you want your legacy to look like?

SZ Yeah, so I have three daughters.

LR Three daughters.

SZ I have twins in college and one that's graduated and for me my legacy has always been to be a great role model for them and for them to see a mother that never came home from work and said, "Can't wait to have a drink," or "It's the weekend, let's go." For me I was always doing what I was passionate about. Having them see that has been really an important part of being an entrepreneur, but the legacy now, because now I'm not selling things.

I was selling products. Now I'm changing lives, helping people have success in their business, making more money. The emotional feeling, and I didn't even know the Zig Ziglar or the Tony Robbins that kind of mantra that they deliver about just helping other people, I didn't even know that feeling existed from all my other business until I came into ...

LR Yeah, because underwear isn't like that.

SZ No, because when you help other people, when you help other people have success and be happier, the feeling of that is priceless. That legacy for me is really what I thrive on.

LR Awesome. What a thing it is when people come and share with you like, "Oh my God, this one thing that you told me ..." or "The support that I've gotten from you ..." or even the example, right? Has changed my business or ...

SZ Yeah. Whether it's giving them more confidence to be themselves or teaching them social media so that they can put themselves out there and do live video. I always say no one's going to fire you if you're an entrepreneur, so just do it. It's okay. I think people are afraid. Again, just taking all my experiences, my character, my stories that I've had from my past life and being able to create content around that now and share it and inspire and educate and encourage other people has just been the driving force behind what I'm doing now.

LR Yeah. How do you get people over their fear of being on camera or in photos?

SZ You show them how to take a really good selfie using hotel filter which is natural light. I'll show you later. You just say to them people aren't following you because you have a perfect smile or because you're gray or because you have wrinkles. It's the content. Get over how you physically look and understand that if you're brilliant and you have a message to share, that that's what people want.

LR That process of kind of getting over that is transformational in itself, I'll bet.

SZ Absolutely.

LR Yeah. Well good. We call this thing MODERN ONTRAPRENEUR. What do you think it means to be a modern entrepreneur?

SZ For me it really means to follow the trends of the teenagers. I believe ...

LR The teenagers.

SZ Oh yeah. They set the mobile trends.

LR Interesting.

SZ Every one of them.

LR Are you on Musical.ly?

SZ I'm not doing it but I'm very aware of it. For me, so the trends that I can give good concrete examples are my daughters, when they were on Instagram scrolling and I look at them, I'm like, "What are you guys doing? You're not even tapping or on the phone." They're like, "Mom, we're on Instagram. Don't get on it because then you're going to teach." It's like challenge taken, doing it. Done, good. Now it's SnapChat.

LR SnapChat.

SZ It's like where are the teenagers hanging out and why? It's because of the way that they process information and how quickly they process it and how can you take those habits how they consume content and interpret it into your business? I'm really good at doing that and teaching people how to do that for their business. I'm not saying get on SnapChat. That's not what I'm saying.

LR Right. No, Instagram.

SZ Well, Instagram and SnapChat, it's all part of that visual video photo opportunity. Everyone is competing for the same kind of attention. How can you give it to them quickly? How can they consume it quickly and how can it be memorable so that they know, like and trust you and want to do business with you?

LR Yeah. Very interesting. It's for you, modern entrepreneurship is a lot about noticing ...

SZ Noticing the trends.

LR Move fast. Everything's changing all the time and being able to sniff out what's next and then jumping on it and exploiting the opportunity.

SZ Yeah. I'm an early adapter to everything. I was on Periscope as soon as it hit. I have 21,000 followers on Periscope. I have a big audience there. Facebook Live, hands down I understand the power of video, the power of video. Modern marketing, I really feel you cannot hide behind a camera. People like your smile, they like your accent or not, they like your mannerisms or not. They can tell if you're authentic and real and that you make mistakes and it's okay, right?

LR Right. It's kind of like about exposing your real authenticity.

SZ Yeah, I believe that that is the power of the future in modern marketing.

LR There it is. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here.

SZ You're welcome.

LR Will you sign our wall?

SZ Yeah. Can I draw on it? Where is it. Right here?

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