Ep. 105 What Does Next Level in Business Actually Mean?

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Today I would like to talk about what the word or the phrase “next level” actually means. I am so tired of this phrase. “I’m going to take your business to the next level. I’m ready to go to the next level.” What does the next level actually mean?

I want to dive into this a little bit. And as a child of the 80s and 90s, I was a Mario lover, that sounds weird, but I was. I loved playing Mario, but the funny thing about my Mario skills is that they suck, and I wasn’t very good at playing the original Mario. And for any of you guys that remember the original Mario, they gave you like 3 lives, there were not a lot of one ups, it was easy to die and then you’d have to start all the way at the beginning, unless you got through these certain milestones. The newer games realize that we all hated it, and they made it easier. But the original one, the original Nintendo Super Mario Brothers was really hard.

So I just got into the habit of playing level one, and maybe level two. And I just loved playing these levels over and over and over again. I didn’t want to go to the next level at all. I didn’t because I knew the next level would be harder, I would die and the boss would kill me. So I just got really, really good at the level that I was on. And maybe this is a sign that you know, I’m not a true entrepreneur because I stayed at the same level, but I also understood the ramifications of the next level.

So when we talk about this word in business, people are usually referring to the next level of revenue. Like, “Okay my business makes $100,000 a year, I want to make a million dollars a year.” So that’s the next level. Now, depending on how you measure business growth, that might be ten levels away. Or it might be one level away. I find that some people in the internet marketing space that don’t actually know business all that well, think that’s the next level when there’s an unlimited amount of levels in between $100,000 and a million dollars a year. But I digress.

So let’s just for the sake of argument say that the next level means a million dollars instead of 100,000. We talk about the revenue as next level, but what we never talk about, or hardly talk about is all of these things that come with that revenue. So I did a post back on November 28th, I wrote an email, I actually got some flack for it, people taking aim at me, which is fine, but I was trying to explain sort of the next level bananas of doubling a business once it’s past the million dollar mark.

So typically in a business growth pattern, you want to grow 15% per year, 20% a year, etc. Now in the land of tech and internet and stuff like that, we see businesses that grow 100% a year, or 1,000%, whatever, it’s just like crazy numbers that don’t make any sense. So when we at Funnel Gorgeous went from 1 million to 2 million, it doesn’t sound like a big next level, but it was actually 10 times, 100 times more significant to go from 1 million to 2 million than it would be to go from 100,000 to a million. Just because the denominator is bigger, so it’s exponential growth.
And so I knew that hitting 2 million, we probably would not get to 4 million, because again, that’s doubling our business, but at double the exponential value of the year before. So as I’ve been watching our numbers and feeling the growing pains of a very quickly expanding business, realizing somewhere in September or October that 4 million was going to be our revenue goal, that we did in fact double the business, and wanting to explain that getting to that next level, was actually quite difficult and pretty messy.

So I started to say like, ‘Okay, you want to say, let’s take your business to the next level, that means going from a team of two or a team of six to a team of 15.” And in our case we actually grew to a team of 20, and then we had to get rid of some people, not because we didn’t like them, but just because we hadn’t, we had over hired in that growth, and that’s very common, you grow fast, you hire fast, and then you gotta scale back because you’re like, “Well actually this isn’t really making us a ton of money.”

We had to spend months and thousands of dollars rolling out a very exciting employee handbook, and a performance review process, and how are we going to pay out bonuses on a yearly basis, and how are we going to give out raises, and what is our strategy for raises, and our maternity policy, and health insurance, and retirement benefits, are we offering them or not? All of this stuff, so that’s what next level meant.

Next level also meant registering in new states for taxes, which was super fun. Now we are registered in 3 of the worst states, California, Connecticut and New York. So that’s fun. Starting to pay six figures in salaries to team members, five figure software costs, basically planning events with giant budgets that are pretty risky. We’re planning an event with a $300,000 budget. You know, $70,000 in refunds, $83,000 in processing fees for credit cards. Just ungodly amounts of taxes, and just expenses rolling out the door.

So the next time you say, “I want to go to the next level.” Yes, you are saying , “I want more revenue.” But you’re also saying, “I want a harder boss.” Back to the Mario analogy. I want a bigger Bowser, I want a trickier piranha plant. That’s what you’re saying.

So sometimes, sometimes it makes sense to step back for a second and ask yourself, “What is your actual goal for your business, for your life?” and this is sort of a side note, but I partnered with Aryeh Sheinbein in a course called Future Fund, Funnel Gorgeous is the, it’s hosted by Funnel Gorgeous, and this is really that question of like, understanding what you want out of life, what it costs to live, how do you see your lifestyle, coming up with those numbers, understanding what you’re actually working towards. Because you may be like 7 year old Julie, and you may realize, “Actually what I want is a million dollar business. I don’t want to go beyond level 3. I like level 3, I’m going to get really good at level 3. I’m going to fight that Bowser over and over and over again until I can do it with my eyes closed, and I’m going to have a great life, and I’m not going to try to go to level 5.

So anyway, that’s sort of my little rant, soap box on decoding what next level actually means. Talk to you soon.

Ep. 104 Stupidly Simple Way To Strategically Plan 2022

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I want to talk to you a little bit about strategic planning, big picture planning for your business for 2022, which we will ignore the fact that 2022 is just on our doorstep, because holy heck, that was a fast year. However if you are like me, you’re probably sort of neck deep in planning mode for 2022. So I just kind of wanted to take you a little bit into my process. You may have heard me talk about this before, but this is really how I set intentions for the year.

First, I like to think in the context of 3 P’s, promotion, process, and production. So I always start with promotion first, because I know that there are going to be launches throughout the year or features, or things that I’m going to want to be promoting or getting out there. So I start with the promotion category, and I look at the 12 month calendar and think, “Okay, what am I going to promote in 2022? And where? And when?”.

So for most business owners anything more than four large promotions per year is probably going to be hella exhausting. Some people only do one big promotion, some do two, some do four. So at Funnel Gorgeous we have two launches of our signature program, Launch Gorgeous, a year. It happens in the spring and the fall. So the first thing I do is I pick the date of the launch, and I pick sort of the season of fulfillment, the season that we’ll actively be coaching. I can’t be in content creation mode if I’m actively coaching. So I pick those out. For us it’s April and September.

And then I look at the season I think, “Okay, well as a spring and a fall promotion, what about a winter and a summer promotion?” and this winter we have our Marketer’s Heart event in February, so that’s a pretty big promotion. Both selling the virtual tickets, as well as selling the offer at the event, which is going to have some fulfillment. And then in summer, I don’t usually do a big promotion. We do sometimes smaller promotions. So I think about, “What’s going on? What have we just launched? What have we just finished? What hasn’t gotten a lot of attention?” and we plan out a promotion there.

This doesn’t mean we’re not actively promoting our products other times of year, but it gives us a really good focus to start with.
Now here is the danger. If you are an entrepreneur who really likes to hustle and grind and set goals and do all that kind of stuff, you make go through this sort of exercise that I just took you through and feel like you’re not doing anything. It’s just very, you know, boring. “Just four promotions, what am I going to do? Sit on my hands, eat bon bons all year?” We need the other two P’s.

So the second P is process. And process is all the stuff that you have to continually do in your business. So if you’re an agency, you’re fulfilling for clients, if you’re a coach, you’re doing coaching calls. Customer service, social media marketing, your YouTube, your podcast, this is a process in my business.

So you look at all of those processes, and you go through the 12 months, and you sort of block out time. So let’s say for example, you are a solo-preneur and you really want to do YouTube. Okay, well that means that either once a quarter or once a week you’re going to have to create your videos. So you’ve got to build that process in. Maybe you also do a Q&A hour, maybe you have clients. So start to block some of that in, even if you don’t actually have the clients yet, or you don’t actually have the call, block the time. And again, I’m doing this all in my calendar. My calendar is really sort of my over-arching planning tool. Google calendar allows you to make a million different calendars, as many as you want, so I have one for Funnel Gorgeous and I just start blocking this stuff out, blocking all the Launch Gorgeous calls, blocking out the Q&A hour, blocking out when I’m going to work on presentations for the Marketer’s Heart event.

So it’s these process things that happen in the business day in and day out. So now, once you do that, now you’re getting a little bit more of a crystal clear picture, and if you are a content creator in your business you should block out 4 or 5 hours a week just to create content, to start to show your brain, “Hey, yes maybe I only have 4 promotions a year, but look at all this other stuff that I’m doing.” Do you want to block out time for admin stuff, for email correspondence, etc, etc.

Now I should mention before I keep going, that if you are sort of a boot strapping entrepreneur, you are a solo-preneur, you may want to actually start with your family calendar first, and block out when you’re going to be away, when you’re taking vacation, so that you don’t actually double book yourself, so you could do that first.

So we’ve done promotion, we’ve done process, and now we’re going to look at project. Project means it is a set period of time to create something. It’s not like an ongoing process. For example, Marketer’s Heart event, we’re going to have to create the content for the program we’re selling. So that’s a project. What I have to do is plan out where that project is going to go. AM I going to do it in February before the event, or am I going to start working on it in March and pre-sell and fulfill it later? So I have to start blocking out that project. And if I’m launching in April for Launch Gorgeous, now I really just have one month to get that project out the door, if I’m doing it in March. Or I have to do it in January.

So you start to see that all of these promotions actually have a pretty significant project timeline, both before the promotion and after the promotion, if you’re actually creating content. So by the time you get to the project P, you now see that your 4 promotions a year actually taking 8 months because you’re bookending the promotion with these projects, and you’re also trying to fit it around all the regular process stuff you do.

So I’m just going to add that fourth P, the personal, which is the first one, the personal vacations. What will happen is by the time you get to the end of this 30,000 ft view, you’re going to realize that possibly 4 promotions is a lot. And it will help keep you on the straight and narrow if you start to get some idea and it happens in let’s say, March of 2022 and you’ve got your whole year planned out. Well, you can totally do that new idea, but it has to displace something else. So that’s the theory of time replacement instead of time stacking. And most of us who get in over our heads and have too much to do, we time stack, we just keep smushing the same multiple activities, multiple things to do in one time slot, instead of saying, “Okay, well I want to do this cool thing, so I’m going to remove the time slot for meetings, and I’m going to put in the time slot.” Right, there’s the replacement.

So that is pretty much the basics of how I plan out an entire year. So I do it all on the calendar, let’s start with personal, then we move to promotion, then we move to process, because that’s the day to day stuff, and then we look at what project is going to, what projects are going to need to be built.

Now some projects have nothing to do with your promotion. Some projects are very systems based, like “I’m going to move to Google drive, or I’m going to create a new customer support, I’m going to migrate from my gmail inbox to Help Scout.” Those kind of operational projects, you’re going to look and say, “Maybe we don’t want to do this during the launch. Maybe we want to do this on a off month.”

So hopefully that helps, hopefully that gives you a nice simple framework to plan out 2022. Appreciate you, talk soon.

Ep. 103 13 List Building Ideas

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I’m going to give you 13 of my favorite free list building ideas. And I know I’ve talked about this before, but if you are stuck on this idea of an irresistible freebie and you want to build your list, you should pay attention to this podcast episode.

So first things first, when you create a free offer, you really want to create it with this irresistible curiosity. You want people to be like, “Ah, I want to know what’s in that.” So I actually recommend you write the headline and the tagline of the lead magnet before you actually create it. Make sure that it’s really curious and that it’s going to do well on a landing page, and then go build the thing that you talked about. So it’s a little bit reverse engineering, but it’ll help make that lead magnet convert higher.

Alright, so let’s dive into 13 different ideas. First, one of my favorites is called a swipe file. A swipe file is basically something you’re already using in your business, it could be an email template, it could be a script, it could be something that you, some sort of standard operating procedure, something that’s already in use, that already has social proof and credibility that you are going to give away. So if I said to you guys, “I’m going to give away my swipe file of all the emails that I use in my Digital Insiders Application funnel.” That would be considered a swipe file.

The 2nd option for a free lead magnet is a checklist. These are just quick downloadable guides that help people get something done. It has a lot of details and parts. If you are a beginner and haven’t, you know, don’t have a ton of expertise, you can do checklists of like roundup style. So it’s like, “50 of the top YouTube channels for X, Y, Z.” And you can just round up the content and make that a checklist as well. So you don’t have to create all the original content, you just do the curation of it, and put it in a checklist.

The 3rd lead magnet idea is of course outline. If you have a big course, did you know that your outline in and of itself, is a handy teaching tool. For example, we have a free course called Move to Gorgeous, and it’s basically step by step how to migrate from one automation tool to the next and the strategy. And we could give the outline of an entire migration series and that person would download it and be able to understand the high level steps of everything they have to do. So of course outline, a book outline, anything that’s outline-ish would work well as an irresistible freebie.

The next one, the 4th one is a Facebook group. You can create a free community. I love this one, because you technically don’t even need a lead magnet funnel, you can just set up a group and then ask for the email address when they join, and if Facebook likes your group and sees that there’s a lot of activity, it will show it as a recommended group, and Facebook will do the advertising for you. At one point I was generating about 500 leads a week from a free Facebook group that I didn’t even go in. It was craziness.

Number 5 and one we’ve seen a lot is a quiz or assessment. I recommend that you do this only if it really makes sense for what you’re going to sell on the backend. If you need to filter people and segment people a quiz is great. Otherwise, they are kind of a lot of work, and sometimes they’re not the most high quality leads. But quizzes and assessments can work. They can get cheap leads. So if you’re looking for huge amounts of leads quickly, quizzes tend to do that.

Alright, the next one, number 6 is a free course. Create a free course. It can be in a members area, where you can have the course and then like an image or a lock button that shows what they could unlock. It’s a great way to get people into your membership area and then wanting to buy whatever is there. You can also take a module from your course and make that free.

Number 7 is an ebook. That sounds overwhelming, it sounds like a lot of work, but if you are really wanting a good longterm evergreen freebie, I would encourage you to sit down over a weekend, talk about a topic that you love and have a writer take all of that audio and turn it into an ebook. In fact, the highest performing lead magnet I have ever created was an ebook with a 78% opt in rate, and it generated over a hundred thousand leads. I ghost wrote a book called Marketing Secrets and that one did amazing.

Number 8, a webinar or a video training. Now these leads tend to be more expensive, but they also tend to be a little bit more committed because you’re asking them to sit down and spend some time with you. A lot of these types of lead magnets, webinars, video trainings, you can actually sell on the end of them because by then they’ve really gone from cold traffic to warm traffic.

Number 9 is a work flow. This is a little bit similar to the swipe file, but many of you have advanced work flows in systems like Asana or ClickUp or Trello. Things that you do day in and day out that you could give away. A lot of these tools have a sharable link, so you can create a landing page, and then when they opt in, you can deliver that link via email and give away a system, an SOP, or an automation.

Number 10 is a challenge. Challenges are very, very good for selling something on the backend. Free challenges get highly committed people, sometimes the leads can be expensive, but they’re working with you over 5 or 7 days and then you can sell something on the backend. Challenges are great for buildup to a launch of a product.

Number 11, this one might be unusual, but if you’re an agency or a service provider, a pricing sheet or a pricing guide, or a detailed description of services can be a lead magnet. I remember being on a site once where I was looking for a designer and I could download their pricing guide, but I had to give them the email address. So using a pricing guide is a great free lead magnet and something that you really don’t even have to recreate if you already have it in your business.

Number 12 is a free trial. If you are doing any sort of membership, or SAAS company, a free trial gets that email, gets that lead, and then allows you to market to them later. This is one of the easiest ways to build an email list very, very quickly.

And number 13, which is seen oftentimes in the ecommerce space, but can be used in the digital space, is a coupon or a voucher. Get 20% off, put your email address in here.

So as you can see, these 13 ideas, some are more involved, some are less. But you should be able to get at least 3 or 4 ideas from this list. Go implement them and start building your list. Talk to you soon.