How April Dunford Built a 7-Figure Solo Consulting Biz

The Hard Shove That Started It All

April Dunford: Really, really bad job. Okay, the last one was what’s the worst?

Louis: In what way?

April Dunford: Really terrible. Terrible. CEO, like a CEO was just awful. And I was really committed to that job. I was deep into it and in my opinion did some very, very good work there and then was utterly not appreciated. And in a way that was just kind of terrible. And I had given up a lot to take that job. I took that job at significantly under market rates based on a promise that the CEO had made to me. And then the CEO just blatantly broke that promise promise and didn’t care. And so it was a terrible experience. It was heartbreaking experience. And it was good in that I needed that good hard shove to get out and say, okay, I’m done, I’m done doing this. Yeah, not doing this again. Whereas I had some not great jobs before that, but this one was so bad and it ended so badly that it was like, okay, that’s it, I’m done. And I think without that, I probably just would have gone and got another VP marketing job somewhere. That was the main thing. The second thing was that I was starting to think about what happens to April in her old age. Man, I’ve done this VP marketing thing seven times at seven different venture backed companies. Am I going to keep doing this? Is this all there is? Maybe I go do something else for the golden years of my career. And so I was doing some thinking about that too. But I will say the big, the big shove that got me out was this really shitty job. And it was just like, okay, that was bad. I’m not doing that again. I’m done slamming the door and it ain’t opening again. That’s it finished.

Louis: Okay, thanks for sharing that. So in 2015, you started Turn your own. And you don’t have to share the details per se, but financially in your personal life, did you feel secure enough or did you feel like a risk?

Financial Security and Starting Consulting

April Dunford: Yeah. So that’s part of the joy of doing this when you’re older is you’ve already made a reasonable amount of money. And I had not the last job, which was bullshit, but the jobs before that, I had been fairly compensated. Ish. Not bad. So I had been saving my money for 25 years, and so I could afford to have a couple of years where I wasn’t making all that much money. And the reality was, if consulting didn’t work out, I could make no money for a couple of years. And then I could just put up my little pinky and say, okay, I’m available. Hire me as VP marketing, and I get another job in 10 seconds. Like, there’s just not that many people. So it didn’t feel risky to me at all. This is very different than where I was at in the early part of my career. I didn’t even consider consulting back then because I was broke and in debt. I needed a job. Different situation. But I’m old.

Louis: How much in debt were you when

April Dunford: I came out of university?

Louis: Yeah, like, what’s the highest amount? I would say, like, were you in the hole the most? Like, what was.

April Dunford: Like, I’m really old, so the number’s not going to sound that big. But it felt big to me at the time. So I had paid for my own university because my parents thought university was a dumb waste of money. And so I went to university and paid for that. And at the end of that, I think I was 50 grand. I think I would. Americans would be laughing at me because you wouldn’t even pay for a year of school with that now. But this was back in the 90s, so I owed 50 grand and I had nothing. And interest rates were 12%. So 50 grand at 12% felt like a lot.

Louis: I’m googling cost of living calculator. So I’m just gonna pick, let’s say 1995.

April Dunford: I felt very broke, I’ll tell you that. Like, it wasn’t like these people in the United states.

Louis: Wow. So 100 grand, basically.

April Dunford: Yeah. It’s not like these people in the United States that come out have hundreds of thousands of dollars debt. But the flip side of that too is like, it’s not like I had some big rich family that was going to bail me out. And any of this stuff. Like, that was my debt, right?

Louis: Yeah. So you didn’t come from a very affluent background. You didn’t come from like any of that. So at the time then you were like in debt out of college and you had to pay it off. And so you worked your ass off in the industry for all.

April Dunford: Yeah.

Louis: More than two decades until the end. Where you felt financially secure, financial secure in your personal life and everything. You have kids. Right. As well.

April Dunford: And to be clear, I didn’t want to run a business. That was never my goal. My goal when I came out of university was I wanted to be VP Marketing at a Fortune 500 company. That was my goal after my first job. And I discovered marketing was my thing. That was my goal for the longest time. And then I got this job at IBM and I was really senior at the end. And then I was kind of like, I didn’t quite get the VP title, although I was like in line for the VP title. And so it essentially made it. And I was like, well, shit, now what? And I had a few years where I was like, I don’t really know what the goal here is anymore, but I’m really good at this thing. So I just kept doing it. VP marketing, whatever. Up until I had this last really bad one. And that was like, okay, I ain’t doing this anymore, so I got to do something else. And consulting seemed like the natural evolution of something to do next or at least something to try. So it wasn’t like I was dying to be a consultant my whole career. I wasn’t. I was quite happy being the VP marketing.

Louis: Gotcha. Okay, so that puts things into perspective for 2015. So in 2015, you start working with clients and in these two years time frame, you still have this nagging feeling. The offer or the engagement wasn’t. You just. It was chaos.

The Chaotic First Two Years

April Dunford: So it wasn’t a nagging feeling, man. It was blatant. It sucked.

Louis: Right? But it sucked. Did it sucked in terms of the finance of it? Did it suck in terms of your mental health and the anxiety that comes with it? How did it suck the big thing?

April Dunford: What I was worried that I was kind of wasting my time. That was my big worry is the engagements were all different, the clients were all over the map and none of it felt good. Like you get to the end. And I wasn’t. I didn’t feel like I was really smashing the thing. And I wanted to get to that. I had this thing. I actually went on vacation to the beach at the end of yearabouts and I was sitting on the beach and I was like, what do I want out of this thing? And I drew this little Venn diagram. It was like three circles at one circle. Was doing my best work. Like, not just okay work, like, my best work, I want to wake up in the morning and say, I am, like, right in my zone of excellence would do my best work. And so I do a circle around that. And then the second was I want to be a little bit picky about clients, so I want to work with good people. And, you know, in startups, we got all kinds, and not everybody’s.

The Beach Epiphany and Three-Circle Framework

Louis: That’s a nice way to say most. Most startups are.

April Dunford: But, yes, not everybody’s great to work with. Right. So I wanted to put this circle around, like, good people. So it was my best work. Good people. And then the last circle was I wanted to get paid what I was worth. And so it wasn’t just about maximizing revenue, but it was kind of like I wanted to get paid what the work was worth because I had felt like in some of the startups I worked with, particularly the last one, I was getting paid way below my impact on the business. And even in the previous companies, you know, you’re always working for stock options and stuff, but there’s a million ways for your stock options not to work out. And so I felt like in the previous 25 years, I hadn’t actually been paid what I was worth. And so I put that circle in there, too. And that’s part of what helped me get really focused down into. I need to just be doing positioning work, because I’m actually not amazing at all the things. I’m actually just amazing at that. So I need to figure out how I do that with a company in a way that has a really big impact. And that was kind of what got me unstuck from doing a little of this and a little of this messaging stuff and some strategy stuff and a little of this and that and whatever.

Louis: So I actually drew your Venn diagram. So to repeat what you said, because it’s very important, your best work, what are you the best at? Something that pays well. That pays what you’re worth. And with good people. Yeah. I think what helped for you, if I look from an outside perspective, is that you knew what you were very good at. And a lot of folks starting out consulting who don’t have the experience that you have, they don’t know what they’re good at. Right. And so the rest doesn’t matter, even if they work with good people. And whatnot, they still do what you did with your hand there, which is a bit of everything and all of that. So before I dive in a bit more into the switch and when you started to change your offer, what’s the one advice you’d give folks listening who don’t have necessarily the hindsight that you had about this is what I’m the best at to actually figure it out.

Finding Your Zone of Excellence

April Dunford: So I think there’s a handful of things. So one is most people, I think, don’t give themselves enough credit for the thing that they’re really good at. So they’ll say, oh, yeah, I know how to do that, but so does everybody else. But if you think about your work that you do all day in your job, what’s the thing that everybody comes and asks you about? What’s the thing you get asked to do over and over again because they think you’re pretty good at it, you can start with that. And then the second thing I would tell you is that most marketing jobs are very broad. Like, you’re doing a lot of different things, and so you can get really good at something very narrow in a pretty short period of time by just focusing on it and studying it and learning a lot about it and doing a lot of engagements on it. So I had a friend of mine, and I think about him a lot, Alan. And he was doing a fractional chief product officer job. And these fractional jobs are generally not great. And so he was doing a lot of clients, and he was getting frustrated with that. And he said, I think I need to pick an area of specialization. And he pulled out this thing at the time, the product managers, there was this training, it was called the Pragmatic Marketing Institute or something. And they had this diagram, and it was like 59 little boxes of all the things a product manager does. And he told me he threw a dart at the chart and it landed on this box that said win loss Analysis. And he said, win loss analysis, perfect. It’s a thing we’re supposed to do. We never do it internally. It’d be great to bring a consultant in to go do it. And he, in three years, he was the absolute king of wing loss analysis, running a great big agency, doing all kinds of money on it. Amazing. And globally, I could go anywhere we get talking about win loss analysis. People would say, I know a guy, and the guy was always Alan. And so I think that you start with something that maybe you’ve already got a head start on. You like it, you’re good at it, you Know some stuff. And then I think you can develop some IP around that. Like he developed a system around it. Like, how should we be doing wind loss analysis? The average company doesn’t think that much about wind loss analysis, but when they need it, right. So then Alan shows up and talks super intelligently about it and says, here’s the methodology, here’s how we’re going to do it, here’s how I’m going to go. And he had a bunch of people who could call in and help you get it done, blah, blah, blah. Essentially, my stuff is the same. I had done seven, eight companies and inside those companies I positioned maybe 16 products in total. But you look at where I’m at Now, I’ve done 200 since I started. There’s nobody on the planet that’s positioned 200 things. By the time you get to 200, who’s going to touch you? Nobody.

Louis: That’s great advice. So let’s maybe identify the turning point. Right. So you’re on the beach. You did this kind of Venn diagram thing and for you it was clear. So it was positioning you had in mind maybe a minimum engagement. You wouldn’t work for less than X money or what was it like this second part?

April Dunford: Yeah, I. The money thing was funny because I was so worried about the engagement and I just figured once I could figure out what the engagement was and I could figure out what people would pay for it. And so at the beginning I was doing these very long convoluted engagements which included a whole bunch of customer research and interviewing everybody on the executive team and blah, blah, blah. And these things were very long. And so I had.

Louis: How long are we talking about?

April Dunford: I had a bunch of big aha moments doing those. So one was, it’s very different how this worked if the company has a sales team or they do not. So if the company does not have a sales team, then nobody actually talks to customers when they’re in the middle of a purchase process and they know nothing. Nothing. They have to go do research to find out all of it. Whereas if the company has a sales team knows a bunch of stuff, you got to pull it out of them. But the sales team knows a bunch of stuff. They know who you get compared to. They know what the status quo is in an account. And if we have a sales team, I can pull it out of them. So I didn’t actually have to go research. Customers go get that if they had a sales team. So I changed the engagement and I stopped saying yes to companies that didn’t have sales teams. I said, you guys, I think I did one because it convinced me they had the research to do it. And that actually worked out and ended up being a good engagement. But 99% of the companies that call me that don’t have a sales team don’t know the answer to the questions we need to answer in order to do positioning. So I just got rid of those guys. So that was one thing. So I started getting really picky about who I worked with. One was, you know, I had that circle that said good people. If I got the bad feeling in a qualifying college, said, no.

Louis: Okay, tell me more about that.

Client Qualification and Red Flags

April Dunford: And I tried not to worry too much about the money. I just said, no. Because the problem is, is those kind of folks aren’t going to be happy no matter what you do.

Louis: Yeah. And they’re not going to pay you on time.

April Dunford: They’re going to be like, man, it

Louis: was okay, tell me about this, because that people really struggle with this. And again, I think you developed your. This intuition and this gut feeling over years of working with people. Right. And are you able to voice out the little things that make you say, so tell me more?

April Dunford: Okay, so here’s the big tell, in my opinion, is you’ll get the CEO that doesn’t want to admit there’s a problem, even though they’re calling you. I want to admit there’s a problem. So they get on the phone and they’ll say, business is great. Everything’s great. Things are really growing. Everything’s great. But maybe our positioning could be a little better. I don’t know. I don’t want to admit that it’s bad. And those folks are terrible clients if they don’t feel the pain. They don’t understand that there’s a problem. And so usually I just say, well, look, dude, if you don’t think it’s a problem, it’s not a problem. Who knows your business better than you? Nobody does. Don’t call me to come in to fix something that you don’t think is broken. But sometimes folks will hire consultants to come in and then disagree with everything the consultant does and then fire them or get rid of them or get to the end of the engagement and go, yeah, they suck. They didn’t fix anything because nothing was broken. So sometimes I get this vibe from a CEO that’ll come in and be like, sell me on what you can do. Because I don’t actually think there’s a problem. I’m like, no, I’m not here to sell you on anything. If you don’t think it’s a problem. I don’t think it’s a problem. Sometimes they’ll come to me and they’ll say, my VC said I had to talk to you. I get this a lot. Now the VC says we’re looking at April stuff and they worked with someone else in the portfolio. We think you should come. You should work with April. And they come in, they’re all cranky about it, and I’m like, look, if you don’t think you have a problem, I don’t think you have a problem. If you want me to tell the VC that I will tell the VC that you don’t have a problem. Nobody knows your business better than you, including the consultant. Particularly the consultant. I started saying no to all those people and my life was immediately better.

Louis: Okay, so sales focused. So they have a sales team. They are talking to customer every day. They have this knowledge. You don’t have to do the research.

April Dunford: So they had to be B2B.

Louis: So B2B.

April Dunford: They had to be B2B. They have to have a sales team. Those two things must be true. The third thing is that if they don’t have enough experience with customers, meaning they’re too new. Either they haven’t released yet or. Or they’ve just got a handful of customers, we don’t have anything to grab on to, position around. We’re just guessing. And so I don’t totally disqualify them. I just say, you’re not far enough along. Call me in six months. And so I dis. I started getting more at the beginning. I would work with some of those guys thinking, yeah, maybe we could figure it out. But now I just disqualify them and say, no, we don’t. There’s not enough for us to grab on and we can figure something out. But it’s just going to be theoretical and you’re not going to be happy when you have to change it six months from now. So let’s just not do it.

Louis: And let’s talk about your engagement in terms of the way you describe it, the way you started to sell 5 to 10k. So at the time you were focusing on B2B sales, B2B companies that were. That had the sales team, you knew how to recognize good clients, the ones that had enough customers to draw insight from whatnot. So those are the people that you were offering that engagement. And so how did it look like then, the 5-10k engagement compared to where it is now?

April Dunford: It’s not that different? To be honest, the engagement looks kind of the same. I think I’m a lot better at it, but I think the engagement looks the same. So one of the key things that I decided was that after working with folks on positioning as a consultant for a couple of years and thinking about how this worked when I was in house doing positioning, I don’t believe that a consultant can come in and do your positioning for you. I think that’s stupid because there’s no way the consultant would know enough about your business and the landscape and your customers and what’s value and what isn’t. Like even If I spent 2, 3 months interviewing your customers, I wouldn’t know nearly what the people in house that have been doing this stuff for years and years, like eat, sleep, breathe this stuff all day. So that was one thing. So my value is not doing the positioning. My value is I come with a methodology. That is my methodology. I understand how it works and I understand where it works and where it doesn’t work. And so I come in, we get a cross functional team together. We do two things. We work through the component pieces of positioning with me as the facilitator and with me as the outside person that can challenge people on the team and say, look, you’re saying this, but you’re saying that, and those two things are really different and we’re going to need to resolve that. So what I’m doing is getting agreement and alignment across the team on the component pieces of positioning. And then the last piece is we take that positioning and we translate it into a sales pitch. And those are the two things I’m doing. So I have a methodology for doing the positioning bit and I have a structure for doing the sales pitch bit and how to map one to the other. And those are two things that companies like, literally most of the companies I that come to work with me, they have been messing around with this stuff internally for six months, eight months, some of them longer than that. And they just need outside help to get unstuck. And that’s my job.

From Done-For-You to Done-With-You

Louis: Yeah, because they can’t see the forest from the trees anymore. Like to their benefit. They know so much of the industry, but it also has. There’s a problem with that. It’s because you know so much. You can’t fucking think for your customers anymore. You can’t simplify things. It’s just blurry, right?

April Dunford: Well, it’s the simplification. Like they know so much, but they don’t know how to start. So they’re trying to do a positioning exercise. But what they’re actually doing is brainstorming. They’re just getting everybody together in the room. And someone says, well, I think everyone loves our product for reason abc. And someone says, no, no, it’s not that. It’s X, Y, Z, and who’s right? It’s just a battle of opinions. And so if it’s a battle of opinions, the CEO wins, the head of sales wins. Occasionally, marketing never wins that discussion, like, ever. Product rarely wins. So having somebody come along and say, I’ve got a methodology, and it ain’t perfect, but it takes as much as the opinions as we can out of it because it builds step by step. It starts with something that we objectively know is true. And. And then we build on it step by step across that. And then we don’t just look at it intellectually like a bunch of marketers that are just going to go, right. Messaging. We’re going to take it and we’re going to translate it into a story that the sales team can use tomorrow to go pitch differently. And there’s huge value in that. If we can tighten up the pitch and we’ve already got a big pipeline of stuff coming into those sales reps tomorrow, you could be doing better business.

Louis: I want to go back to something because it’s so important. People in the consulting, freelancing world know mostly about those three options, like done for you, done with you, do it yourself. Right. This is the typical three kind of layers. And clearly the done for you. You learn that you can’t do it for them, as you said. Right. It’s such a strategic engagement. Positioning is probably one of the biggest decision you can ever make as a CEO or founder. Right. So you learn that you can’t. Right.

April Dunford: Yeah. You’re not going to outsource that to some rando.

Louis: Well, I mean, some do. It doesn’t work, but some do.

April Dunford: I know some do. And I think it’s. I think it’s a mistake. It’s a huge, huge mistake. A lot of those people come to me afterwards and they’re like, we were wrong.

Louis: Fix it. Fix it. So the do it with you is basically the engagements where you learn the value of facilitating instead of telling them this is what you need to do. It’s more like you bring it out of them and you guide them. And even though you probably have the certainty that, okay, this is what it must be you must be doing, you probably delicately bring it to the table by sometimes, right?

April Dunford: Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes. But I try to keep my opinions out of it, because again, I don’t know, right. So I try not to jump ahead in the process because generally when I do try to jump ahead, I’m wrong. It’s interesting how the thing actually comes out, you know, like, the place where I probably have the most sway is that I think teams have a really hard time wrapping their heads around differentiated value. And what’s the difference between a feature and value? And that doesn’t come naturally even to a lot of folks that are really experienced marketers. So I probably do the most kind of, you know, adjusting the team there where I’m like, I don’t think that’s value. Or I just keep asking the question, so what? Oh, we got this fancy AI thing. So, so what? Why does customer care? Well, because, you know, it’s going to save time doing that. Well, so what? Is that actually a big deal? I’m there doing a lot of that, but I’m trying to repress my opinions about what’s valuable to customers or not, because I don’t know. I don’t know better than the people in the room. The people in the room know better than me.

Louis: That’s so interesting because I think based on your experience in marketing, it’s easy for a lot of people to believe that they are gods and they know everything and they fuck it up this way. So they try to do it for you and they try to run down. So you’ve learned the hard way that you can’t do that. The other thing that you mentioned in part of your engagement that is so interesting is you’re literally able to translate this kind of abstract thing, which is discussions around the table or whatever, to something that, as you said, the sales team can do and test with tomorrow.

April Dunford: So your time value, right, you can walk out tomorrow and change something tomorrow instead of us. We’re all going to navel gaze. We’ll go through 9 million. Messaging takes a little bit longer. And I try not to get involved in a messaging because I’m not good at messaging. And so most of the teams that I work with, they’ve got somebody on the team that’s amazing at messaging. And so marketing is going to fool around a bit, taking that differentiated value and making the words really sing around that, and testing the landing pages and the copy on the homepage, all that kind of stuff. Sales pitch, on the other hand, like, 99.99% of the companies that come to me have a sales pitch that is absolute garbage. Absolute garbage. And nobody’s looked at it in ages. And we come out of there with a sales pitch that smacks. That is a big thing that we can walk out and stay.

Louis: But it’s the time to value, right? It’s so interesting to uncover because clearly this time to value, if consultants or anyone offering their knowledge can nail that part, it removes the risk and the decision from the client. Right. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to be yet another six months long fucking project. We gotta talk and talk and talk. It’s gonna take forever. And then at the end, we don’t fucking know what’s gonna happen.

April Dunford: Right. Well, think about it this way though. Part of what we’re getting in the room, if you think about what is the nasty hard part about messaging, is that nobody agrees. That’s the hard part. So we’re just getting the everybody agrees off the table. So we’re like, look, the words aren’t perfect, but can we all agree that our differentiated value here is this plus this? And getting everybody around a room to nod heads and go, yes, and then we go, okay, good. We’re not a bunch of copywriters, so we’re not going to group copyright this thing. We’re going to let the copywriters do their amazing thing and make their amazing copy. But are we all, but we’re all agreeing that conceptually these are the three points? Yes, they are. Okay, good. We’re done talking about it. We don’t need to come back and revisit this again. We’re all good. Companies spend months monkeying around because they can’t get agreement about this. And then they get it all down and then the head of sales goes, well, I don’t, I don’t get, I don’t like that. I don’t like point number two. I don’t like when you said, when you say that word, I don’t like it. But what they don’t like is the concept behind it. Same thing with the CEO. CEOs like, well, that’s not how I would say it. Right. So let’s get everybody in the room and let’s get it all out on the table and then let’s agree and then we’re all going to get around to go. Do we all agree? Yes, we do. Okay, good. Let’s shut up about it now. We’re going to pick it and stick it. We’re done arguing about it. Go.

Louis: How did you play with that pricing? How did you go from 5, 10k to like on your site? At the minute it’s 60k minimum. But I’m sure you charge more on certain products.

Building Platform and Pricing Evolution

April Dunford: Here’s the handful of things that happened. So one was I got really serious about disqualification. So, you know, you don’t have a sales team, you’re out. You don’t think, you have a problem, you’re out, you give me the bad vibes, you’re out. So I’m disqualifying a lot of people, which means I gotta have a pretty big, wide open funnel. Like I gotta have a lot of people coming in so that I could disqualify the majority of them. So at the time when I started, I was not a well known person. People didn’t know who I was. And so people knew me in Toronto because I had been vice president marketing at a bunch of tech companies. Here I had a pretty big network because I had worked at a bunch of US based companies too. So people kind of knew who I was. They didn’t know me as a consultant, they knew me as a VP marketing. And so I started to get serious about trying to raise my profile so that people could find me. So the first thing I did was I had always done a little bit of public speaking and I considered myself to be an okay public speaker. And so I really leaned into that and said, okay, speaking is, is a way for me to get on stages in front of people and talk about this stuff that I, I know and I could do a good informative talk. Then people would know me for this thing and then they’re going to call me. So I started doing a lot of that. I was fairly active at the time. I was really active on Twitter. Now I’m hardly active on Twitter at all. But at the time Twitter was big and a lot of CEOs were doing stuff on Twitter. So I was fairly active there. And I was doing a little bit of blogging. But I was pretty lazy blogger, to be honest, from the start. And then when I really nailed the methodology to do this thing in a workshop, I thought, well, I’m going to write a book. And then the book would be really useful because anybody who had a problem with positioning, I could just point them at the book. And then if you read the book, you would know exactly what you’re going to do with me. And either you’d say, yeah, this sounds good, I want April to come in and do it with us. Or they’d say, no, this is stupid. And they wouldn’t even bother calling me and then I wouldn’t have to disqualify. So I was really focusing on building my platform or I reach so that people knew who I was. And the big pillars of that were social media speaking. And then in 2019, I released the book. And that the book was a real game changer for me.

Louis: Tell me more about that. I don’t want to necessarily take the knife and just put it back where it was into the wound. I don’t remember how to fucking say that. The expression. But that year, that was the best and the worst. Was it because you were just. You worked yourself, you burnt out doing all of this? Did you feel strained in your personal life? And how did you know? How was it like?

The 2019 Book Launch and Burnout

April Dunford: So I way overextended myself on the marketing side of the equation. So I had really decided to smash my foot on the gas to get known. And then I wrote this book and it took me. Basically, the book was released in May 2019. So all of 2018, the book was coming and I knew it was coming. And it was this. It felt like this big deal, personal thing. And I was going to be really pissed if nobody ever heard about the book. It could be one thing. If people read the book and think it’s bad, that’s fine. You’re not going to make everybody happy. But if nobody reads the book because nobody even knew it existed, that’s really going to make me mad that I took all this time, wrote this book and whatever, and it just went because nobody knew it was there. And then, like I said at the beginning, nobody wanted me to do anything. So then I turned into the yes machine for a year and a half where you want me to do a thing. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I said yes to everything. So, one, I was traveling way too much, and I had not traveled much previous to that. And then I kind of went bananas for a year and a half and spoke at every conference everywhere. And so it was just like time zones and sleeping in hotels and when you’re not eating properly or working out properly because you’re traveling too much. And like, too much travel is just hard on you physically. So that was terrible. And then all these podcasts and everything else, I’m saying yes to everything. And my calendar is getting really jammed up. So I’m working. In the days where I’m not traveling, I’m working. I got super long days full of podcasts and things and, oh, could you write me a guest post and could you do this? And whatever. It was awful. And so at the beginning of 2020, February, I actually sat down and went, okay, I got to really rearrange My life here because it’s way too much travel and I gotta figure out how to not travel in 2020. This was February. I made this decision. And then it’s my fault, I guess, because then, you know, the world conspired to make sure I didn’t travel anywhere for a year and a half.

Louis: So then that was good because you were able to do less, obviously. No traveling. And you started to pick out the podcast you’d go on to or the webinars you’d take part in.

COVID Pivot and Going Enterprise

April Dunford: Yeah, so I started to get a little bit more picky about. I was still doing a lot of podcasts. I’m still doing probably too many podcasts now, but I am being a little bit pickier or at least spacing them out more so that it isn’t all just a giant pile of them all together. And then I stopped doing speaking altogether during COVID I did a couple that were virtual events, like a handful, and they were terrible and didn’t drive any business. So I was like, okay, this is an easy choice. I’m just going to stop doing these. I’m only now starting to do face to face events again. I did a handful last year. And then because I had, you know, I just released a book last week. So I’m doing a bit of speaking in support of that book now. It’s conference season. I’m doing a bit of that now. And then the other thing that was really interesting was that business started to really take off because all of a sudden people know me and so lots of clients are calling me and I was traveling. Every time I did a workshop with a company, I’d get on a plane to do that. March hits and we all go into lockdown. And I had five or six clients that were booked to do workshops with me. And I just called them all up and said, we’re not doing it. Cancel. Give everybody their deposit back. That was it. Because I was like, I don’t know how to do this remotely. But I had one of those clients came back to me and said, well, couldn’t we do it over zoom? And I was like, look, okay, I’m gonna charge you a little bit. That not my usual rate. Cause I don’t know if it’s gonna work. And we’re gonna do it as a test. It turned out it worked just fine. And so then I spent the next year doing way too many workshops because I could do one every week if I felt like it. Because I was just sitting around home, boarded my bored outta my tree. And so I did a lot of those, but the demand got so high because everyone was trying to reposition because of COVID And so the rates went up and, and again the whole thing is just this kind of virtual cycle. Like now lots of people know about me, so I’m getting a lot more demand, I’m getting more demand from bigger companies. So the rates went up again. So if you look at the kind of companies I’m working with now versus the kind of company I was working with five years ago, they’re pretty different.

Louis: You went enterprise ish.

April Dunford: Yeah, I still have, I would say 20, 30% of the companies I work with, I would say are series be startup. So they’re 10 million ish revenue, 20 million ish revenue in there. And then there’s a big bunch of companies I’m working with that are way bigger than that. I’d say pre IPO kind of 80, 100, 200 million revenue and then the occasional really big one. I did a bunch of work with Google and Epic Games. I love those guys.

Louis: Show off. You’re such a show off.

April Dunford: So it’s a bit of that. So but at the beginning I was doing tiny little series A Canadian startups. The result of me being everywhere and all over the place was now people know me and I’m getting opportunities that I didn’t get before because I got lots of clients in Europe, which is super cool. Where at the beginning like I was working with everybody I was working with really local.

Louis: And you went from lower than six figures to seven figure man. Money is testament to your hard work and the sacrifice that you made along the way. But my analysis of what you’ve done is you provoked kind of your own luck and you were at the right time, the right moment. Not only Covid happened and everyone was repositioning, but I think the other big trend that you served on was the fact that product marketing as a discipline is growing a lot because not everyone is into pouring endless amount of money into startups anymore. Like it seems to be going back to a bit of sense in terms of efficiency and actually we gotta listen to customers and shit. So you had the intersection of all of that and then on top of that you were at the right place. And your book and methodology is absolutely phenomenal.

April Dunford: Thank you.

Louis: Because it’s simple, but it’s so difficult to create something simple in that world. So you, you fucking smashed it. Right?

April Dunford: Thank you. But you’re right, like, and it’s important to point that out, like how much lucky things combine to make that Happen as well. If my book had come out in 2020 versus 2019, it would have been totally different because 2019 was peak conference. There was a thousand. There’s still not nearly as many conferences going on now as there was. 2019 was nuts. I did 50 speaking engagements in 2019, and let me tell you, there’s conference season. So that meant there were many weeks where I was doing two, three things,

Louis: you know, Jesus Christ.

April Dunford: And like, if it had been 2020, I don’t know how I would have promoted that book. I couldn’t go on the road and do conferences. The virtual conferences were stupid. That would have changed everything. And then, like you say, there was this. The thing about marketing is the pendulum swings. We swing from being very tactically oriented, tips and tricks. And we had just come off of 10 years of girls hacking fiddly tips and tricks. And the pendulum was really swinging back to fundamentals. Right? Like, let’s get back to the fundamentals. We really get what our differentiated value is. We really get what our target customer looks like, all that stuff. And there’s me sitting around at that time. The other thing was that I had done all this promo on the book, and then we went into lockdown, and everybody was reading books. Like, it was a great time to be a person with a book because people were all doing training courses and reading books and doing all kinds of stuff. And so that was good. Yeah. So you can’t kind of discount some kind of funky luck and timing and all of that too. Not that I didn’t bust my ass

Louis: exactly, but definitely help you.

April Dunford: Like, sometimes you bust your ass and nothing happens.

Louis: Exactly. I mean, you know that from past experience. The other interesting thing, I think for anyone who’s worried about focusing your attention, because as you described it, you, it’s only B2B tech companies with a sales team that have a CEO that knows. Right.

April Dunford: More than more than a few million revenue.

Louis: And yet. And yet. And yet, when you hear people talking about your book, most of them are not in that profile. And in fact, you wrote it first for tech companies. But in fact, so many people I know who are not at all in tech, nobody to have used it. Right? And to me, that’s a testament to the fact that even if you focus your attention on one thing, you can still build, as you described it earlier, like a massive pipeline of people who know you, who don’t necessarily fit that ideal profile. But you do need to reach them anyway, because then they know someone who works in that category. And therefore you could be the right fit. And so it’s not about saying no to everything from the distribution marketing side. It’s saying no to for the type of people you work with directly, but then spreading the message to pretty much everyone who wants to listen.

Vanity Metrics vs Business Results

April Dunford: Yeah. One thing I will say that I think I’ve gotten better at now than I was at the beginning is like when you’re doing a lot of content creation stuff and doing stuff on social media and promo stuff, it’s easy to get kind of caught up in things that are actually just vanity metrics, like how many likes did you get on the thing? Or how many followers do I have? And whatever. And if I was trying to optimize for some of that stuff, that would have been a waste of effort because who I’m trying to get at from a sales perspective is very narrow. So for example, when I did my year of 9 million speaking engagements, at the end of that I sat down and looked at, well, what are the types of events that actually drove me business versus the ones where, oh, everybody clapped and everybody loved to see me. And there was lots of people taking selfies, but I didn’t get any business. So when what I found was there were only a handful of marketing events, like less than a handful of marketing events where the senior marketers actually show up. And a lot of the marketing events are very junior folks in marketing that are there to learn. And yes, I can sell some books there, but no business is going to come from that because they don’t have influence in their organizations. They read the books, they do the stuff, maybe they grow up and be my clients someday. But I’m kind of old, so I ain’t going to be here forever. So I think I wasted a lot of time. If I look back at that 50 whatever speaking events I did that year, there’s probably 10 I could have taken off of there. That again, very good for my ego to stand on stage, get the applause, all that stuff. But was it actually driving any business? Maybe not. So since then I’ve gotten more focused on the places where I actually do show up. And there’s a handful of conferences that are the audience is, is tech startup CEOs, like I just came from business of software. This is a great conference for me. Like everybody there is very serious. It’s not a huge audience, but it is a high quality audience. And so people are really smart, really thoughtful. It’s a great place for me to be on stage.

Louis: So I love that you’re speaking this year.

April Dunford: Like that’s a Good group of people there. Every time I go there, I end up having good conversations and I end up with business. So that’s a good place for me to show up. And then there’s a lot of other ones that, yeah, maybe not. And occasionally I’ll throw one in because purely for fun, like, I’ll show it in, throw it in. Because I’m like, oh, I like Stockholm. Yeah, I’ll go there, what the hell, haven’t been in a while. But I’m trying to be more intentional about the place. I’m trying to get over my scarcity mindset when it comes to speaking and podcasting and all this stuff and learning to say no to some things that, you know, it would be fun and, and good or whatever, but not necessarily good for the business. Like my podcast, I’m very on the fence about it right now. So I have this podcast. Yeah, so I had this podcast and I decided I was doing all these things where I was a guest on a podcast and that seemed to work for me, but I was always getting asked the same few questions, like define positioning, what made you write the book, that kind of thing. And I thought, well, there’s all these other questions that people have that I never get to get into. So I’m going to do my own podcast and it’ll be this neat evergreen content that I’ll have on my site, but it also, you know, be good for business and blah, blah, blah. So I launched this podcast, I got these folks to do production with me to make sure it looks really good at the beginning. So I’m probably overpaying for that. And I launched this podcast and I’ve got this thing and I’m about 20 episodes in, so however many months that is. I think I started it in June maybe. And so I’m 20 episodes in and a lot of people say, well, I’ll commit to it for 20 episodes. That was me. Documentary for 20 hours. I’m 20 episodes in. And I don’t know, I don’t know. I can’t tell whether this is just good for my ego or if this is actually good for my business or what. So I know a lot of people are listening because my numbers look great. Like for a brand new podcast, numbers look great. I’m hitting all the charts. Like any way that you could measure how podcasts do against other podcasts. It looks pretty good for a brand new podcast. Anecdotally, I get a lot of people. Like I was doing conferences last week and people come up and say, oh my God, I love podcast. I listen to it, it’s so useful, whatever. But I have not gotten one bit of business that I think was really attributed to the podcast. And so I’m a little bit worried that this is little vanity project for me at this point. But for the money I’m spending on podcast production, which is not nothing, I would be better to focus that money and energy into doing something like, I don’t know, I should probably do a newsletter or something. But in doing something else that would actually drive some business. Because like the book, for example, I mean, there’s no question there. Did that drive business? Absolutely. Yeah. Barely cost me anything.

Louis: So, last question, and in 10, 20 seconds, if you want what’s next for April Dunfold in the next five years?

What’s Next for April

April Dunford: Well, I just released the second book which was. It’s this focusing on this. How do we take our positioning and translate it into a sales pitch? And so I’m really excited to have that bitch that. Sorry, that bit. I didn’t mean to say that. Sorry. I guess.

Louis: No, no, no, we’ll keep it.

April Dunford: I’m swearing.

Louis: Really? Yeah, really fixed it to get that bitch.

April Dunford: Get that bitch out there. But that’s been a bit of a missing piece to the puzzle. I had the previous book on how to do positioning and people would self serve and work through it themselves, but then they couldn’t do the sales pitch part and I was like, I know how to do it. I could teach you how to do it. Now I have a book so I can just point people at it. I’m amazed that this book doesn’t exist already. Like, the reason it’s called Sales Pitch is because there’s literally no other book out there called Sales Pitch. Anyway, so I’m excited about that. So the next year I’m in promo mode for that book. So I’m doing a bunch of public speaking, going around the conferences, doing all that kind of stuff. So I’m doing that and that’s going to be my big focus for the next couple of years. And then after that, I don’t know. I’m trying not to plan out too far because like I say, I’m old and I’m doing a lot of thinking about what happens when April doesn’t want to work for me full time at all anymore, what does that look like? And things like that. So I’m doing some thinking about April’s life outside of professional stuff right now. So that’s where my head’s at.

Louis: Interesting. Someone is going to build another cabin in the woods. Somewhere.

April Dunford: Yeah, thinking a bit. Yeah. But that actually is on my list of things.

Louis: See, I know you so well. You don’t know me at all, but I know you so well. April, you’ve been a pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing all of those little tidbits and secrets that I never heard before from you. Anyway, been super interesting and I could literally talk to you for hours. So thank you for your generosity as always. Thank you for what you’re doing in the world of marketing, making it a better place because at least what you do is fundamental for businesses. So I love it. And also thank you for showing being such an inspiration for folks who are not white men with beards who know that they can be like April one day. They can look up to that and say I could do my own thing in my own terms, working with people I like and being the center of attention in a specific category. And so yeah, thanks for you for doing that as well.

April Dunford: Thanks so much for having me on. Even though you’re saying it’s my last time. Boohoo cry.

Louis: I hope you’ve enjoyed it. And that’s it for another episode of everyone hates marketers.com thank you so much for listening. I’m super, super grateful. I’d love for you to consider subscribing to my daily newsletter Monday to Friday called Stand the Out Daily. I send very short, hopefully interesting, surprising, shocking, entertaining content to help you Stand the Out. It’s at everyone hatesmarketers.com you can subscribe for free and obviously unsubscribe whenever you want. I’m just going to read a couple of emails that I got recently as a reply. Juma said, your content attacks the mind primarily, which is such a good thing because most of us are skilled at what we do, but we don’t have the courage to do it our way. Mark, who just subscribed a couple days before, said, this is my first issue of your newsletter. Love it. Glad I subscribed. Brianna Said, I just realized this morning that my my email habit is now to 1. Skim through the list. 2. Select all unread industry email except yours. 3. Delete and don’t think twice. 4. Quickly skim yours. Amy said, Also loving the new content that’s coming from you. It feels really lovely. Kendall said, I like your writing a lot. It really resonates. There’s so much bullshit out there. It’s good to touch the authentic. And Chloe said, where is the I love this email button? Brilliant. I hope you subscribe. You’ll be joining more than 14,000 subscribers at this stage, which is crazy. It’s the size of a small stadium. Anyway, thank you so much. See you on the other side.