Did EOC values affect the way I did marketing? They absolutely did. When I first started to build a business and I looked at marketing and messaging, I would look at other similar companies and I would look at their websites and I would look at, you know, what they kind of put forward first and foremost. And sometimes I would think, oh, I just need to emulate that. They look successful. Let me just kind of, you know, take some of their words and kind of like mash it into my, you know, messaging.
And at a certain point it didn't quite seem genuine. And um there came a point where I had to just um go back and reflect on who I was and what made me unique, right? And then the messaging needed to also reflect that uniqueness. One of the clients that I worked for many years ago when I was doing interstitials for television, um they were public service announcements. Uh he this was an individual who actually had been very successful in Madison Avenue.
He was his claim to fame as he coined the phrase Gillette the best a man can get. That's his claim to fame. But uh once he told me he says Ed you create from the heart and I had never really thought about that before creating from the heart. And so I started to try to look at our messaging as connecting with other like-minded individuals, right? My business coach at the time had said, you know, your unique proposition, how you see the world, how the stories you like to tell, they're going to attract people who are attracted to that proposition.
You're going to be those are going to be the best fit. the best fit are not going to be um you know I remember once we did a um a video for a gentleman who was all about the gold standard and finances and and making money and and so we did the video series but I felt so drained afterwards because his values didn't align with my values but at the time I you know I needed jobs and uh with time you know what what my coach helped me to understand is that my unique selling proposition, which is my value structure, will also attract others who have a similar value structure.
And eventually what that ended up looking like is that I ended up doing more and more business with nonprofits, people who served other people in the field of uh healthcare was a big one, uh the field of education and also in the field of arts. um and then eventually also in the field of religion and spirituality. And what that did is it attracted them as my base of clients. And so my my commercial clients or my for-profit clients kind of became less fewer and fewer and my nonprofit clients grew and grew and they were actually great clients.
Oftentimes nonprofits have not only they have great mission statements and wonderful stories to tell which also fed my kind of like uh inner filmmaker desire to you know make an impact on the world. I get to tell their stories but they paid their bills. I mean practically you know they didn't they didn't fudge on like uh you know uh paying I mean they always paid on time. They paid in advance. Um they were they were great clients to be to be a part of.
