Ali Abdaal - Carrie Rose

1) Carrie Rose, the founder of Rise at Seven, talks about her background and how she ended up going to university, despite it not being the norm for people in her community. She credits her confidence and belief in herself to her father, who always encouraged her to succeed. However, her father passed away suddenly when she was 15, which was a difficult time for her. She explains that his passing gave her even more motivation to achieve, and she believes that she is doing it for him.

2) Carrie also shares her experience of losing a parent, where she gives two tips on how to cope with the loss: seeking grief counseling and writing letters/messages to communicate with the person you lost. Finally, she explains how proud her father would be of her success and resilience.

3) Carrie shares her experienceof studying New Media Communications at Leeds, a digital media course which allowed her to apply her interests in innovation, artificial intelligence, and strategy in a creative manner. Despite having no clear career plans or direction at this point, she recalls the fun and wild experience of being a student for three years. Carrie reflects on making a mistake of choosing to stay in an expensive apartment at the university and being surrounded by wealthy people, which turned out to be a culture clash, but she learned a lot from the experience, especially on how different people perceive and handle money. Carrie has grown to become more willing to strike up conversations with people in everyday encounters, believing that sometimes casual meetings can lead to unexpected opportunities.

4) Carrie believes that identifying common ground and adding value to someone's day helps her initiate conversations. This skill has served her well in building her million-dollar marketing agency, Rise at Seven. Rose's obsession with search engine optimization came from her experience interning with the Google 360 guy and discovering the impact of video content on local search rankings. She took an extra module on SEO and learned both the black hat and right ways of manipulating Google rankings. This led to her specialization in search-based marketing for her agency.

5) Carrie talks about how she got started in the SEO industry and realized the potential for making money in it. She taught herself SEO by watching YouTube videos and reading books, and quickly saw that many people were not utilizing SEO to its full potential. She realized that there was a gap in the market and focused on offering a unique service that nobody else was offering. She also talks about her experiences after graduating from university and working with companies like Google and Spoons.

6) Carrie shares how she landed her first marketing job at Sticky Eyes and the lessons she learned while working there. She talks about how she was initially intimidated by the idea of calling journalists, but eventually landed a feature in The Sun for a GHD product launch. She emphasizes the importance of creating compelling stories that are useful, engaging, funny, or resourceful in order to get PR and mentions that she has worked with a variety of brands, from finance to travel to cars, and has always been successful by creating stories that people care about.

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7) Carrie gives an example of how her marketing agency was able to turn a potentially boring topic into something compelling and newsworthy. When one of her technology clients wanted to promote their cloud data security service, they capitalized on a trending topic at the time, which was the debate around Facebook and data privacy. They did their own study, comparing how much data Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok have on people, and used this to create an online report that they pushed out to press. This allowed them to position their client as an expert in the field, and they were able to get a lot of press coverage as a result of it. Carrie emphasizes the importance of finding a story angle that will grab the attention of journalists and their readers, rather than just trying to promote a product or service directly. She also notes that access to journalist databases is key for getting your story in front of the right people.

8) Rose discusses the importance of targeted PR outreach for maximum coverage. She advises on using databases to find journalists and creating lists of those who have covered similar stories in the past. Rose highlights the need to make PR relevant and engaging for journalists, as this will help brands to create stories and angles for their products or services. She emphasizes the importance of external ideas and opinions while launching a new product, as that will help in creating compelling context for the targeted consumer. According to Rose, the best PR agencies are those that build strong relationships with journalists and create a super targeted approach.

9) Rose discusses the concept of the "purple cow" from the book of the same name by Seth Godin, which is about standing out and being different. She explains that the point of creating a brand and marketing content is to make sure it stands out and is memorable to consumers in a sea of other content. She also notes that 89% of the $20 billion spent on advertising every year is never remembered, which is a lot of wasted money. To combat this, she focused on finding people who knew how to make memorable advertising when building her own marketing agency. She also emphasizes the importance of mental availability, and creating consistency and association between a brand and a particular concept or topic.

10) Carrie Rose discusses how she received seed funding from a company called Apprentice, which gave her the confidence to start her own business. The investment provided a buffer and gave her the ability to move forward without constantly checking her bank account. She talks about her salary progression in her previous roles and how her frustration with not being able to make changes in her agency spurred her to start her own business. She then shares the story of how she came up with the idea for her agency, which focused on capturing both the demand for brands and search traffic generated by traditional advertising.

11) Carrie describes how she started her marketing agency with just one other person, a director who she convinced to take on this massive risk despite finding out his wife was pregnant. They launched the agency within two weeks, creating a social media strategy with a big announcement and taking a huge risk by introducing themselves with their new agency's name at a conference their old agency owned. This move gained them thousands of Twitter followers overnight and an opportunity to speak at another conference, which drew in dozens of clients despite the small size of their initial clients.

12) Carrie Rose shares the three key characteristics that she looks for in a successful employee: tenacity, curiosity, and enthusiasm. She believes that people who push through and don't take"no" for an answer, are curious and ask questions, and have a positive outlook on life are the ones that succeed. These traits usually indicate a high performer, also known as an "A player." However, she admits that A players are hard to get and even harder to keep as they may transition to start their own businesses. Carrie discusses how letting people go during her company's recent downsizing was difficult for her because she runs the business through relationships and her heart.

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13) Carrie discusses the difficulty of having to let people go due to performance issues and shares some characteristics of those individuals, such as not speaking up when struggling and failing to keep trying when faced with setbacks. She also offers some advice for women in the workplace, including the need to be aware of the gender pay gap and the importance of being confident in asking for a pay rise.

14) Carrie talks about her experience coaching CEOs, business owners, billionaires, and multi-millionaires, where she noticed a gender difference in leadership. Women often struggle with imposter syndrome, feeling inadequate, and lack confidence in taking up leadership roles, while men struggle with building relationships with their business, people, and propositions. She expands on her personal journey, from growing up on a council estate to becoming the owner of a seven-million-pound business. Despite her success, she admits that she still struggles with taking money out of the business and doesn't pay herself enough, hoping to re-invest back into the company to continue growing.

15) Carrie discusses how hanging out with people running multimillion-dollar businesses changed her attitude towards money. When she saw how these entrepreneurs approached millions and tens of millions in terms of energy and attitude, it gave her permission to sell a $10,000 product. Rose's perception of money changed after their agency grew from three to seven million in the second year. Even though the leap seemed huge, as it tripled their earnings, she feels the difference between making 50 million and 300 million isn't vast because it's just tripling that. Rose believes when you learn how to make money, it's not that hard to do it; you only need to learn how to do it.

16) Carrie discusses her plans for the future of her marketing agency. While she is open to the possibility of partnering with another agency or merging with a larger company in the future, she is mainly focused on the work she is currently doing and getting passionate about sitting in front of clients and coming up with marketing strategies. Additionally, she mentions that if she were to receive a large sum of money, she would use it to invest in other businesses and coach them on how to succeed. For her, success is defined as being free of other people's opinions and her own mind, but she is still learning about herself and has a long way to go to fully achieve this.

17) Carrie talks about her personal definition of success, which involves building a business that she can look back on and be proud of, and having the confidence to do things differently. She also wants to give that confidence to others as part of her mission statement. When asked for final advice, she advises listeners to not let anyone, including themselves, tell them no.