#187 - Is Your Online Course Business Built To Last?

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Hey, hey, guys, it is Kate here from hellofunnels, and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. Today we are going to be talking about something that is very near and dear to my heart, and that is how to make sure that your online course business is built to last. That it has what it needs in place to be able to weather crazy years. You know, changes in algorithms, economic downturns, you know, your life, things happening, like people getting sick and going on holidays. That it is set up in a way that it helps you to get closer to what you want and what you need, not just right now, but in many years to come. So we're talking about creating, you know, what I call rather than just online business, but an online empire. Like something that is designed intentionally to be something that lasts, something that is going to be there for you, that is going to be able to withstand the storms. So how do you know if you have and how do you know exactly what to do if you haven't? That is exactly what we're talking about inside this episode.

Alrighty, guys. So I wanted to kick off this episode with probably a tiny little bit of a TMI moment. So for anyone who's been around my part of the Internet for a while, you've probably heard this story before. But I really wanted to share just quickly why I care so much and why I believe it is so important that we do create our businesses with intentionality, and we do create them to last, to not just to be something that is very reactive and is designed to, you know, work in this moment right now. This is my. The real Cliff Notes version of my journey to get here in business was, you know, this is business number three for me. My first business I started and the business model that I chose was based on what I knew. You know, I had been working as a journalist. I knew that publication kind of model. So that's what I replicated. That's the model that I chose to pursue. And I didn't know what I didn't know. I got many years into that journey and realized that, you know, while I'd made the decision to create that business because I'm like, this sounds like fun. This sounds like a good idea. How do I monetize it with ads? Like, that was how most publishing models were set up. But the reality of it was that as a model, it was very expensive. There was not a lot of control. You were very much at the mercy of the market. If things were not going well economically. And this was like, 2007, 2008. So when I first started it, so I was probably a bit of a slow learner to pick this one up because I'd been through some real economic turmoil. But the reality was my day to day was I was cold. Calling brands to try and organize brand partnerships like that was the thing I did not want to do. I would never have applied for that as a job ever. And that was now my job. Plus having the extra pressure of having team and having to, you know, hit bigger and bigger targets and all of this stuff. So for that business, it was not built to last because it wasn't built around me and what I really wanted and needed. Second, business sort of started doing online courses and you know, and that was definitely better. That solved a lot of the problems, but there was still something missing there, that the topic just didn't really excite me or you know, I wasn't particularly passionate about it and I just kind of felt like I was phoning it in at the end. So again, it was another like little learning moment for me of like, well, okay, so that's obviously something that's important and that I need to have a business that is going to last longer than, you know, three, four, five years. And I wasn't wanting to with business number three to get three or four years into it and have to start again because every time you start again, obviously it's many steps backwards. There's a lot of stress, there's a lot of work. And I was, you know, I'm getting older now, I'm in my 40s. I, you know, I'm wanting to be moving forward and not backwards. So I was very, very intentional with business number three. And I wanted to make sure it ticked some really, really important boxes. And not just so as a business that I liked, but also boxes that were really important for it to grow, for it to be able to grow quickly and easily, for it to be way more profitable than business number one and business number two and more enjoyable as well. And I think when you have that good combination, that is a business that is built to last. So what are these guys? How can you make sure that your business is on the right track? Or if not, how can you sort of see the holes and start to course correct? Let me take you through them now. So first of all, any business to be built to last, it needs to be built on three pillars. These are the pillars that are going to be that really, really strong foundation, as I said, that are going to make sure that your business can weather those storms that is something that's going to be around for years to come and that is going to make it like three is a triangle. It is the strongest shape and that these three pillars making up that triangle are going to be the strongest foundation for your business. So number one, the first pillar is a strong office suite. So to know if you have the right office suite, like a really strong foundational office suite, it needs to tick the following boxes. So got a pen? All right. Hit pause if you don't grab one. Okay. So first of all, when you think about your offer suite, your offers, it needs to tick these boxes. Number one, your offers are easy to sell. And I totally sure I don't need to dive into that deeper. Like you kind of know, like, sure, you might want to sell more of them, but, but if you are making promotions and you're always making sales, particularly on the first and last day of those promotions, then yes, your offer is probably easy to sell. Sure, you could fine tune it, make it easier. But if it's not easy to sell, if it's like trying to get blood out of a stone, then your office suite definitely needs to work. Number two, the offers in your office suite get great results. They are out there doing what they say they're going to do. They are out there creating great outcomes, giving great service. You know, just all these raving fans and amazing testimonials. That's not the case. You need to fix that dot point before you move on. Next thing in your office suite is it needs to be profitable. It needs to be when you're selling your offers that you have extra money in the year in the landing in the bank, that it's not just, you know, a sale to sale kind of existence. You need to have structured your offers and priced your offers so that yes, they're selling with ease, they're attracting the right market, but there is a level of profit built in. It is very hard to grow a business that is unprofitable. Number four, and the final piece of the puzzle for this office suite pillar is that your offers need to be something that is enjoyable, that gives you purpose, or at least that you like to do. Now I know not everyone is driven by purpose and that's fine, but you at least need to like showing up, helping people with this solution. You need to like the kind of people that are coming in that are being attracted to these offers. You need to enjoy the way that you are g your support, the way that you are participating in your office. So if you have ticked all four of Those, then you have pillar number one. Congratulations. If not, jot them down, you got some work to do. That's okay. Most people will not have even half of these. So just good to know. All right, I'm going to move on now to pillar number two. Pillar number two is your sales system pillar. So this is like how you convert, how you make your sales. And again, there are some boxes that this needs to tick. And this is when I say how you make your sales. This is whether you're doing launches, whether you're doing funnels, whether you're doing a combo. It's whatever is that best mix for you. But, you know, regardless of that mix, regardless of which ones you are doing, I still need to be ticking these boxes. So number one is they need to be reliable. So that means that whether it's a launch, whether it's a funnel that, you know, obviously within a sort of a range, one plus one rarely equals two in this world. But you know that with a good amount of certainty that when you take this action, this will be the outcome. This is the amount of sales that you will get. So you need to be able to know that. Very hard to plan to grow, to structure your business if you do not know if it's always just a, like a sticky finger in your air. Pull a number out, and that's your goal. Like, you need to be able to know what works, how well it works, how well things convert so that you can start to reverse engineer things. Number two is it needs to be repeatable. You should not be out there creating new things over and over and over again. Yes. Create some new things throughout the year. It's how you add a little bit of spice, you keep people engaged, but you need to make sure that the majority of the way that you are selling is something that has been systemized, something that can be done again and again, and something that you know potentially might not always be done by you. So it has to be systemized and repeatable. Number three is predictable. This is kind of, you know, similar to reliable. But as I mentioned, you need to be able to have that predictability so that you can sit down and forecast. So you can sit down and plan. So you can go, all right, here's my goal to hit that goal. I know I need to do X, Y and Z. If you can't do that, then you do not have a solid foundation yet. And that's okay. You might still be figuring things out, but it's definitely something that you want to get figured out. Number four is it needs to be enjoyable. Ish. I put the ish in there because I know there's a lot of people out there who just don't like selling in any form. So you need to make sure that the way that you set up this pillar and the choices that you make and the strategies that you decide to add into your mix to make up this pillar are the ones that are the most enjoyable or at least the least unenjoyable for you, because these are things you're going to have to be doing. There's going to have to be times when you are promoting things or selling things or. I said, whatever that looks like for you. It is something that you have to do in business and it's going to take up a certain percentage of your year every year. And so you want to make sure that's not something that you are dreading. The more you dread it, the more that you don't want to do it, the more you'll procrastinate on it, the more you will put it off, the least likely you are to show up and be your absolute best and, you know, the least likely you are to smash your goals. So enjoyable. Ish. Or at least the least unenjoyable option if you just really don't love this at all. And then the final thing, and this again is really important. And I couldn't figure out how to put this all in one word. Well, actually, now I've thought of one. Diversified. There we go. My notes. I said not having all your eggs in one basket. So we need to be able to be making sales. We need to be making sales throughout the year, whether it's with funnels and you're making them every month, weekday, or whether it's with launches and you're making them every other month or every quarter or is a combination. Combination is my preferred method, by the way, in case you were wondering. And, you know, maybe it's a mixture of webinars and challenges or whatever it is, but you just don't want to have all your eggs in one basket. And that's particularly for people. And I see this happening in two different ways. Number one is people who will, like, just have their quarterly launch and nothing else. And they put everything into that quarterly launch. You know, it's like 80% of the time leading up to it, a whole bunch of money in resources, resources. And literally all they have the time and resources for is to be really performing that quarterly launch. And then they have maybe like 20% to be trying to put out the biggest Fires in the back end. And to be delivering at the absolute minimum where this becomes dangerous is if one of those quarterly launches does not go to plan and does not hit your goals or anywhere near your goals. And this can happen, you know, whether or not it's something that you've done and maybe the launch just hasn't resonated, hasn't converted, or something external that you have no control over, which I think we've seen over the last few years, is definitely things that can happen. You do not want to have the only way that you make revenue be something that if it goes badly, then there's no more revenue happens. You need to have this diversified. You need to have multiple ways of revenue coming in, preferably a few of them automated, because this is how you make this foundation stronger. If it's just trying to rely on one thing, and that one thing could easily go tits up, excuse my Australian, then that's the problem. And that is definitely a hole that you would want to fill and something that you would want to fill to be able to have this business that is built to last and doesn't feel like it is just constantly on shaky ground. Okay, onto the lucky last pillar, and that is marketing systems. So we've got pillar number one is your office suite. Pillar number two are your sales systems, and pillar number three are your marketing systems. So the difference between marketing and sales, in case anybody is wondering, is sales is how you make the sales, the actions you take that lead to a sale. The marketing is kind of everything before that. So it's how you attract new people into your world, how you nurture those people, how you share content and things to kind of get them excited and educate them and bring them to that conversion event that is a sales event. So that's kind of the distinction there. So for a marketing pillar to be strong, to be fortified, to be built to last, it needs to tick these boxes. Number one, it needs to be simple. Complicated is rarely your friend here. Complicated usually kills conversions. It usually makes your life difficult. It usually means that there's a really high likelihood that something's going to break or not work properly and you're not even going to know about it because you've just got this whole spiderweb of things going on. So bring it back to simple. Simple works time and time again. Number two, it needs to be busy, life proof. Because marketing is something that has to, just like sales, just like delivery is something that has to be able to happen day in, day out, whether or not you've woken up and you'll feel you've got food poisoning or not, or whether you have to take time off because it's kids are on school holidays or because someone in your family's not well or you're not well, or you know, life stuff, right? So your marketing system, this is the system that brings people into your world, engages with them, communicates with them, connects with them. That system needs to keep rolling regardless if you show up to work or not. So it needs to be automated and or needs to be outsourced to someone on your team. It also needs to be predictable. Same with the sales. You need to be able to know those numbers and know that particularly when you put them next to sales. You say, if sales is the outcome, okay, this is what I want to get from sales, Therefore, what do I need to do in my marketing to achieve that? So you need to know what you convert at all, those kind of good things, what your best audiences are, where your people hang out, and if you do this action, what actions they will take. You need to know that. And again, that's the thing that comes with time, comes with practice, comes with testing. But to feel like you've really got that pillar dialed in, it needs to be predictable. It also needs to be measurable. That kind of goes hand in hand with predictable. But, you know, you don't want to be doing marketing. That is probably like the real old school way of marketing. And marketing is like my background. That's what I did at uni. I worked in advertising agencies before I got into journalism. But, you know, there was always different types of marketing. There was marketing they called direct response or below the line marketing, depending on which type of advertising or marketing you're in. The direct response marketing was marketing that had. It had a call to action. So you could go, all right, I know this works because we got this number of responses versus above the line advertising, which is when you see billboards and TV ads. And their way of knowing that something was working was like, well, we spent a lot of money on ads and those ads kind of everywhere. And then we went out and do some random surveys and asked people if they remember seeing these ads. And we saw a bit of an upswing in sales after those ads. Therefore, we're going to assume that they worked. We've got no idea of knowing if it was this one or if it was this one. With the measurability of online marketing, pretty much all online marketing is direct response marketing because it will have a call to action. It will have something you can track. You can be like, okay, I know this worked because I can see these people clicked here and then the people who clicked here then did this and then did this and then converted it. That you need to be able to track these things. You need to know how to measure that these things, like what the milestones and benchmarks are to be able to say, yep, that was successful, that worked. And you need to be able to see people's behavior over time. But obviously that's a bit more of an advanced thing. But as long as you can measure it, as long as you can roughly track it, that's going to really help you to fortify this pillar. And then the final piece. And this is a non negotiable again, it's slightly more advanced. But this is the thing that when you click this into place, then all of a sudden, you know, combined with the other three things, you're going to be able to grow like crazy. But your marketing needs to pay for itself. It needs to look after itself. It needs to go be a grownup, go get a job, go pay for itself. No, seriously, you know, you need to have a marketing system set up that is generating its own revenue, usually through a mini funnel. You know, a small, simple funnel set up on the front end to generate a certain number of sales. Whether that's with a mini but mighty offer, like a $7, $27, something like that offer, or whether it's with. You know, there's lots of different ways of doing that. That's, that is just one. And they're not even my favorite way of doing it anymore. But you need to have a deliberate little marketing ecosystem set up as part of your marketing pillar. That just means that, you know, marketing is no longer an expense, it's no longer a hindrance for how you can grow. Because when your marketing pays for itself and your sales are reliable and predictable and you have an offer that sells, put those three things together and your business is unstoppable. But if you don't have those three things, or if you only have two, then it's going to feel a little unsteady. It's not going to feel that rock solid foundation that we want. That means you have a business that's built to last. So guys, I hope this has been helpful. I hope that there have been many aha moments. I hope you've written down a ton of notes. Unless you're driving, please don't write if you're driving, but if you have, please let us know. Leave a comment below if you're watching the video or shoot us a DM over at HelloFunnels. Or better yet, share it with one of your business besties if you think that there's a little diamond in here for them. We would love of love if you could help us to get the word out, but other than that guys, hope this is invaluable. And I can't wait to share even more little value bombs with you next week on the next episode of Doing Online. Alrighty guys, I'll see you then.