Episode 51: Power of Systems, Mindset, and Tenacity in Entrepreneurship

I think tenacity is absolutely an attribute of entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship. And if you don't consider yourself a tenacious person, it doesn't matter what the course is, it doesn't matter what the product is. Because if you get knocked down, you're not going to pick yourself back up.

Welcome to the Start Tiny Podcast. I'm your host Ali bjork and in 2019 I launched my first ever tiny offer for $27 and have since generated over $5 million in revenue after starting an industry wide low ticket revolution. I've been helping other entrepreneurs launch and scale their own Tiny offers and on this podcast we pull back the curtain on exactly how they're doing it so that you can do it too. What is up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Start Tiny Show. I am so excited to bring you today's guest. She is one of our clients inside of the Tiny Offer Accelerator group coaching program and I've gotten to work with her personally to help bring her Tiny offer into the world. She is one of those people who's been in business a long time and creates amazing great content, but had so many different options that she could create for tiny offers that she's going to advertise and grow her list with that. It was a hard place for her to start because she's so close to everything, because she sees everything that it's hard to be able to identify what a cold audience might want to see and what you know when you're in her position. Like where did they need to start and what do they think they need was something that we were able to dive in together and really think about her processes and her frameworks and figure out the piece that is the most attractive to a new, you know, someone who's not familiar with her, who is just seeing an ad in their newsfeed. How do we get those people to jump into her world and want to join her other programs because of what her Tiny offer, how her Tiny offer was positioned. So I've gotten to work with Justine personally and closely and help her strategize through not just creating the Tiny Offer, but some of the mindset stuff around launching a new product to strangers. And you know, we can get into different levels. Not saying this is specifically what Justine did, but I've seen this in a lot of clients where we get into over analysis or we stay, you know, we almost procrastinate the launch because it's unknown and it's new and it's not guaranteed that it's going to work. So really having a coach who can hold you accountable and have you set launch dates and have you make sure that you do the thing that you're saying you want to do is really important.

So.

So I'm excited to share Justine's story with you and her journey through entrepreneurship is just amazing. I think you'll find her so inspiring and all of the go getter things that she has jumped into that I hope you'll take a listen and really take a lot out from this episode because it's a really good one. So with that being said, let's go ahead and jump in with Justine. Welcome back to another episode of the Start Tiny show. And I am so excited to have an amazing guest, a very inspirational guest today who is, who is also a Tiny Offer accelerator student and she's going to share how she got started and tell us a little bit more about her story. Welcome, Justine. I'm so excited that you are here. Thanks so much for being here. Justine. How's everything going today? Welcome to the show.

Hi Ali. Thank you for having me. I hope this is an extra long podcast because I have an extra long story.

Ooh, that's exciting.

No. So I am Justine Lackey. I founded a bookkeeping firm called Good Sense Management. I was one of the first virtual bookkeeping companies in all of America, which seems insane, but I founded that company over 15 years ago. And so I built it, I ran it and then I sold it in February of 2023. It was a very successful sale. I had 28 people court me and then narrowed it down to three and sold to my dream buyer in California prior to selling. Like all good business owners, I try to develop an exit plan. So a year before I sold, I launched Bookkeeper's Business Incubator, which is my one year mentorship program where I teach bookkeepers the business of running a bookkeeping firm. So I started that in February of 22. I've had a couple of cohorts now and then just responding to the market and getting introduced to you through the lovely Amber McHugh. I said, yeah, there's.

Yes.

I said there's so many side hustling bookkeepers, solopreneurs, people are dabbling and we have this huge database of resource of materials. How can I take some of these materials and create some bite size actionable pieces of or lessons using the tiny product format? So that's what I've done. I've focused on that. We started together in December. So yeah.

Oh, I love that story. So I was trying to do the math in my head. Started in 2010. Ish. With your bookkeeping business?

Yeah.

2011.

Yeah, it might have been. I think, I think I filed in New York State in 2009.

2009. Okay.

2008. Yeah.

Amazing. So what were you doing before that? So an entrepreneur or did you get sick of the. The hustle of working for someone else? Like I'd love to hear that story.

No. So even crazier is that Good sense is older than 15 years. I, I had one corporate job once for like three months. And so I started freelance as a freelance bookkeeper in my very early twenties. And then I, I became quote unquote like the bookkeeper to the stars in New York City. So I worked with a lot of world renowned out artists, stylists, fashion photographers, galleries and yeah, it was super cool. It was a great, it was like really cool time to be in New York City. You know, it's super young and around all these super cool people doing super cool things. But so how I launched into a virtual model is I was six months pregnant climbing a ladder into a loft in slingback heels in a fashion stylist studio. And I was six months pregnant and I was like what am I doing? I could fall off this ladder. Like this is insane. So then I decided I had to figure out how to do this from home. And so my virtual bookkeeping business was run from FedEx and messengers. Like that's how. Because it was really pre online banking.

Right.

It was still paper statements. So that's how so then. But then I, I finally had so much business and I bought a home. So I formed an entity and I hired my first employee.

That's awesome.

So yes, I've been an entrepreneur since out the gate.

Since birth. Yes, probably.

Probably. I mean I wasn't hustling Hershey's in fifth grade or anything like those stories that you hear, but.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Any of your clients resistant to you going online or were they? Because I know I kind of have a similar story where I was working, I was like going to people's offices and I had my, my padfolio and I'd present information and when I, when I wanted to switch to not drive to their offices, I'm like, you guys, there's this thing called the Internet that exists that we all use anyway. Why aren't we, why am I still driving to your office and wasting so much time but did especially with it being bookkeeping and financial information. Did you have any kickback to that or were they Very supportive.

So long ago now. I think that memory is a funny beast. And I can't really say it's true. Right. We all. Yeah. So I, I can say I don't really remember a lot of resistance. What I remember resistance around was making the switch from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online. And I was one of the, like, not one of the. I would just say my firm very early on changed Everybody over to QuickBooks Online. I got in. In touch or was put in contact through Mike Michalowicz, actually. This is incredible. Man named Todd Hutchinson, who was an Intuit account rep at that time when Intuit was really cultivating their relationships with accountants and bookkeepers. And Todd sat me down, he's like, listen, this is where we're going. Everything is moving to QuickBooks online. You can get ahead of the game and switch your entire firm over now, and I will help you and I will completely hand hold you through that whole process. And I knew he was right. I mean, I had my very first job. One of my very first jobs was I helped launch the first Internet cafe in 1996.

Wow.

It was the very first T1 public T1 connection in New York City. So I knew it. I had watched the whole Internet trajectory and I was like, he's right. So I'm like, I'm jumping on Todd's bandwagon. He now works for this company called Scaling New Heights, which does a huge conference for bookkeepers and accountants. He's still lovely and still in touch with him.

Yeah.

So somehow, by God's grace, Todd and me convinced Intuit to send Todd and a private trainer to little old Osnay, New York, which is a suburb of New York City, to train my entire team privately on how to use QuickBooks online.

Wow.

And then we migrated. We probably had 60 clients at that point. We migrated them all over to QuickBooks Online. But that was a. That was a herculean task. And how I did that was I just told the clients I would pay for the subscription for. I think I paid for it for the first six months.

Oh, okay. So there were you sweeten the pot a little bit.

Yeah, exactly. I think. Okay, this is where we're going. And. Yeah, yeah.

You know what's really cool about that story is like a theme that I'm noticing is you're a very early adopter for a lot of different things, you know, and just having the confidence to say you worked with the stars of New York. Like, I talked to so many different entrepreneurs and it's like that, go getter mentality. I feel it makes such a big difference between businesses that work and businesses that don't really take off, you know? So have you always had that mindset of, like, yeah, I'm the bookkeeper to the stars? Of course I am. Like, that confidence to go do that, because that's amazing.

Oh, I was. I was completely intimidated in every room I was in. I mean, it was definitely a fake it till you make it. And that was just pomp and circumstance. My friends was a photo editor for a very, very prominent music magazine at the time. And everybody needed a bookkeeper. Was just. We didn't really have freelancers then.

Yeah.

You know, and so it was just. And I really cared about doing a good job. So it's really hard to find good people. So that was one of the things that made good sense. So valuable is that when I sold the company, the oldest client on the roster had been with me for 20 years.

Wow.

He had hosted my baby shower. First kid.

Yeah.

So, yeah. So I think it's just about recognizing. I don't really know what it is. I mean, I think there's just. There's. That's so packed. Like, why am I that way? I mean, I'm like, I am that way because, like, you know, I have a lot of financial trauma and I need to have complete control. Like, I try to have control over my life. You know, I don't know. I was just really. And I will say I've always been excited about entrepreneurship, like, that whole thing and talking shop with people. And one of the things that I loved about running Good Sense was being able to, like, look under the hood and help people figure out how to run their businesses better. It's one of the things that I really, really love coaching my students because I can. I. I do have this ability to look from an aerial view and say, okay, like, this is where we need to go.

Yeah. Because the numbers always tell a story. And I think a lot of people, at least a lot of people that I work with in the early days, they're, like, resistant to looking at their numbers and trying to understand it. But I'm sure with you serving bookkeepers and working with bookkeepers, what have you noticed with some of the. The insights for helping them get started in business? Like, did they have the same confidence to go after clients? And is that something that you end up coaching on, so looking at their own numbers?

I guess so. When I was, you know, essentially what I teach in bookkeepers, business incubator. It's almost like a Franchise model. Right. I pull all of the systems and everything I built and I'm like, okay, this is what you need to do during a sales call. This is what you need to do during an onboarding call. This is how you handle disgruntled client. This is how we handle pricing. It's like soup to nuts. And when I launched Bookkeeper's business Incubator, I was like, okay, this is what I'm doing. I'm giving people the structure and the foundation and the architecture and the PDFs and the processes and all the different steps. It's this fast track to building the business that took me 15 years to do. It's on a platter.

Yeah.

What I found out at the end of the first cohort was what I was really giving people was confidence. And I've seen some life changing things happen. You know, people go from making $25 an hour to $75 an hour and they're in Oklahoma, you know, where like that is probably the equivalent of making 150 or $200 an hour in the New York City area.

Yeah, Yeah.

I mean, just really being able to contribute to their family's economy or their own economy. Singles, moms who have been able to. That's really what happened with me. Right. Is I got divorced, so I had these two young children and I was like, okay, well, what am I going to do here? How am I going to make this work? So, yeah, it's. And I think part of it is like when you go through a program like BBI and you have the architecture, then you have the confidence because you're not. Your energy isn't fractured between all the things I need to do. Like, you have a map and you have a plan. Right. It's like when we sat down together and I told you all the different things that I had and we came up with what, like, this is what the funnel looks like.

Yeah.

Decided on like, what was the first tiny product and what was the upsell going to be and what the one time offer was going to be and how are we going to take people through that journey.

Yeah, I love that quote. That's. It's. You can't see the label inside of the bottle because I think, I mean, you had all those products that you could use, you had lots of different options. But when we're so close to our businesses and it's probably the same for a lot of the bookkeepers that you work with, you can't see your blind spots or you can't. You're like, so close that you can't figure out what the first step should be. And as coaches, we really collapse time for people because we've. We've done it, We've seen it. You know, we. We can figure out how to put it together and give them the systems and everything. So I think that's really, really cool.

I love that saying, collapse the time. Right? Because I, like, sometimes I'm like, geez, what was I doing? What? To figure this out. But, you know, when you look at the archive of a material I created, I was like, okay, I can totally see it. And then, of course, dealing with market changes in life and, you know, clients onboarding and offboarding and changing and pandemics and what have you. Yeah, but I agree. Yeah, but I agree is, you know, we hire coaches to help us collapse the time. The thing I would say, though, is you can hire the best coach in the world, but unless you actually sit down and do the work, it won't happen for you. And I think that there's a lot of, you know, I. For me, I mean, you. You knew. I mean, I came in, I'm like, all right, what am I doing next? Like, you know, a little bit of a task tyrant, maybe.

Like, you know, I wasn't gonna say that, but, you know, I. I know.

I'm sorry.

No, no, I loved it. And it was. For me, it's really. I mean, as a coach, you know, there's different personality types and. And even as a coach, sometimes you might have a style that's not perfectly congruent or doesn't. Isn't always the best style for some of your clients. So I think as a coach, like, I learned a lot working with you and saw some of our blind spots as a company too, so I'm grateful for that. Something else that you said that I wanted to point out is the confidence piece and helping the bookkeepers have confidence. Because I've been in lots of different mastermind rooms. And it's funny because it's always mindset, like, it always. So often it comes down to having the confidence to do the thing or not, procrastinate or not. You know, like, have these points of resistance where we know we need to be doing something, but there's something. Some reason why we're not actually taking the action on it. And I feel like whether we're teaching bookkeeping or tiny offers or I have friends that coach on real estate and all these different things, when you're a coach, it's. It's like giving them the Mindset and helping them find the confidence to do the things they know they want to do anyway. So it sounds like you do that really well for your clients, too.

Yeah, I think there was, at some point we were on a call and, you know, one of the group calls and you were like, yeah. At the end of the day, we're all mindset coaches.

Yeah.

I think that there's some truth. Truth to that.

I mean, I think that it's weird, but it's.

It's true.

It's true.

You know, I think one of the reasons why my story resonates with people or one of the places that they can draw inspiration from is, you know, it. I didn't. I wasn't a college graduate. I had just moved to New York City and I was going to community college, and I just fell into bookkeeping. And then I just ran with it because I had a talent for it and I liked having time, freedom, you know, so it took me 17 years to get an associate's degree. I learned everything from, you know, the ground up and, you know, somebody. I was in this book called Edupunks by this woman, Anya Kamenetz. It's about people who teach themselves how to do something. It's an autodidact. So that's. I am self taught, literally, from soup to nuts. Not just from the bookkeeping perspective, but from business. Until I really. I had, of course, bought programs along the way. That shelf help, you know, I bought the program, I stuck it on the shelf. I never used it. Oh, yeah, it was. It was only until I really started to get like, I think when I joined Michael Hyatt's program, business accelerator and really put my, you know, toes, you know, my nose to the ground and got that. I had worked with some coaches, but Michael probably made the biggest difference in terms of making.

What was it about his coaching that helped the most, do you think?

I think I was ready for it.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I think his. His content is amazing and he's an incredible individual. He's so grounded and so smart and so strategic. But I. I was just not. I don't. You have to be ready for it, you know, and you have to, like, not be willing to give yourself a pass. Like, you know, you have to just say, listen, I'm. I'm here. I'm in it to win it, and I'm going to do what it needs to take, and I'm not going to, you know, buy into my own BS anymore. And that's when you. That's when the change happens. The change happens when you make the change. So, yeah, that's.

Do you see clients that. That come in and they're not ready for it? Is it possible to coach someone to readiness, or do you think I may.

That's a weird question, but coach somebody to ready. Readiness.

More of just chit chat. Food for thought.

I think. I. Well, the first thing you have to do is be able to get them on the phone. So I've definitely had people who have come into the program, like, gung ho, and then they disappear. And that's kind of one of the things that I think differentiates me as a. As a program coach is that I actually try to chase people down. But, yeah, you can only send so many. Like, I'm like, listen, like, I'm here for you to win, but, like, in order for you to do that, you need to show up, you know?

Right.

So there's definitely different personality types or, you know.

Yeah, yeah, I've seen that too.

Yeah.

And I've seen it myself when I hired coaches when I was first getting started, and I thought, oh, I'm gonna pay for the most expensive coach I can because they're gonna help me get the best results and then into the program. And I'm like, oh, wait, I'm like, I wasn't utilizing the program. And I ended up. This is way back. I hired Subi Zimmerman. Do you know her?

Yes.

She's like an Instagram person. I hired her for one of my coaching. Yeah, I had no. I had no. I was not ready for that. And I would send her these massive emails that was like, can you help me figure out what I should sell and who I should work with? And she's like, no, I can't. You know, she probably is used to coaching people who are like, ready to hire and scale. And here I am.

Brought her up because she was a good Sense client.

She really. Oh, cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Small world.

There's only so many degrees of.

Right. And I actually, I wanted to bring up something because you just had your public speaking presentation in Calgary about.

Oh, yeah.

Yes. Yeah. So. So I have the inside skinny on that. Right. Because I was the bookkeeper. And that's a whole other, like. So after fashion collapsed in 2009, then I became the bookkeeper to the Internet superstars.

Oh, yeah.

But the background of what I wanted to share is. You're absolutely right. Like, I would be able to look directly at the correlation between a Facebook ad spend and somebody's gross revenue, their net revenue, because different people have different spending habits.

Right.

But it was, you know, we were kind of just chit chatting back and forth about that on Facebook this week and I was like, oh, I had to tell that to Valley because, yeah, I just like, you know, like, if the Facebook ad spend went up 20, the revenue would go up somewhere right in that window. So. And if it went down, it went down.

Yeah. And it's funny because, you know, I think there, there's a correlation between being confident about what you sell and being willing to run ads too. So I don't, I don't know if there's something there with ads being more successful when you're ready for them because you're confident about your messaging and who you serve. And I posted something yesterday that said organic traffic is only free if your time is worth nothing.

Yes. Money, time and energy.

Yeah. But then I thought about it and I was like, well, some people aren't ready for ads, so maybe that's not fair. I feel like there is a period of, like, getting clarity. And if you don't know who you work with and what you sell, it's probably not a time like organic traffic can be great for bringing clarity.

But I think that's important to address because you have to iterate several different times. And I think that, you know, people can view someone like you or myself and say, oh, wow, well, they did it, but I can't do it. But what they're seeing is the byproduct of many, many hours of work and many, many failed attempts. They only get to see it through the filter of success. They don't get to see it through like, staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night crying your eyes out because you failed or like you lost a big client or, you know, you spent $15,000 on ads and a launch. Like, they don't. My first digital product that I launched was in 2012, right after I had my third child. I don't know what I was thinking, but I decided I was going to create this huge long video course called Chief Wealth Officer to teach business owners just about finance. And it was such an arduous process and I was very, very sick post the delivery of my daughter. And I don't know why I took it on, But I spent three months and like 10 or $15,000 producing and pulling this thing together. Maybe it's 10.

Wow.

And then by the time I got done, I had zero energy to market it. Like none because I was still running. Good sense.

Right?

So that was like, like imagine if you manufactured $10,000 worth of teachers and you just stuck them in a warehouse. Like that's the equivalent of that, you know, so they can say, oh, she has like bookkeepers, business incubator. But no, like, I had the chief health officer course. I had a QuickBooks online training course. And then I kind of folded things for a while and then came back post. Well, pre this, the sale of good sense. But I want people to remember that because it's, you know, Michael Jordan didn't become Michael Jordan in a day.

Yeah.

It's hours of practice and like figuring out, you know, how you can best get the ball in the hoop. And I don't know why I'm making a sports analogy because I'll be the furthest thing from a sports. But whatever. I was gonna roll with it.

It's a good, it is a good analogy. And I saw one about, I think also Michael Jordan. Very. He's great for analogies. But it, it said something some number of, like how many times he's missed the game winning shot. Like he, it was on him and he missed and it was like, I think it was in the 20s or something of imagine how many times that his team was counting on him and he failed and he kept going and, and nobody looks back at those games. They're looking at the sum of his career. Right. So as entrepreneurs, I mean, I've had failed launches, I've had webinars where nobody shows up. And I think people forget about that side of it that I. That it's almost like a rite of passage in a way that we've all experienced it.

Well, I think, I think tenacity is, is absolutely an attribute of, of entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship. And if you don't consider yourself a tenacious person, it doesn't matter what the course is. It doesn't matter what the product is, because if you get knocked down, you're not going to pick yourself back up. So I think it's, I think having radically candid conversations with ourselves and what we're capable of and what we want. You know, some people are like, no, I do not want to be beat up and battened down and like, get up with a, you know, a missing tooth and a black eye. I'm gonna go get up today. Yeah, but you have to be, you know, you can lick your wounds like 24 hours and then you gotta just get back on your horse and do it again, you know? Yeah. And actually more importantly, learn from it, like, what went wrong, because that's the only way that you can get better is by capturing. Capturing that.

Yeah, yeah. One thing that I, I worked with someone who is an operations consultant at one point and anytime I got mad about something or upset about something, she's like, it's just a sign that you need a system in this place, have an emotional response. You just need to build a system so that it doesn't happen again. I thought that was really good advice.

Yeah.

So help me take radical self responsibility too. Of like, how do I prevent this from happening again.

Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the big game changers for us at Good Sense was we implemented eos which is.

Oh yeah.

Operate an entrepreneur operating system which is based on the book Traction by Gino Wickman. We actually hired a professional EOS implementer.

Okay, nice.

And one of the most powerful things of that process, the woman's name is Denise Haney and she works all across the country. I can't say enough great things about her. The mo. One of the most powerful things for me through the EOS process was you have these meetings every week with your team and you identify problems. That's great. But it's like, then how do you solve the problem? So for us, one of the things is if a customer complained about something, that wasn't an opportunity for us to say, Allie, so annoying. She complained about something, you know, with us it was an opportunity for us to say, this is a problem, you know, how can we fix it? What happened here? Oh, she didn't get her reports on time. Okay. So now we need to. A mechanism in place to make sure that our reports are going out. You know, and so that's one of the elements that I bring into bookkeepers business incubator, which we call bbi is how do you effectively delegate and manage? Because quality control when you own a bookkeeper or accounting company is huge. You know, so. But you're right, is that if there's an emotional response, it's not enough for you to articulate the problem. You have to actually come up with the solution. And then when you come up with the solution, you actually have to make the behavioral change. And that's where it's huge. Everything is the. The big leap is from conception to execution. It's from conceiving a tiny product to actually iterating it and bringing it to market. That's the execution piece and that's where people get lost in that gap.

Yeah, definitely. And so one thing I was thinking about with when you sold your company or you were preparing to sell your company systems and processes Must have been a big piece of that. I would imagine so that it is sellable. And it's not just the Justine Show. You know, I see that a lot with personal brands or with.

Yeah.

Who want to sell their businesses. And they asked me, should I be a personal brand or should I be this company name. Did you know that you wanted to sell it when you started it?

No, that was a mindset thing. I was having a crisis, like, I hate this business. You know, I don't know what went wrong. And I was talking to my graphic designer at the time, and she was like, well, you could do something different. And I was like, I can't do anything different. Like, I have two kids. Like, what are you. Like, this is nonsense. And she was like, well, you could sell the business. It's an asset. Right. And I was like, what? And that was like. I had never thought about it like that, but it was. I was like, sitting on this, like, cute little pile of cash, you know, so. Yes, absolutely. Systems are important to your business. They're important to your business because they're completely related to client churn. And 100%, when you get into due diligence, they're going to look at how quickly you are taking on new clients and how quickly clients are leaving. So that's called your churn rate. Right. So and. And defections. Right. How many clients left over a period of time? When you have strong systems in place, you mitigate defections, which is why when a client complained, we knew that this was something we had to address.

Yeah.

Because then it would become a problem for somebody else. And so that's how we mitigated defections. Now, the person who purchases your firm, they might already have their own systems. They might incorporate some of yours, they might not. But I think that everybody has their own style. Right. And their own way of running a firm. They definitely pulled in a lot of elements of what we like what we were using, our whole. Our whole software stack, that stuff, our onboarding process, all of that stuff. But we did have another. A lot of other things in place, like HR and things. But they had a whole HR team, so they didn't need to incorporate ours. So, yes, I would say that it's important, but it's not. What they, you know, might not be as important as you think as. In terms of what they're really looking for is the stability of the client list and the revenue and the profit. Right.

So, yeah, you said you started kind of the info sales side of your business and maybe more of a Personal brand. How it was one year prior to selling or a couple years.

Yeah. So we launched in February of 2022. I think it was the last week of February of 20. So a couple years ago only. Yeah. So. And then Good sense. The sale closed on February 2, 2023. So was. I was just getting ready to close my first cohort. Like, close out my first cohort.

Yeah. So that was very strategic to do it that way. But as well thought out as it sounds like it was, I knew that.

I wanted to leave. I had actually started having conversations in 2019 and it had been percolating on it for a while, but it was still like, okay, you know, I'm the primary breadwinner in my family. And it was like, okay, like, well, I can't just peace out, like, what's the plan? You know, so by. So I had started, I had preliminary conversations and I had a number of cold solicitations come through.

Wow.

And I. And interestingly enough, the hedge funds are really trying to snap up bookkeeping firms. It's like when they went after like funeral homes, you know?

Yeah.

So I, I knew that I wanted to leave. I hadn't really thought about it. I took a two month sabbatical in June of 2021 to July of 2021 to start to build a shell of goods of BBI. And then we launched it and I knew that I had market viability. And so then I said, okay, well now I have an exit plan. Right. Like to placate my little like inner child that has financial 10 potentials. Like, you can't. I have something planned.

You're safe, we're good.

Yes, we're safe, we're okay. And then I had a bad hire because people as people as people will people. So that's always like a drag. Right. And. And it was just like a Lion King moment. It was, it is time. Yeah. So, yeah, so it wasn't. I, I wasn't building out like, okay, in three years I'm gonna exit. And looking back on it, that I would actually recommend somebody do that because I think there's things that you can do to like make the sale easier and more valuable to you when you walk away. But yeah, it wasn't as strategic as it sounds.

Yeah, yeah, but you were building all of these products in the background to help you run your own business, which turned into assets that you use now inside of your coaching programs, and then even just to give the 10,000 foot view. And then you take pieces of those bigger programs and turn them into your tiny offers. Is that how you thought about it?

Correct. So one of the best books that I read very early on in my career was Reworking.

Oh, I gotta write that one down.

Yeah. So it's Rework. It's by Jason Freed and David Heinmeier Hansen. They founded 37signals, which is the owner of Basecamp, which was.

Oh, yeah.

Very, very first project management softwares. And I probably can't tell you anything else in that book other than simplicity was key, which is like simple, simple, simple. But they had a great line in that book that says, find the sawdust in your business. Because when milling houses, wood milling houses, figured out that sawdust was an actual product, they opened up an entire new revenue stream. So you should be looking at your business and figuring out, like, where is the sawdust? And so this was a byproduct of. That's.

That's good.

Yeah, yeah. So I, I can save you from reading the book. Although I know you're a voracious reader like I am, so.

Yes. Yeah. Get the crib notes version. Where's the satoshi? Yeah, it's true. Like, tiny offers are sawdust. Because a lot of people can. They have templates and they have all sorts of things that are sitting in their Google Drive that they don't even realize are valuable to other people.

Oh, my God. I was cleaning out my Good Sense drive because I was like, finally I was getting migrated off their email system. And.

Yeah.

And then I like found like a whole other plethora of documents that we can turn in. Like, we, we probably have. I mean, BBI is huge. We're working on streamlining it now, but there's definitely over like 125 checklists, PDFs, workflows, process maps, all that. And then I was going through the Google Drive, I was like, oh, there's probably another 40 or 50 docs in here, which, you know, you could. That does not mean that every business will use it. And. But, you know, I mean, just things like having really powerful job descriptions. Very, very clear, well articulated job descriptions take time. And even if you're using AI, you have to have the copy to drop in there.

Yeah.

So, you know, our whole HR module is like, there's probably eight different job descriptions in there.

Wow. And that would be so valuable to someone who's trying to hire and it. And it's like the nugget to show them how much you can help them or how many other things you could help them with. If it's like that's the teaser.

Yeah.

Of course they're gonna hire you for other coaching if they're interested in that.

Yeah.

That's so cool. I was just in Calgary last week for a mastermind that was focused on ads with Deepesh Mondalia. And he's an ads guy and he was showing us some of his funnels. He has 20 different front end funnels running and they're all tiny offer style. You know, they're all ads straight to a sales page for a, a digital product. 20 different ones. And I was like, oh my gosh, my mind is blown. Cause I have maybe two running right now.

And I. Yeah, I was like, this does not sound like a good idea.

Right. No, but he. So the thing that blew my mind too is he has different ad accounts for different, different tiny offers. Well, he didn't.

Oh, that's an interesting.

Different ad account for each offer because I've noticed when I, If I have too many different front end offers running, it's like they all kind of like tank a little bit and the results are not as good. But he puts each one in its own ad account. So they don't even know that they're competing against each other. They're just trying to run. And we'll have to, you know, we can deep dive into this and the accelerator. But so I was thinking about you guys and everyone, all the different ways you can do this. He's got ebooks that he's selling for $7 as a front end and then has, you know, like a membership on the back end. So there's, I mean, there's so much even further that you can take tiny offers than $27 info products. You could turn those job descriptions into a $7, like a tiny, tiny offer.

Right.

Anyway, we'll have to talk about this.

So interesting, because one of the things is I don't, I don't know how many funnels we have. If we looked at our freebies on that arch, because we started with the classic model of the freebie to, you know, putting them up, et cetera, et cetera. And then we switched the tiny offer mostly because I wanted to be able to help people in that lower market who don't, you know, can't yet afford a group coaching program.

Yeah.

But I feel very overwhelmed by the number of, first of all, just Kajabi products that we have that we could even potentially turn into tiny products. But the freebies. And so I've been talking with my team about like, how we can streamline it so that we can really rinse and repeat it. Yeah. I think that, like, for me. And without exhausting the audience, too. Right. So how do. How do we shuffle through these? Maybe four or five different options, but I feel like I want to. I would rather have, like, three to five that are really, really, really polished and, like, perfectly executed.

Yeah.

20 of them.

Yeah.

But that's just my style.

Right.

I'm very. I'm, like, very much, like. Okay. Like, you know, I always want to be the best.

Yeah.

And so.

But that's how you win with tiny offers, too. You know, you. You wow them so much with the. An amazing experience for a $27 product or whatever the price point is. And then. Then they're like, oh, my gosh, this company rocks. Like, what else can I. Yeah. Do with them?

Yeah.

I think that's. That's a good way to do it, too.

So one of the values that we determined for Good Sense, but also a personal value of mine, is constant evolution. Right. Like, I always want to be better tomorrow than I am today. Yeah. At full focus for Michael Hyatt's company, they. They talk about continuous wow or relentless wow. And I'm like. I think, like, that always really appeals to me. It's like, how can you completely blow somebody's mind?

Yeah.

And that's. That's really true with. With Good Sense. Like, we focused a lot on a hospitality element of bookkeeping, and people don't think about that. You know, and it's. But it's. Money's so intimate.

Yeah.

So I think it was a real market differentiator for us.

Yep. And I would. I would definitely agree with that. Like, I've had. I've had a bookkeeper in the past that I didn't feel connected to, or she had a new account manager every other week because she was fast. And I was like, I don't. I ended up leaving because I. I just wanted one point of contact who I felt safe around. And, you know, not that I was unsafe, but. Yeah.

So people don't like changes. Yeah. But for when we talked about mitigating defection. Oh, no. If you start bouncing people around all the time, forget it.

Right.

I'm going to stay.

Yeah.

Yeah. Nobody wants that when you know. Yeah.

So can we dive into your tiny offer a little bit and talk about what. What you ended up deciding to sell and how it's working for you.

Sure.

And I don't know.

I could have been more prepared and pulled updated metrics.

We can just.

Yeah, sure.

Fair number of what you're what where you're at, ad spend and profit wise. But how did you choose? And I know we're short on time, so I have to be efficient. How did you choose the tiny offer that you, that you ended up advertising?

So, you know, we looked at all the different modules that were available in bbi and one of the things that is very important when you're starting a relationship with a new client as a bookkeeper is onboarding. If you can gain somebody's trust during that onboarding process, you, you have a much more likely, it's a lot more likely that you will develop a long term relationship with that client. If you get on the phone and you're stuttering and you don't have your shit together. Excuse me, you're, you're, you're not organized. You are not going to give somebody confidence that you have the ability to handle their books. So an onboarding can be very, very complex depending on the level of bookkeeping that's happening. If it's a single client with one account, it's easy peasy. But we had full service bookkeeping clients where we were handling all their ap, their ar, you know, all of it. So there's many levels to bookkeeping. So I knew that that product was an area where most, many, probably most bookkeepers can improve. So that was what we started with. It's a 37 product. It is. You know, everybody says, oh, it's worth so much more. No, no, no, no, it's definitely worth so much more. I mean like I like, I was like, you were like, you should sell that for 37. I was like, ali, this hurts, you know, I was like, ouch. And then our upsell is a product called Organize, which one of the things that people don't understand is how much information bookkeepers manage. We're like baby librarians, you know, so if you have one client with four accounts, that's great. But if you have 10 clients with four accounts, you're now managing 40 accounts. And if that's usernames and passwords, you now have 80 usernames and passwords to manage.

Yeah.

So it's a lot of information management. And so in organized, I teach people how to keep all of their digital documents organized.

Oh, cool.

That the formatting is the same because when you hire people right now you have to go into what I call information transference. How can I teach you, Ali, about the clients that we have or about our processes? That's how we transfer the information. So the information needs to be the same. It needs to be consistent. That was the upsell for 19. And then the OTO or the one time offer is a product called Pricing Perfection. It is my proprietary methodology for pricing bookkeeping work. There's generally two different ways to price bookkeeping. It's hourly or retainer slash, value based. And I came up with something that takes the best of both. And that's what I teach in that training. And that training is $99. We're probably going to change the pricing on that because that one is very valuable. That methodology allowed me to develop a firm that had a 76% percent profit margin.

Wow.

So when you imagine that you're going to sell, that is a very attractive feature for anybody who's looking to buy a business.

Yeah. What I notice about those products is they're very specific. So they solve one problem each. Each one you, you know your audience well enough to know what their pain points are, where they get stuck, where they need help with. And then you created products around each specific problem that they have, but also ascending them into what's going to get their attention, what they think they need, all the way into what they really need, which is the pricing side of things. So I love how you did that. And can you tell us how your ads, how your ads are doing if you were surprised by how your ads are doing?

Yeah. So I hate Facebook ads. I mean you got to know like, you got to know what you're good at and I am not good at Facebook ads. And I open up Facebook manager and I'm like, ah. I just, just because it's visually cluttered, I'm like, this is not a good user experience. Me and my five star experiences, you know?

Yeah.

So I have an incredibly talented Facebook manager who I've worked, worked with for over two years now.

So she's on your team or is it an agency?

She's not an agency. She's a, she's a solopreneur slasher. So I mean she might have people back end for her, which I don't care because they do a great job, you know, but my main point, my main point person. And she just does a great job. So yeah, I think the last time I checked we, I think we had about a 48% Roy. So you know, for every dollar that were, you know, every $10 we spent, we took in $5 worth of revenue. Little $4.80, 48%. So, so that's nice. You know, if you think about first that you've, you've mitigated your list acquisition costs which are very expensive. And second, that you have this, like, little bit of change coming in every day. That's been really great. You know, the. The nice thing is, is that the. The feedback that we've gotten on it, like, inside of our learning management system, we. We use kajabi, but the comments are great, you know, so. So now. Yeah. So now I think. I think that offer might be exhausted now at this point, because we've been running those ads. It's the middle of April, and we launched on February 1st.

Okay.

Or January 31st. So we're like, you know, 10 weeks in.

Yeah.

We're getting ready to launch our next tiny product funnel. And I think we're trying to. Our goal for that is April 23rd.

Okay.

Which would be. Which would be a piece of advice that I would give other students or other people who are trying to launch tiny products. Like, I think it's called constraint theory. Like, you can't just say, like, I'm gonna launch a tiny product. Like, you have to put a stake in the ground and say, I'm launching this product by this D. And so we had decided that January 31st was our launch date. And when we went through, I had the shell of the products that we wanted, but there was a number of bonuses that you and I brainstormed that I then had to create content for. And you have to sit down and create the content, and you have to sit down and create the canva graphic. And you have to do all those things. So. So it's very, very important that you're staying accountable.

Yeah.

So that you can drive those projects to completion. Because otherwise you'll just sit in the course and not do the thing.

Yeah, that's great advice. Any other advice or input you would want to share with someone who's considering launching a tiny offer or joining the program to get support around launching a tiny offer.

So, yes. You have to be a yes person in life, you know, which means that you have to ask the question, you have to raise your hands, you have to be the squeaky wheel. You have to say yes. So you will never know unless you try. And if you fail, it is still a win because you can learn. If you succeed, you now have a new revenue opportunity which you can then harness and do other stuff with that. So.

Yeah.

And I think that goes back to sort of what we were saying earlier in the conversation is, you know, like, what. What made you different? Or like, how did you do these things? Because I was always like, oh, no, I'm going to call that accountant and get that clarification or oh, no, we're hiring this EOS integrator. Oh, no, I'm going to invest in a 30. You're like, oh, yes. Not oh, no. Oh, yes. I'm going to invest in this coaching program.

Yeah, I'm going to do it and figure it out. Not being scared.

Oh, yeah. Intuition is like, that's the most highly underrated business skill.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for being here today, Justine. It's been a pleasure. I could talk to you all day.

But I love talking to you.

Clients.

Well, thank you so much for having me, Allie.

Yeah, thanks, Justine. Have a great day.

You too. Bye.

Bye. Oh, that was such a great interview. If you want to check out Justine and you want to connect with her, head to her website@justine lackey.com. that's J-U-S-T-I N E L-A C-K-E-Y.com, which is also her username over on Instagram and LinkedIn. Oh, that was such a good episode. I loved chatting with Justine and I hope you guys enjoyed that interview as much as I enjoyed taking part in it. And just want to remind you that we do have calls available, implementation calls or strategy calls, whatever you want to call them. Our team is available to help you see how you could apply some of these strategies and frameworks in your own business and what kind of tiny offer launch you could create or what kind of product you could create. We're here to help you strategize through all of that. So if you're interested in working with our team or even just talking to us to explore the idea, there's no, no hard pitch, nothing weird, nothing uncomfortable. We're pretty, we're pretty chill and we're here to support you. We're here to help you win. So go ahead and book a call if you have any interest at all in exploring this idea or this strategy or interested in learning more about getting some coaching on how to make ads work for you, finally. And how to get your own tiny offer out into the world, how to make it work with, you know, ascending into high ticket scaling to get enough people buying your tiny offer to really make it valuable for your business. Anything that you want to talk to our team about, go ahead and book a call. The link is included in the show notes and if you have any questions at all, go ahead and send me a message on Instagram. I'm happy to chat about anything to see if there might be an opportunity to support you in growing your business and hitting your big goals, because that's what we're all about. So I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, and I will see you in the next episode. Thanks, guys.