98: How Julie Braun Uses a Revolutionary Docuseries to Follow Her Students Through Their Career Transformation

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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 Super Julie Braun. SJ is an entrepreneur and her company, Super Purposes, helps people get the career and salary they deserve, regardless of their challenges. They specialize in teaching folks how to get a job in 12 weeks and helps them both in the career and getting them the career and the salary they deserve. Sj, thank you so much for joining me. I'm super excited for our discussion today.

Me too, Destiny. I'm super duper excited.

There you go. I had to throw that in. Super excited. I caught that, sj. So I'm going to let the audience know that. So, sj, why don't you take a few minutes and walk the audience through your entrepreneur journey, how you got to where you are today and then we'll kind of go into the online courses and how you started creating them and why did you add them to your portfolio?

Sure. So, well, I'm going to take everyone back to when I was six years old because that's when it really started. If I'm 100% honest, I was really struggling in school. I wasn't a very good student. And one of my teachers and even my parents had told me, you're going to have to work very hard making, I think maybe the idea that I wasn't that smart. And so when I was six years old, I noticed that everybody on my block, they were figuring out recycling back in those days. And people would load up their cars and they would take their cans and their bottles to the recycling center. And I thought, well, maybe I could do this for them instead so then they don't have to do that on Saturday. I can do it. So I gathered up all the newspapers back in the day we used to Read newspapers. So we recycled the newspapers and cans and bottles. And the first weekend I asked my mom, can you take me to the recycling center? It was about a mile and a half away from my house. And I lived in California at the time. And I remember getting that handful of money with the recycling. And I was so excited. And that was the start of my entrepreneurial journey. Since then, I have had lots of businesses in my youth, but then I started working in hospitality and entertainment. And I would always be getting promoted for bigger and bigger jobs. And I worked for a lot of big box brands like Nike, Carter's Children's Wear, Victoria's Secret, Estee Lauder, lots of very notable companies, mtv, it goes on. But I never really felt like I fit in in a corporation. And I would get to a certain level and then I wouldn't do very well. I wasn't getting along with my boss, or maybe I wasn't being the best communicator to my team. And in that time period, I kept saying, you know, maybe I should just go back and do my own thing. So around 2000, I decided that I was going to start. I was going to leave my corporate job, my last corporate job, and I was going to start my own business. And so it had been a real long time. And I basically just did some consulting work for marketing. And I realized very quickly I am going to fail. I didn't have any help. I didn't have the paycheck every week. I didn't have the processes and the understanding of running a business. And I was really scared. And then I thought, my next thought was, well, why don't you get some help? So I started my own internship program within my first business, my consulting business. And I started getting interns. And they started helping me create the formation of the company and processes and taking care of social media and that sort of thing. And then I thought, okay, maybe I should do something more with the interns. And I met this woman who became my co founder. Her name is Michelle Demers. And Michelle told me, why don't you build an intern business? And I thought, she is my messenger today. And that's what we did. Michelle and I got together about six months later and we started superinterns.com and from that I've built Super Purposes, which is the business that we've pivoted to. Now Michelle has left the business. She's still my soul sister. I still love her. She's gone on to create lots of businesses and courses herself. But now with Super Purposes, I'M really focused not on interns, but I'm focused on helping people to get the job and salary they deserve. So that's kind of the journey.

So I love how you went back to where you. When you were six years old and you found out about this need in the neighborhood. How long did you do that for? I'm just curious.

I think I did it. If I remember, I think I did it for a couple of years. And then destiny. Here's. Here's what. What came from that. Because I realized I was really doing sweat equity in this recycling business. You know, I was having to hustle every week. Every day, I would go to all the neighbors and I would pick up whatever they left by the door for me. I'd have to ask my mom, can you please drive me on Saturday? If she couldn't, then I had to make two or three trips on my bike to the recycling center on Saturday or Sunday. And I realized it took me a few years because I am a little bit of a slow learner, that there must be something easier and better and faster to the money. And So I have $5, and I said, I'm going to approach the local neighborhood kid and ask him if I can buy his paper route. And so I gave him $5 for the paper route. And within a week, I had made that $5 back. And I realized the paper route is the upgrade to the recycling business. Yeah, I don't have to work as hard. I mean, I still had to work hard, but it was more money, it was more reasonable time that I was putting into the paper route. And so that was around. I think I was around eight years old when I did that.

That's one smart kid, I'll tell you that. So let me ask you this. You were working with all of these big name brands. You mentioned Nike, Carter's, Estee Lauder, Victoria's Secrets. I think he even said mtv. So we got to ask what you get, what you did there. But you mentioned that you said you would get to a certain level, then you wouldn't do very well. Do you, in looking back on it and reflecting on that, why do you think that was the case?

I think part of it is I'm not meant to necessarily work within the confines of a very rigid, traditional structure. I'm kind of a zany weirdo. I'm kind of a creative person who perhaps I'd like to break rules or I like to challenge authority. And that typically does not bode well in a corporation. When you. My last job was Executive vice president at Carter's Children's Wear. And when you get to that level, you know, the only level up from that is the C suite. But I had hit that ceiling. I was going to be at that position or I was going to get terminated. That was, you know, going to be my two choices in that career at Carter's. And I think in a company, most corporations want people that, you know, aren't renegades, aren't people who maybe challenge the status quo. And I think I'm kind of sort of that person. So I love that I finally got that lesson. It took me decades to learn that, to learn that I didn't necessarily fit in any of those places, but I did the best I could. And it has been a wonderful, wonderful journey because I can go back to all of those experiences and take that knowledge and use it and retool it for things that now I'm working on in my company.

And thank you for sharing that. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs who are listening to this podcast and can relate and they might not can put their finger on it maybe the way you did, but there was something in their role in that corporation, in that cubicle or whatever, wherever they were sitting, they're like, I'm not meant to be here. And I think there's a very powerful kind of aha moment for folks. So today you have this company called Super Purposes and you help people get a job in 12 weeks. Tell us a little bit about the services that you offer there. And I know you have online courses, so tell us a little bit about that portfolio. When did you add online courses to your portfolio and what was the rationale behind for, you know, why did you add them?

Sure. Oh, what a great question. Well, when we started Super Purposes, which really is going to be three years in August, so it hasn't been that long. We're still, I still consider us a startup. We're still learning. But I knew right out of the gate that we wanted to create a course that was very niche oriented. And we knew that our recipe of getting a job from I don't know where to start to accepting a job offer and putting in your two weeks notice or, you know, getting ready for excellence. We know that recipe. We're really, really strong in understanding all the steps and parts and pieces to that. And I had met one of my teammates, actually. She is, she was a military spouse and she said, would you ever develop a course? We hadn't even developed a course yet, or maybe we had. We developed a. What I call a generic course. We weren't going to sell it. We were just going to use it as the basic formula. But my teammate said, I'm a military spouse. Would you ever create a course for military spouses? And I said, tell me more. And she said, well, we have a lot of problems. We have discrimination problems. We move on an average of every 18 months. When we move, we lose our friends, our resources. If we're living close to family, we lose our family connections, we lose our job, and then we lose our confidence. And when she said that to me, my heart just broke. And I said, okay, that will be the first course that we create. So we created a course for military spouses speaking specifically to their challenges. And we have, right now, I think we've got five or six courses to very specific groups. One is college students and recent grads. Another one is for trans gender and gender non conforming folks. Another is for COVID 19. So we created an online course for people who were struggling to get a job. And we really kind of look at the remote piece and so that's the courses that we have right now. You asked me another question. I'm sorry, I forgot what it was.

Yeah, I mean, I was just curious as to maybe you started out with courses. Maybe, you know, and this. That's fine. Did you start serving your clients in like a one on one type situation or group coaching type situation, or did you start out from the gate with these online courses?

We did a combo platter. So thank you for bringing me back to that. We did a combo platter of doing coaching services with developing the courses. And it was interesting because whenever we create a course, I always look for an expert in that arena. So for our military spouse course, I looked for a military spouse who was an expert in career. And we come together and we build it together. But yeah, coaching services was one of the first and it is something I still do today. Actually, when I look at my calendar this week, I think I had something like 22 coaching meetings. And so I am still coaching people. I am still teaching people. Sometimes I do group sessions, sometimes I do workshops, sometimes we'll do webinars. But the coursework kind of came and coincided about the same time.

Okay, so sj, can you tell us a little bit about how do people find out about you? This is where a lot of people struggle. It's such a crowded market out there. I'm sure you have a ton of competitors. I've not done a lot of research in your particular area, but I know there's other people out there that are helping people find jobs. Can you tell, tell us a little bit about your marketing strategies, your traffic strategies, and how do you, how do you find these clients for your one on one coaching services?

I love this question so much, Destiny, because I wish somebody would have told me what we're doing now. It took us a while to get to where we are in this moment. One of the things that we do that I think is very unique and different and special is we are right now filming a docu series following five unemployed career seekers. And as we're following them, we're giving them coaching. They have access to our online course, so they're going through our course and we're following their career journey in the docu series. We released our first episode a couple of weeks ago. We're going to be releasing our second episode and I can tell that people who are watching this are starting to come to us saying, I need your help. So it's kind of like having a television show that is servicing the sales of courses and coaching. We also do all the other things that everyone else is doing. We do a lot of social media. I do a lot of podcasts and get articles written about our company. That's another way to drive some traffic. I also really love to take on individual clients. I think every week I probably add one, one or two new coaching clients to our company. And if I don't take them, then I give them to somebody else on the team. And it just seems like sometimes word of mouth can be the best way to get coaching clients. So if someone gets a job right away, we get an amazing testimonial from them, we'll get video from them, we'll put it online. We'll maybe even use that to market to people who have shown interest in our course, but maybe they didn't press the buy button and we'll send them the video and say, here's somebody that we worked with recently and here's their results. And so we're starting to get a flow of clients, which is really exciting and selling courses.

Sj, I'm completely fascinated by this docu series that you were talking about. Can you tell us a little bit more about that, the process, you know, where is it offered? Is it offered on YouTube? Can you also walk us through, you know, how you got these people to agree to allow you to follow them around and just a little bit more? I think this is so unique. I think folks would like to hear a little bit more about it.

Yes. Thank you. Well, it is my pet passion project. So we had the idea late last year and I kept saying, you know, wouldn't it be great if we could get five people who are either unemployed or underemployed? And we've just followed them in their job search and everybody was like, oh, my gosh, we love that idea. And so what we did, because I had a little bit of experience putting together shows previously in my past corporate background, I said, all right, let's do an open casting call in January, January, February. We will find the five people. We will have our legal team draw up an agreement. We won't be able to pay the cast, but we can give them some things, like the online course. We can give them the one on one coaching that I would do with them on camera. We'll give them other supportive things like our super survival task force. We'll just, you know, we'll. And we'll make them feel like a star. And that was very productive. So we did the casting. We got five amazing individuals. I could not now Destiny. We've all seen those reality shows where you think, oh, my goodness, these cast of characters, where did they find them? I've been in those casting situations where you have to look for a real long time. Sometimes you have to look through 100, 200, 500 videos and people before you find the right cast. We found the cast in about three weeks. And one of our cast members was formerly incarcerated and he's on parole and he has a challenge getting a job. Another one of our cast members is a filmmaker and he is sober. I can relate to him because I'm also so sober. So he has had some challenges picking up his career after getting sober. And so that's where his challenges have been. And then three other individuals. One person's a veteran. He's been out of work for 10 years. He's a disabled veteran. And so his frustration is he has a doctorate and yet he can't get a job. And so all of these people, we got them together and we said, okay, we're going to film this remotely. We're going to show you how to film yourself. We do video diaries every week. They take what's called B roll of themselves. So we put them on different excursions. Like, I'm thinking of Ryan, for example. Ryan is. Loves yoga. So we said, okay, Ryan, the next time you do some of your yoga poses, turn on your camera, do a couple poses in front of the camera. And we use that within the docu series. And so it's been all done by the cast. And then on my team, I have some amazing creative people, all walks of life. Producers and video editors, comedy content writers, graphic designers. This whole motley crew of creative people, which they all are excited about. The docu series, they put forth their talents and efforts, and all together in this collaboration, we have our creation.

I love that. I, like, want to go to YouTube right now to watch it. It's one of the most creative things I think I've heard from a marketing perspective, and I've interviewed a lot of people here recently on how they're promoting their online courses. So definitely going to check that out. And I want to make sure that the audience has a chance to view that also. So, sj, walk me through or kind of tell us, what do you see as next steps in your business?

I think next steps for us is we're actually moving our online course to our website. We've been using a platform called Kartra for our online course, but we are currently in the migration of moving our online course to our site. We're going to look at different values instead of demographics for course creation. This is a new kind of thought that we have and a new way of doing things. Destiny, I love this question. We've always been thinking of people and demographics. I've always been thinking, okay, well, Destiny lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and she has a family. And, you know, so I think of demographics, but what we're moving to is what people value. And so, Destiny, if we got into a conversation and I found out your number one value was family, then I could develop an online course. Maybe it might be family values, how to get a job in 12 weeks. And it would be based around the beliefs, the things that you care about, around family. And that opens up the door. That doesn't matter what age you are. It doesn't matter what education level you have. It doesn't matter what income. But it's more based upon. This really matters to me. And that's the future of our online courses. We're going to be developing our online courses with values as being the key component for all of our career online courses.

Yeah. So in the marketing world, you know, where I come from, that's one of the segmentation variables when you look at psychographics. So I think that's powerful to take your kind of targeting and your marketing down to that level. So I love what you're. Love what you're doing there.

Thank you.

So, sj, you've been doing this for a while, and I know that you have a Lot of experience in the corporate world. Also, what advice would you have for other online course creators or entrepreneurs out there?

Get started today. Do not wait. Sometimes I think people get maybe stuck on perfectionism. They think, well, I don't have that, so I can't do that until I have the next thing. And I just think, don't build the Taj Mahal. Don't try to build something that is perfect and pristine and beautiful. Just, just build something and then get it out into the world. Your customers and clients and people who want to take your online course will tell you what they want when they start to take whatever it is you've created. And sometimes in the beginning, you give everything away for free. So you create something and you say, okay, I'm going to give away, give this away to 20 people for free so I can get feedback. And when you get the feedback, you apply the feedback and then you're able to build something more in alignment with what your customers or clients are looking for. So that would be my biggest advice, is get started today. Get into action. Don't wait for that perfect moment. It's never going to come. It's never going to come. I think the difference between people who are successful in life and people who aren't is sometimes it is that action. It is that action mode. I mean, destiny. You've been doing this for a long time too. You've been in marketing for, you know, I think you said probably over 25 years and you've built online courses. What do you think is the missing.

Ingredient sometimes I think in entrepreneurship in general is that it's basically what you said, and so many people echo this that are, you know, have had success in the entrepreneurial world is that action gives you clarity. So getting started, just putting something out there and then you can refine as you go along. So where your business will be in three, three years is today is very different than what it will be in three years. In three years, you will have either, you know, done a different course or different product offering or have different services. You'll pivot based on the feedback that you're getting, getting from your customers. So I agree with you. Don't wait for that perfect, perfect offer that you have. Just get it out there and you can refine from there. So that's some great advice.

Well, you just gave me a chill. My entire body, every hair is standing at attention right now. That was amazing. What great advice.

And I think for everybody listening and I really can't say this enough, even in my own business, it has taken some twists and turns. And I interviewed somebody earlier today, and that's exactly what she said. She goes, I'll give you my entrepreneur journey. But it has a lot of twists, interns in it. So it is.

It is a roller coaster ride.

For sure. So, sj, where can people find you? And I particularly want to point them at some point in the future. And I realize it might not be out there today, but this is an evergreen podcast. People, you know, year from the year down the road might be listening here. Where can they find out about those docu series?

Yes. So we have. We have it on our YouTube channel, which is super purposes. Two words. If you go to YouTube and just type in super purposes, you'll go to our channel and the docu series. The first episode is up at the top of the page. You can click on it, watch it. It's not really super long. I think it's under 30 minutes. It's probably around 20, 25 minutes. But it is very compelling, funny. You can see kind of how we are that zany, weirdo, motley crew of people. And the journey of these five individuals is. I mean, I could not have written this. What happens to them? Right now we're filming week week 10. We're moving to week 11 next week. And what has happened to this group of people has just been just amazing. Amazing. Interesting. Not what you would think. It's been an adventure, but day in, day out. Superpurposes.com that's where everyone can find us. That's where our courses live. That's where people can find out what we're working on. Our docu series will be there. And unless our docu series gets bought by Netflix, we will be. We will keep it there, I think, forever. And we're doing a second season next year. We're already ramping up for our second season because we know that this is something we're going to continue to do moving forward.

And, sj, I will make sure that those links are in the show notes, and I do want everybody to go to your website. I love your branding. I didn't mention this before we started recording, but you have. I love the branding that you have on your website. It's very unique and fun, and I want everybody to go check that out.

Oh, thank you. I will tell our web design team because we're. We're constantly working on making it better. And, you know, sometimes we have a big question mark going, is this the right thing to do? So thank you, Destiny. We need encouragement sometimes.

So sj. Thank you so much for joining me today and walking us through your entrepreneurial journey from the time you were collecting those recycling bottles and cans and taking them to the recycling center near your house all the way up to where you are today.

Thank you. Really appreciate it.

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.