Meet Carmen and Deirdre: Your Go-To Marketing Duo for Empowered CEOs!

Meet our Marketing Expert Duo, Carmen and Deirdre! Carmen is an Online Business Manager, a Whole Person Certified Coach with over 25 years of marketing experience, and the co-founder of Encore Empire. She specializes in mindset in entrepreneurship and marketing.

Carmen and her business partner, Deirdre Harter, CPA, work with service-based entrepreneurs—Business owners over forty who are ready to own the power they’ve spent decades building. They teach their clients the business of business through their year-long coaching program, The Empowered CEO Blueprint, and also offer smaller courses to help ambitious CEOs scale their service-based businesses without all the guesswork.

Read on to find out more about their life and business!

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Hey Carmen and Deirdre! 👋 We'd love to know -- where in the world are you? What do you like about it? Dislike?

Carmen is just outside of Portland, Oregon, and I love everything about it! It's not too far from the coast or the mountains, and it's lush and green from all the rain we get. I don't mind the rain at all because it makes the sunny days that much more beautiful with greenery and blooms.

Deirdre is just outside of Richmond, Virginia and she loves it there, too. She's not too far from VA Beach and she loves to garden in the lushness that Virginia has to offer.

What’s your favorite way to create content? What’s your favorite way to consume it? Why?

We love recording - be it video or audio. We're just really good at sitting down, writing out talking points and recording - it's so fun! Audio is great because we don't have to be "camera-ready," but doing live videos is so much fun because of the audience interaction.

Audio is our favorite way to consume because it's the most convenient.

Describe your dream client.

Our dream client is a B2B service provider who has been in business for a few years if not decades. She/he has hit a brick wall in their business where what they were doing successfully is suddenly no longer working. Their revenue has plummeted because of it and they're looking for help to turn things around.

Why is that person a dream client? How would you help them?

They're our dream clients because they're committed to doing whatever it takes.

Most people look at the symptoms of a business that's not doing well and identify one or two areas to focus - sales and/or marketing are the most common. They search for a sales or marketing coach or agency to solve their problem only to find that this approach doesn't do much.

What we know is that the trouble starts under the surface with a lack of a foundational business strategy. Once we uncover what the real culprit is, we work with our clients to build or rebuild that foundation and watch as things "magically" turn around. Watching the transformation and the joy it brings our clients is priceless!

What’s a funny anecdote, related to your area of expertise, that you can’t believe you did (or believed)?

Both of us are very experienced in the inner workings of Corporate America, but somehow, it took us way too long to learn how to step into the role of CEO in our own business. Once we realized this mistake and discovered what a difference it makes, our mission has been to help as many entrepreneurs do the same.

How would you describe MV to an online business owner who’s never heard of it?

MemberVault will become the heart of your business if you let it. It's a place to house your offers, programs, and private coaching client resources. You can create public and private communities, sales pages, and blog posts - heck, it can be your website, too.

Our favorite part is the learning platform where we can create lessons in our programs, ask questions that our clients can answer and we can reply to right there inside the platform - the interactivity and engagement levels are off the hook! This allows you to collect valuable data about what matters most to your audience.

What made you decide to use MV? Why do you keep using MV?

Carmen was one of the founding 100 members. I learned about it when I purchased a sales program from Adrienne Dorison and she used the platform before it was officially MemberVault. I believe Erin worked for her then - it was WAY back!

We use it because it far surpasses any learning platform we've experienced online and as consumers of lots of content, we've experienced a lot. Nothing comes close and you guys are always up-leveling the experience, which is incredible.

What frustrates or annoys you about using MV?

The main thing is the lack of organization options on the admin side. We have tons of products that we ran in the past that people still have access to, and we want them to, but they clog up our back end. Having the ability to archive helps, but it would be nice if that piece could be up-leveled. Also, having to use CSS to hide buttons, etc., but that's more of a minor annoyance.

I (Carmen) haven't switched our website to MV yet and don't have plans to. I happen to love WordPress (weird, I know), and the theme and plugins give me so many options that, at this time, it's not something that I'm drawn to.

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Want to get in touch or learn more about Carmen and Deirdre? Check out the links below!

Visit the Encore Empire's MV site here.

Connect with them on social:
🖥️ Website
Podcast
Facebook Group
Carmen's FB
Deirdre's FB
Carmen's LinkedIn
Deirdre's LinkedIn