Ever opened your content calendar, sighed dramatically, and closed the tab? Same. For solopreneurs and small business owners, marketing often becomes the thing we push to the bottom of our to-do list. But what if there was a better way?
In this episode of The System for Everything, I sat down with Tayler Cusick Hollman, marketing consultant turned founder of Enji, to talk about the emotional and practical realities of DIY marketing. We dug into why we avoid it, how to fix it, and how to build a plan that doesn’t make you want to scream.
The Real Reason You’re Not Marketing
Let’s start with a truth bomb: most of us procrastinate on marketing not because we don’t care—but because we don’t feel confident. Tayler broke it down: we put off what feels uncomfortable. And for many of us, that’s marketing.
We tell ourselves, “I’m not a marketer.”
“I didn’t go to school for this.”
“I’m not doing it right.”
Sound familiar? That’s the kind of internal narrative that keeps your brand invisible—even if you’re amazing at what you do.
Why the Hustle Doesn’t Work
Tayler said something that made me pause: “Consistent doesn’t mean constant.”
We’ve all been sold the idea that successful marketing means showing up every single day on every single platform. But if your plan requires monk-like discipline and 27 hours a week, it’s not a plan—it’s a punishment.
Instead, she recommends being brutally honest about your time. Most of us realistically have 1–2 hours a week for marketing. Not five hours. Not ten. One or two.
So what if we built our systems around that truth?
The Weekly Routine That Gets It Done
Tayler’s advice: trade daily marketing guilt for one solid weekly session. One hour. Blocked on your calendar. Treated like a client appointment.
Why? Because trying to do 15 minutes a day is a trap. Those minutes get stolen by client work, life chaos, or—let’s be honest—a breakdown in the shower. You end up feeling like you’re always marketing but never finishing anything.
Instead, batch your tasks. Write that blog post. Schedule those posts. Then move on with your life. One weekly power hour is better than a week of half-efforts.
What to Cut Right Now
Feeling overwhelmed? Start by cutting back.
You don’t need to post five times a week on Instagram.
You probably don’t need to run ads unless you’re high-volume.
You absolutely don’t need to be everywhere.
Tayler suggests repurposing one solid piece of content multiple ways instead of reinventing the wheel every time. Smart. Strategic. Sustainable.
What a Real Marketing System Looks Like
A sustainable marketing system:
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Fits your actual schedule
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Centers consistency over frequency
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Includes monthly planning so you’re not scrambling
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Lets you repurpose instead of starting from scratch
And if you need help building that? That’s exactly why Tayler created Enji.
Introducing Enji: A System Built for You
Enji is more than a software tool—it’s a done-with-you system built specifically for small business owners. No blank slates. No vague templates. It’s Tayler’s strategy brain turned into a beautiful, user-friendly platform that actually helps you get things done.
Whether you’re launching a podcast, updating your blog, or just trying to keep Instagram alive, Enji helps you plan it all in one place. And it’s designed with the assumption that you’re busy—which means everything is streamlined and realistic.
Plus, there’s coaching. Real human support. A founder who answers questions herself. It’s a system that cares.
Connect with Tayler:
Review the Transcript:
Julie: Welcome back to the System for Everything podcast. Today’s episode is dedicated to every business owner who has ever opened a blank content calendar side dramatically and close the tab. We see you. We are you. Welcome to the system for everything, the podcast where we believe there is a system for just about anything, even that marketing plan you’ve been promising yourself.
You’d start next Monday. Today we’re joined by Taylor Cusick Holman. She is a marketing consultant term small business champion and the founder of Engie, which is a super user-friendly marketing tool, made specifically for small business owners who are doing it all themselves. After spending over a decade helping small businesses figure out their marketing tailor to everything she knows and poured it into Engie to help you get your marketing done quickly, confidently, and without the overwhelm because.
Let’s face it. Most of us didn’t sign up to be our own chief marketing officer, but with the right tools, it doesn’t have to feel so impossible. Welcome Taylor. Thank you for being here. Thank
Tayler: you so much for having me. I had to mute my mic ’cause I was like, I’m laughing already. I was like quiet. Well, I like that.
Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet. Julie is giving her intro. That’s a good way to start it. That is a good way to start it and I’m so excited that this is absolutely going to be the bright spot in my day and I’m ready for some laughs and some really fun conversations about all of the things.
Julie: I’m so excited we are gonna get started as we always do with the system.
Reboot. A quick little reset to start our episode with some humor and humanity. So Taylor, what internet niche rabbit hole could you give a TED Talk on?
Tayler: Oh. Ooh. What I mean, probably politics. Oh yeah. I mean, which is not like super rabbit hole nichey, but like your girl goes down some rabbit holes. Um, so you are, you are
Julie: always aware and on point.
Tayler: Yeah. My protest sign sits right next to my desk.
Julie: Yes.
Tayler: Because it’s a piece of history. So I feel like I’m going to, you know, it’s gonna live as long as it doesn’t deteriorate. So, yeah, I would say that’s, that’s the rabbit hole niche that I could go give
Julie: a
Tayler: Ted talk about.
Julie: Awesome. Okay. What is the dumbest hill you would absolutely die on?
Tayler: Oh my God. I wish I knew this question was coming, because I say that to Brett all of the time, who’s my husband and my business partner. I go, I will die on this hill. I mean, I think the hill that I will die on is that. Is anything related to like standing up for the quote unquote little guy? 100%. I, I have been known to be a martyr.
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks mom. I get it from her.
Julie: All right. And finally, who is a fictional character that you think would make a terrible business owner?
Tayler: Ooh, a terrible business owner. I mean, anyone from White Lotus.
Julie: I mean, they’re all so rich though. How’d they get rich? None of them are business owners.
Tayler: I mean, I think they are, but they’re bad ones. I mean, like the, the latest season is a prime example. I can’t remember his name ’cause the character’s names never stick into my brain. But the southern dad, he was a business owner.
It was a terrible one because he got like locked into some fraud thing.
Julie: I, I will be honest with you, I did not watch White Lotus, which many people are surprised about. ’cause it seems like it’s so right up my alley. I just did not like the first episode. I, I mean, the first season I just could not get into it.
I powered through the whole thing and I was like, but I don’t know something about it. But I mean, I know all about what happened in the third season and I know, you know, Piper, no, like, so. I got that down. I’m on my fingers on the pop culture. There you go. I would expect nothing less. All right, everyone, you have met the personality.
Now meet the powerhouse. Let’s dive into how Taylor’s helping business owners finally stop ghosting their marketing and start showing up with a plan. Here’s my conversation with Taylor on the system for turning marketing procrastination into a plan. Okay, Taylor. I mean, I know why I do it, but in general.
Why do we put off marketing?
Tayler: I mean, there’s a whole laundry list of reasons that is very like deeply personal for every single one of us. But correct me if I’m wrong, but I would assume that most of the people listening to this podcast and in your, you know, your ecosystem are service-based business owners, right?
Like trading their time for money. Yeah. I’m sure there’s
Julie: some products in there, but mostly probably service.
Tayler: Mostly service. So the big thing is that you just always prioritize client work. That always feels like the most important thing. And that’s not a, I’m not saying that it’s not the most important thing because if you do a really good job, then yeah, you’re gonna get referrals and like this whole sort of snowball effect happens.
You know, if we go a little bit deeper into like the psychology behind it, because your girl has a degree in psychology and sociology. We as humans procrastinate on things that we don’t feel great about doing, that we don’t feel confident about doing.
Julie: That is crazy because I literally for a second just felt like I was in marketing therapy.
Because like it hit me while you were talking, like, don’t think about other things while people are talking. Julie, what’s wrong with you? But it hit me because I feel like lately I’ve been having a lot easier of a time marketing and we can, you know, get into how much NG helps me and I mean, it mapped out all of my podcast launch and stuff like.
Side note, today, the day we’re recording, this is the day my podcast stuff came out and all my social media is handling itself thanks to Engie. But I think before when I was in certain facets of like business and different pivots and offering certain things, I think maybe I didn’t believe in them or I didn’t like doing them, and I wasn’t honest with myself about that.
And that is why I would put it completely on the back burner.
Tayler: Absolutely. It’s. An extremely human thing to do. So if anyone is listening and is like, I don’t want anyone to feel attacked or like I’m pointing fingers at you, I’m, I’ll point a finger. I mean, I at least have my hand up next to my face and like hiding the finger pointing over here, over here.
But it is, it’s just the reality of it that when we don’t feel. To a certain degree of confidence or with like, we’re doing something with a certain degree of confidence that we’re just like, uh, you know, like that can wait. Right? Or I don’t have, I don’t really have to do it. It’s this very deep seated, deep rooted thing that isn’t the easiest thing to change.
Believe me, someone who like has run many businesses trying to help humans change this behavior, it is really effing hard. The whole point of it is that we keep trying, like we do our best, whatever that version of best is every single day. And we try to, you know, use the logical sides of our brains to balance the emotions that we have about things to like help keep us from procrastinating like permanently.
Julie: Okay, so we’ve diagnosed the problem. What is the fix? I mean, what makes that marketing plan stick? Where do you see most? They go off the rails.
Tayler: Oh boy, this is, uh, yeah, this is gonna be like a marketing therapy session, folks. Like I’m into it. Buckle up because marketing goes off the rails because a lot of you have this really negative self-talk, and there’s a phrase that is kind of a broken record in your mind, and that’s the.
I’m not a marketer phrase. I didn’t go to school for this. I’m finger quoting because just to describe the hand bush, it’s, I a very, I am notorious for knocking things off of the table while having conversations. Yeah. You have this belief it’s negative self-talk. Right. That you have no business doing this thing and so you don’t think that you’ll do it right.
Or you know, you don’t think you actually have the right to be doing it. You think you shouldn’t be touching this thing or you even think, well, creating a marketing plan is like just gonna be way too complicated and I won’t know how to go about it. So that’s, I mean, before you even take step one, shit goes off of the rails.
And again, like it’s a human thing that is not, I see more people struggling with this than not.
Julie: So I mean, what is a realistic marketing system then actually look like? For someone like the solopreneur, the small business owner who is juggling 19 other things.
Tayler: Yeah, 19 or anywhere between 19 and like 104,000,072 things.
That’s probably more accurate. Yes. You know, uh, wherever, depending on the day. Mondays are worse than others, but you know, the, from where I sit, I’m a realist and the math has to math. So if your marketing plan really would take you 27 hours to do in a week, hi. Like it’s not gonna work. No. That’s just not feasible.
No, it’s not realistic. And so the first step in having a marketing plan that’s act that you are actually going to have a shot at sticking to, it has to fit your life. And I talk to tons of people every week. It’s like my job. And I asked them like, how much time do you really have to work on marketing every week?
And I’m like, be honest with me. Like, don’t lie, don’t lie to me about the answer to this question. And most people say one to two hours a week, and they make a face when they’re saying it because they’re like kind of ashamed that the number is so small. But there’s nothing to be ashamed about. Because if you know, hey, I have an hour or two a week that I can dedicate to doing my marketing things, then you can make a plan that fits that.
And the other piece of this is sort of a, a mantra that I want people to remind themselves of is consistent, doesn’t mean constant. That’s a powerful one that I recently started saying, and I was like that Taylor. Say that over and over and over again to like all of the people. Consistency doesn’t mean constant.
And so if you have one or two hours a week, you can still be consistent with your marketing without having to constantly work on it. Or even if you have, you’re like one of the, the like freak who’s like, no, I had like 12 hours a week to work on my marketing. Even what consistency looks like for you is still not constant because there’s still.
Constraints around how much time you have to do your marketing. So that to me is like step one in figuring out what all the other pieces are.
Julie: Okay. So we know now that it can be simple, it can be sustainable, it can be consistent, but how do we make that a habit? I mean, it’s so hard to get human beings. To change.
I mean, what do you, what advice do you have for someone who’s trying to get to that consistent point, but already feels so overwhelmed?
Tayler: Yeah, and this is what I like to say is a very simple but impactful shift that you can make. And I’m not bullshitting folks. Like I have helped a lot of people make this change.
And, you know, again, we’re humans, so some weeks we’re better at it than others because of, you know, the life that’s happening around us and that we’re, we’re very much in the middle of. But instead of taking that one hour a week and thinking, I’m going to work on my marketing 15 minutes a day. Those little 15 minutes here and there are very easy for other people, other things client work to steal from you.
They, it’s gone. Right? Or maybe you decided to like cry in the shower for an extra 15 minutes that day. Right, because that week is, I mean, the shower is, the shower is where I go to have big emotions. So I am also projecting on other people. When you think you’re gonna work on your marketing a little bit every day, it doesn’t happen.
And also if we use an example of, Hey, I, I wanna write a blog post this week. If you try to write it in 15 minute chunks, like you’re gonna at the end of the week go like, oh my God, is this blog post done yet? Like, I’ve been working on this all week. And so again, you have these like negative emotions and then you start to spiral all into the negative self-talk.
Instead of doing that and breaking that time into little bitty pieces that you work on, just work on it for an hour. Just get the damn thing done and make it a weekly routine instead of a daily task. So it is much easier for us to block an hour of our time on our calendar and. I mean, we’re not always successful, but not schedule over that hour versus 15 minutes.
That can go away really quickly. So that’s a really simple but impactful shift that we can all make as, as business owners to actually get into the routine and change our behavior so that our marketing is consistent over time.
Julie: Is there anything you think that’s taking up space in most people’s marketing plans that, I mean, they can just cut.
Like what is just a waste of time?
Tayler: I mean, for a lot of people it is. It’s not like totally cut, but it’s a big cut down on how much you think you need to be on Instagram. Like how many posts per week you think you need. I was just talking to, do you know Emily Foster Creative?
Julie: I know the name. I, I don’t know her.
We’ve never interacted, I don’t think. Okay.
Tayler: But she, she and I, she, we did a marketing consultation call. She’s in the NG community, and I reserve a little bit of time for like one-on-one sessions with folks. She was lamenting about her inability to stay consistent. And so we’re talking through, Hey, what are your current expectations of how much content you will produce every week?
And she’s like, well, five Instagram posts, and I had a blog post and, and I’m like, girl, no, you don’t need to be on it that much because like five pieces of content a week means. 20 in a month, which means I can’t do 20 times 52 in my head. So whatever that is, the number’s really big. Right?
Julie: Especially when realistically who you’re trying to get that in front of is not even seeing it the first time around.
And so it would be such a better use of time to take that one piece of content and turn it into five different ways. You can use it on Instagram
Tayler: totally to, to. That’s a big thing that people can cut is just their expectations of their output. And again, if we tie this back to like consistent doesn’t mean constant and your marketing plan needs to fit how much time you have.
It’s all related. But if I have to call one out that a lot of people can just like straight up stop doing it would be advertising. A lot of people like meta ads. Yeah. Oh, okay. Like meta and Google ads. Unless you are a volume-based business where you need many, many, many sales, many, many, many bookings all of the time, constantly, advertising is kind of a waste of money, in my opinion.
I am o That’s fair. I’m willing to, I’m willing to die on that hill.
Julie: Okay. Are there any like small, kind of like daily or even weekly habits you would recommend? To keep marketing off of the back burner.
Tayler: Oh, to take it off of the back burner. I mean, it’s mostly a, a monthly habit is gonna help you take marketing off of the back burner.
And that’s doing some planning, like, what are you going to do this month? And again, like if we operate it within the, the constraints of reality right. Then to plan out a month is not that complicated. It’s like, what blog post are you going to write and publish? What you know, two Instagram posts a week?
Are you going to create and share? The other thing is maybe some of these folks that are listening are on Pinterest, right? Like it becomes very simple when you’ve narrowed the lane and how much you need to do, and then if you make the plan ahead of time. I know all y’all are really great at executing checklists like we all are obsessed with to-do lists.
And if you’re anything like me, if you did something extra today, you’re gonna write it down just so you can cross it off. Uh, yeah. Yeah. So like, make, make your monthly plan so that it is, you do have the checklist for you to just start doing your thing and crossing those things off of the list.
Julie: Okay. I wanna get into talking a little bit about.
This incredible platform you’ve built, and do not think that I’m not still gonna try to get you to come back on for a, the system of being a female founder episode, but, you know, I don’t, we can’t go like too off the rails. We’ll get, we’ll talk for an hour, but just kind of tell everyone what Eng g. I mean, what did you make it for?
Why did you make it, you know, when you were dreaming it up, what were you like, okay, it absolutely must do this. Like no matter what, like what was that thing?
Tayler: You know, NNG is for small business owners who have to do their own marketing and aren’t marketing experts. And when I say not marketing experts, that doesn’t mean that you’re clueless.
About what you need to do for your marketing. We’re smart people. We are all smart cookies. But there’s just this, you know, like all the things we’ve already talked about, the negative self-talk and all of like the deep rooted, you know, human condition things, it gets in our way of actually getting stuff done.
So, you know. Brett, who I’ve already mentioned is my husband and business partner. He started coding the guts of nng during the pandemic because he’s, he’s a technologist but has been managing people for a long time and he was just bored and he’s a nerd and I love him for it. And I was like, so what do you do with that?
Like you’re building software. It seems like a really big side project. And so. We thought about a few things, but then when we started talking about what, what I did at the time as a human consultant, it’s like I think that we could create a system like productize what I do. Not gonna, not gonna be easy, but not impossible.
So that’s, that was the, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, we need to do this. And then we built it for small business owners because the little miniature version of my therapist that lives on my shoulders, Dr. Corey, um, she would, she would laugh. I mean, like there’s, I have a very strong justice piece to my personality.
Like I have very knee jerk reactions around what I think is right and wrong and all that kind of stuff. And. When you look at the world of technology, there’s not someone trying to solve this problem. And you know, there are people trying to solve parts of marketing and business problems that small business owners have, but usually it’s something that was built for big businesses that they create some watered down version of for small business owners.
I’m like, no, like we’re gonna build this for small business owners who have a very complex problem. And so it changes everything about how we think of what we’re doing and what we’re building and why we would would build it. But we are absolutely building it for the people who I think the rest of the technology world and business world is just like totally overlooking.
Julie: I love that. And what’s the thing that you were like, it must do this. Like the, the piece of it
Tayler: having a strategy was the, it must do this like, and a strategy that creates stuff because I know that none of us need another blank slate. We just don’t need it. Um, because we will overthink it and have analysis paralysis, and then we’re, we’re still stuck in the same place of just trying to figure out what we’re gonna do.
So it was extremely important that we, we came up with a way to like, basically put my actual brain into the software so that there were like, that it guides you. At every sort of turn. And if it, if it doesn’t for some reason, then you know, you just hit the chat bubble and like I sit here at my computer,
Julie: it does, and it’s so user friendly and it’s so beautiful and I’m just wildly proud of you.
Tayler: I didn’t write any of the code, but I’ll pass the compliment to the people that do that. Zeros and ones.
Julie: Well, it’s great. And you know, I think a lot of the, what makes it work is your heart behind it.
Tayler: Yeah, that does. That is one of the things that I’m extremely proud of is most of our reviews mention the customer service and the level of like human attention that our community feels, and that is also something that is very core to what we’re doing.
Because I know that marketing is just one of these things that people just want another person to tell them it’s gonna be okay. Like this is right, we just want some, I can’t come up with a word with it ’cause I’m borderline Mary. Maybe perimenopause, I don’t know. So my brain just like stops thinking of words.
Uh, is it validation? Would validation be the word maybe? I dunno. Yeah. Validation. We want some comfort and validation that like the thing that we’re gonna try. Is okay to try. And so, you know, I didn’t want it to just be software. I wanted it to have this human component. And that’s why there’s group coaching and that’s why like I respond to customer service.
It gets like a crazy cuckoo person. Like, I’m like, oh, notification must respond, must respond. But it is, it is something that I’m, I’m super proud of and I think does make us unique.
Julie: Oh, thank you so much for this conversation. Taylor. Please tell everyone where we can find you, where we can find Eng G.
Anything else you wanna promote or else anything else you got going on? Gimme all the, gimme all the details. Uh, well,
Tayler: being a startup founder means I don’t have time for anything else, so there’s, there is no other things going on other than me trying to get outside and play. To keep my head screwed on straight, but I am a geriatric millennial, hence the perimenopause reference.
Shout out. Um, you’ll find me. Yeah. Shout out to the perimenopausal ladies out there. You’ll find me on Instagram. Please don’t try to have a conversation with me on TikTok ’cause I check it like every 11 days. So on Instagram our handle is ng co, so ENJ ICO co. And our website is ng.co. And if you, uh, like my version of weird, I am the full version of Weird on my personal Instagram and that’s Tailored Designs, T-A-Y-L-R-D Designs.
Julie: Oh, thank you so much, Taylor. We are gonna end with our systems shut down In my very limited free time between work, launching a podcast, uh, being a wife and being a mom to a newborn, I have been, of course, rewatching Vanderpump rules. And let tell you, watching it in hindsight is. Nuts. I mean, it’s a wild experience.
I mean, the editing, the absolute foreshadowing, the red flags, we just all ignored. I have so many thoughts, so many thoughts on Jackson’s gaslighting. Kristen’s continuously correct detective mode to how no one ever really worked at serve. I sat down and I was thinking about this and I was like, I wanna get into like the system of dysfunction that made this show so iconic and I could go on so long that it would be its own standalone episode.
So I’m gonna do one. Uh, if there’s any other shows you think I should pull system takeaways from, please DM me. I wanna know Bachelor Love Is Blind, the Office, any of those. All right, that is a wrap on this episode of the system for everything. If you loved it or you even just liked it enough to multitask while listening, go ahead and hit that subscribe button so you never miss a system.
Leave a review if you’re feeling generous and come hang out with me over on Instagram at Dallas Girl Friday, where the real behind the scenes chaos lives. Thanks for listening, and remember, there’s a system for everything, even this.
