Stories of Passion and Resilience from Jennie Smythe-Founder Girlilla Marketing

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Speaker 1: M taking a Walk Nashville at the end of the day.

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Speaker 2: Like that simplicity of making sure that you do a good job, that you don't mess it up, and that you turn around and help somebody behind you.

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Speaker 1: Pretty powerful stuff.

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Speaker 3: Hi, this is Sarah Harrelson, your host of Taking a Walk in Nashville Today. I am taking you to the eighth Avenue South neighborhood in Nashville. Joining me today at her office is Jenny Smyth, the founder and CEO of award winning Girl LM Marketing, which heads digital strategy for a diverse roster of world famous entertainers and brands, including Debt and Company, Willie Nelson, Darius Rucker, Blondie Brookshields, and Vince Gill just to name a fuel. Her early career includes time at Disney's, Hollywood Records, Yahoo Music, Warner Brothers, and Clear Channel. And today we are sitting down to talk about her new memoir that is out now called Becoming Girl.

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Speaker 4: Gorilla Buzzsnight and this is Taking a Walk Nashville with singer songwriter Sarah Harrelsick.

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Speaker 5: Hi, Jenny, thank you so much for being on the Taken a Walk Nashville show today and.

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Speaker 1: You're having me. I'm happy to be here of course. Yeah.

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Speaker 5: So we are here at Gorilla Marketing today in Nashville, and I just read your new memoir, Becoming Gorilla, that.

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Speaker 1: Was published earlier this year.

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Speaker 5: So what inspired you to write about your life experiences as far?

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Speaker 2: I want to tell you you're the first person in a long time that has actually pronounced gorilla right, so high five. We have many variations, but that was that's fun and exciting for me. I wrote this book simply because I felt like I had all this information and all these stories that I thought people could really resonate with and hopefully on the work side of life digital marketing and social media really just take a look at how they were behaving online and improve because there's so many good things about it, and that really doesn't make the news very often. So I wanted to kind of tell the historical, you know, relevance to my life personally through my career, but I also really wanted to leave people with ideas and options of how to better relate to human beings online.

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Speaker 5: And you get very personal in your story in this book and your life experiences, and I kind of got chills reading the prologue myself because my father's name is actually Pete and you have a peat. I have a peat, and I was a strange for him for ten years until my mother passed away and then I got reconnect did with him.

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Speaker 1: So I just related whoheartedly to your.

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Speaker 5: Story, and I just think so many other people can relate and connect to your story. So thank you for sharing it. I definitely thank you for telling.

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Speaker 2: Me that because sometimes, like you know, that was the intention of the book, is that and I said this, I hope that people see themselves in my story. So to hear that is actually really powerful for me because I know that it worked and that was the intention. And you just by saying that somebody's going to see this podcast and they're going to say the same thing to you, and that was the intention. It was just to say, like, hold on a second, we're all connected.

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Speaker 1: How do we move forward? And especially after the.

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Speaker 2: Last few weeks for us online have been really difficult for a lot of us, And so even though the book came out in April, you know, in October, the fact that I'm still able to talk about the basics of what I think we do together to move forward in this type of communication is doing that.

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Speaker 1: It's like really connecting with people. And so thank you for telling me that.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you. I think connection is so important. I think young female professionals will relate to this book a lot. And I want to talk about the start of your career because you say the music industry is all about who you know sometimes, and I think that's so true. And speaking of who you know, as stripper, landed your first professional opportunity at Elektra Entertainment, and as she told you, they they're going to think you're a stripper when you arrive.

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Speaker 1: Was not the case.

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Speaker 2: I mean, it was like there, it was a wild time in the nineties. Yeah, but no, I don't think anyone thought I was a stripper. But I did heed her advice, which was it boiled down simply.

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Speaker 1: She was like, I'm going to help you. Once you get settled, you help somebody else. And then I won't.

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Speaker 2: Say what she actually the words that she used on this podcast, but she basically, in a very blunt way, told me not to mess it up, that there were people that needed to be helped behind me, and like there's not a career counselor that could have given me better advice, Like it was so out of left field coming from this person who I.

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Speaker 1: Don't even really know her real name, Like it was NICKI.

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Speaker 2: That's all I know, you know. But if I could find this person again, I often thought, oh, man, I hope at one point she sees something and reaches out and says, I'm Nikki.

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Speaker 1: That would be so amazing.

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Speaker 2: But at the end of the day, like that simplicity of making sure that you do a good job, that you don't mess it up, and that you turn around and help somebody behind you.

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Speaker 1: Pretty powerful stuff.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that's very important. And during the course of a career, you worked for a lot of different corporate companies in the corporate world and music, such as Warner and Yahoo and clear Channel. But what was the actual turning point that led you to starting your own business guerrilla marketing And how did you navigate past the fear of being an entrepreneur for the first time.

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Speaker 1: So I was really lucky, Because I say lucky, I worked really hard and took advantage of opportunities. So we just called that lucky.

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Speaker 2: To have amazing job opportunities at gigantic companies. The problem with me with those particular companies, is that I never really fit a particular role or I would fit now, but then I naturally you want to keep changing and doing different things. And when somebody offers you a job for a role, it's pretty well defined, like here's your job description, here's your salary cap. You know, you might have a bonus structure or some kind of incentive, but for the most part, like you know what your lane is. And so even though I had amazing experience, it wasn't like a I didn't have like a bad experience that I was like, I can't do this anymore and I need to start my own business. It wasn't like that at all. It was it was basically more about I don't fit in this world and I'm not utilizing the skills that I have in the best way possible for me. And so my only option was really to be an entrepreneur. My only option was to start the company that I envisioned that I wanted to work at. And in this job seventeen eighteen years later, it changes every single day.

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Speaker 1: I don't have a lane.

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Speaker 2: I definitely have responsibilities as a CEO as making sure the health and wealth in my company is you know, doing well, but I don't know what I'm gonna do every single day when I walk into this office. So that is a spirit thing, you know, and you have to be the right personality for that. But truly it was a much more natural fit for me than anywhere else. But you asked me how I got over the fear. You don't ever get over the fear.

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Speaker 1: And again seventeen eighteen years later, the same worries that you had on the first day that you start are still there. But like, you do it.

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Speaker 2: Anyways and then it just becomes a muscle reaction. But I even, you know, people used to say to me all the time in the beginning, like why would you do this? It's so risky, you know, how do you know? Like what are you going to do when you're twenty years in.

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Speaker 3: You know?

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Speaker 2: And I'm like, man, those are all what ifs that you could actually apply to any other job, you know, because companies go under all the time. And I grew again, I'm a kid in the nineties, so I saw all these giant corporations fall. I saw all these people with houses, their mortgages default.

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Speaker 1: I saw my dad.

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Speaker 2: Worked for the same company for twenty five years. My mother worked for the government. That didn't seem like an option for me.

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Speaker 1: It just didn't. It just it wasn't for me.

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Speaker 2: There's nothing wrong with it, it just wasn't for me, And so I figured I would bet on myself.

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Speaker 1: Have to take a leap of faith.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, but like pragmatically speaking, the biggest piece of advice that I have for anybody is.

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Speaker 1: To just not go into debt. You know, because as soon as you have debt and there's expenses, but expenses are different than debt. Debt is changes how you make decisions.

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Speaker 5: So yeah, I think that's a good point, especially because you know, it might have been a different story if just right off the bat, you were going to be saying, you know, hey, I'm going to start my own company, instead of the career experience you built up before that, before those skills right that you learned.

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Speaker 2: And the same thing when you're starting out, like kids that are coming out of college and they have accrued an exorbitant amount of debt, they're making decisions based on paying that debt off instead of setting up their life. That's a huge problem for me.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that's such an important point, And you bring up a few times in your memoir how you felt like you needed to accomplish a great amount by the time you were thirty. And I think, as women especially, we all put a deadline on ourselves, like we need to accomplish this and that by the time we're thirty, when you know.

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Speaker 1: This shouldn't be the case at all.

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Speaker 5: So what advice do you give to women who feel like maybe they're stuck in their career at their age and they can't break the glass ceiling.

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Speaker 2: Oh so making all of those decisions got me in jobs I didn't like and a divorce, right, So if I would have made different decisions, then I wouldn't be here talking to you about these same things. So like, it's not I wouldn't say that any of those things are mistakes per se.

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Speaker 1: I would just.

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Speaker 2: Say that, like it was experienced, that maybe didn't have to be so painful.

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Speaker 1: But I truly believe that, like those weird.

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Speaker 2: Rules that we put on ourselves, I do feel like, generationally speaking, some of those things have dissipated. And so I see people that I work with that no longer are feeling those kind of pressures. And you know, there's biological pressures. Of course, there's biological pressures for women on when they are gonna decide to potentially have a family or not, and you know, that's that's something that has to be addressed. But I think you see more options and you have more examples now of people that have worked through pregnancy or you know, adopted or you know, got just so many different ways to do that. Where really, when I was coming through it was based on two choices.

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Speaker 1: You know, you were either going to have kids or you weren't right.

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Speaker 5: And how was your digital marketing agency shifted since you opened it in two thousand and eight with the development of technology.

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Speaker 2: Everything, I mean literally we if you just think about what was happening hapening in two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine online, it seems like simple times, man. I mean it was like Facebook was a college thing. Twitter was like having a moment YouTube. You know, you're watching Obama inauguration videos, You're watching Susan Boyle like singing her heart out, Like you're experiencing the Internet for the first time with a lot of people. And not to say the Internet wasn't there, because it was there before that, but everybody having access and really what changed that was the mobile phone, right, the smartphone, because up until then, I mean I remember sending in marketing meetings and people saying, hey, all those people between California and New York, they don't have Wi Fi and they're like on dial up and they're never going to adopt these things like music streaming and downloads.

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Speaker 1: And I was like, what are you talking about?

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Speaker 2: Like that is crazy to just say we're only going to care about this coast and this coast and everything else in the middle the flyover states if you will like these people, I mean, the implication was that, like maybe they weren't a smart and I just was like hardly offended by that, Like I wanted to I wanted to speak to them, so like how do I do that?

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Speaker 1: You know? And so that was that was that was the assignment. The assignment was to.

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Speaker 2: Figure out how to reach people that you were told maybe didn't want to be reached digitally.

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Speaker 1: And I just didn't believe that. And I still don't, you know, when I hear things about you know, certain research studies and you know, different ways that we measure through survey, I'm just like.

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Speaker 2: I I refuse to believe it because I don't need a middleman to tell me like what people find interesting because people can speak for themselves. So that was that was a huge game changer to be like the person one of the people at the table who had the perspective.

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Speaker 1: That didn't go through a gatekeeper.

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Speaker 4: We'll be right back with more of the Taking a Walk Nashville podcast. Welcome back to Taking a Walk Nashville.

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Speaker 5: Would you say AI has helped you with it?

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Speaker 1: Was it still?

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Speaker 5: Is it still just an area you guys were trying to figure out how you can use it beneficially, look.

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Speaker 2: Double edged sword, huge issues on copyright, data protection, all of those things.

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Speaker 1: But just like when the Internet came, just when the search.

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Speaker 2: Engines came, it's an equalizer and it is another tool in our in our arsenal and as people, you know, you used to be able to choose like are you going to watch DV? Are you going to go on the internet? Are you going to go to the library, are you going to read a book? All of that AI is already here. It's already integrated into everything that you do online. So the idea of you know, sort of raging against it is futile. What you have to do is figure out how do you use it to your advantage. So to answer your question, my our biggest hurdle are impostors. From a music marketing standpoint, our biggest are, hands down is impostors and and scams of our fans online. And the platforms don't really help us out.

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Speaker 1: So they give us tools to proactively report these things in which is helpful, but it doesn't.

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Speaker 2: It's like a never ending game of whack a mole and it costs us time. It costs us money and time. You know, certain things don't get.

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Speaker 1: Removed because the impostors and the fake accounts get nuanced to the rules of like what.

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Speaker 2: Is considered an impostor and what isn't. And it's heartbreaking to read some of these stories of people that are catfished and think that they're talking to somebody and they're not. Some networks are better than others, but for the most part, that's our biggest hurdle right now.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, I think your job has been constantly shifting with the course of technology, and it will continue to. But do you think it's harder with technology now for everything you have to sort through or does it make it easier because you don't have to phone up as many people stick flyers around them.

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Speaker 2: I actually think you still need to do that because I feel like you're leaving real life, you know, a side by just concentrating solely on digitally. So I would say this, I would say, the volume is what makes it sort of unattenable.

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Speaker 1: It's the amount of networks.

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Speaker 2: Is the amount of different types of content that needs to be created on each network, right like it used to be this was for video, this was for photo, This is for pictures of your kids and your dogs, right like, that was kind of how we looked at things, and now it's hey, these are the five different types of media that you need to create for this. This is the interaction, you know whatever. So I sort of liken it too, having multiple networks within your reach, and each network has its own set of channels, and so how do you approach that? And sometimes it's the same on you know, across the channel, but oftentimes it's not.

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Speaker 1: So it's a volume thing.

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Speaker 2: But I will say this, I love social media the idea of being without it, even though it is not without its faults, But I do remember a time without it, and I am very happy to be connected with people, to be able to keep in touch with my friends who don't live here or that do, and that we're just busy and on different paths, and that I get to see those birthday photos and I get to see you know, their accomplishments at their jobs, and just in general, you know, able to learn about causes that are important to me that I can donate to. Like these are all blessings, but for the most part, the ethos in this building is that you don't own these networks and you can't depend on them. Like we're as we're sitting here today, on the date that we're sitting down, there's a strong possibility by the time this goes live that will have some indication of what is going to be happening to a particular network or not, you know, in the.

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Speaker 1: Next three four months.

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Speaker 2: So things like that are really good reminders that like you can use that you can use these networks, but you can't rely on them.

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Speaker 1: So as old school and eye rolly as.

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Speaker 2: This sounds, it's super important that you have your own properties, your email list, your website, you know, any any business that you own that you have the data because at any given time, one of these networks can go down, go away, get bought, get sold.

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Speaker 1: And we've seen this before.

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Speaker 2: You know, you asked me about two thousand and nine, like man MySpace was was it? It's not here anymore, and we still talk about it like it was a part of our culture.

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Speaker 1: It was a part of our ethos.

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Speaker 2: And so these things can be impactful and they can also be fleeting.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, you just never know, right, of course it's going to take rice exactly. You've dealt with your own battle of breast cancer, and you know, it seems everywhere you look now people are dealing with cancer in some form of another, and many entrepreneurs and full time creatives can't afford health insurance or they just kind of put it off, and then when they deal with their own health battle, you know, they're out of work, they're not able to go and do their job. And you are on the board of Music Health Alliance. So how does this organization break the barrier for people in the music industry struggling to obtain healthcare.

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Speaker 1: They're so far beyond even breaking the barrier. I mean, there was nobody doing this work.

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Speaker 2: So Tatum, the founder of Music Health Lifecience, had a wide breadth of professional experience before she founded this company, but she started on the music business side, and I think she saw a need that we weren't taken care of, as a lot of us are independent contractors, a lot of us are musicians that after a certain point in life, it's impossible to be a touring musician or you know a plethora of reasons why somebody can't live on the road anymore. And we get so much from this community. Not only do we get amazing art, but we get friendships, we get support systems, we get you know, community like and those aren't buzzwords like, that's literally what we have. And so to know that somebody who's given their whole life to the music community has we don't. I mean, yes, we have unions for certain points of professional careers, but for the most part, none of us qualify for any anything like that. So Tatum became the conduit to the music insurance and medical community and the music community when nobody else was doing it. And I was lucky enough to see her start that company. So for me, we are pretty similar in our personalities. We are pretty similar in our love of the community and also tenacity to make something happen. And we started at our company's you know right around the same time. She's a little younger on that front. But she not only has helped me, but I mean thousands of pounds, thousands of people, and it is everything that you could potentially imagine. It is organ transplants, it is preventative dental care, it is you know, having a dedicated resource for medicare. It is the place where a lot of us, when something acute happens, we call. Like she has become the person that we all call providing services to small businesses like mine, of finding insurance that everyone here is covered.

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Speaker 1: There isn't.

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Speaker 2: I don't have an asset in my business, like I don't have master recordings, I don't have any of that. My business assets are my people. And so for me as an entrepreneur being able to make decisions of where my resources are going to go. I hate how expensive the insurance company is. The insurance company businesses because it's a business. They're not out here being nonprofits for us. In fact, they're profiting very well, some would say criminally profitable. But my biggest expense minus our mortgage, is paying our health insurance premiums. And at one point in my career when I showed up on Tatum's doorstep. My business wasn't going to make it because of health insurance costs. And when I think about that and how many people entrepreneurs, small businesses, and especially women owned business because there was a time when our insurance was much more expensive than mail insurance, which is a whole nother podcast. We had to find a reason to keep going, and Tatum was that reason to help me find something.

00:25:38
Speaker 1: That I could.

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Speaker 2: Know that I was doing the right thing for my team, but also know that I wasn't going to default on any of my thoughts.

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Speaker 5: I love that and I just love to bring awareness to that organization. So I hope if anyone that's in the music full time listening to this episode at or checkout Music Health Alliance.

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Speaker 1: That makes me help. That was very joyful.

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Speaker 5: Yes, So since we were on taking a walk Nashville, I know when you were on taking a walk with Buzz, he asked you who would you take a walk with, But in this podcast, I like to ask where in Nashville is.

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Speaker 1: Your favorite place to take a walk. So I think every after I watched I had watched.

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Speaker 2: A bunch of the Buzz podcast before, and then I felt like the pressure like I really thought about, you know, what I was saying and who I was going to pick after listening to what everybody else pick. So I'm I'm I in my in my mind, I thought you might ask me who, So I was like, oh, who else? But I'm relieved. I think that to this day. Radner Lake is such an amazing place in the heart of Nashville. So it's like in the middle of the city. It's just a beautiful path around a lake and it's you know, an hour, you know to get around the whole thing, really, and I just.

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Speaker 1: Think it's just the biggest gen of the city. Yeah, I love hiking.

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Speaker 5: There so many good dirt paths and I think they're under construction right now to fix the Iroin Road that should be back up in November for yeah to check it out.

00:27:16
Speaker 1: Yes, well, Jenny, thank you so much.

00:27:18
Speaker 5: Again for being on taking a walk Nashville today. If someone wants to purchase your memoir Becoming Gorilla, where's the best place that they can find it?

00:27:27
Speaker 2: Anywhere anywhere you buy books, but at my website. If you purchased there, then I know that personally, and that.

00:27:37
Speaker 1: Means a lot to me too.

00:27:38
Speaker 5: Wonderful and that's Gorilla Marketing dot com. Yeah perfect, Thank you again, thank you today.

00:27:43
Speaker 4: Okay, thanks for listening to Taking a Walk Nashville with singer songwriter Sarah Harrelson, and check out our other podcasts, Music Save Me, Comedy Save Me, and Taking a Walk. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.