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Marcia McFee (MarciaMcFee.com) is a rock star. We check in with her about how to think like a filmmaker for better communication, what we can all gain from every travel opportunity and vacation (as seen through curated spiritual adventure travel) and paying attention to those fleeting ideas that demand to be nurtured. Plus, we start the first of our tips segments about how to prioritize your marketing – in this episode, it’s all about the negatives. Which is a positive. 
Transcript:
Jeff Randolph:
Welcome to the Small Business Miracles podcast. I’m Jeff Randolph. This small business podcast is brought to you by EAG Advertising & Marketing. We’re going to talk about marketing and we’re also here to celebrate entrepreneurs. We have marketing news and advice that business owners can use to keep moving forward. This week we sit down with Marcia McFee, a prolific teacher, entrepreneur, lecturer, worship designer, and spirituality leader who is basically a rockstar in her field. We’ll talk to her about innovation and our place in the world right after this.
For a stretch of time here, we’re going to talk about how to prioritize your marketing. First, a word about who we typically work with as an agency. We don’t usually talk about all the clients or the client work because we don’t want this podcast to be an infomercial, but I think it’s important to understand our perspective here. Our clients are growth-minded small and mid-sized businesses that want to grow. They likely don’t have a full marketing department or oftentimes they don’t have dedicated marketing leadership, meaning we’re working directly with the CEO, the business owner, maybe a vice president of sales who has responsibility over marketing. Because of that, we focus a lot on prioritizing your marketing efforts. If you have all the resources in the world, it’s like playing tennis without a net. You can do a lot more with your marketing. You can be on social media channels that no one has ever heard of on the off chance that that social media channel actually catches on.
For the rest of us, the humans out here, we have to be very selective and use our resources wisely to prioritize the best first place to put our first marketing dollar before we move on to spend the second marketing dollar. Entrepreneurs are bombarded nonstop with great new opportunities that may be good ideas, but we need to put them up against our priorities in marketing to see where that really shakes out. If you see one of those shiny new opportunities come along and it isn’t a better strategic tactic than what’s already in your priority list, it’s exciting, it’s wonderful, it’s fun, but it may be best to table that if it really doesn’t fit that priority and be the thing that you need it to be.
So where do we start? We’d suggest starting with the negatives. Eliminate the things that are going to do damage before you get out of the gate. Think of this like taking the parking brake off before you start to drive the car. If you don’t take the parking brake off, you can do all the right things, you can drive the car, but they’re just not going to be as effective and may actually damage your car. Things that we might put into this include, let’s start with your location listings. We’ve talked about those before, but these are the places online where your company information exists, but you may not actually control that directly. If someone uses yellowpages.com for some reason and they see that you’re open at 8:00 AM today, they then load up that trailer and drive 100 miles to get to your place only to find out that you’re closed on Sundays? It’s probably the fastest way to earn a negative online review and lose a customer. So we’d start by prioritizing that kind of negative.
Speaking of, we would also put customer reviews in that category. Address those. The way a company responds to an online review is just as important as the review itself. But don’t stop there. Listen to those reviews and honestly assess if you could have done better. If there’s something about your process, your company, your employees, your procedures that could be better, fix that issue. Not just the way you respond to the review, but actually fix that issue. Another parking brake is in the search engine optimization category, you know, SEO. If you have errors there that are negative indicators to search engines, fix that before you start investing in the proactive SEO measures that can get you new traffic to the website.
That may be not being a mobile friendly site or it could be your security certificate is expired and it’s taking away some of that trust. It may also be something like site speed. If it takes too long for your mobile page to load, Google will see that and they won’t send as much traffic because they know a customer is going to get frustrated and hit the back button before they actually see your page finish loading. That’s a negative you have to fix before you start investing in that proactive stuff.
For an employer brand, the next one may be your employer reputation. Do people hate working for you? Those people talk. They post on Glassdoor, and that’s going to make it difficult and much more expensive to recruit the people you actually need to do the work. Plenty of strategies to fix that. It doesn’t necessarily mean you need to raise your wages, but the way you’re positioned and the way you communicate will go a long way there. Your website may also be a negative that we need to fix first.
What does that experience look like? What does your customer do? What do they do when they get to your site? Does the site convert traffic to being a customer? Is it telling people what they want to know about you? Is it too hard to read? Does it represent your target audience so that customers see themselves there? Before we pay to send traffic to the website, we may need to fix that site.Those are just a few of the big parking brake kind of issues that you’ll want to remove to help you prioritize where you spend your marketing budget. It’s step one for us. That is your marketing prioritization tip for today.
I am here with Marcia McFee. Marcia is a professor, she’s a ritual artist, an adventurer, a worship designer, an author. Marcia, welcome to the program.
Marcia McFee:
Thanks so much. Great to be here.
Jeff Randolph:
I’m happy to have you here because you are kind of a rockstar in your world. I want to make sure everyone understands who you are and what you do, because you are absolutely prolific. You even have self-described as I’ve been around, as they say. You go deep into that. Give us a sense of who you are and what you do.
Marcia McFee:
Wow. Okay, so at the heart, I am a creator. I am a creative. And that takes many forms. And really what I do now is an amalgamation of all of the creativity that I have trained in and done my whole life. So I started out in my first career in professional dance and musical theater. So the arts and creating things, creating experiences all over the world was really my first foray into this creating thing. And I’ve always been involved in the church and at a certain point I felt a call to do big extravaganza performance art around social justice issues in historically significant places.
Jeff Randolph:
Like we all do.
Marcia McFee:
Like we all do, right? Because I knew the power of getting artists together, musicians, dancers, media artists, people who create amazing light, sound, et cetera, orchestras. And really my idea as I traveled the world with these dance companies, I really saw some significant places that had stories to tell, historical stories that we need to listen to in order to make the world a better place. So that really was the ground. And I went to seminary, got a graduate degree in divinity, mainly because in theology, because I wanted to have sort of that grounding in social justice and ethics that would inform my work. And while I was in seminary, I just started talking to churches about the arts, what I knew about the arts that would help them with their worship, and it kind of snowballed and I never imagined I would do that.
Now, I have created these big sort of things around social justice issues, but the majority of my bread and butter work now is worship design studio, which helps churches… I’ll say this, this is the unofficial tagline, all right. Unofficial. It’s what I say to people on the airplane because a lot of people don’t have a connection to the church world. Completely fine. But how do I describe what I do? Well, I say I help churches be less boring, and it’s a very large market.
So that’s not to slam people, what they’re doing because everybody’s in a different place, but we can all be better communicators and that’s really my job is to help people be better communicators. It just happens to be in this church world where the communication, hopefully, the progressive church world is really where I live and breathe and that is messages akin to those social justice messages that I first was really inspired by, and that is, let’s make the world a better place for all people. So that’s really kind of the basis of what I do and it manifests itself in many ways.
Jeff Randolph:
Gotcha. Well, and worship design studio is one of those outcomes from all of that work that you do. Describe a little bit more about worship design studio and what that is and who uses it, that sort of thing.
Marcia McFee:
Yeah, so my ideal client, as we say in the marketing world, is pastors and worship volunteers, staff and volunteers, paid and unpaid, who are creating communication events, i.e. worship, every week because Sunday comes around every flipping week.
Jeff Randolph:
Without fail.
Marcia McFee:
Without fail. And that’s a pretty big pressure kind of thing. And so it’s small to medium-sized churches where the leaders are wearing all the hats. And oftentimes what gets left on the back burner and slapped together last minute is worship. And that’s not good because that’s the primary way that we communicate-
Jeff Randolph:
That’s what you’re putting out.
Marcia McFee:
… And transform lives and inspire people to do good things in the world. So that’s what worship design studio does. I educate in all the worship arts, so verbal, musical, media, visual, tangible, all that kind of stuff. And I also create full packages that churches can just buy and then that jump starts them into their planning. And so they don’t have to start from scratch. And that’s really the official tagline, and that is you’re never alone and you never have to start from scratch.
Jeff Randolph:
It’s staring at that blank page can be just a detriment for so many. And you’ve overcome that. You’re also an author. I want to dive into Think Like a Filmmaker for a minute, your third book, and you’re giving strategies for delivering a sensory rich workshop that keeps volunteers invigorated and pastors inspired and congregations coming back for the sequel. Give us some background and the inspiration for that book because it sounds like all of those performance pieces are coming together in a book this time.
Marcia McFee:
So a lot of people have equated Sunday morning worship to theater to teach sort of the art form, but these days not everybody goes to the theater. And so those metaphors for somebody who’s leading a small little church in the middle of rural America, they might not go to the theater and so it’s not as immediate and tangible for them as a learning tool. But everybody watches movies. So I decided, plus if I had to do all over again, I would totally be in film. I’d be directing film. So I studied filmmaking in order to write this book. I talked to filmmakers and I found analogies about how they tell stories effectively to help people who are creating these storytelling events every Sunday and help them understand the relationship.
Our most beloved scenes in a movie are likely underscored with music. Now why is that and how does that work? And in some churches, you know, in historically black churches, that is like a given. But in lily-white rural churches in the Midwest, let’s say, or anywhere, that hasn’t been a skillset that they have. And so I break it down and I say, okay, this is how you do a movie underscore underneath this reading and here’s the neuroscientific reason why it helps us hear the words better.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah, a good way to kind of help tell that story and engage someone emotionally, which is where we get sales that way. We get brand awareness that way and you can engage with a story. The music piece is interesting because as a person who is, let’s just say challenged with dancing, even, there’s that moment in your brain where you say, I will begin dancing now. And not everyone has that. Other people have the ability to just kind of flow into it. Having the music come in, not at a, and the music is…
Marcia McFee:
Yeah, now we’re doing music, now we’re doing words.
Jeff Randolph:
Now we will do music, now we’ll do words. That’s a good way to go. I like that.
Marcia McFee:
Yeah, so it creates this sense of that Sunday morning communication event, i.e. worship, as a journey, as a spiritual journey from beginning to end rather than an agenda, like a list of things to check off. And sometimes worship feels like that, and God knows that most people in the pews have way too many agendas. I mean, they spend their week with a bullet list of things to do. So that’s not what we need when we nurture our spirituality. We need a journey that sort of takes us somewhere in a narrative that helps us live our lives better. And that is a very different kind of communication than the business meeting.
And so teaching that artfulness, that’s what I call ritual artistry, that is exciting to me because I’m an educator. I’m a creative, but I am also at heart an educator. And so when I see the light bulbs go off and people find a simple skillset, even somebody who just reads right off of the page and is not a very skilled pianist, but they learn how they can use that and create movie music underneath words, and their like minds are blown, that’s so fun.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah. Well, and anything to help communicate with the crowd, anything to help communicate with the audience so that they get it. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I was reminded by the checklists of things that we all have going on in our head. We have an attention span like a ferret on a double espresso. We can’t focus on anything. And so the more you can give them the ability to sit and enjoy and engage in a story, that story is going to have impact that’s going to be meaningful.
Marcia McFee:
Absolutely. And my background and my fascination with neuroscience and cognitive science really helps me in this teaching because we all learn and communicate in different ways. And for some people, it’s not the music, it’s the visuals. And if the space that we’re going in to have this experience is the same every week, that is boring to us. Boring is relative to our learning style. And so how do we create a space that’s also communicating a message even through just color and texture and lighting? So these are just yummy things that I love to teach and that’s kind of what I’m about.
Jeff Randolph:
Well, I’m glad you said neuroscience and cognitive. We’re going to dive into your brain next.
Marcia McFee:
Oh, dear.
Jeff Randolph:
Because we interview business owners, we interview entrepreneurs, and a thing that many of you have in common is that the way you make connections, the way you innovate, the way that you’re thinking about things. So as a business owner, we can already see that passion for innovating and bringing new ideas to the market. You’re always thinking about what’s next and you’re trying to get something out of your head and into a finished product. If you’re thinking about business advice in that way, what’s the best business advice you’ve gotten?
Marcia McFee:
Well, so much because when I started this 30 years ago, nobody in my field was doing it.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah, you’re a pioneer.
Marcia McFee:
So I was just making it up as I went along and I studied with people who were teaching others how to sell information, how to get your product that was a teaching kind of thing out there. So I studied with them. But I think to your question about the best advice, I would say it’s back to the communication thing. Learn how to talk about what you do to anyone. So that’s why, you know, in this podcast, likely there’s a whole lot of people listening that aren’t necessarily in the church world. So I’m not going to, when you ask me what worship design studio does, I’m not going to start with some answer that doesn’t communicate to a broader audience. So that’s why I always have my airplane speech ready.
So communicating what you do I think is really essential because if you’re a pioneer in some way, if you’re innovating something, then people don’t even have a framework, talk about cognitive science, we talk about frameworks. They don’t even have a file folder in their brain to sort of put it in because it’s not something they’ve encountered before. And so learning how to say, well, this is like this like, only it’s related to that. So that you’re always learning how to speak in a way that can actually create a picture, because that’s how we learn the best, is to create a picture out of our words and have that be something that goes, oh, I get it. Wow, I never heard of that but that’s really cool. So that I think is the best advice is that learning how to talk about it, even when it’s so innovative you’re not sure what it is yet.
Jeff Randolph:
Right, you don’t know how to get it out of your own head.
Marcia McFee:
Right. Yeah, I would say that’s it. I mean, lots of other stuff on the way.
Jeff Randolph:
Well, but great advice, great insight into how you think. I want to talk about travel because one of the products that you offer is also some travel and destination kind of experiences. You’ve developed events there. You’ve just, I think, created and completed a spiritual adventure in Ireland as an example. And as part of that, you said travel helps expand our worldview and rightsize our perception of our role in it and our responsibility to the whole.
There are a lot of examples of how we live in that global village and how travel can help center us either spiritually or otherwise. As you think about the role that travel has had in your life, what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs or even other humans about how to travel and how to approach purpose in travel? And my own experience, I’m about to go on a trip to the middle of the Mayan jungle and live in a bubble hotel for a few days where it’s just, you’re totally cut off from everything else and you’re just there to think, right. Tell me, how do you approach that travel? How should people think about it?
Marcia McFee:
Yeah, thank you for that question. I love it. So spiritual care adventures is sort of my new innovation, my new venture that I’m developing even further because I’ve been doing worship design studio for a long time, it’s going to stay, it’s still serving lots of people. But I think as a pioneer and as an innovator, I’m always looking for the what’s next for my own growth. And I have traveled my entire life. My father was an airline pilot and it’s in my bones, it’s in my cells. So I started taking people on these spiritual care adventures. And spirituality for me is a big, huge umbrella term.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah, there’s a label there.
Marcia McFee:
Yeah. It’s just about expanding our consciousness, expanding our experience. And travel is so amazing at doing that, but a specific kind of traveling, I think. And that is moving from just simply being a tourist to a pilgrim. So a pilgrim is someone who is embarking on the adventure in order to learn, not just about where they’re going, but to learn about themselves. And so when I take women to Ireland, it’s a tour I call an untour. And it’s not sightseeing, it’s sightbeing, which is kind of a shift in consciousness about how you find yourself there.
Jeff Randolph:
Let’s put a service mark on that term real quick.
Marcia McFee:
Right? Yeah, you all can help me with that.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s right.
Marcia McFee:
And it’s that shift that helps you sort of be in a different state of mind when you’re there. Not just gobbling up information, but also doing what I call exformation. So getting out what’s in your head and playing with it in an environment that’s different. Because when we’re in around difference, it is a catalyst for discovering something new about ourselves. And so I would say being open to discovery is being open to difference and open to transformation. Who am I going to be because I had this experience, not just how much do I know and how many places can I put the flag on my map? But who am I because I went on this adventure?
Jeff Randolph:
How did that change me? How did that make me look at the world?
Marcia McFee:
Yeah. And in Ireland, I call it creator, badass, and saint. That’s the untour. Because I’m looking at Irish female archetypes, and it’s a trip for all women. And so we’re asking ourselves along the way, looking at the pre-Christian goddess tradition, and how does that live in us? Which is a very creative kind of, it embodies creativity, that goddess tradition. And the badass is about the Grace O’Malley, the pirate queen of the West coast of Ireland. How are we fierce in our protection of the least? And so we ask ourselves that.
And then the saint, in Ireland, saints, female saints are really an amalgamation of the goddesses and everything. And so how are we an amalgamation within ourselves? We’re not just one thing. We’re multiple things inside ourselves. We manifest our presence in the world in multiple ways and how can we celebrate that? Saints were not all goodie two shoes, they were pretty fierce. So we kind of look at that. So finding a way in kind of a perspective and talk to as many people, locals as you can, always. It’s just amazing how quickly people are willing to open up their lives to a stranger.
Jeff Randolph:
At the very least, you get better restaurant recommendations.
Marcia McFee:
Absolutely. That’s right.
Jeff Randolph:
But beyond that, it sounds tremendously inspiring though. It really ties into creativity. You’ve used that word several times in that. Just in if you need to be more creative for the day, the research would show that even taking a different path to work changes the neural pathways in your brain so that you’re thinking differently. I can only imagine that going to Ireland and having that kind of guided perspective helps inspire and make you more creative, even introspectively. There’s a lot of power there. That’s big.
Marcia McFee:
It is. And every time I go somewhere else, like I go on vacation, but I can guarantee you the muse is going to show up and I will have pages of ideas because my mind just expands. I happen to like places where I can see a long way. I lived in Tahoe for a long time because the mountains do that for me. Some people, it’s going to be the beach. Some people, whatever inspires you. But yeah, that’s like if I’m stuck, then I got to get unstuck just by moving my body out of familiarity into difference.
Jeff Randolph:
Get somewhere else. Well, let’s switch and do something a little different now. We’ll get into the lightning round. And the lightning round is, don’t be afraid of the lightning round.
Marcia McFee:
I’m not afraid.
Jeff Randolph:
But you don’t have any concept of what category of thing we’re about to talk about. We’re going to dive in, we’ll get shorter soundbite kind of answers. We’ll dive in if we need to. The first one is, what’s the best part of your job? So when you look back on a workday and you say this, this is it. This is why I do it. That’s it.
Marcia McFee:
Oh my gosh. Talking out loud to other people. So like right now, this is like the best. This will be the best part of my day right now.
Jeff Randolph:
Man, I hope it gets better from here, honestly.
Marcia McFee:
No, seriously. But that’s my answer is like batting ideas around and batting philosophies around and just dreaming. Yeah, that’s the best part.
Jeff Randolph:
You deal with some challenges. When you have to recharge from a challenging day, what does self-care look like?
Marcia McFee:
The fireplace. I’m just saying that today because it dropped 70 degrees here in Kansas City like overnight.
Jeff Randolph:
It did. There was a cold front that hurt us all.
Marcia McFee:
Yeah, so that’s the first thing. You said lightning, that’s what came to my mind was sitting in front of the fireplace reading a good book.
Jeff Randolph:
Gotcha. Next question. Before the master’s degree in theology and PhD in liturgical studies, you had that early career we talked about at the top of the show about in professional dance and musical theater. Is there anything you miss from those days? Is there a “What if you stayed on that path?”
Marcia McFee:
Oh, Lord. Not a “What if I stayed on that path” because dancers get old very early. But what I do miss is, gosh, we traveled all the time. We were always on some world tour. So even though I still travel, I don’t travel like that, that much and that extensively. But also the improvisation. Five of those years I was dancing with a company that was doing a collaboration with the Dave Brubeck Jazz Quartet on stage for five years around the world. And the improvisation with jazz musicians was unbelievable and it was a high that is not to be replicated anywhere else. So I miss that high.
Jeff Randolph:
I could see where you could miss that. You have mentioned already that you lived in Tahoe. You’re an avid skier. I snowboard, or at least I did at one point before it really started to hurt to fall down. Which led to your second book, Spiritual Adventures in the Snow: Skiing and Snowboarding as Renewal for Your Soul. Where is the best place to ski or snowboard and why?
Marcia McFee:
Oh, gosh. Well, I am going to have to just give a shout-out to what was my home resort the whole time I was in Tahoe, and that’s North Star. It’s near Truckee is where I lived and on the north shore of Tahoe. But I will give a shout-out there because I wrote my book there and a lot of the athletes that I interviewed were there. But also I got to spend the night in a snow machine grooming.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, you got to ride the grooming machine?
Marcia McFee:
Oh my gosh. It was magical. It was magical.
Jeff Randolph:
Just making fresh corduroy all day long.
Marcia McFee:
Making fresh corduroy on slopes that are so steep that you have to hook onto something at the top of the hill so that the cat won’t go tumbling down the hill. You’re literally tethered to the top of the hill. And then the woman who was-
Jeff Randolph:
That is where you lost me, by the way. At that moment, I’m out.
Marcia McFee:
No, it was thrilling. It was exhilarating. But the woman who took me out, she is a musician as well, and she played movie music, movie soundtracks the whole time.
Jeff Randolph:
You scored it, yeah.
Marcia McFee:
Like what’s better? That’s incredible.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s amazing. I think I’m going to have to go with Beaver Creek. I have a love for Beaver Creek in Colorado. It’s just a wonderful part of the Vail Resorts family. Let’s talk about your entrepreneur brain for a minute. You don’t have to talk about what you have your eye on next and what’s next for you. We don’t need to give that away. But I’m curious how your brain works to figure out what’s next. How do you approach that? What does that formula look like?
Marcia McFee:
Wow. It’s less a formula and more a spiritual journey really. If we want to talk spirituality, it’s about getting in touch with what I really can’t not do.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, interesting.
Marcia McFee:
Right? Because I can come up with 50 ideas in a day. It’s just the way my brain is wired. And I love how Elizabeth Gilbert, author, describes ideas. She kind of personifies them and she says ideas float around in the sky and they look for potential people to bring them to life. And then they find one, they plop down on their head, and that’s when you “have an idea”, in quotes. You have an idea, and if you don’t do it for a little while, they go, this is not happening, I’m going to go find somebody else. And they leave you and they go somewhere else. And that’s why it’s like you see some idea and you go, wow, I had that idea 10 years ago. Well, yeah, you did, but you didn’t do anything with it so it went somewhere else. I love that sort of magical image.
Jeff Randolph:
It’s a good image. Yeah, good image.
Marcia McFee:
But because so many ideas actually do plop on my head, I have to really discern what’s mine to do? What’s not mine to do? Because we can’t do it all. We can’t spread ourselves so thin that a project doesn’t come to fruition. And so it is kind of a discerning, it’s kind of a like, what is my spirit yearning to do? And if I don’t have a fire for it or if the flow isn’t happening and the connections I’m making, then I have to let it go. And that’s a spiritual practice as well, letting things go. That’s a huge one.
Jeff Randolph:
Outstanding. Let’s end the lightning round there. We’ll stop the pain and stop the torture. Marcia, it has been great to have you on the podcast. Tell me where can people find you if they need more information about you, need to get in touch, need to go on a spiritual journey to Ireland, need to get worship design studio materials. How do they find you?
Marcia McFee:
Well, I think the easiest place is just to go to marciamcfee.com, M-A-R-C-I-A-M-C-F-E-E.com, because both of those names are spelled differently than many people imagine. But that’s kind of the hub for my many projects that I’m doing.
Jeff Randolph:
If you’re doing it, it’s going to be there. All right, excellent. Well, Marcia, thank you for being with us today.
Marcia McFee:
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Jeff Randolph:
And that is our show. Thanks to our guest, Marcia McFee, and thank you for listening to the Small Business Miracles podcast. Remember to subscribe, leave us a five star rating, and review. Drop us a line on our website at eagadv.com if you have any thoughts. Until then, we’ll be out here helping entrepreneurs with another small miracle.