Melody Bussey

I attribute my success to not giving up. Being tenacious and stubborn. When people are saying, oh, you won't be able to do that, nobody can do that, when people tell me that, it just makes me angry enough to say, oh, I'll show you. I don't know how, but I'm going to. I turn the negativity around, and don't take it as, oh, well, I shouldn't try. It turns around the other way for me. It's like, oh, watch me. Watch me do this. The negativity fuels my fire. Don't tell me what I can or can't do.

The best career advice I got was it's not all about the work. In other words, you have to have a work-life balance. Your mind will stagnate if you don't give it some downtime. What good is it to hit the apex of achievement in your business if you've got no one left to share it with? I cringe when I look at some of these posts, especially on LinkedIn, going, you have to drive, you have to grind 24-7. That's the people that make it. Those are also the people that have heart attacks when they're like 32. Stress is like the number one killer. I see the importance of family and spending time. My sister lives in France and works for UNESCO, and she gets all of August off. The whole country does. It's very different. They insist that you take a year off when you have a child, and you get paid during that time because they know that staying home with your child in those formative times is important. You're raising a well-balanced, secure citizen that will go on and be productive as well.

I would tell young women entering my industry to focus. When I first came into this, I was trying to do all the things, and spin all the plates, and be everything to everybody. You cannot do that and remain sane. It's better to focus on one thing and do the one thing extremely well. Really be known for that first, then add. If you try to do everything, you'll dilute all your forward momentum because you're trying to spin too many plates, and you don't have the structure and the infrastructure, let alone the mental bandwidth to take that on. I know because I've been there and done that, and had to restructure like 3 times because I was like, I can't spin all these plates. I can't bring in people right now, so I need to decide what am I best at? What am I doing well at? Let's do that. Let's let all the other things just kind of cool their heels, and let's focus on one thing and do one thing well. That's what's worked.

I think the challenge is keeping up with the algorithm changes. Sometimes it's daily, and sometimes monthly. Trying to understand what the thinking is behind the algorithm, that's been a challenge. Keeping up with the new technology is a challenge, because AI is becoming more and more sophisticated, again, overnight. Staying up to date on that, especially if you're a marketer and a branding expert, you need to know what is trending, and what is likely, of all the trends, what is likely to last and not be a flash in the pan. That's a challenge because it really is a gamble. You have a best guess, and then if that doesn't work, you course correct. The other challenge is positioning your client's message and your own message so that it's crystal clear in a vast sea of AI goop. Everybody is ChatGPTing all of their social content, and it all is starting to sound and look the same, and it's annoying. You can use ChatGPT, that's fine, it's great for structure and scaffolding, but you can't stop there. You have to inject your personality and your thoughts and your emotion into that post, or email, or whatever else it is you're doing. People have become very savvy to something sounding AI. It's an immediate turnoff. They want to talk to a human.

I think the values for me are people who respect my time, because I respect theirs. I don't mind hopping on a quote-unquote quick coffee chat, but we need to have some guidelines before that, because you have enough coffee chats back-to-back, you've lost a whole day and really done nothing. Time is important. That's one thing that really has been driven home, is time is important.