92: Alyssa Adams: How to Earn More Money, Find More Freedom and Make a Bigger Impact

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Welcome to the Course Creators MBA podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners increase the revenue with digital products and automated sales funnels. In this podcast we tell the stories of ordinary business owners just like you. We talk about their story and how they got started, the challenges they've experienced and how they overcame them. And these are discussions with real people who understand what it's like to own an online course or membership business. Before we begin our show today, I want to let you know that this episode is sponsored by our flagship Course in a Box program which helps you create your revenue generating course in less than a week. Course in a Box is available on AppSumo at a special deal and you can learn more about Course in a Box by visiting the link in the show notes. Let's jump right into our show.

And today my special guest is Alyssa Adams. Dr. Alyssa Adams is a psychologist turned intuitive business coach. She helps trailblazing entrepreneurs like coaches, therapists and wellness practitioners to build a practice as unique as they are. Together we cultivate the confidence to earn more money, to find more freedom and make a bigger impact than they ever thought was possible. Alyssa has been featured in media outlets, co authored a certification program in nutritional psychology, shared her ideas at national conferences, and sold profitable online courses. Alyssa, thank you so much for joining me. I'm super excited to be here with you today.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk with you today.

So why don't you take the audience through your journey as an entrepreneur and tell them a little bit more about how you got to where you are today.

Sure, yeah. It's kind of an interesting story. I feel like there was a part of me, maybe like many entrepreneurs, that always kind of had a sense that they would eventually own their own business or that they would eventually work for themselves. So I think I always kind of had that playing in the background even when I was in my nine to five jobs. Just always something that really pulled from my attention. I worked doing traditional work. I worked in medical centers, in health care for most of my career as a clinical psychologist and really started to feel myself burning out from the work. I moved into administrative roles, leadership roles where I was managing clinics or doing a lot of the management, behind the scenes operations kind of work and not seeing any clients for a period of time and it just wasn't quite right for me. I didn't want to work in a system. I wanted to work for myself. I still wanted to work with clients. I am kind of A helper healer by birth, I think. So not working with clients was, I knew wasn't right for me. And yet when I was doing a lot of things, therapeutic interventions, I was really burning out. So it kind of hit this point where I had to figure out how do I leverage all this training and experience that I have? How do I use my expertise in a different way and do it in a way that doesn't burn me out, that feels actually sustainable and fun and energizing. So what I did was I left my full time job, I started a coaching practice. So I expanded into coaching. So I started doing different types of coaching early on. And I think I did what probably many service based providers or entrepreneurs do is that I first started my business and I thought, well, if I'm just a really good coach, people will find me, people will come to me. Which I found out quickly isn't the truth. Right. That wasn't my experience. Even though I knew I was doing really good work, I needed to have a better way to actually get clients in the door. So it really kicked off my interest in sales and marketing and creating offers and selling offers and being more visible and all of those pieces that actually go into creating a successful service based business. And it was really fascinating to me. It was elements of the same psychology that I had loved my whole career, but just really applied in a different way. So I eventually started teaching what I was doing and the sharing, the success I was having with other therapists and coaches and wellness practitioners and I partnered with a fellow coach to offer groups. So it has been really fun for me to kind of help teach those things to other therapists and coaches and help them build businesses that are really true to who they are and align with their own truth about the work that they want to share in the world that are kind of fueled by their ideas. So that's really been kind of how I landed where I am. And I think also just working with so many people building their businesses, I started to realize and appreciate the importance of your inner landscape, as I call it, your personal psychology. The stuff that's going on behind the scenes, that's kind of pulling you off course. So really doing a heavy dose of that work with my clients as well has really been able to kind of catapult their success in a way that I think like strategy by itself wasn't quite amplifying it in the way they wanted. Yeah, so that's kind of in a.

Nutshell and I definitely want to dig into what you just said there about that inner landscape. But I'll get to that later because that fascinates me. So you mentioned that you left your full time job and went into coaching. What year was this?

So I started building my coaching practice in 2017 and I was doing it part time. Coaching part time and working full time up until the middle of 2019 is when I left my full time job.

Okay, so it sounds like you had some type of transition plan and work to build up your coaching practice before you completely left your full time job. So let me ask you this. So once you started coaching and you mentioned that the first thing that you realize that people won't actually find you, you gotta, you gotta have some type of marketing plan. So what, what did you do to kind of build up your practice at that point?

Yeah. So great question. So one of the things that I think was actually helpful is that I did, I really humbly appreciated. There was so much that I didn't know. So I invested in a bunch of courses. Right. I took a lot of online courses, I joined masterminds groups, I worked with a business coach. So all of that was really helpful, I think, in like accelerating my success so I didn't have to kind of DIY everything. Um, but the biggest thing for me, I think, well, a few things were really critical, I think in helping grow my business. One is that I love speaking. Like, I really enjoy speaking to groups, I enjoy presenting, I enjoy being in front of people in those ways. So I tried to lean into that. So I started to do webinars or in person speaking or I started to kind of put myself out there looking for speaking opportunities, ways that I could get in front of people, people who maybe wanted to get to know me or hear what I had to say or hear me teach about a certain topic. And then, you know, having the door open for working together, the possibility of working together more closely. Some of the other things I did were to just. I networked a ton. I reached out to people to talk one on one. I went to networking events. I just met other business owners that, you know, when you're working a traditional 9 to 5 like you don't I, at least for me, I didn't know a whole lot of people who were entrepreneurs, who were. Had their own businesses or would even be potential referral partners. So I really had to develop that part of my network, which was fun. I mean, it was amazing to meet new people. I still am in touch with many of those people I met early on to just build referrals, talk about what I did and try to get the word out there more and more. You know, doing kind of the traditional things, too, like having a kind of a free download or doing like, a free challenge. I did early on in the beginning. So all those different. I tried a bunch of different things I think was the. Is the kind of takeaway point. I was like, let me try everything and see what I like and see what works for me. So the things that I really landed on that I love are things like speaking, presenting, meeting with other people, building referral networks that are really strong and getting just really clear on what the heck I was doing and what I was offering to people. Um, that really let the doors open much wider for me.

So I like what you said there about testing out different things to see what works for you and your audience. Right. So it's a combination. A combination of that. Because I think that we hear all these strategies, oh, you got to do this, you got to do that, you got to do this. But at the end of the day, you might try doing a webinar, you might try doing a challenge, and that just doesn't resonate with your. You know, it doesn't resonate with what you like to do. So I love what you just said there. Let me ask you this. At what point did you decide to offer online courses as part of your portfolio and tell us a little bit more about that, transition into that aspect?

Absolutely. That's such a great question. I love online courses, and they're actually a pretty big component of my business now. But that was a slow start. So I actually got interested in the idea of online courses and programs very early on in my business. Like back in 2017, when I had first started, I thought, like, oh, this is a great way to package my expertise, to package things and share them to clients. Because I was always very worried about burning out in a business I created, right. Like I was burning out in jobs I had previously. So I didn't want to take that tendency and just, like, drop it into my business. So I wanted to find ways of doing things that didn't require as much of me, but so they were always appealing to me very early on. The problem, however, was that I didn't know my ideal client base well enough. I didn't know their problems well enough. I didn't know how to create programs and courses that would address things that they really needed that early on in my business. So I think what I did was. So I actually created a course early on. I ran a webinar to sell this course, not one person showed up to my webinar. Not a soul. I did it anyway, though, because I was there and committed to it, which meant that no one bought the program that I spent all this time building and had to take a step back, really, and think about what, what's going on here. Right. Like let's, from a very strategic, very objective perspective, kind of look at all of the moving parts and all the pieces to kind of deconstruct, like, what happened here and how do I do this better next time? Or how do I just change my whole approach in this way? Because it. There is strategy right there. There is a lot to think about in terms of building programs. So anyway, that was a great experience. I put my interest in online courses on hold for a while and did a lot of one on one work. A lot of calls with people, a lot of presentations, webinars. I worked with groups. I worked with loads of individual clients. I did a lot of free calls and so much of that talking to people who were in my ideal client group. I was able to so much more clearly understand their problems. Really, really understand their problems, understand their hang ups and, and points of resistance and all these different things. So then it felt like courses were actually just born out of needs that they were describing versus me trying to, like come up with a thing and then push it into existence. So this was a different strategy for sure, and it worked much better and I was much clearer what people actually wanted.

I love that. So where did, what did you do from there? What kind of course did you create and what year was it? Just to give us an idea of the timeline.

Yeah. So I created. I have three courses right now. I think the first one I created was. Oh my gosh, 2019 or early 2020. I want to say somewhere, maybe the end of. Yeah, somewhere in there was when I created the first course, and that one was a course is still in existence, but that is a course where I help people who are therapists or mental health providers to add coaching to their practices. We talk about how to keep your clinical work distinct, how to market a coaching arm and a therapy arm in your practice. We talk about how you want to structure that, the different ways it could look, the different ways to niche. That was really born out of so many calls I was having with therapists or other mental health providers, former colleagues of mine, really, and then other people who were curious about me branching out into coaching. How do I do that? What does that look like? How do I keep it clear from my therapy work. How do I get coaching clients? Can I have a practice that does both? So all of those questions and conversations that I was just having over and over again, I turned into a course. So I built that course. And it's not super extensive. It's meant to be kind of a launchpad to get people out there and doing it and coaching and building that arm of their practice. So, yeah, so when. When I speak with people now, I have this course that I'm able to offer them. I've also launched it from live webinars, which was very successful. So it really fulfilled a very specific need for people. So it was the first course I created. And then the next course I created was built out of many again, like therapists, coaches, people in the helping healing fields I was interacting with who were asking me things like, how do I actually bring my intuition into my work? I don't know how to do that. Like, I. I feel kind of connected to my intuition. I don't know how to bolster it. I'm not quite sure how to bring it into the room with clients, and I definitely don't know how to make business decisions based on my intuition. So I created a smaller course to address exactly those things. So it's kind of the how to guide for how to bring intuition into your work with clients and to use it as a tool in your business. So that one I also have as an offering for people. And then the most recent course that I developed is kind of a longer, a little bit more robust, lengthy program where I teach people how to create their signature program. So again, this was born out of a need where a lot of clients that I was working with were feeling like, well, it's really hard to stand out in this sea of therapists and coaches. I have a ton of interests. I don't know how to land on one thing. I have all these different areas of training and expertise. I don't know what to do with them all to make it sort of feel cohesive and how to sell things and make offers that are compelling to clients. So I created a program that helps people design their signature program, their signature system, that kind of integrates these different areas of their expertise and their training. And it's a really integrates them not only into their signature system, but it's packages them or helps them package them in a way that actually speaks to people, that makes it sellable instead of just kind of an intellectual exercise of creating it. So those are. Those are the three programs that I have right now.

So for the Last one that you just mentioned, creating their signature program, how do you find the client? The students for that particular course?

Yeah, so they're the same. It's my same kind of client base that I work with individually or do groups with. So it's also. It's therapists, coaches, wellness practitioners, healers, helpers, people. In that space, you have client based, service based businesses. So those are the folks that come into that course. And the way that I promoted that one was again, webinars, which I really enjoy. I had a network of people who kind of helped me promote it. So they also shared it with their groups, their audiences on social media. And I ran a small amount of ads to that webinar too, actually, and I did a live launch for that one. I've only launched it one time so far, so that that one was really same group. I also have a podcast as well, so I talked about it on the podcast. I had some episodes kind of leading up to it about signature systems and how they can be helpful for your business. So I really did a lot of work to kind of get interest and energy. Before the launch, you mentioned that you.

Had a network of people that were promoting it for you. Was this an affiliate program that you had put together where you pay them or they were just promoting it out of the goodness of their heart?

Yeah, no affiliate program. They were just other kind of ambassadors, people who were close friends and business owners as well, who would either share it with their list or post about it on social media to their followers. And so I do the same thing for them. I share things about their events and webinars and things that they have going on. So really building that ecosystem of support has been really helpful for me, especially in the launch of this course too. And of course, that was also not just business owners that I knew, but people who also, like, had a group of people who I thought could benefit from it, so that the people who were in their audience, it would make sense to help promote the webinar.

I love that. Absolutely love that. I want to go back to something you said earlier, and I kind of marked it on my paper. You talked about the importance of the inner landscape. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I was just curious and it kind of just stuck out to me. I'm just curious what you have to say there.

Absolutely. It's one of my favorite topics, actually, to talk about. So whenever I talk with people about business building, I always think about it in three kind of legs of the stool. One is the strategy so the marketing strategy, the sales, the kind of nuts and bolts of things. And then we have the kind of intuitive, energetic piece of your business. And then the third part is this inner landscape, the personal psychology piece, right? So this is the collection of fears you have, the doubts you have, the beliefs that you hold conscious and subconscious, those things that pull you off course when you're not expecting it. So, for example, if we know that we need to be out there, being seen in some way that feels good to us so that people actually know about our business and know that we exist, but you're out there. It takes you two hours to put together one social media post, or you are hesitating to hit send, or you won't reach out to pitch yourself to a podcast, or you hesitate in sending an email to your list. Like, all of those things, you feel like, oh, maybe I'm just not motivated. Maybe today's not my day. Maybe I'm just not sure about what to say or should I email them once or twice this week? But it's actually not that. Right. It's when we dig deeper, it's this layer of I'm really scared of judgment. Right. I'm really scared of being rejected by people. Now, that takes a little time, right, to kind of peel away the layers and actually get to the core of what's going on. But then we can lean in to address the fear of judgment. The fear, like, where did that come from? Why is that there? How did that land there for you? And what do we do to address that so that it's not pulling you off course? Course when you think you're headed straight ahead, and it's actually pulling you over here to a different direction, so you're not fighting against these things and trying to overcome them without understanding them and really doing that inner work to identify what's going on and change it.

Okay, so thank you for kind of indulging me and taking that little tangent there. Sure. I appreciate that. And I love what you had to say, because I think everybody can relate to, you know, things in our business, whatever. Whatever the case may be. And you named a couple of things that could happen there that are kind of pulling us, pulling us off course and keeping us from accomplishing the goals that we want. So, Alyssa, what do you see as next steps in your business?

Yeah, great question. So there's been a couple things that I'll be doing next. So one of them is to take these courses that I created and turn them into more of an evergreen offering. So they're available to purchase from my website, but in terms of the actual like sales process of it, I've been doing a lot of live launching, so I think I have kind of a sense of the webinar converting the course being interesting to people. So I kind of like did my foundational work and now I would really love to turn them into something more automated so that it doesn't take as much of me every time I want to sell or promote them so that it can be a little more automated. So that's a hope and something that I'm going to try to put some energy into. Coming up, are you going to take.

Your live webinars that you've already done and use them in your evergreen?

Yes, I will use a version of them. Yeah. So I will probably rerecord the ones that I have done already and on purpose just for the evergreen piece of it. Yeah. But I'll use the same kind of ideas and template for them.

Gotcha.

Yeah. And then the other thing I'm actually doing is I just started an offering that is a blend of hypnosis and coaching and that is exactly kind of what we just talked about. Right. It's like addressing those inner things that hold us back from either building wealth or charging for our services. Discomfort with sales, public speaking, those things that kind of take a deeper, deeper work to actually move through the roadblocks that are there. So that's a new, brand new offering that I'm starting soon. So that'll be really great for people who are feeling like there's kind of a roadblock on their path to success. We can kind of get in there, clear some things out of the way, then help them move forward.

Is that like a one on one type offer?

Yeah, so it'll be a one on one offer. It's like it's a 30 day program actually. So people will come in, do a hypnosis session with me. That'll be the first thing we do together. And then we'll have two follow up coaching sessions to really start to create change based on the new beliefs that we're trying to integrate for them.

Is that something you can do virtually or do you need to be in, in the room with the individual?

I can do it virtually. I just need to see them. So we do it on Zoom or some kind of other, you know, way that I can actually see them. But yeah, absolutely, we can do it online. That's the way I've been doing it.

Sounds like a great, a great offer.

Yeah.

So my closing question for you is what advice do you have for other online course creators or entrepreneurs out there?

Yeah, yeah, a couple of things. One I think is to really, really know the problems of the people that you're trying to build courses to sell, to like really deeply understand their problems so that you can help build courses to solve them. Not just based on things that are interested to you, but tangible, salient problems for your ideal clients. And to do it, to get out there and start right. It's an iterative process to build courses. So moving quickly through that process can really help you feel like it's working and just being in conversation and in dialogue with the course that you're creating. Oh, maybe this webinar didn't convert as well. Let's tweak it. Let's try it differently for the next round so that you're, you're looking at as a longer term strategy so that you're really engaging in the process of making it better and better and refining it over time. But get out, start, do it.

And I love that advice and I love what you said about, you know, really doing the research and, you know, kind of digging into what people want. And I like what you did and I think it's one of the best ways to kind of figure out what people need is going out and doing either that one on one work or done for you type work just to really get to know your customers very, very well. So, Alyssa, where can people find you?

Yeah, people are welcome to pop over to my website@dralyssaadams.com so it's just D R a L y s S a d a m s.com or they can find me on Instagram. Rissa Adams.

And I'll make sure that all of those links are in the show notes so people can just click on them and find you there. And thank you so much for sharing your story. I love how you went down a career path and decided, you know, I'm getting burned out. This is them for me and kind of pivoting into the online world. And I know a lot of people can relate to the story that you shared with us today.

Yeah, thank you and thank you for having me. This is lovely.

Thanks. 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.