I Didn't Open a Studio for the Reason You Think

The secret's finally out, TSC Studios is open. But this episode isn't really about the studio. It's about the problem it solved, and why that same problem is probably quietly stalling your marketing too.

I walk through the real decision behind opening a content and podcast studio three minutes from our office, and why it came down to one realisation: most of us don't have a discipline problem when it comes to showing up consistently, we have a friction problem. The gap between "I know I should post" and actually doing it is almost always logistics, not motivation.

In this episode:

• Why I stopped blaming myself for inconsistency and started looking at my systems instead
• The habit stacking approach I use every single morning (and why it works)
• How to spot where friction is quietly costing you momentum in your own content and marketing
• One question to ask yourself that changes everything

Press play, then go find your own friction point.

Links:

• Join the WhatsApp community
• Follow on Instagram: @coffeesandcontentpod
• Find Loren on LinkedIn: Loren Tomlinson
• Visit us at: www.thesocialcollective.co.nz

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the In Her Empire Era podcast. I am your host, Lauren, and today's episode, as always, is brought to you by The Social Collective, my incredible digital marketing agency. I am really, really excited for this episode. It is, of course, another solo episode, but that won't be for too much longer. I am really excited to start making some changes in the podcast space. One being bringing on some guests, and that is because I can finally let the cat out of the bag. So for those of you who didn't see it last week, I officially announced that we are opening TSC Studios. Cue the applause. Well, thank you, my friends. You're too kind. I have finally opened up TSC Studios, which is really, really exciting. We got the keys last week, and it is something that I've been keeping on the hush-hush for a very, very long time. I wanted to make sure that all my T's have been crossed and my I's have been dotted before I announced it to everybody. But in a nutshell, the main reason that I'm bringing it together is, well, I guess it's a few things. The first is that I have not yet found a podcast studio or a content studio, which that is what TSE Studios is. It's both podcast and content studio focused. Um, I really haven't found anything on our side of the bridge. So for those of you who are Auckland based, you will know kind of there's essentially one side of the bridge, which is the CBD and South Auckland and everything kind of on that side. And then there's the other side. There's sort of the North Shore, Northwest, and we're based in Hobsonville. That's where the social collective's office is. And traveling into the city is like a half a day excursion at minimum. Um, usually a full day if you've got a couple of things to do while you're there. And I really wanted something that basically took the friction out of my week. And I felt like there would be so many people that would feel the same way. And that is a lot of what I want to talk to in today's quick episode is the importance of figuring out that it is more than likely not a discipline problem that you have when it comes to growing and scaling your marketing in particular, but it's actually just figuring out where the friction is and what you can do to fix it. So this podcast studio, like I said, came about because the videos that you're seeing at the moment are recorded in my home studio. I am very, very lucky we have a spare room at home and I am able to record them. However, I want to, of course, be able to have guest episodes, and that's a little bit tricky when you live almost an hour and a half out of the Auckland CBD. So, well actually, yeah, it's about an hour and a half's drive out of the Auckland CBD. And I think it's really important to be able to reduce any areas, especially when you're a business owner where you have friction. I'm a big, big fan of Lauren Bostick, um, who runs the Skinny Confidential. She also hosts an a podcast called The Bosticks with her husband, Michael. Um, he runs an amazing, amazing media company over in the States called Deer Media. But I learn a lot from them. And one of the things that she is constantly preaching is this topic of habit stacking and making sure that you are doing things in a way where you're still going about your day, but you are able to get so much more done. One of those things for me looks like being able to go out on my morning walks with my dog and I clear out all of my emails. So I talk to Claude basically the entire walk and I go through all of my to-do list. I go through all of my outstanding emails, I draft up replies, I get everything organized. I also go through and I organize the team's tasks for the day. So I look at what my team have on their to-do list, I add things to their to-do list if there's things that I need to get off my plate. And basically I put that all together so that by the time I get into the office, I skim through all of the emails that I've drafted, I look at all the notes for my team. My team and I have a quick 15-minute stand-up where we go through what's on our lists and basically what's been pulled from the list that I have sent through to our Slack channel, and then we get stuck into it for the day. And I love being able to have it stuck in the morning. I've not only got my morning walk in and really energized myself for the day ahead, but I've also managed to tackle a whole bunch of tasks. Now, the friction that I was starting to notice is this is my home podcast studio. Of course, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, it is pitch black. And of course, I like recording in daylight. At the moment, I'm recording and it is about 10 past five in the evening. I have a presentation to do for the wonderful New Zealand Institute of Education at 5.30. And so I am cramming this episode in before I do the presentation to again stack my evening of being on camera, being all done up, having something to say, and just really getting into, I guess, the talking vibe before I do my presentation. But again, it's being able to cram things in together. However, most days I am still at the office at this time. And so by the time I get home, it's dark. And yes, I could invest in a whole bunch of lighting at home, but that doesn't solve the issue that I then have of where do I put a guest? And for me, guest episodes are really something I want to do in person. They're not something that I just want to do through a Zoom call while I can. I really value being able to have that face-to-face conversation. I was also starting to get to a point where we have, I guess on a separate note, the social collective obviously does a lot of content creation. Our clients are now asking if they can come to us for content creation because we are forever going to them. So again, looking at how we can condense things with what we're doing. How can I condense my travel time so that I can get more podcast episodes in during the day for my team and I as well, when it comes to creating content, how can we condense the time that it takes for us to travel somewhere? And how can we condense our spend as well? So we don't have to be hiring different content studios, different podcast studios. And so the natural next step was to take on a bigger expense, as you do, haha. And we looked at content studios. And the reason that I did it is because, like I said, there's a few reasons. One is that I want to have a space where I can have guests. The second is because we want a space for clients and anybody really to be able to record content. We also want it as an agency. I want it for myself, and I want it for our team to be able to have a space where they can record content too. And I guess the last thing as well is we have something called TSC Academy that is launching later this year. This is kind of like a soft launch for it, if you will. And that is our training academy. And we're going to be teaching a lot of marketing, a lot of what's happening with AI and how you can automate a lot of stuff, how you can integrate AI into your marketing and into your strategies. And I again really value being able to do that in person. And so when we started to kind of add all of these things up, it really just became a bit of a no-brainer that we needed a content studio of our own. And doing it in a space like Hobsonville, where there isn't a single thing that exists around there, and there actually isn't anything on our side of the bridge that is really fit for this particular purpose, meant that we have a bit of a competitive advantage. But also, it is a three-minute drive from our office. Like that is, you could not have aligned the stars anymore. It is a literal three-minute drive from our office. So all of these friction points that we were having with commuting to clients and which obviously we still do, but commuting back to my home podcast studio to get a podcast episode in, commuting to a cafe for a meeting with a client or commuting to their offices, all of these friction points are now being just condensed and squished because we have somewhere where we can offer people to come meet us, to come see us, for us to invite guests to do podcast episodes. I can duck out of the office, I can shoot up the road, I can do a podcast episode, and I can be back within an hour. I love that. Having a three-minute commute is a literal dream come true. And it just so happened to be that it was the right place, the right time, the right location, and it all just worked out. So I am so, so excited to introduce you to TSC Studios. I am still gonna be in the home studio for the next few weeks while we renovate everything. But the aim is by early August, everything should be done. Hopefully, sooner we're just waiting on all of the furniture and the final pieces. And then we're officially gonna show you exactly what it is. But for now, you can go over to TSC.studios on Instagram and follow along for the journey. There is so much that's yet to come. And of course, like I said, we are opening the doors to the public so you'll be able to book the space, which I'm really excited for. Um and yeah, it's just a cool space to be able to have. We've got so many plans for what we're gonna be doing in that space and how we can bring a bit of a community to life. Um, so stay tuned. But like I said, I really just wanted to touch on, I guess, the importance of recognizing that a lot of the time when we fall off the bandwagon when it comes to marketing in particular, it's not because we have a discipline problem. It's not because we can't be bothered or we're lazy. And I think so many of us gaslight ourselves into thinking that we are just lazy and that we don't have any structure to our lives. But in actual fact, it's because there is friction. And I think there's a gap between I know that I should post and that other side of it, which is I actually did post, which is almost always a logistical problem, not a motivation problem. And like I said, one of the biggest things that I started to notice is something that I've actually incorporated into my, I guess, my life and my routine since the beginning of the year, which is getting in my 10,000 steps every day. And that was something that I'm doing for my fitness, but it's also something that I'm doing for just my general well-being and my mental health. And for me, that looks like bookending my day with walks. I do one in the morning and I do one in the evening. And I find that really, really helpful because my morning walk is usually by myself and I spend all of that time just making sure that I can get all of the work done, get all of the setup done, get set up for the day and get ready to go. And the one at the tail end of my day is a lot more decompressing. Usually my partner comes with me and both of us are business owners, so we kind of debrief at the end of the day before we come home. And then it means I don't bring any of that stress of work, if there is any, into the house. And I can kind of just let it all go on my walk. And so what that looked like for me was really starting to struggle with figuring out where I could fit in this podcasting when I'm in the office most days of the week. And on the days that I'm working from home, I wanted to have the same luxury as my team and be able just to work in my sweats. No makeup on, hair up, feeling like I don't have to be on camera. But in actual fact, I love being on camera when it comes to recording podcasts. I feel so much more alive, so much more connected. It also gives me so much more social media content as well. So there were so many reasons why I needed to look at, okay, this for me isn't a motivational issue. It's actually just a logistical thing. So I guess when I think of like what the fix is, or when someone says to me, what's the magical solution? or what's the way that I can fix this? I think one of the first things that I would say to you is don't tell yourself it's just a matter of trying harder or committing more. Sometimes that might be the case, but more often than not, it's actually just removing the friction between the idea and it actually existing. And so by no means do you have to go out and do what I did and get a whole content studio. There's obviously a lot of financial discussions and conversations and decisions that you have to make when it comes to that side of things. And obviously, there was major, major benefit for the agency to have its own content space, as well as the podcast, as well as the academy, as well as our client work and just the general population in Hobsonville that are business owners. But I think that this is also why so many founders start to lose momentum when it comes to their own brand. Because the moment that content starts to require effort to access, and it isn't just a quick, I'm gonna pick up my phone and whack something up, especially because now we need to be really conscious and really connected with what we're posting online, thinking about is it strategic? Is it meaningful? Does it have value in it? Is this something that is gonna resonate with my audience? And admittedly, yeah, that takes a little bit of thinking and it takes a bit of thought to make sure that we can actually produce something for social media that is valuable. So gone are the days where we can kind of just like fling a post out. I do love to fling a good post out on LinkedIn though, as a bit of like a work in progress type thing. But I think a lot of the time that we stop making moves and moving forward is when we find that it is just too hard to move that needle forward. And so I think if I could give you any advice from the decisions that we have made is looking at your business, look at what it is that you need to put in place. Is it a skill enclawed so that you can automatically do something on repeat every week so that it becomes easier? Is it, for example, just backtracking, for example, the podcast, I have a skill that's set up so that when I take the transcript of every episode, it gives me show notes, it gives me a Substack article, it gives me LinkedIn content, it gives me a post for Instagram. So that kind of stuff means that I then sit down, I spend like a solid half hour having a really great chat with my microphone, speaking to my computer, and I can pump out a really great piece of content that then my team or I could then take and turn that into some amazing content moving forward with my voice, my sound, my tone, my information, my knowledge. And that's again a really great way to take out a bit of that friction. And this is where I think AI is just so fantastic because there is so much that we can do with it. Because I think the bigger truth is that consistency compounds, but only if the system supports it. So build the system before you chase more ideas. And I think when it comes to building a system and building a marketing infrastructure, first and foremost, like I said, stay tuned because TSC Academy is launching later this year and there is going to be so much goodness that we can share with you all there. But the second thing I wanted to say is if you are based in Auckland or you're going to be in Auckland on Thursday, the 13th of August, come along to our Cocktails and Conversation event. It is run through our events division in her empire era. Um, come along to Cocktails and Conversations. That's our next event that's coming up. It is all around the new AI era. I'm going to be launching the panelists very, very soon. They are absolutely amazing people and they have so much to share about how to use AI for business, how to use AI for life, and how to use AI in general, like where to start, what to do. I don't want you to feel stressed about it. I want you to understand it so that when it comes to you figuring out how you move past these friction points in your business and in your life, you have the tools to be able to make that happen. So, my tip for you as you wrap up listening to this episode today is look at where your own content or your marketing continues to stall. Because I honestly think it is rarely the ideas side of things. I think it's a lot of the execution and that's where the friction is. And I want you to start thinking what is one thing that I could implement that would make this exponentially easier for me moving forward and start there. And if you have any questions, please head over to In Her Empire Era Pod or Lauren.the SocialCollective and ask me any questions that you have. Also, don't forget that we are inside our WhatsApp community, so you can join that. And of course, make sure that you're following TSC.studios on Instagram because we're going to be opening the doors to the general public very, very soon. Also, if you have seen the announcement post, it's the one where I'm holding up the little keys, go comment on there if you want an invite to our launch party because we're going to be having one of those very, very soon. So yay, TSC Studios is officially open. Yay, I can finally announce that that has happened. That is all for today's podcast episode. But continue to drink your coffees, stay caffeinated, stay hydrated, stay thinking and agile. And I will see you all same time, same place next week. Bye, my friends.