210: The Messy Art of Juggling Multiple Successful Businesses

Foreign welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks, constantly live, launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today.

If you run or are considering running multiple businesses, then this interview is for you. Dr. Destiny Cobb, who has two thriving businesses and runs several large online events a year, shares really openly about the challenges she faces behind the scenes and the key systems that she now has in place that make it all possible without getting totally overwhelmed. Hi, I am Ruth, host of the Mess of Success Summit and welcome to this interview with Dr. Destiny Kopp, a certified business growth coach for digital product entrepreneurs. Destiny helps business owners 10x their digital product revenue without the need to be glued to their desk, constantly live, launching or worrying about social media algorithms, which I know a lot of people here are very interested to hear more about. Okay, Destiny, so we've had the official intro. What I'm really, really want to talk to you about is how you run multiple successful businesses and make it all work. So can you just give the quick fire overview of these multiple businesses before we dive into that?

Absolutely. So I own hobby school, which I started from a domain name purchase just a few years ago and we do online learning virtual summits in that particular brand and we've grown it over the years. We have about 30,000 people on our email list, lots and lots of customers. So I can go into all the details there. We definitely have some messes along the way, so happy to delve into that. And then I have my personal brand which has been out there for several years now. In that brand I also have my newsletter, Profit Club, which I have a collaboration app for, for that in a membership. And then I have my digital product growth lab and also two Shopify stores, one with hobby school and then hello, content with my personal brand.

I mean, you just have so much going on and I'm from the outside. Like you're always doing these big events like the Hobby school Summit and events. So much going on and you're serving your own clients and you've got, you know, teenage kids and all the things that life brings as well. You did say it has been a messy journey though. So can you share a little bit more about how it has gone over the years? Yeah.

So when you were asking me about this, I'm like, I feel like everything's been messy over the Years. Like I don't feel like anything has been easy for me. Like when I hear, oh I had this, you know, million dollar launch and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. I've never, not like that's never happened to me. I feel like I have to basically fight tooth and neck or everything that I have built. And you know, it was really hard for me to kind of pinpoint like one particular mess because I feel like every single thing I do, there's always something that goes wrong. Right. There's always something I could probably point to. I've done the launches where I didn't get any sales. So that has happened over the years. I've had an event where tech issues happen, lead pages stop interacting with convertkit and we lost like 4000 leads in one of it that I had paid for. So I like everything that I do I feel like has mess in it.

So you've been running your personal brand business for longer than hobby store, is that right?

That is correct, yeah.

How did you get to the point where you're like, I'm going to start this whole new thing and it's not just a small thing, like I'm going to go full in with this new thing as well?

Yeah. So that was probably a mistake that I made. If I had to go back and do it all over again, I probably wouldn't have done it. Probably a lot of people listening to this can relate to this. You know, we're all kind of multi passionate. Right. There's different things out there we want to test, we want to try. And you know, I kind of ran across that domain name. I was just like messing around on vacation. You know, my, my whole family was still in bed and I was at the computer. I'm like, I saw that domain name. I'm like, I feel like I can do something with that. Not realizing at that point in time, if I had realized this, I probably would have done it. Not realizing at that point in time how much work it was going to be to start something completely from scratch. You know, kind of figure out what's the best business model, how do I do this and all of that. So a mistake, probably a mess if I have to be completely honest with you. And I made mistakes in the beginning process there. Right. So when I first launched that brand, I started doing it with paid bundles and they were selling but it really wasn't growing the business as I wanted to. And that's kind of when we switched to Virtual Summit. So I did a couple of those. I'm like well, this isn't working, so let me try something else. And that's when we switched over to the, the business model with the virtual summits.

I think what's really interesting, like what I'm thinking about is firstly because I've had the pleasure of getting to know you and some of what goes on in your business. And I'm always like, so admiring like how you are running these big events and, and that's the thing. Your version of like, oh, struggling to grow your audience and stuff is someone else's version of like, man, I wish I could have what Destiny has, let alone with like two businesses. And I just think it's so refreshing to hear, like, I tried different things. I took on too much. I decided to run this business on a whim, which I didn't know about your hobby school brand, but what a great domain name. Like, I can't blame you for doing that. And I've been figuring it out along the way. And I just was part of your hobby school summit, which literally just ended at the time of recording. So even that, like, if it was my summit, I'd be like, no, can't do any interviews now. I'm going into hibernation mode. And it was so well put together. Like from, from my perspective, you've just got it all nailed. Like, everything's in flow, all the speakers know what's what. It's all automated, the communication and everything. But I know that it hasn't always felt like that for you. So can you talk about the process of trial and error and messiness behind the scenes to get to this place?

Yeah. So let me take you back a couple years. So when we moved to that virtual summit kind of business model, if you would, to grow that brand, we started trying different types of summits. So I did like a home and garden type summit, which is really like growing fresh vegetables in your backyard and that sort of thing. We did more like a homeschooling, back to school type event. So we did that and tested that out and then we started testing out some like more crafty type summits. And you know, again, that particular year when I first started doing that, we were doing summits on almost every single month, if you can believe it. Like when I think about that, I really don't know how I got through that stage. But we were doing them almost every single month. And we kind of just again trial and testing and we figured out what our audience was interested in, what they weren't interested in, and come to 2025, we have really narrowed down the events that we're doing this year in the kind of the niches that we are focused on. Like we don't do any of the back to school homeschooling type stuff anymore. We're not even doing our harvest to table summit this year, which is kind of the growing your own vegetables. So we kind of stopped doing that and really more focused on creative type summits. That's kind of what we have learned is best and works for us. And kind of going back to your question of the process, like it took us a while, right? But now I do feel like we have a very well oiled kind of process for finding speakers, onboarding speakers. You know, I always try to automate stuff whenever we can. So like the automation of, you know, getting all the speaker information, you know how that takes a ton of time. So all of that, we try to automate every single thing that we can just to make it a very smooth process for everybody.

Was there ever a point in doing all of these summits that you felt like giving up Foreign.

Hey there Destiny.

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I have felt like giving up so many times. I don't even want to admit this honestly. And you know, I'm a little bit, you know, I'm going to date myself a little bit, so I'm a little bit on the older side. You know, I'm 53 now and I'm like, okay, how many more years can I do this, Ruth? That's, that's kind of what sometimes goes through my, goes through my head, you know, know, am I getting too old to do this? But I do feel like quitting. I would say almost every year I'm like, you know, should I be doing this anymore? Or whatever. But really what keeps me going and what I enjoy doing the most is like all the collaborations that I. All the kind of friendships really quite frankly that I make with the clients and the people that I work with and the speakers in our events and you know, if we're doing a bundle in my personal brand and all those relationships is really what I enjoy. And that has kept me going. But to answer your question, it is a lot of work doing all of this. I felt like if I only had my personal brand and the two memberships that I have in my personal brand, I feel like I could work like a part time schedule. But with hobby school and everything, I'm definitely working full time.

Yeah. And it's really important, I think just to normalize this. Even like someone on the outside is like you're doing amazing things. But it's really normal also to question that sometimes and think am I doing the right thing for me, do I want to do this? And actually those questions can be helpful and can lead to some important decisions about what you're doing with your business. And they can also just sometimes be a sign that I'm tired, I need a little bit of a break and then I'll come back refreshed. How can you serve your clients in your personal brand with all this big stuff going on? Because I know that running summits and this year I'm doing two summits in one year and that for me is huge. So let alone however many you have done or are doing, how do you make sure that you can continue to do justice to that business and keep it going when you have so much going on over on the other side of things as well?

I think there's a couple things. One is I do have a VA that works for me. She primarily helps me out with hobby school, but I have her do some stuff, stuff with my personal brand here and there. But I would say that for the most part for the summits, she's doing all the work there. The only really thing that I'm doing there is more of the marketing type stuff. So you know, the emails, the sales page, you know, I go through and look at the funnels, make sure everything is, you know, set up correctly there and it's working properly now with the launch of the memberships in hobby school, I'm. I'm definitely there. Right. Because we launched with the part time passion club. You know, I'm the coach in that program. I'm doing all the work there getting to onboard those new members, but I'm doing that. But the Summits and stuff. She's definitely doing that. The other thing I just wanted to mention was I am very, very deliberate in terms of what I do and where I spend my time. So I keep things pretty simple, right? I have on my Gmail account, I have Google tasks there, and I have all of my goals for each one of my brands, what I want to accomplish, and I keep track of all my tasks there. I say no to a lot of things. Like, I get almost every single day, somebody is contacting me to be in a summit, to do a speaking gig here, to do this, do that. And I say no to most things. Unless I feel like if I go to what my core goals are and what I'm wanting to accomplish, unless I feel like it really fits into that, I say no to most things. And I'm very focused on what I'm promoting. So I have a promotion calendar that I put together. Honestly, I think I put it together in October of 24 last year for all of 2025. We have this promotional calendar for every single, you know, brand that I manage. And that's what we're focused on. It doesn't mean that we make some tweaks here and there, but I honestly doubt it because I basically know what I need to focus on, what I need to do to make our revenue numbers.

I love that. Were you always so boundaried around what you focus on?

I have been forced to get there due to my limited time. So I would say if somebody can only work like 20 hours a week or 30 hours a week or whatever the case is, having a very specific kind of, you know, focus in terms of what you need to do, what you need to accomplish, and kind of say no to everything else will definitely help in that regard. But I was kind of forced to get there because I had so much on my plate.

Can I just check? Do you only have the one va?

I have the one va. I have somebody else that is helping me with some images for the Shopify store. We have a lot of products. We have about a thousand products that we're getting ready to upload. So she's like, creating the images in Canva and helping us upload them to the Shopify store. So she's working about 40 hours a week right now. But once I get all that done, she won't, you know, we won't need her anymore.

Okay. Because I think that that is amazing. Like, given everything you have going on, to mainly just have that support from the one VA and yourself, I mean, it shows to me that those priorities are working for you and serving you.

Yeah, for sure. I'll give you some examples. Like, I know every single month this is the offer that I'm going to be promoting. Like in February, I know I'm going to be promoting my digital product growth lab. So I have a webinar, a live webinar set up for that and I have processes for that. You know, we do our promotion two weeks before the webinar to get people to register and then from there we have the cart open period for like 10 days after that. So then we're promoting that. So I know that's what I'm going to be doing in February. And then in March I move on to promote the newsletter Profit Club. Obviously in January we were doing the part time passion club in hobby school. So I have a very specific promotional calendar that I focus on.

For a time in my business, I was running two businesses at once. And that was when I transitioned from copywriting over to coaching. And I had them both going on at the same time. But I knew I was going to quit the copywriting, you know, fairly soon. Even that I found took up a lot of mental capacity, like the sense of juggling, I think. Do you ever find this or has there been a way around it that has helped you with this feeling like you're juggling different? Because although there's things in common with both businesses, they are quite different audiences and ways of approaching them. Right?

Well, there are two different audience. One's more of a B2C audience and one's more of a B2B audience. So they are completely different. So you're, you're, you're right about that. And yes, I think that I do feel like I'm juggling things when I put everything down on paper and I'm like, here's the goals for hobby school, here's the goals for my personal brand, here's the goals for the offers that we have in each of these different brands. That helps me figure out, okay, here's what I need to focus on to grow that particular offer. And it really does come down to offers. Right. You have kind of your main core offer and then you have promoting that. But I do feel kind of scattered sometimes. I don't think that's ever going to go away, is it? How could I get that to go away?

Yeah, I really appreciate the honesty around it. Okay, so let's say that someone listening to this, you know, they're multi passionate and I know that some people actually beat themselves up about Doing things like you said, like finding a. Yeah, I'm going to make a whole new business around it. So, firstly, I just love that you shared that, and that is the way a lot of our brains work. So let's say someone is listening to this and kind of thinking, okay, I want to do these two things, but I'm also feeling like, stretched because you are prioritizing both businesses. That's what I see. And from witnessing you and talking to you like you are prioritizing both, you are making both work at the same time. A lot of us might do a bit here and a bit there, and that is. Is not going to help for the momentum that we want to build in each business. What would you say to those people who want to make them both work? What is the number one thing that you would recommend that they put in place at the earliest stages of making it work?

So this is really a tough question. So I'm trying to think about what I did that I would recommend to them. And I really think it just. For me, what really helped was putting together that promotional calendar, because that promotional calendar really drives kind of everything that we do in our business. So, for instance, for hobby school, we know that we're running five events this year. I know the offers that I'm promoting off of those events. That's our game plan for hobby school. That's what we need to execute on. For my personal brand, I know what I'm going to be promoting almost every single month. And there's some months that we're taking off. Like, I'm not doing anything in June or July, but I know what I'm going to be promoting every single month. And again, that's our game plan. So I know I got what I got to do. Kind of going back to what I said before. I know I have to start promoting that particular event two weeks before. And I know that we have, you know, the cart close period after that event. And if you have that promotional calendar, it will basically drive your project plan and you'll know exactly what you need to do.

And from my experience as well, it's so energetically draining, and I'm speaking from personal experience to be making decisions constantly. Like, every month, every week, new decision, what's next? What's next? Or, you know, so I can see how that really takes away some of that mental load that comes with juggling things at once and keeps it driving forward. Does your VA help you to stay on track with the plan? Like check in with you, or are you kind of Is that the way your brain works and you kind of self motivate to stick to the plan once you've created it.

So what I basically use her for like a lot of times on Friday, I'll ask her before you go for the week, can you let me know what's outstanding for, you know, the organ. We have the organized living summit coming up in next month in hobby school. So right now we need to start working on like all the promotional materials, the funnels, the sales pages and stuff. This Friday I'll ask her, you know, can you please let me know kind of where we are, what we have left to do in that? But I don't really. She's not really there necessarily to kind of keep me motivated and going, but she does help keep me like on track. And here's what's still outstanding. Here's what we need to do to make our deadlines. And kind of going back to what I mentioned, that I put together this promotional calendar in October of 2024. It really does take away all that kind of monthly decision making. What am I going to do this month? How am I, how am I going to make money? Right. You know, what do I need to do to make sure I'm bringing in revenue in the business? So when you, when I set that up, it really drives everything. It drives, like I said, you know, our promotions, how we're getting money in. It even drives our newsletter calendar because we know based on our promotional schedule, here's what we're going to put in the newsletter every single week.

This is definitely the direction I'm heading in in my business because my brain is very much like, I want to do stuff in the flow and I want to make last minute decisions and stuff. But it doesn't work when you get to a certain level where you have so much going on. I think it works to a point. There's one other question that I want to ask you about it. When you are planning so much in advance, how do you deal with that? The reevaluation process that's happening in the moment, depending on how, what the results are of what you're putting out there?

Yeah, so that's a really good question. I'm trying to think this year like I have the promotional calendar out. I know generally, right. Because I've been doing this for several years now, like for hobby school. I know generally what my results are going to be now. There's going to be some, you know, ups and downs. Obviously you're going to have things going on with the economy or just, you know, different speakers and events. Now, if you're in a place where you don't have that history, right? So, you know, for some of the newer offers, we might not have that yet. But if you don't have that in that history, sometimes you just got to go out there and do it and see what the results are and maybe try it again in two months and see what the results are there. What I have found by doing that, and I think this is a very important point for everybody, what I have found when you do that is you build upon your learnings every single time and it just gets better and better. Every single launch that we have done for one of our memberships, every time we do it, we get better results just because I think our messaging and our emails and our targeting, everything just gets tightened up.

And I imagine having this promotional calendar planning to launch and relaunch and relaunch is actually very powerful thing for your business as well. Because I know a lot of people get in their head and they'll launch and think, I have to reinvent the wheel and do something different because it didn't go the way I wanted it to. But actually it's in the relaunching and repeating but tweaking and improving that actually things get better. Right.

So what I'll do is just tweak things every single time. Just little bitty things like, you know, it might be heading on a sales page or it might be an email we make a couple of tweaks to. But I'm not reinventing the wheel and I think that really helps in terms, you know, you talk about all this stuff I have going on, just not having to reinvent the wheel every single time has been, you know, it's barely been a lifesaver.

Yes. Makes so much sense. Okay, thank you so much for just sharing. Honestly, I feel like this is going to speak to a lot of people who want to step up in terms of their planning and their focus. I love what you said about staying focused. I know that you have a freebie for our summit attendees. So do you want to tell us a little bit about your newsletter profit calculator?

Yeah, so I'm really into newsletters. I did a six month research study all about newsletters and I had a lot of aha's about that. But that's a discussion for another time. But what I want people or what I want to help people do is make money every time they hit publish with their newsletter. And in this newsletter, profit calculator you can go in and it's a, it's a Google sheet so you can go in and input the information about your newsletter and how you make money or what you'd like to monetize in your newsletter and it will give you some estimates about how much money you can make every time you send out a newsletter.

Ooh, I love that. I'm going to go and sign up for that as well. Oh thank you so much Destiny. So you can find all of Destiny's links including that freebie where to Follow Destiny online. And please do come and share your key takeaways in the Summit group from this conversation. Thank you so much for being part of it. Destiny Me. Thanks for having me Ruth.

Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you like the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.