The rush to reinvent everything on January 1 sounds exciting until the pressure spikes and the planner gathers dust. Let's take a different route: start with a pause, get your nervous system calm, and let simple, offline creativity make space for better choices. Instead of stacking goals, we strip back the noise and build from what actually feels good and true.

Kerry Mulhern, marketing consultant, social media manager, mom, and host of Reset with Kerry, joins us to unpack creative resets you can use anytime. We explore why “creativity” isn’t just painting or perfect output; it’s any small act that breaks routine and anchors attention. Think walks where you notice details, journaling without a plan, sewing a tiny project, or even trying a new restaurant. Those low-stakes, tactile moments switch off fight-or-flight, the same way great ideas pop in the shower. When the body feels safe, you can finally hear what you want, not what the feed tells you.

We also dig into strengths and personality insights to guide your experiments. If your strength is community and storytelling, you might volunteer in a creative setting or gather a small group to make something together. If curiosity drives you, test a class or sport you’ve never tried. Adults rarely let themselves be beginners, but that’s where joy and community often start. From there, we walk through a simple reset circle: notice the whisper that something needs to change, pause and calm your system, use a creative practice to hold the pause, audit what to keep or cut, anchor new beliefs and priorities, and only then move forward. Repeat this across the year so your goals stay aligned as life shifts.

Expect practical takeaways, a few laughs about our collective planner obsession, and permission to do less before you do more. If you’re craving clarity without the burnout, this conversation will help you reset with intention and design routines that feel human, not harsh. Listen, save it for later, and share it with someone who needs a gentler start. If it resonates, subscribe, leave a review, and tell us the one off-screen activity you’ll try this week.

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Meet your hosts and learn more about Kickstart Collective at kickstartcollective.co

Kickstart Collective is a creative marketing agency based in Wilmington, NC. We offer our clients a creative advantage through creative content and marketing strategies.

If your marketing ends at “closed won,” you’re leaving growth on the table. We turn the funnel into a flywheel and show how small changes to attract, engage, and delight can lower acquisition costs, increase retention, and make every customer add force to the next one.

We start by reframing the goal of content: not just traffic, but momentum. You’ll hear how to find the posts worth scaling, package them into lead magnets, and build clear next steps that convert attention into owned audiences. From there, we unpack the engage stage with segmented drips, timely retargeting, and sales alerts tied to buying signals, all tuned to relevance over noise. We don’t skip the human layer either—cadence, tone, and context are what turn opens into replies and replies into revenue.

Delight is where compounding begins. We walk through onboarding that shortens time-to-value, simple advocacy programs for reviews and referrals, and social proof that feeds SEO and better-fit leads. Along the way we share a concrete example that loops blog traffic into leads, leads into customers, and customers into growth signals that power the next cycle. To keep it practical, we include a year-end audit framework—scale what worked, fix what’s close, and cut the rest—with metrics to watch and small tests to run.

AI shows up as a support tool, not a crutch. Use it to draft outlines, repurpose long-form into clips, and propose nurture sequences you can refine for voice and accuracy. Pair that with smart content repurposing and a clear community loop, and your marketing becomes a steady engine rather than a series of one-off pushes.

Ready to build a system that doesn’t stall at the bottom of the funnel? Follow the show, share this with a teammate, and leave a quick review to help others find it. Want next week’s playbook in your inbox?

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Get more from Toucan Talks!

Watch on YouTube
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Meet your hosts and learn more about Kickstart Collective at kickstartcollective.co

Kickstart Collective is a creative marketing agency based in Wilmington, NC. We offer our clients a creative advantage through creative content and marketing strategies.

Vanity metrics look shiny—but they don’t pay the bills. In this episode, we break down the difference between numbers that look good (followers, likes, views) and the metrics that actually move your business forward. You’ll hear how we think about CAC, LTV, conversion rate, retention, and engagement quality, plus how to stitch reporting together across ads, website, and CRM so you can make smarter decisions—faster.

In this episode, you’ll learn

• Vanity vs. value: Why engagement metrics matter contextually but shouldn’t be your north star.
• The business metrics that count:
  • CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)—what you can afford to pay to win a customer
  • LTV (Customer Lifetime Value)—how much a customer is worth over time
  • Conversion rates across the funnel—from awareness ➜ lead ➜ sale
  • Retention & churn—what happens after the first sale
  • Engagement quality—signals like meaningful comments, site time, clicks, and forms
• Website signals that diagnose ad quality: Bounce rate trends, landing page fit, and audience targeting.
• Benchmarks & expectations: How to use industry benchmarks to sanity-check performance without chasing illusions.
• Reporting cadence that works: Monthly formal reports; tighter checks during ad learning and creative testing.
• Tooling that helps (without the headache): CRMs for sales dashboards, cross-platform reporting (e.g., Semrush), and native Shopify/Ads integrations.

Enjoyed the conversation? Follow and subscribe, share this with a teammate who lives in dashboards, and leave a quick review so more people can find the show. Got a question about your metrics stack? Send it our way and we might feature it next week.

Get more from Toucan Talks!

Watch on YouTube
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Meet your hosts and learn more about Kickstart Collective at kickstartcollective.co

Kickstart Collective is a creative marketing agency based in Wilmington, NC. We offer our clients a creative advantage through creative content and marketing strategies.