Why Gillian Perkins Stopped Coaching and Switched to Digital Products

0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design the best lives. Hey guys, I’m Sharon from digital nomad quest. I am super excited to speak with Gillian Perkins today, Gillian, thanks for being here today.

0:22
Hi, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to dive into some topics today.

0:26
Sweet. So Gillian is a YouTuber, entrepreneur and marketing strategist. We actually hit each other up at flame con, right. And I wanted to speak today to learn more about how you went from like coaching to focusing mainly on digital products. I’m actually thinking about coaching, but I’m also you know all about creating digital products and building passive income as well. So maybe First off, can you introduce yourself to the viewers and listeners out there?

0:52
Yeah, so my name is Gillian Perkins. I’m most well known for my YouTube channel. That’s my name Gilliam. Perkins. I run a company called startup society that teaches aspiring entrepreneurs how to start online businesses and create passive income primarily with digital products. I’ve been running startup society for about a year and a half at this point. And my youtube channel is about two and a half years old. So it’s relatively new. Prior to this, I was running a marketing agency. So we were doing services for clients, primarily Facebook ads and Google ads, and then transitioned into coaching when I realized that our clients needed a lot of strategy support. And then from there, we moved into digital products as our audience grew, and we wanted to be able to serve a wider audience.

1:37
Cool. So I guess the coaching part of it were you doing it with a bunch of like a team or because you said you start an agency beforehand, and then

1:46
yeah, so I had a few people on my team who were doing the actual ad services. However, when I was doing the coaching, it was just me doing the coaching.

1:55
Okay, cool. So did you need any like prior certifications to start or before You guys already had like established an agency you already had that, like clout like, Is that how it worked? or?

2:06
Yeah, so certifications, I think can be really helpful for establishing your credibility to be able to do coaching, especially if you don’t have prior experience. However, if you have significant prior experience with anything, then there’s likely people out there who are very interested in paying you for your advice for you to look at what they’re doing and advise them on what they should do next. So one thing that I think a lot of people wonder is like, is coach is certification legally required? And the answer is no, almost never unless you’re consulting about legal or medical matters. So it’s not required. But if you want to feel more confident about charging for coaching services, and you don’t have that significant prior experience, and it can be helpful. Okay, awesome. Maybe we should back up to two like you Starting that agency, so yeah, so was it difficult to do that and like what made you start that in the first place? I think it might have been difficult if I had started it cold turkey, I just like tried to jump in and start an agency from day one. But for me, it wasn’t like that all each of these different phases of my business has very much been a transition. So I started my first business, which was a local music academy, about 12 or 13 years ago now I was back in high school, actually. And I started this business. It was at first just this little thing that I did on the side while I was obviously going to school, and it grew and it grew and it grew. And then at a certain point, I was so busy myself, partly because I was working on marketing the business that I had to start hiring people to help me and so that was when the Music Academy was really born. Because prior to that, of course, it was just me, you know, serving my clients. And so then I had these teachers who are working under me and I needed to bring students into support them. So they had enough work every single week. So we really focused in on the marketing aspects, experimenting with many, many different types of marketing, both local and digitally. And so it was just a learning experience that like everything always is you’re running your own business. But as my marketing skills improved, I started having peers who also ran their own businesses reaching out to me and asking for my advice, and then asking me to actually help them with it. So it was a really natural transition. And then just again, I had more work than I could deal with. And so that was when I started hiring other freelancers to help me out building my team.

4:38
Okay, awesome. So it’s like this natural progression. Yeah. Awesome. So how did you figure out like, how much to price your, you know, your services? How did you figure out how to like, package it? Did you look at other successful people like how did you do that?

4:52
Yeah, well, when I initially started pricing, I think every time I started praising something, I kind of started at the bottom barrel sort of pricing just because I didn’t want to be trying to market a service. And wondering why people weren’t buying and having it be because of the price, like I needed to work on my my copy and the marketing messages surrounding whatever that package service or product was. And I felt that if I charged a premium price, then maybe my copy was fine. It was just the price. So I would always spend a start at it, like the lowest possible price. However, that’s not necessarily what I recommend someone would do. Because as I’ve worked in marketing for longer and longer, and I’ve learned more about the psychology of marketing, I’ve come to realize that the price that you put on a product is really the value label that you’re putting on it. Yeah. So if you’re selling a course, for example, and you say this course is being sold for $100, or you say I’m charging $1,000. for it, you’re saying that this course is worth $100 are worth $1,000. And so it can actually Be more difficult to sell a product for a lower price point. Yeah. And that can be really counter intuitive and can make for some challenging situations as you’re trying to just kind of feel that out and find the right price point. Of course, the message also has to match the price point, you’re talking about it like it’s a premium service, but then it’s $5 a night, then people are going to, like have a red flag open their brain, you know, amazing, but it’s really cheap. What’s wrong here. But can conversely, if you are packaging it as this is like a discount service, you know, we hire us because we’re cheap. And then it costs $1,000. That again, people are like the message won’t match that price tag. So you just have to kind of make sure that there’s concurrency there. So what I typically recommend to people now is to look at their competitors see what their competitors are charging, try to figure out what the average price of the company editors are charging, oh, on the high side of average. So if you see that your competitors are selling a digital force, and in your specific niche, maybe it’s going for anywhere between $20 and $1,000. And I would say that in most niches it is that widespread, right? But most of the courses maybe fall between the five and $700. Mark, then $700 would be right where you want to be, it’s going to be a really safe spot where you’ll be able to position yourself as a premium brand, but you will be pricing yourself as market.

7:30
Awesome. I love that great answer. So when when it came to building your agency, were you doing Facebook ads for clients? Like what were the offerings again?

7:40
So most of our clients were digital brands that were selling either services or digital courses.

7:47
Okay, so were you like guaranteeing some results? Or was it that you were just managing the ads or the courses or whatever for them?

7:56
It’s really difficult to guarantee results with advertising. Especially if you’re not doing it as a complete package deal where you’re handling every step of the process, because there’s obviously like the tech infrastructure side of their business. There’s the coffee and the messaging and the offer itself. And then there’s advertising and advertising is just one element of it. So it’s pretty rare for advertising agencies to guarantee any sort of results unless they are handling the entire picture that like the entire sales funnel, basically. So no, we wouldn’t typically guarantee results. It was very much based on almost like an all a cart method of like, Okay, how many ads Do you want us to run? What is the size of these audiences that we’re running?

8:40
Got it like that? Okay, have you moved completely off the agency and now you’re doing like as well and coaching then YouTube and then Okay, no, okay. Okay, got it, and then going into coaching. So you said that a lot of these businesses you felt like Oh, they really need some like help with this. So

8:56
strategy. Yeah. And so that kind of goes back to what I was. Just talking about where it was kind of frustrating that we couldn’t promise results, right? Because you’re charging had to charge a premium price for these services, in order for it to really make sense because it’s very time consuming to run ads for clients when you’re charging, you know, this high price, and then oftentimes not producing the results that we really wanted to produce. But it was because there were some piece of the puzzle that we weren’t able to control. And so the results were just really out of our control. So that was part of why I moved into the realm of coaching was because I really wanted to be able to help my clients figure out how to, like fix those holes in their businesses, or how to improve the different aspects of their businesses so that they could get those better results that they weren’t really after. They could hire anyone to run their Facebook ads for them. And obviously, that everyone who runs Facebook ads is phenomenal at it, but there’s plenty of people out there who are great at it, right? So what I saw as a whole In the market was people who are really giving these business owners that advice that they needed on how to construct their entire successful sales funnel.

10:10
Got it? Do you have like a good example of a client you had where it’s like, oh, they they need something like way more than just like management of Facebook ads and what you saw.

10:20
That was like every fly and that’s the thing. Yes, yes. So I had one client I both of these examples that are coming to mind are actually not digital products. But one client was the studio that was like an aerobic exercise studio trying to remember exactly what the name of this type of exercise whether it was a type of exercise I had never heard of before. It was something kind of like floodings, but it was like a dance type of movement. And they had a pretty successful studio, but they were having a really hard time getting leads because people hadn’t heard of this type of exercise before. Right. And so whenever they would try to advertise it, that was the number one problem they would run into, was that they’re like running Facebook ads this come try this blank, blank blank class. And people would scroll right past it because they had no idea they were interested in that. And so we really had to take a different approach to their messaging and instead run ads that were focused on the pain point and product. You know, are you struggling with back pain or something like that more? Are you looking for a more enjoyable way to exercise and then even though it was a local business, not a digital business, using freebies or opt in offers, things like that, so that we were giving some giving these people like a free checklist or something like that, that would give them that first little quick win or giving them a short exercise video, so they could just try it out at home, even though it wasn’t going to be nearly the experiences that they would get in studio, it still gave them a taste. And it was that little bit of customer education that we needed to do. And it was a piece that was really missing in their sales funnel. And so they hired us to run their ads. We immediately realized that that wasn’t all they needed. They really needed to work on that piece of their sales funnel. It was getting people to into the funnel. Yeah.

12:00
Got it. So then you were doing the agency part as well as like you added an additional service coaching, right?

12:08
Yeah. And it was mostly labeled as like strategy consulting coaching I find to be such a vague term. Yeah.

12:15
Yeah. So I want to dig into this more.

12:18
Yeah. So I’ve always kind of steered away from that term, even though what I was doing was the same thing that many people label as coaching. I’ve always said consulting, because I feel that then I can say specifically, what type of consulting I’m doing, like, Am I consulting on YouTube algorithm strategies? Or am I consulting on Facebook ads strategies? It just seems a lot more specific. I suppose you could do the same thing with coaching, but coaching just seems to be this big pool. And we wonder, okay, are they coach because of experience or they coach because they were certified like you mentioned before, whereas consulting, you wouldn’t get certified as a consultant like it would be based on experience. I feel that it’s just a different industry.

12:57
Okay, got it. I wanted to go into more about Like the structure of how you did the coaching calls or how you did it, so like where they want off coaching calls or where they long term clients, like, did you have a mix of both? And like, did you have like free consultation beginning where you kind of get to know their business and see if it’s a good fit for you. So you can talk more about it?

13:17
Yeah, I did a mix of both. We do some one off coaching calls. And those I would allow people to purchase on my website, so they could just sign up pay right then and schedule it. Whereas the ongoing I would have them apply first, and they had to be accepted and approved for often do some sort of discovery call. And then we would book them as a long term client and the first they would get like a better rate per session if they were an ongoing client. Whereas the one off calls were more expensive. I would never do discovery calls for those one off calls, but I would always do the discovery calls for the ongoing clients. One thing that’s a little bit tricky about the discovery calls I find is that a lot of coaches will put a button on their website just to schedule just Every call. And there’s just a few different problems with that, first of all, because it’s so free, it’s less like the perceived value is lower. So not as many people will click it seems too easy, right? So it can be better to have some sort of application process or to pitch via email after someone is opting in for a freebie or something like that. Another problem with it is that because it’s so easy, it makes the coach look like they’re not really in high demand. You know, if I can just book something right now, well, then their schedule must be really open. Yeah, right. And then the final problem is that you’re not going to qualify your people your leads before you get them on a discovery call it all and so you’ll have people booking discovery calls who are very unqualified, maybe they just have no budget or maybe they’re just a completely wrong fit for your services and it ends up being a waste of both of your times.

14:53
Okay, got it. And I noticed you said we so is that like your your agency like they were backing you up While you’re doing these calls, or is it was it just you? I’m confused.

15:04
I’m not sure when what context I just said we, we do today because I have a team these days when I was doing the consulting, I transitioned completely out of the agency. It was just me for about a year I just did basically freelance consulting. But absolutely no team was actually really nice to just have that freedom and that flexibility. Yeah, not just as soon as you’re working with another person, there’s a certain amount of inefficiency that necessarily happens as you’re going back and forth and you’re communicating with them you’re passing work back and forth. So I have a team now and I love them and they help us they allow us to do a lot more but it does mean that my work is a little bit less flexible than it was when I was just realizing

15:44
it and you said the one off they pay for it. So they basically fill out your like a contact form or something and say like, Oh, I want to get a one hour. Like coaching call is there limitations on like, how big their business can be or, you know, like, maybe you feel like you can’t help them the most that you’d like to because of your expertise. So like, is there certain qualifications they have to have?

16:11
Yeah. So I would always recommend that you do have people apply. Like, you could do these one off coaching calls like I did, where there isn’t any sort of discovery. They hopefully have read your website enough, right. But they understand who you are and how you could help them or not help them, right. But they’ve paid so it won’t be a waste of your time. Right. Okay. They’ve done their homework. So it’s kind of on them if they want to book something without any sort of application or anything like that. With the ongoing claims. I do find that it’s much more important to do an application first and then a discovery call and then actually look them as a long term plan. Yes, it’s more involved from a like a time perspective. Yeah. I think it will save time in the long run. I feel like I forgot your question that what was your question?

16:56
No, just about like if they did that one off, right. Are there times where you feel like my, your expertise couldn’t satisfy their needs? So like, you don’t have except those people or something, but it sounds like it’s mainly that they would check over your background and make sure that they would be a fit for you kind of thing, right? Yes, yeah. So you were asking about,

17:15
like business size and things like that. So I mean, of course, it’s always important to be really clear about who your target customers are. And like, if you were doing business coaching, which I think is what you’re considering doing, then having a specific type of business in mind, including the size of that business, in terms of revenue, and in terms of the number of people in the company, because obviously, this is of different sizes, and different types are very different from each other. Right? So even if you could help someone really effectively that has a small team and as revenue under half a million a year, you might have no idea at all how to help someone with revenue of 10 million a year and team of 50 people Though it’s just so important that you are clear about where your like zone of expertise is the skill set that you have the advice that you could give to someone with that person actually be. And it can actually be like, give your prospective customers a lot of confidence. When you say exactly who you help, and you don’t help. I specialize in helping businesses between $100,000 and $300,000 per year that sell digital products. Hmm. And only that, right, because there are thousands and thousands of people just like that out in the world. And when you say that they know they’re in the right spot, and they’ll be a lot more likely to want to work with you.

18:37
Yeah, what was your kind of like target audience?

18:41
So at first, I was just helping anyone who working with anyone who was the people who had been booking our advertising services, mostly small businesses, but was both online and offline businesses. They typically had small teams. I was working with the owner of the company, but they typically had a stuff under them, once I abandoned knows what I was gonna say it’s kind of a bad word here. But once I moved away from the game, and I was focused only on doing this consulting work, I realized that I needed to specialize a lot more. And so then I started speaking only the online business owners who are either doing freelance work or selling digital products, which are people who I’m now serving inside startup society. But we’re not doing more of a one to many approach where we’re creating core content. And we’re able to this gets into it like a whole separate discussion. But basically, I realized that when I was doing the coaching or consulting, we would spend a lot of time me saying the same things to each client. And I had to charge a quite high rate for to make sense for me from a business model, especially because as you become more and more experienced, of course, your advice becomes more and more valuable to your clients, but you also have realize how much money you could make doing, like putting your own advice to practice into practice. That kind of makes sense. Yeah. And so it came to a certain point when I realized that even though the advice that I was giving to my clients was really valuable to them, because I was helping small business says, There wasn’t anything I could do for them. That would be worth the price per hour that I knew I could make selling a product myself. So for example, if I was creating these digital products in my business, maybe I can earn $1,000 per hour, but if I’m helping small businesses and giving them advice, then if they’re in that, like infancy stage of their business where they’re just getting started, which was a lot of what my audience was, then maybe my advice to them would be worth $100 per hour. I mean, I could price my services at 1000. market the heck out of them and make some sales. I’d be doing both myself and them a disservice because I’m having to work extra hard to get those clients because it’s not a great fit with who my audience is. And I’m charging them more than the services really worth to them. And so that was why I ended up moving into the digital product space, because I realized that because I was saying the same thing over and over again, that advice that was kind of universally applicable that could be packaged and sold at a much lower price. And I could still, you know, make the amount of money that would hit my goals, but at the same time, it would be sold at a price that wouldn’t make sense for these business owners who are just starting out. So is the decision I made because of where my audience was. Now, if I had a different target audience and the advice that I was giving them say could like if they were at the $1 million mark right now, and I could give them some advice that would get them to the $2 million mark, then it would obviously be worth it for them to pay me $1,000 an hour right. Yes. Because of who my audience was that that service didn’t make sense for me. And so now what I really like to do is to package that universally applicable advice. It saves everyone’s time, it saves everyone’s money right now, and I have time left over because that doesn’t require as much time for me I have time left over to serve the members inside startup society and actually work with them one on one for for free. Really, like I can get into our mastermind community, I can answer their individual questions. We do monthly mastermind calls every month, like their group coaching calls, basically. And people can ask me their questions. Now everyone gets their questions answered for their unique situation. But we aren’t wasting our time. I’m not wasting my time saying the same thing over and over and over again. So it’s just much more efficient.

22:47
Yeah, those masterminds? Are they if they like purchase a course they’re joined into the mastermind? Is that how they get in there?

22:54
Yeah, basically. So right now we’ve got two different masterminds going on. One is the startup society mastermind and that’s For mostly a newer business owners online, so they’re in that startup phase with their business. They’re somewhere between the zero and hundred thousand dollar a year mark in profits, profits, they’re typically in the first zero to five year mark in their business although most of our members are about the one two year mark. So that’s one of the masterminds we have going on. And then the other one is our channel launch mastermind, which we actually just relaunched, which is for YouTubers who want to be more than just hobby youtubers actually watched on YouTube into a source of revenue.

23:33
are they paying like to be in the group or was it because they purchased the product of yours before they

23:39
started society is a membership programs and the members pay every month. It’s currently at $49 a month and so that gives them access to the mastermind as well as all of those course materials. We add new course materials every single month side channel lunch, they have purchased a course with a one time payment and then that gives them access to the mastermind

23:59
cool Interesting. Do you feel like having that one on one coaching experience, though, helped you get like, these different clients for your new business model? Like do you feel like that step is necessary to get to that point you currently are?

24:13
That’s an interesting question. I don’t think it was necessary. However, it did help to bridge the gap. Because it can be, I would say, somewhat more difficult to sell courses than to sell coaching services. And the main reason for that is because in order to sell the courses, because if you’re selling them for a smaller price, then you would be earning from the consulting services, you have to sell more copies of them, basically. So if you’re selling consulting services for $1,000 a month, say, but your course is $500. Not only are courses just a little bit more difficult to sell because like people know that they’re not going to be as perfectly catered to their unique situation, right. But another You’re gonna have to sell twice as many in. So it’s a little bit more difficult for that reason. However, once your audience has grown, becomes easier, yeah. As you have economy of scale, basically. So you’re able to use mass marketing methods to market to thousands of people at once. Yeah, sell them a digital product. And so it becomes a lot more efficient later on. But when you have an audience, like, say you had an email list of 500 people, I wouldn’t really recommend trying to sell them a course not to say that you could, there are situations in which that would be a great option had, like if the thing that you’re trying to teach them would be taught really well. And of course, then you could show them how, for example, if I was trying to teach photography tutorials, and I had an audience that was really interested in like learning how to shoot pictures of their kids or something like that, of course, could be a great way to do that. It wouldn’t make sense for me to try to sell consulting services for that right? visual, I’ll be able to provide better information if I’m trying to enforce because I’ll be able to You take the time to do like the post processing and to add in demonstration clips and things like that, right? Yeah, our senses, of course, and you could sell it much more affordably as well. But if it’s a service that maybe would be delivered better as consulting, then I wouldn’t recommend trying to sell a course to an audience. Because it’s going to be harder to sell, you’re gonna have to sell more copies. And you’re going to, to some degree, probably burn your list a tiny bit in the process. And if you have a large audience, it’s okay that you burn a little bit of your list. Because it means you got to help that many more people, you know what I mean? Like 100,000 people on my email list, and I go through this course like, okay, I lose 10% of them even which would be like much higher than you’d expect. But if you lost 10%, but in the process, that mentor that you made 10,000 sales right and to help 10,000 people, so much more efficient than if I was trying to sell one on one Help people a little bit more. Because if I sold one on one, and I was providing one on one services, I mean, I could only help maybe a year. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s why I say like, it’s really depends on your audience size of

27:17
trying to provide for them.

27:19
I guess what about like, a smaller audience? Like I was actually wondering, would coaching people give you those super fans? Like, you know, how, yeah, I saw your video with Pat. Like you guys were talking about the super fan idea. And I’m wondering if coaching would help you get those you know, testimonials like those students that are like really heavily advocating for you, which will actually like, help your business so much more. I don’t know if that matters if because I know you have such a big YouTube following. So I feel like it doesn’t. It may be didn’t matter as much now. Like it doesn’t matter as much now but like maybe someone who’s starting out like do you advise starting with coaching to get those like super fans or?

27:59
Yeah, so this This kind of goes back to your question of like, was the coaching necessary to Yeah, kinda. So I don’t think that the coaching is necessary in order to start selling courses. But for me it bridges the gap of my audience is small, I want to start making money sooner rather than wait until my audience is very low actually got up. I didn’t know how long that would be. I mean, I knew I was on the right path. Okay, growth every month, but I didn’t know how long it would take for my audience to get to that point where I could easily sell courses. So I started coaching. This was only one of the reasons I started coaching, but part of it was because I initially actually tried to sell courses when the audience was quite small. Yeah, at all. And so I thought, okay, we need to try something different. We need to not be using automated marketing techniques, kind of embrace some of those tactics that pat talks about in superfans where he’s more engaging one on one with, like a human to human in a human human way instead of to be way but you brought up earlier Interesting point there about the test getting those testimonials for your course, a lot of people actually do this. I don’t know if you’re aware, but a lot of the time when people are selling a course, what they do is they initially launched the course, there’s two different things people do. Let me tell you about both. But one of them, one is the beta launch the course they sign up for the course right now this course is going to be $1,000. Right now you can get it for $100. And you’ll be my beta audience, man. The other thing that people do and think that actually can work way better is that they launch their course first as an accelerator program, or money, then they’re going to sell the course for interesting, the course that maybe it’s going to sell for $1,000 they started an accelerator program and that accelerator program is $5,000. And the reason why is because that allows, first of all, it just kind of makes more sense from like a what the student is getting perspective because if we watch for a vibe if we want to get the best Results from a beta test type experiment, then we as a course creator, we need to provide exceptional service to those people, we need to be talking to them a lot, both to find out, you know, what they like and what they don’t like about the course, but also to ensure that they get really good results so that we end up with good testimonials. If you’re gonna do that anyway, then you might as well charge accordingly, right? Yeah, of course there are different situations in which one or the other of these situations is better, but I see so many people trying to launch a beta product, they have a really difficult time selling it because it’s so cheap that again, they’re under valuing it will buy it maybe right buy it and then they don’t get results from it because they invested so little. They’re not very committed to it like they don’t have a lot personally invested. Yeah. So they don’t even do it or they do it in a really like half hearted way. And so then not only has the course creator not made very much money because they were selling a low price it in a 401k They also don’t really have testimonials to show them testimonials. They’re like, you know, when you give someone something and they say thank you just because as opposed to that kind of testimonials instead, if we can figure out a way to give people an even better results, yeah, perhaps charge a higher price for it. That’s going to produce the best testimonials. It’s going to mean we make more money and it’s going to mean the students get way better results.

31:23
Yeah, definitely. You’re saying that accelerator program is like, like maybe more hand holding like you’re trying to really make sure they Okay, so it’s like, very personal one on one kind of

31:33
sometimes it includes one on one elements. It’s basically like a group coaching program with a curriculum that’s backing you out. So it’s not just like everyone let’s you know, get on a zoom call together. And, you know, you can all ask me random questions if you’ve already produced the course, typically, backbone of the course. Uh huh. They’re working through it, but then giving them either some group coaching every week or some one on one attention. So that you can ensure that those people really get results.

32:03
Got it. Okay, so actually going back to the coaching elements, I saw a few questions on that. So like, when it came to structuring your calls, was it like you, you answer any questions they have and then like, give them some homework or like what was what was your method of every like our call you had?

32:23
Mm hmm. Interesting question because like we were talking about my business kind of went through some progressions. First of all, I was just like phasing out of the ad agency. So when I was first doing this, I already was, like, very familiar with their businesses. So because they had been my advertisers. And so because I already knew a lot about their businesses, I was able to talk to them a lot during the call, give them lots of advice. Okay, let’s look at this. How about you consider this Okay, here’s your assignment. Here’s things you need to get done before next call. Yeah. Then as I started accepting more clients, that you know, words coming from the advertisers agency, there was a lot of people coming in who I had no idea what they needed. So it would start with them filling out a survey to tell me a bit about their business. them a lot of the coaching call would be me asking them questions to very, very fully understand that their situation and figure out what the problems were. That can be one of the most valuable things you can do as a coach or as a consultant is to get crystal clear about your clients business, or whatever it is that you’re consulting them about, because that’s when you’ll be able to figure out the root of the problems and the advice or help them figure out the solution so that they can actually solve the problem. Hmm, okay, got it. But of course ending with those like action items, you know, before our next call do this, that is incredibly important.

33:46
Okay, cool. And then when it came to like, favorite tools, you have recommendations on tools for coaching as well as your courses.

33:55
What kind of tools do you have in mind like software tools?

33:58
Yeah, software tools. And IDs teachable and then like D certain things for invoicing and like payments and scheduling to Yeah,

34:09
yeah, so I like to use acuity for scheduling calendar it also works really well I personally use acuity works really well you can also take payments through acuity that’s going to be and people can like book a coaching call and pay you at the same time. It’s just like a really smooth system. And I really like systems that are like, just work really well. integrate a bunch of things together. Yeah, I don’t personally use this next tool but a lot of consultants I know use honey book and really like it if you’re going to be passing a lot of information back and forth. And you can also put like contracts in there for your clients to sign and all sorts of things like that. Each of all you brought up teachable is a course platform and I do use that with my courses. All of them some of them are self hosted, some of them are in teachable. It depends on how much customisation we need for the course for example, startup society, which is actually a membership program. We have self hosted, because it’s a membership program and we want to be able to control a complete membership portal for the students that just has some features that teachable doesn’t provide. But I do love teachable. It works really well. Do you do you use teachable yourself?

35:21
Yeah, I’m currently using it. I have an Etsy course. And I’m like launching a blogging course. So yeah, I love it. It’s interesting that you use it like for some of them and others you don’t. It’s interesting. Yeah.

35:32
Yeah. So I mean, I would recommend it as far as you can go with it, which is pretty far because all the alternatives are either much worse or much more expensive. Okay. So we tried some of some alternatives that were similar price points are a little more expensive and did not compare at all they were they did not work very well. They’re very poor user experience. They were hard for us to manage. We eventually actually came up with a custom solution, we actually use a software called access Li to manage our self hosted courses. That it’s a pretty small company, fairly new couple of years old. But it integrates with WordPress. It’s basically a WordPress plugin, but it’s a very extensive WordPress plugin manages the memberships, user accounts, and also the course content itself on your own site. And as a deep integration with Convert Kit, which is what we use for our email marketing, we’re able to tag our users based on actions that they take inside of the membership pearl so that we can then trigger emails based on those actions. Wow. Yeah. So it works really well. We can provide a really great user experience, but it’s definitely a lot more involved. So it is very time consuming, especially if you want to set up a lot of those integrations.

36:58
Yeah, okay.

36:59
But if One of my favorite tools, and I would certainly recommend it and it’s not enormously expensive. I believe it’s about $90 a month. So, okay. It’s not infusion soft pricing. Okay, cool. Cool.

37:11
Yeah, look into that. That’s interesting. Okay, so maybe we can talk about, like marketing strategy. So you started with the agency, maybe you could tell us like about how you got for your first few clients that way first. Mm hmm.

37:24
So I, my first few clients with the agency were honestly just friends who saw that I was building my business. And they saw that somehow I was getting clients and they needed more clients in their businesses. And so they reached out to me and started asking me about how I was doing that. And now on the one hand, I feel like this is kind of an unhelpful answer, because a lot of people’s response might be well, I don’t have a network of people or you know that that isn’t an option for them. They don’t have that word of mouth option yet. But on the other hand, I think that anyone can take this advice and apply it and it can be Some of the most valuable work you can do, which is to publicly do the thing that you want to attract. So, I’ve heard so many examples of this recently, I’m trying to think of what the best friend might be at Flint con. Actually, if you are at Flint con, there was this artist speaking. And he was taking pictures of buildings and taking drone shots of cities. And then he was basically photoshopping his art onto the sides of these buildings because he wanted to be doing murals on the size of these buildings. And so he was doing a public demonstration of the work he wanted to be doing even before he was able to do it. And so depending on the industry that you’re in type of work you want to be doing this could look like all sorts of different things. It could look like you working with pro bono clients basically do pro bono work for clients, so that you can get those testimonials, get that experience and share the results that these clients got. Social media, it could look like you making YouTube videos and explaining strategies or doing how to tutorials or just showing your experience in some other way. Like, for example, if you were a web designer or a graphic designer you want to clients, you could be live streaming on YouTube, your design process, for example, so that people could see the quality of your work. So in my case, when I was first starting my advertising agency, I was publicly demonstrating my ability to attract clients, because I was doing it in my own business. But that’s not the only way to demonstrate your work. There are a lot of ways that you can create kind of like a mock up of your work, basically, that can attract the right clients.

39:43
Yeah, that example is really good, too. I watched that phone calls like, that’s genius. Maybe like your YouTube channel probably brought in a ton of clients, right? Or did you already move off of that model when you moved into YouTube or

39:57
so when I first started YouTube? I was the consulting right now I’m about two and a half years, a little less than two and a half years into my YouTube channel. And for the first one year, I continue doing consulting. But YouTube really did allow my audience to grow so quickly, that I very, very quickly realized the need for a way for me to serve people at a greater scale. Because I we are starting to get more inquiries coming in for coaching, reasonably sift through and that was what made me realize, okay, how am I going to decide which of these clients to pick on? The most obvious easiest way is simply to raise my prices, right? to filter out some people, but then that brings me to that problem of well, are the services that I’m providing really worth that much to the clients? Mm hmm.

40:48
Okay, got it. And then maybe we can talk about the marketing for your courses. So do you do evergreen courses or do you make it always exclusive to a certain period of time and then you end it? Mm hmm.

41:00
So that’s a great question. And something that we have been experimenting a lot with over the past year, we’ve done live lunches, we’ve done evergreen launches. And we’ve also done hybrid lunches where we built an evergreen system. But then we would only run people through it at certain times. So for example, like every month, we might promote whatever it is that triggers people getting into that evergreen funnel. So maybe every month we’re like doing a webinar, or we’re hosting a challenge or something like that. And that hybrid model is the model that I’ve come to life the best at this point in time. All the models have some problems and those benefits. Live lunches are great because it’s really easy to do the scarcity that you need in order to compel people to buy right because you’re saying like it’s only available till this date, so people know they have to buy off they’re going to miss out

41:49
real quick when you say live launches. Are you saying you’re live streaming too? Or is it just

41:54
oh no, not might be a part of it. But I just mean you’re launching something on a specific data available for a certain number of days, and then it’s unavailable after specific date, but everyone is on the same cycle. So five, yeah, it’s great because it has built in scarcity basically. Like you have a good way to motivate people to buy, but it is exhausting because you have to be so on during that time, you have to create a bunch of content, often original content just for that you’re building the systems for this one time thing. And, and if you think you can reuse those systems, the next time you launch six months or a year later, a lot of the time you have to rebuild most of them, just because stuff will be out of date stuff will have broken, you’ll tweak stuff, you might have some new systems. So yeah, so it’s just a lot of work every time and then with the Evergreen launches, the problem is primarily that they convert at a much lower rate, because not only do you not have that built in scarcity of a specific date that after the suitable and be available, and yes, there are timers out there like deadline funnel that can help you overcome those issues, but still doesn’t work quite as well. And then you’re also and this is the biggest problem I see with it, you’re missing out on the like social proof that normally happens with a live lunch. During the live lunch, you had your posting on social media about the lunch, and then people are responding to your posts, and other people see their comments, and they see that other people are excited about it. You might also be doing like a live webinar. And so a bunch of people buy all at once and it it just creates a lot of momentum for your life one. The biggest problem, though, that I have with the live launches is actually I don’t think it provides the best customer service to your audience. So basically, you when you’re doing a live launch, you’re saying that we’re going to launch right now because this is the right time for us. Like as the business it’s the right time for us. We’re already been long enough. We’ve made you wait long enough. So now we’re going to let you have it. But the problem is that like you’re going to be launching to your audience and Only a small percentage of them will actually need that solution that you’re providing to them. At that moment, a lot of them might have needed it three months ago, and now they’ve moved on, they find a different solution, they decided to, you know, just do something different. And some people might need it in the future, but they’re not ready. So you’re telling everyone this is for sale now, but it’s not applicable to everything, you’re wasting a lot of people’s time. And that means that you’re probably burning your list or burning your audience burning your reach a lot more than you need to. Hmm, what’s nice about evergreen is that you can have it timed out based on when users are like your audience took a certain action. So for example, they opt into your freebie, and then two weeks later, they get the option to buy your product. So you’re going to be giving it to them when they’re most likely needing it. And so that’s going to be the most helpful to them and also the most likely to earn you money. Yeah, right. But like I said, there are some problems with evergreen So that’s we’ve been kind of moving more towards this like monthly or quarterly launch model, where we’re doing these challenges or webinars or workshops, these different events that kickoff a lunch, the lunch is happening on a specific day, everyone’s going through it at the same time, but it’s happening on a regular basis. So every month, there’s an opportunity for people to join the course. So then we’re using things like deadline funnel to create more urgency during the launch. But we also get that social proof.

45:30
So it’s open for like how long and then you close it off, and you do another month, and then you’re like, or it’s out of

45:37
pens on how long the your launches are between them two launches that we’re doing on this like recurring cycle right now. One of them is for startup society, and it’s a challenge. It’s a four day challenge, followed by a week long open part, and we’re doing it each month. Mm hmm. And then the other one is for Channel lunch. And it is a workshop that we’re doing and we do it once. Actually We’re doing a little bit more frequently than once a month. It’s not like on the same day every month, but just a couple times a month we’re doing this workshop and the open cart period is just three days after the workshop. Cool. And don’t like maybe you can walk through the the marketing for like, that launch. So is it webinars? It’s a certain amount of emails per week or whatever, like, what does that look like? Yeah, so what I found is that selling via like social media posts doesn’t work very well. Okay. So I try to use social media to as much as possible get people into the things that do convert Well, in my like, let’s get really nitty gritty right now, in my experience emails, and this is like, unpopular opinion. I think emails converted like half a percent. Okay, so I just say it’s unpopular, because most people claim higher than that, but I’ve never found much higher than that. But I mean, percent is fine if you have a big enough audience. Right. And of course, the more tailored your product is to your audience. And if you segment out your email list and you might get a higher conversion rate than that, just like blasting your entire list. But if we can get people into a well designed workshop or a challenge, then those typically convert a five to 10%.

47:20
Okay. Wow, yeah.

47:22
So if I can drive people into those workshops or challenges, then we’ll make a lot more sales. The easiest way to do it is to promote your like free opt in offers on social media. It gets people on your email list and you tell your email list about the events. It’s easiest but doesn’t work the best. Okay? Hi, you are losing people at each step of the process. So if I say to 100 people, like if I if 100 people see my Instagram post, and I’m promoting a freebie, and Okay, then maybe less he’s a bigger number. This is going to be like to, say 1000 people. Okay, and then 50 of them opt in, I think this is kind of high, but 50 of them opt in to people on our email list, we promote the event, the event is a webinar. Okay? How many of those people actually sign up for the webinar? Maybe like 20%. So in this example, that would be 1010 people sign up for the webinar, how many people show up for, okay, really like maybe three, three or four? And then if you have that great five or 10% conversion rate on the webinar, you probably sold zero. Right? That just gets really small, really bad. So yeah. How about that first big dip, which is on your social media posts, you’re instead promoting the event itself? So you’re promoting the webinar, you’re promoting the challenge. And then if 20% of those people that went, I said, No, it was I said, 50 people, so 50 people signed to the webinar, then you end up with somewhere between like 15 and 20 people at the webinar. Then you’ll make sale. Hmm. So if you can just cut out like any step of that process, then you’re going to increase your conversion rate overall.

49:08
Cool. So sounds like the workshops and the challenges are like, that’s a good stuff. Okay, cool. Awesome. So what’s next for you now? Like, are you going to make more courses? Yeah,

49:21
yeah. So we actually have several more courses than this two courses that I mentioned to you. We also have one about creating online courses and launching online courses. And we also have one about blog traffic and about list building. And so right now, what’s next for us is we’re just trying to figure out how to effectively manage these different programs that we sell, so that we can provide as much help to the audience as we possibly can, but at the same time, keep the business streamlined and focused. So we’re not being pulled in a bunch of different directions, which is why I only mentioned those two courses because those are the two programs that we’re right now where the most focused on so we’re just trying to figure out if there is a way to To help people in more ways, or if we just need to, like cut off even more courses than we already have. Awesome, it’s kind of an interesting problem.

50:10
But that’s a good problem is like,

50:13
Yes, yeah, I and like, I feel like we’re probably going more and more towards having a smaller and smaller number of courses, maybe three would be a good number because I used to do like provide far more services and different courses than I do now. And it has become more and more streamlined. And so then for a while, we were selling just just like seven or so courses, but right now we’ve just taken a step back and this is something kind of similar to something that I’ve done with my my closet, my wardrobe in the past. I don’t know if you’ve ever read like Bob Murray method or not the best example Have you ever heard of a project 333 Okay, so it’s like a minimalist wardrobe declaring method and so for a period of three months, you have just 33 items in your wardrobe. So basically for a season, you have a wardrobe of just about 33 items, which yes is like way fewer than. And so, like, I’ve been really intrigued by minimalism, and it’s like, it’s very appealing to me, because it seems like it would be more efficient and allow us to focus on the things that matter most instead of being distracted by the stuff doesn’t matter. That seems really appealing, but I like stuff, right? And so it’s really hard for me to decide which things to get rid of. And so something that I’ve done in the past to help me get through that like process of trying to get rid of things, instead of saying, like, only keep these 33 things and then everything else will send to Goodwill. Like that’s really hard because you’re like, Well, what about this dress that I love, I mean, like, I don’t need it in the next three months, but I want to keep it right. So instead of doing that, boxing everything else up and just putting it in like the back of my closet or in my garage. or something like that. So I’m able to like test drive having less. And so we’ve been kind of doing the same thing with the business where Yes, we still have these seven courses. And I definitely don’t want to scrap any of them right now because I mean, I invested months into making these courses, they have a lot of valuable information in them that I really want to share with my audience. Unfortunately, it’s only going to be effective for them if they buy it because they have to invest in it or else they’re not going to put it to work as our most valuable asset is our time and so we will be willing to invest more time if we haven’t kind of like put like, anted up first, right? So we have to figure out a way that we can sell them but at the same time I want my marketing and my business and the sales funnels and the website, all those pieces to be streamlined and to be focused and not to be cluttered and distracted and like distracting to the audience because that won’t serve them because they won’t be able to Just find the information but choose what they need. So that’s why we’ve chosen to just focus on these two courses for now not scrap the other ones. But this way we can try out having fewer courses and work on optimizing the funnels for these courses as best we can. And then later on, work on, like, just experiment with what we can do with the other courses.

53:22
Yeah, awesome. That sounds great. Do you have any like last pieces of advice for aspiring coaches or people who want to start their own courses?

53:30
That’s like a big category. Yeah, just comes to my mind is just like, well, just give it a try. I mean, that held me back for so long was that I didn’t know exactly what to do. I had a lot of different interests. I had different ways I could help people and I didn’t know what the best way was, was in terms of like, should it be coaching, should it be courses? Should I start a podcast or YouTube channel or what should I do? And I wasted a lot of time just trying to find the best option, the best option is the one that you do. So, think about doing something or if you’re thinking about doing several things, just pick one, try it out for three months or six months and see how it goes. And then after, you know, a solid chunk of time, not not next week, right? But after three months or six months, then you can evaluate Is this the right fit and either keep going with it, or cross it off your list. And that has helped you make the decision helps you find the right option, because you’ve now crossed that option off your list.

54:30
Yeah, awesome pieces of advice. Thank you so much for sharing your valuable information. Gillian, I feel like this just a test to like how high quality or courses must be because I feel like I learned so much from it. I’m probably gonna review this interview over again and just to like, absorb the information again. So thank you so much. Where can people find you?

54:49
They can find me anywhere. Just as Gillian Perkins on YouTube. You can search for my name there or GillianPerkins. com. Those are the two best places to find me. Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

55:02
So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode, please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one

Transcribed by https://otter.ai