It has been almost a year since I wrote my last post here and thought it would be a good time to update you on where I’ve been and where Frank McClung Advisory is heading.
Shortly after I wrote the April 2022 post, my mother of 87 whom I’m the primary caregiver, fractured her hip. This necessitated surgery to partially replace the hip in June 2022. The next six months she (and I) spent rehabbing her hip so she can now walk again with the aid of a walker. At the same time, my wife, who is the primary caregiver for her mother who lives with us as well, experienced some significant health issues. Did I mention we have a 14-year-old and an 8-year-old we homeschool?
So, life happened.
All I was able to do in the advisory role is advance my thinking with a lot of reading and research, keep current with website trends, and maintain and advise my existing client base.
I thought 2023 would be the year that my advisory work would take off, but then the economy stumbled, inflation rose, uncertainty took hold, and many companies scaled back their website plans.
More significantly in March of 2023, my son created a short video of my mother, who is still a practicing professional artist, that went viral on TikTok. It went viral again a month later on Instagram (5.5M views and 630K likes). These created a whole boatload of interest in my mother’s art.
She now has over 42K followers on Instagram (@miriammcclungart), and we are working with two major home improvement shows (on Magnolia and HGTV) to get her art into their renovated home show. And we’ve sold more art than we have in years.
Since March 2023 and her video, I’ve been mainly focused on taking advantage of the art opportunity the viral attention is affording my mother’s art for as long as it lasts. There are amazing artists everywhere, and this type of opportunity may never present itself to them so they pass away in obscurity–their work known only to close family and friends. I did not want that to be the case for my mother’s work.
So, I’m still in a bit of a holding pattern on the website advisory side. I have a couple of things I started work on that would be of great value to your organization. For example, many services-based organizations that need a website redesign have not properly (if at all) defined their strategic narrative. I’ve been working with an expert practitioner to discuss a short course to define your strategic narrative before you start your website redesign.
My newsletter, Contrails, has mostly sat dormant this year. I want to get that going again to share with you all that I’ve processed over the last year to help your organization put your website in a better position to serve your clients. Having a video go viral is something many organizations’ marketing departments dream about, but few are actually prepared to handle the opportunity it presents. I have some lessons learned from my mother’s art experience that can help you position your organization’s website to take full advantage of such an opportunity should it occur.
Let’s see where 2023 takes us. Thanks for following along with me.