75: Franziska Iseli: Maverick Entrepreneur, Marketing and Brand Strategist

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My guest for today is Franziska Aeli Franziska is a best selling author and co founder of the marketing education platform Basic Bananas. Based in Sydney, Australia. Basic Bananas is a unique marketing training organization that doesn't play by the rules of convention. Through their marketing programs, they have supported thousands of businesses by using sports, smart, innovative and effective marketing strategies. Franziska, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to chat with you today and can't wait, can't wait to jump in here.

It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Destiny, I know the audience is very interested in hearing about your journey into entrepreneurship. So why don't you kind of take it from here and tell us, you know, how you got started and how you got to where you are today.

Yeah, definitely I'd be happy to share. So I, as probably the listeners can hear, I have a little bit of an accent. I'm currently based in Sydney, Australia. I've been living here for 15 years. But I'm originally a Swazi, a Swiss Australian. So I grew up in Switzerland and back home in Switzerland I started my career in advertising, marketing and advertising after doing a master's degree in marketing and political science. And then I moved to Sydney and continued working in advertising. And then 11 years ago started my. Almost 12 years ago, actually this year started my first business, Basic Bananas, the one that you mentioned. And it was born out of an observation that we saw that there was a gap in the market. So I was working with a lot of corporations in the advertising agency. But where I live here on the northern beaches of Sydney, there are a lot of small business owners and they didn't really have access so much to our resources because they couldn't afford what we did in advertising. But they also needed to know how to market. So we started with my ex husband. We started this company, Basic Bananas, where we started to show business owners how to use these strategies that the big guys are using to grow their businesses. And that's the first business. And then the second one we started a few years later is a branding agency which is run by one of my best friends now where we implement people's brand and do brand refreshes and websites, logo etc. Any of the brand materials that people need. And then there are a few other businesses that started later. But Basic Plans is sort of the first one and still the one that I'm quite involved in.

So the basic advantage, you started that I think you said around 11 years ago. So that was around like 2010.

Yeah, end of 2009.

Okay, okay. And then you started another one later to that was a branding agency that's being run by your best friend. How, how does the branding agency and Basic Bananas come together? Do they work? Are they kind of, you know, part of your portfolio or how did you set that up?

Yeah, they very much work hand in hand. So what we saw at Basic Bananas, by running a lot of the marketing programs for small business owners, we saw a lot of really bad examples of branding, horrible websites and just really ugly brands. Again, these are businesses that can't afford to work with advertising agencies that probably would make them look really good, but they don't have to budget. So we decided to start an agency that has the level of quality of an advertising agency. And one of my best friends used to Work in advertising for 20 years. So got her on board to run this and make it affordable for small business owners. So a lot of our members at Basic Bananas now also work with our agency and we all sit in the same offices here in Sydney.

Okay. Now you mentioned something in there about an ex husband. So is he still in business with you and how is that going?

Yeah, we separated almost years ago, maybe two and a half years ago, and we're still working together across both of these businesses. And we're. We're almost like best friends. We had the, you know, a lot of people come to me and they say you should write a book about how to separate. And. Well, I don't think I'm a professional at it because I've only done it once. But we definitely had a very conscious separation. It was very amicable and we support each other. We have a very complementary in business. We have a very great business partnership and we both are seeing. We have new partners and we get along. My new partner works out of our offices with his business and yeah, it's very, very friendly.

I can see why people say you should write a book on it because everybody that I have known that has gone through that process, especially. Especially if there was a business involved. Right. It just. It's definitely not going as smoothly as what you described.

Yeah, I think we're just both quite. We're both, you know, quite kind and considerate people. So there's not much ego involved and there wasn't when we separated. So I think that's probably the bottom line, is put your ego aside and, and just do the best you can for the other person that you always did when you first met.

So let me ask you this. Our audience are online course creators and. Or people who have memberships as part of their. Part of their business or aspire to have that as part of their business. At what point. And you can tell us like what year it was too. At what point did you decide to add online courses to your service or product portfolio? And what made you go down that path?

So we first started with live training. So basically business owners would come into our venues and once a month. We still run that program now, but now we do run it virtually and it's called the Clever Bunch program. And that was one of our first programs. And every month we would get together with a group of business owners to take them through how to do great marketing over 12 months. It was almost like a. It is almost like a marketing degree that they get, but a lot better than the Textbook one, because it's all business owners run by business owners for business owners. It's very practical. It's not theory and stuff that doesn't work. And so that started off not being so much online, but more in person. But then we also had everything that we did with them, we also recorded everything and put that online into a membership website. So they would come to their sessions and then they would also have the materials to watch again if they wanted to online to revisit or to get some of their team members to watch the online courses. And then we kept running that program because we do find that this component of the combination of life and online works really well. And what we have. And then so we've been running this for 10 years maybe and then we start. We also added some people of course were not in areas where they could attend these sessions. So we created an online program for people that couldn't come to a live session and they just wanted to do self paced learning. And that's called the Marketing Smarts and that's still running now. We started that maybe I would say about seven or so years ago, maybe. Yeah, seven, eight years ago. And that program is still working. When the pandemic hit, we had to change the main program, the one with the live sessions, to now virtual training. So we still have. So in the Marketing Smarts, the second program that's all online course, self paced, people can join, they can then go through the program step by step. It shows them the progress, where they're at and then they graduate. The clever bunch we had to create virtually once the last year, a year ago. Now all the sessions that used to be live in person are live but on zoom. And here's the interesting thing, and this is sort of a. I find this is quite an important lesson for online course creators. You are hopefully creating these courses because you want people to get results. And so what we have found is that when you have a little bit of a life component in there, just you running a zoom session every now and then to help people to answer their questions, to keep them accountable, they will do a lot better than if they don't have any contact with anyone. And you know, I can speak for myself, I'm sure I've bought online courses about. Actually yeah, I've bought some art classes about watercolor painting, illustration and I haven't done a lot of it. So people, people including me just buy stuff and we don't maybe necessarily go through the program unless there is a bit of a curriculum and someone holding you accountable.

That's definitely good advice and good feedback. I want to dig into your programs a little bit more. The Clutter Bunch program, you said you're now running it, you know you're running it virtually. Did you say it was a 12 month program?

Yeah. So the Clever Bunch, which is our flagship program, the most popular one, and it's also the one where people get the most incredible results. It's for small business owners. A lot of them are, you know, a lot. I would say 20, 30% are startups and then the rest are established businesses, but quite small businesses. And it's a 12 month program every month. We get together for three hours virtually now and we have a curriculum for them that goes for 12 months. So it's every month is building on the previous month. So we start first with the marketing strategy, what is their strategy? And then we go through different components. Like, okay, now we need to look at your positioning, how do you create campaigns, how do you use social media, how do you do offline marketing, how do you do online marketing, how do you increase your sales? So each session has a specific topic and it goes for 12 months. And now because we are running these virtually on Zoom, we have people in the groups from everywhere. So we have very mixed groups. There's one group that has people, business owners from Sweden, from Switzerland, from Australia and the US and Canada. And then in the past we, because we used to run these sessions in person, we would have a group just with people in Sydney, then we would fly to Melbourne, have a group with just people in Melbourne. And we have also a partner in la, she would run a the sessions just for la. Now we have a very, very multicultural groups and that makes it even more exciting.

I think that's wonderful. So did you find that your revenue increased because you were, you know, move this to virtually and you could basically, you know, invite the whole world instead of just people that were living in certain cities first.

It's a great question. First. So we had the whole lockdown here in the country in Australia in March last year, March 2020. And when that first happened, our revenue decreased probably by a lot, by about 40%, which is a lot for us. And the reason why is because we had to pivot the whole pivot, for the lack of a better word, we had to change the whole business from the model where we would do the live sessions. People would meet us and like us and then trust us and want to buy from us to then go completely virtual. And so that that made our revenue go down by about 40%. And then we had a period of time there where we just had to figure out, okay, how can we run this program as effectively as before without seeing people? So that took a few months to change the whole program, to run it virtually to set up our studio, have really good cameras set up and audio, etc. Sorry, that's my dog here in the background.

That's okay. We love dogs here.

I've got a puppy here, Kelpie. She's beautiful. She's just very, very active. Jumping up on me every now and then.

Yeah, no worries. We love dogs. And I know my audience loves dogs also.

So that's what happened. And. But then, so that's as the revenue went down and now that we have everything set up and we can work with the whole world, it's grow, it's going up again. So it's been growing since the beginning of the year.

So let me ask you this. You know, when you pivoted to offer the, you know, the course via Zoom and you could offer it to the whole world, where did you find everybody? Like how or how did they find you to, you know, because I'm assuming they weren't necessarily in your world before that. So how did you go out and find these people?

Well, two things. So interestingly enough, a lot of them already were. In our world, we have quite a large database because we've been in business for such a long time. So a lot of them, interestingly enough, once we had the virtual option, a lot of the people that couldn't do our program before because they were either in land where we are not running live sessions or they were overseas, they now can join the program. So a lot of them came from the database that are like, oh, online now. Well, now I can join you. And then that's, that's sort of the older leads and then to get new people into the pipeline and to see us and to love us, we do a lot of different types of marketing, but we do a lot of digital marketing. We use different social platforms, paid and organic. We do Google Ads, we do YouTube remarketing. We have partnerships with different organizations. We used to do a lot of. My partner, business partner and I used to do a lot of speaking engagements a lot. And that, that was very effective. Now we do a lot of virtual speaking engagements. And also I mentioned strategic partnerships. We. What else? There was something else I was going to mention. So there's really a lot of different avenues that we use what that people find us through and then we get referrals of course, a lot of that is happening too. So it's a whole, it's a whole ecosystem of strategies that we use.

Yeah, and that's definitely what I was hearing from what you were saying. You weren't relying on just one, you were looking at a multitude of things. So your Clutterbunch programs, your flagship program, and you also have the marketing smarts between the two, what is your biggest revenue generator? Is it like a 70, 30%, I'm assuming with the flagship versus the self pay scores, how does that break out?

Yeah, it's about 80, 20 in terms of revenue because the Clever bunch is about 80% of the income because it's more expensive, because it is 12 months and it is with us. So my co founder and I are running these sessions, which is amazing for them. We used to have, before the pandemic, we used to have mentors running all the live sessions. And then, because now we. Because in the beginning, 11 years ago, we used to run them all. My business partner and I flying everywhere. And then we decided that it became too crazy with the team running a team. And so we hired mentors to run these sessions. But now, because we can run them all from our studio here in Sydney, they get us, which has been amazing for them. They love it. So that's the, that's more expensive, that program and most people want that. But then the marketing Smarts is only 900 and I think it's 990 or something like that at the moment. So that's, that's a lot cheaper. And that has. Obviously you need to get a lot more people in to make the revenue that you make from the flagship program, which is we. It normally used to be 14,000 Australian dollars, which is about 10,000 U.S. and then we have been doing for businesses that have been struggling a little bit, we've been doing a Covid special sort of sponsorship for, I think it was about 8,000 Australians, so about only 6,000 US. So it's quite a price difference. But the results that people are getting are crazy. I mean, we have people in there that say they have made more money in one month after implementing the program than they made the whole previous year together. And just, you know, lots of stories like that. So it's worse, it's worse for them to invest.

So let me ask you this. I know in the Clutter Bunch program you're, you know, you have the Zoom meetings with them. How do you have them every week? And what other support are you giving as people go through this program?

So in the clever bunch, they have a zoom session for three hours once a month in their small groups. They only have 10 to 12 businesses in a group. So they have really small group environments. So we can really help them and that's once a month. And then every week they can also come on a help desk which is a lunch hour where they can come and get their marketing campaigns reviewed. So they will come to the live session run by myself and my co founder and then they go and implement the campaigns. And then if they want us to review, for example, if they're doing a social media campaign and they're like, don't really know if I'm doing this right or it's not working, they can come once a week. We have a lunch hour where we just review people's campaign, which they really appreciate.

Now the online courses that you have in the online program, it's only a port portion of your revenue, right? You have other revenue coming in from your agencies.

Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's basic bananas. So that's the revenue that is coming in is mainly through those two programs. And then also we do a little bit, we don't advertise it, but we do a little bit of consulting for mid sized or larger companies where you know, they come in and they just want the strategy done by, by us, the founders. So we sit down with them and that's, that's a lot more expensive. We don't advertise it because we don't really have time to so much to do too many of those. And then the other business is, is separate but it's, it's owned by, you know, the same, the same people. Here is the agency and that's, that's different. Yeah, that's different. That revenue is from websites, branding, a lot of brand strategies we're doing which I'm involved in too and I love it. Branding is probably my favorite part of marketing. So yeah, that's, that's a completely different business and revenue.

So let me ask you this, Francisca. You've been doing this for a while. I know you've probably had some ups and downs in your, your businesses over the year. Definitely you made a pivot last year with the pandemic and you couldn't do the, the live trainings anymore. What do you see as next steps for your agency or Your online courses in 20? Hey there, Destiny here and I'm the.

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I really see that for for Basic Bananas for the online courses we will start to focus. We've, we've done a lot of marketing in Australia and the US because that's where we already were and I can really see how we are going to start to expand more into other geographic areas and the way that we will do it is through partnerships. So having a local person there that wants to run the operation. Even though we can run everything from here, we've got everything set up but it's still good to have a local person there that can talk to our members and support them and also run that. We can train up to run some of our live sessions because of time zones we do at the moment we have our European businesses in our programs here, but that means that we're running sessions here that are from 7 to 10 at night and sometimes I go to bed at night because I get up at 6. So so the time zones are obviously a little bit challenging sometimes. So the future is to have more partners in these areas and then obviously increase the marketing also in these areas and then for the businesshood. One thing that Julia, my friend who runs the agency and I really love doing is working on culture books. So we created a culture book just before the pandemic for us, Basic Bananas and the Business Hood which has been really helpful to outline our culture and to almost provide a little bit of a guide for our team on how to behave and how to respond to how to be a part of the culture, how to display our values and it's been really great also to onboard new team members even also when you have a semi virtual team which we have for them to feel included and we've had a few mid sized organizations approach us to help them do that for them. And so I see that we might focus more on doing more of that kind of work in 2021.

So that's interesting. So it's a culture book. So it's like an employee handbook, if you would, but it's focused on. Tell us a little bit more about it. I can kind of envision it, but I want to make sure I understand it. So guidance on how they contact customers or how they speak with customers or write back to customers. Tell us a little bit more.

Yeah, it's sort of. It's. It's bringing all the team members together and getting out of them how they believe what the company's brand essence is. So, so, so we do training, leadership training with, with their teams to first find out how they perceive the company, which is part of branding, how they. It's basically employer branding, how they perceive the company and what behaviors they're seeing at the moment in the company and then what behaviors that they would like to see. So then once we have done some work with talking to people and workshopping with them, so the culture comes from them. It's not just a dictatorship, but it's more of a democracy. Then we look at what are some of their principles that they want to establish. Because culture is really, really, really important, not only to attract the best talent, but also for customers and clients to see that this is an amazing business because their culture is just. It's great. So then we establish principles with them. And you know, that could be things like always be proactive or things like we don't tolerate any gossip here or talking behind anyone's back. So you establish these principles that then help you to create a really beautiful culture that people want to be part of but also feel safe. And this is really important in today's world where one, there is so much uncertainty and people don't know where we're heading in the world. But also two, there is so much talent out there, and this talent now has access to working with anyone in the world, really, with a lot more companies being okay with people working remotely. So you do have to have a great culture, not just good salaries. The new generations, they obviously need to get paid fairly, but they care more about being part of a great culture. So that's sort of the purpose of that work. And it's really important work. It's really impactful.

I agree with the comment that you made about the up and coming workforce generation. My son's about to graduate from Georgia Tech very soon, and that's one of the things that he's most interested in, is who he's going to be working for and the culture there. So I love the work that you're doing there. Let me ask you this, I have one last closing question for you. You've been doing this for a while, since 2009. What advice do you have for other online course creators or entrepreneurs there?

Yeah, so I've got, I've got four things that I'll share and some have already mentioned that I feel are really important. The first one, and this is also a little bit of an observation in this space of course creation. A lot of people come into this world and you know, they may see someone like us and they might go, oh my God, you know, these guys are, are doing so well. I just want to do this so I can get rich. And that's the wrong attitude. So the first most important thing, because then they just provide stuff that is sort of average just to try and make money. It won't work. It's not easy. You know, people make, make this sometimes look easy. People look at us, we've been copied so many times over the last 11 years. I don't really mind because I know how much work goes into it and most people never stick with it. But the most important thing is you don't come in with the wrong motivation. I would focus on providing value. I wouldn't focus so much in the beginning on just doing it for the money because it won't work if it's just for the money and people just publish random stuff just to make a buck. It won't work. It won't work. It needs to be. You need to sell something that is good, that people get results from and that they love and talk about positively. That's the first thing. The second thing is also add your own spin to what you're doing. Don't just regurgitate what everyone else is doing. Again, you know, people are observing others. Let's say someone wants to run a course on guitar, you know how to play guitar and then they see someone else do it and then they just copy paste what they are doing. Add your own spin because you've got your own brand voice, you are your own person and you probably have your own ways of doing things. So add your own spin to it, make it your own. Don't just copy what everyone else is doing. And again, that will make you more talk about able. Number three is try and build community. Because it's a lot easier for people to get results from anything if they feel supported and they feel like they're part of a community. They're not just alone out there, especially now. Again, as we feel maybe more disconnected with the pandemic and working from home. It's been a difficult year for many, many people. So enabling community will really help them to feel part of something and also get results. And you can do this through having Facebook groups where members can connect with each other, running live sessions where they can maybe see each other and say hi and share their experiences. And that brings me to the last one, which is number four, which is, if possible, I know this is more work. It's easy to just record a program, put it online and sell it, and then sit on a. On an island and drink mojitos. But if you can add some sort of a life component into your program, again, whether that is a monthly live party that you're doing where people can come and join, or it's part of the program where once a week they get a live session with you, add some sort of of life in there, not just recorded, prerecorded, because then you can really help people. And also you can learn a lot when you do live sessions with people live joining you, you will learn a lot about them, about what they need, about how you can improve your programs. And business really is all about providing an amazing solution. The best businesses, the biggest businesses out there, they really care about their product or about their service. The ones that don't care, the ones that just provide something that is below average, they either have to sell it for super duper cheap, which is one strategy, or they want do well. And I would just go for the first option where I would really look at how can this be the best thing that I have ever made that helps people to achieve what they want to achieve.

That was a lot of value and thank you for that. I was kind of reflecting on what you said about the if you're in it just to get rich, you know, basically you need to stop. And I, I've done a lot of these interviews and I've not heard anyone that's been an overnight success or Achie got that, you know, got rich overnight. So for sure, if that's your motivation, you might want to rethink this. But I also loved what you said about building the community and supporting your students as they go through your programs and your courses. So that's all great information. Can you let people know where they can find you?

Yeah. So the best place, if you would love to learn more about our programs at Basic Bananas, we've also written four books. The latest one just came out on social media. You can find all that on Basic Bananas. Dot com. And then for branding, if anyone is interested in looking at what we're doing there, our portfolio and the work we're doing there, you can go to the business hood, which is the business H O O D dot com. And then for anything else I'm involved in, I'm involved in a few different ventures, you just go to my own website and that is under my name, which is a bit difficult to spell, is francisca easily dot com. And that's Franz or C for you guys. F R A N Z I S K A I S E L I dot com. And you can find me on social media. You can find Basic Bananas on social media. Just come say hi, ask questions. We're, we're so happy to help you. We've also got a podcast, We've got a YouTube channel. Just a lot of free stuff out there that we have under Basic Bananas.

Francisco, what's your podcast name?

It's called Basic Bananas Radio. So you can find it on anywhere, Spotify, any of the itunes, anywhere. Just if you just type in Basic bananas, it should come up.

Okay, perfect. I will make sure that the links that you provided are in the show notes so everybody can just click on them and find you. Francisco, thank you so much for joining me today. I love chatting with you and getting to know you better and loved everything that you've been doing over there in Sydney, Australia.

My pleasure. Thank you for everything you're doing for this community too. It just makes a huge impact for people.

Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you love the show, we'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.