The Power of Integration

Two companies. Two kids. Two offices. Two regional marketing firms. It’s a lot.

You know well the battle of competing priorities, limited time, unending to-dos and “should dos.” In fact, many of my coaching clients come to me when they are struggling with this all-too-common challenge: how to get it all done and still maintain your sanity.

I don’t have a magic solution. Instead, I have processes…processes that I have put in place to help me manage my increasingly complicated life…and processes that I help my clients develop to better manage theirs. Recently, I looked at these processes from a different perspective and noticed a common thread—integration.

Hear this: integration is not multi-tasking. It isn’t responding to emails when you are supposed to be listening to your daughter recite her presentation for school. Rather, it is managing your life so that the emails do not demand an immediate response so that you can be fully present for your daughter’s practice session. It is drawing on experiences and expertise from one part of your life to help you succeed in other parts.

When I’m not speaking to corporations and organizations across the country or working with individual clients, I run MMB Music, the sole U.S. musical instrument distributor for Germany’s STUDIO 49 Orff Instruments. When I took over the company, I had two choices: market heavily to retailers who would stock my product or market to the music educators who would be using my product. While I still did the former, I concentrated heavily on the latter. In fact, I created a content marketing strategy to engage music educators across the country. When we started, we had a big vision and a small list. Today we send weekly lesson plans and teaching tips to over 25,000 music educators across the US. We started a small community that became bigger than I ever could have imagined; a community that took on a life of its own—and the target audience became our key innovators and content creators. The success of that strategy was recognized recently by the American Marketing Association’s Pittsburgh Chapter. We received the 2016 Marketer of the Year award in Education.

I was surprised—and honored—and immediately began to think about how we could use the success of this strategy to benefit the Michelle Marie Brady community. How could we integrate successful elements from that initiative into something innovative for a completely different target market—my corporate and individual coaching and speaking clients? Crowd-sourced seminars? Webinars? Private client-client communication channels?

My team and I are meeting about just this topic…and I don’t know yet what will evolve from those conversations….but I do know the power of integration—and I want you to know it, too. Where in your life are you succeeding and where might those principles or ideas be applied to other parts of your life? Make a list and let me know!

If you enjoyed this insight, I encourage you to check out the rest of the blog here. Questions or comments? I’d love to connect! Visit my LinkedIn for more information on business, the power of integration, upcoming keynote events, and more.