Find Your Purpose, Master Your Skills, Make More Money with Marisa Murgatroyd

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life, nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to the Lead On Purpose Podcast. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion and now coach to entrepreneurs, CEOs, professional athletes all over the world. This show is for people who refuse to settle, people who are driven, people who want to grow, who know that there's so much more to learn and want to learn from the world's best. Each week I bring you insights from a special guest who's at the top of their game with whether they're in Formula one, whether they're a billionaire, whether they've started a company from scratch and take it to the top. I bring them to you so that you can rewire your mindset, take action and lead a life of purpose. Let's get started. Today you're going to get a chance to listen to Marisa Murgatroyd, someone who has helped thousands of people to turn purpose into profit. She's an incredible thought leader, has a massive following worldwide and she really helps us understand how do we sell without selling our soul. As part of Mindset and Meaning Week, the series that we're running, I know you're going to love it. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at NZMortgages Co NZ. Marisa, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

All right. I'm super stoked to be here and to get to know you and your audience.

Hey, we're super stoked to be connecting with you because a lot of our audience have skills and talents. They're very creative. They, some of them are in the leadership field leading others. And I think the one thing I keep hearing from everyone that I talk to is around this idea of freedom and being more free. And my understanding is that you are an artist and that someone very close to you and your family pretty much said that your skills are unmarketable. So I'd love to start at that point because I think a lot of us have skills that maybe others around us are like, don't be silly. Who would pay for that? Like what? Just stick to your day job. You'll get paid for that. So tell me a little bit more about your story and how you've ended.

Up doing what you do 100%. So I was certainly not the one that would have been voted most likely to build a company that's brought in $50 million. When I was growing up and when I was a kid, because I was super arty, super creative, I just spent hours and days and weeks in my room reading books, and I would craft and do origami and make beaded necklaces. And I remember getting the computer in the house when I was maybe six or seven years old and making stationary on print shop with the dot matrix kind of printer and all of the different things. But I always pursued the things that I loved and was passionate about. And I remember, not only did my dad tell me I had no marketable skills, but I remember my brother, who was an investment banker, telling me that I had knew nothing about the way that the world works. And when, you know, I graduated from school, I went into filmmaking, and I was making 1,000 bucks a week. And it got to the point where, as a documentary filmmaker, I wasn't feeling like I was making an impact. It was less about the money. But I've read this number that the average documentary takes three years to make and is seen by a thousand people. And I felt like I was wasting my life. And I went into an inquiry of, well, what else could I do? Or what would people even pay me for? And I'm afraid that I didn't have a lot of answers. And I think out of desperation, I thought, well, you know, I know how to make things look good and sound good and tell a really good story, but who's going to pay me for that? And the girl who'd been told her whole life that, you know, I would never make money with my art, with my creativity, didn't even believe that those were valuable skills. But what I discovered is that in a completely different context, that the skills were massively valuable, that being able to make things look good and sound good and tell good stories is the basis of all business and marketing. And so what I was being paid a thousand bucks a week for in one industry, I could be paid $5,000 for $5,000 an hour for in another industry. And it was just this massive surprise. And it took me years to kind of navigate that and realize that my skills had a huge amount of value. And. And so what I often tell people is that everyone has this million dollar skill set inside of them. They just either don't know what the skills are, they can't see yet the context in which those skills would be really valuable to someone else. Right. As we don't know.

That's really powerful.

Yeah.

I would love to chat a bit about two things there. One, the belief around I don't have skills. And then the other aspect is, you know, people just not being able to see them. It's not even, I don't believe, it's just I don't see them. So how did you rewire your belief to go, actually, I believe my skills are valuable?

Well, I think that was a process of. Because here's the thing, you know, actually skills create confidence. So it's competence that create confidence. And so I got it to double down skills that were specifically related to business and marketing. So even though I had this transferable skill set, I was missing some fundamental skills needed to actually go about building my business related to, you know, the sales, the marketing and the niching, the branding, the positioning, all of the things. And so this is important because I think one of the biggest industries that's emerging right now is the skill transfer industry. As you take people who maybe were, you know, in retail and now they move to digital customer support, right? Or you take someone who was a schoolteacher who maybe moves into corporate training. So so many of us now are seeing, you know, the ways that the context in which we've given our skills be destabilized or just changing and the ground is moving beneath their feet. And so when you have a skill set, there can be a whole nother industry in which that skill set is way more valuable than it currently is in the industry in which you're working. But the confidence comes from competence. So you have competence in this area, in this industry. When you move to a new context, you've got to develop the understanding, the awareness and the competence within that new industry. And so there are certain things that you got to learn in a new context that just are essential to have the confidence. And so a lot of people think confidence is just a, a mental game, but there's a thing called the confidence competence loop. And so, you know, you don't can't walk into a situation necessarily that you know nothing about and be confident in an authentic, grounded way. You can manufacture confidence or bravado or whatever it happens to be, but to be authentically confident, you really have to give yourself that time and space to kind of learn and develop skills that will allow you to Kind of take that million dollar skill set you have and actually make $1 million with it. So I say that there are two essential skills. One is the million dollar skill set you already have and the other is the skills that you need to learn to be able to package and market and actually make the million dollars from the million dollar skill set.

Mm, that's powerful. I really, really relate to that. So I was a drummer. As a young drummer, I wanted to go and compete. So I went to the world championships. And I remember getting on stage and feeling so confident. The only reason I.

Literally, I'd done four or five years of preparation, of playing very simple things over and over and over and over to a point where they sounded quite well put together. And that's why I had the confidence, because the competence had been put in. So there was years of work. I see it no different in what you're saying, James. You've got to get the skill set. So then when you take it to the world, the confidence will be there to deliver. So this idea of a million dollars, it's interesting. A lot of people I would chat to that work 9 to 5. The thought of making, taking home a million dollars is ludicrous. Now, there's a few that would and a few that would say that's maybe not nearly enough, but many would say, God, that's never going to happen. So where do we start? How do we take the first step?

Yeah, well, that's where I think it's the identifying of the context in which your skills can have massive value. Some people might call it a market niche. If you're a business, you're an entrepreneur, you're a coach, it's doubling down on what you do and who you serve and being as specific as possible. Because right now, specific skill sets have a lot of value, right? Some of the more general ones are being eliminated. So you have to have deep, specific skills to create that value. So figuring out what is that kind of where you meet the world and then what are the skills that you need to develop? And I think there are. I actually have a program called a success school that has these six categories of skills. And this is for people just, just beginning though. And the first one is niche clarity. And I think that niche clarity is a skill set because it's not a one and done. The world is moving so fast. If you look at the product development cycle, I mean, new products are being released within, you know, a month or two or three. So it's an evolution as you change as the world Changes as technology changes, as consumer and market expectations change, you've got to continually be kind of recalibrating that niche. Then there's messaging and positioning, which is, you know, how do you articulate what you do so it can stand out. Then there is the sales and marketing and then there's the networking and prospecting, which a lot of times comes before sales and marketing because it's how do you make, you know, a few sales versus how do you make the many sales? But a lot of times you got to make the few sales to test your market, to collaborate, to find that message, market match before you can turn on the sales and marketing engine and make a lot of sales, which is where a lot of people go wrong too. They try to use techniques that are too advanced for where they're currently at. So it takes a whole lot of time to kind of understand the techniques, but they're not even clear on the foundation. So they're putting the cart before the horse or trying to drive a Lamborghini to the grocery store, whatever it happens to be, and it just doesn't work. Then there's the productive habits of just how are you structuring your time, your focus on the important things that really matter, the priorities. And then finally it is having that winning mindset which are how do you really reclaim all of this? And we're in one of the more negative kind of news cycles and social media environments where there's a lot there that can pull you off that center. So really being able to focus on these areas and develop these areas and then choose from there once you have your niche, it's like, okay, what's your business model? What's the vehicle through which you want to make money? Also super clear on who the audience that you want to focus on and then what are the offer types that you want to make and then how do you field test and offer type, get it to market as quickly as possible, get people paying you money and then make it better and better and better and iterate your way to awesome from there. And then once you've got a proven model, how do you choose platforms, channels, marketing strategies to kind of ramp from the initial sales, which is oftentimes the low hanging fruit, into kind of wider and wider circles of influence.

Amazing. That's really interesting. My partner has two interests over the last few years that she's got into. One is crocheting and the other is skipping. And so she started like looking for people online and when someone says to me, look, Here's a crochet YouTube channel that has 3 million subscribers and most of its videos has north of 4 or 500,000 views. And I'm watching and I'm listening, like, this is fascinating. So these sub niches, these tiny niches that you think there's no money in that some person is doing a crochet video and making tens of thousands of dollars. Every video someone is skipping and has millions of views on every skipping video. And I'm like, okay, so we can actually monetize our passions 100%.

And the more specific the passion, the better. I mean, I was talking to someone, they just repair old watches and they just film, like they've got a camera pointing down on their desk, repairing old watches. Millions of freaking views that they then monetize. So a lot of times it's these specific things and then really choosing what that specific thing is. And a lot of people just go so broad that they don't have a chance to compete, you know, on a crowded Internet with a super broad niche, because too many other people are trying to kind of scream into that void. So you gotta double down. And that takes a little bit of courage, because we don't want to choose. I mean, you started this whole thing about talking about freedom and people want freedom. And sometimes making a specific choice feels like it's antithetical to freedom, am I right? But the irony is it's the focus that creates the flow and the freedom. But you've got to kind of get over what I call the knee jerk freedom, which is I get to just do anything that I want, anytime that I want, you know, with anyone that I want, and get to the deeper level of freedom, which is your choosing. And through that choice and through that commitment, another level of freedom comes in, which is the freedom to make an impact. The freedom to really develop, you know, a valuable set of expertise. The freedom to make lots of money doing it. You know, so there's deeper level freedoms, but they require a sacrifice of superficial level freedoms.

That's beautiful. And it's interesting, I think back to. So I was involved in music. Yeah, it was drumming, and then it was Scottish bagpipe drumming. So very like niche, niche, niche. Right. And so I started about maybe 15 years ago developing online products and educational downloads and then a membership. And it was kind of almost frowned upon because a very traditional kind of following in there. And a lot of my peers thought it was a bit ridiculous that I was monetizing and that I was running a business doing this musical instrument thing. But it was actually really easy to market because I was marketing to pipe band drummers. I knew where they lived, I knew what their frustrations were. It was really natural. Now I know that many people won't have a very specific niche right now that they can maybe go down to. For me, it was kind of just. I landed on it. I was lucky. What have you dealt with maybe in the past few years with people that have broad niches? And how have you helped them bring it down into something that's kind of a subcategory?

Yeah, well, I say that a lot of people do it kicking and screaming because I think for many people, they have this thing of, I want the world to see me and all of me and this authentic representation. And to be successful in business, you have to shift from what you want to what the market wants. And then here's the thing, you find the place where they intersect, right? So I've seen this diagram before where it's two circles. Like, if this is what you want. My hands are too small, though. And this is what you're. I'm like four foot eleven and a quarter.

Right.

The market. So a lot of people just do it tangentially. But if you can start almost at the center of what the market wants, which may be at the edge of what you want, then once you get the momentum going, you can start to bring it closer and closer to where you want. But many people want to start with. I just love helping people clear their limiting beliefs, you know, and which ones, all of them, anything that stops them. And that's where a lot of people start. And so bringing this idea down so it's so specific, then people know it's exactly for them. And there's a whole lot of resistance to that. But on the other side of that resistance and making that choice, I mean, I've seen people double down and just such, you know, unique fields. And a lot of it is also not just the what, it's the who. You know, for example, who is it that you really serve? So I've got a student who is a shaman and she's working with me now to bring her work into corporate. Right. So a lot of people just like anyone who's got a spiritual crisis and needs help, I'm going to help them, you know, but then being like, oh, actually, you know, you know, companies need this deep level of alignment as well. And there's so many examples of people who've just gone from, from here to here. Financial advisor, who help women build their portfolios. Well, what kind of women are you talking about single moms who are struggling to make ends meet? No. Okay. We're talking about women who make, you know, a minimum of $100,000 a year, don't know what to do, you know, with, you know, the money that they're making. Right. Or it could be women who make a million dollars a year. Right? You might not start there, but you. Maybe you get there after going through women who make a hundred thousand dollars a year. And just being able to be that level of specific in what you do can just open the world for you. And it feels counterintuitive. And people feel like they have to cut off, like, part of who they are in order to make that kind of choice. But let me kind of phrase it this way. I was, after undergrad, I was dating this guy, and, you know, who I'd gone to school with. And then I was going to go to grad school in London, and I remember thinking, like, I want to be free. I want to go to London. I want to be able to date whoever I want to date. And I tell him that, you know, look, we've only been dating for a few months. We're both. I'm off to London for grad school, you're off to Los Angeles for grad school. Let's just break it up now so we can just do what we want to do, right? And he was like, well, how do you know, Like, I want to keep my options open. He said, well, how do you know you're not closing an option? By really committing to me right now. And I think that we think options are many, the multitudes, but what if the real option is the choice to go deep, right? And that so many doors open within that choice. And I think it's one of those paradoxes that when you can kind of wrap yourself around and see. Well, no, I am not saying, you know, closing the possibility of people being able to experience all of me, but I'm giving them one door to walk through, to enter my world. Because most people don't have the patience to look at a thousand doors or 100 doors or whatever else that happens to be. They need to see the clear focus from there. Once they're in, you can show them some of these other layers.

That's amazing. I really like it and it's interesting thinking about it from my own filter. So I get a lot of real estate companies, both commercial and residential, come in, and they want me to work with them in terms of building habits, really high performance habits within their teams, building their team Culture. I also get a lot of individual professional athletes and professional sports teams coming around, building professional habits. Then the other probably area is CEOs bringing me in to work with their teams. Often I'm like, okay, if I had to go down into one thing, I'd be saying no to all these other things that I actually really enjoy. But do you think there's a way.

With online presence to have a niche? Like maybe three niches? Two or three. And you market specifically to them in terms of like, targeted marketing? Is that possible or does it get pretty messy?

Well, a few things. There's actually three ways to niche. One is the what, one is the who, and one is the how. Right. So you can actually micro niche on all three, or you can micro niche on one, or you can micro niche on two. You need at least one. So you can get ultra specific about the why, that, the how. For example, crocheting hats for vegetables. I just, I did a few. A few things there, right? It could be really specific about the what now, that, or. And then if you're really specific about the what, maybe the why is the. Sorry, the who is more general because lots of different people might want those little hats for their vegetables. Right? How? Well, actually, I don't use the normal crocheting style. I use this one that my grandmother invented in World War II because she didn't have the right needle. You. You know what I'm saying? There's lots of different ways to do this, and any one of them can create differentiation. So perhaps your who is a little bit more open. But the what or the how or both the what and the how are highly specific.

That's powerful. I love that.

Yeah. And you can certainly another couple of things on that. You can certainly have, you know, couple demographics and then have different marketing for the different demographics as well. Sometimes the same lead magnet with just a different kind of title attached to it. The other opportunity is when you get really specific with one audience. Sometimes other people come and say, hey, can you do that for me too? And you don't have to say no when they ask, but you're not focusing on attracting those people. But if they come through, you can still have the option to say yes.

I love that it happened recently. I got invited to Antarctica to essentially deliver team high performance team training. I was like, wow, that's so left field. I don't market to that audience. It happened through word of mouth, essentially. So I like that you're open to me being able to do that because I don't want to kind of close down into one thing and just become that. I really enjoy the variety. And I think maybe a lot of entrepreneurs are similar in that, that they do enjoy variety.

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes I and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejloughlin.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

100%. And, you know, also, not everything has to be a business. And I think this is where, like, in, you know, our culture, just like many people get married or they date and they expect their partner to give them absolutely everything and be their one and only everything, you know, and sometimes you need friends and you need other people in your life who kind of provide these different balances. I'm like, you know what? Great. You have this passion. Does it have to be a part of your business? Maybe you do like, you know, French pastry baking on the side, and it doesn't become your business. Right. And so there are other ways to have outlets for passions that don't all have to relate to business. That doesn't mean you can't have a business that contains multiple passions of yours. And there are other ways to get passions in. Like, I love designing experiences. So in my live events, I will do these really fun, creative things. And so that gets the artist onto the playing field. But I'm not going and kind of working specifically with artists or talking about being an artist, even though I was an artist, but I bring a lot of artistry into what I do. So that's part of my differentiation of how I do things differently from other people.

That's really powerful. I love that. And for me, thinking about, I run large leadership events and corporate events, there's maybe four or five hundred people. There's. And I haven't brought drumming or that kind of thing into it at all. But maybe there's a way to bring some kind of rhythm or movement.

So I'd like to think, well, there's.

You could go.

I mean, you could have teams come together and it's like, well, what is the rhythm of the team? What is the rhythm of the company? What is the heartbeat? How do we have that? You know, I mean, I know even one of my creative directors or my creative director here, she has this passion for all kinds of art. And what she's been doing on team meeting, so she doesn't go crazy, you know, when you're on one too many meeting, is she'll create an AI song at the end of the meeting that just kind of summarizes what just happened. So it's like our quarterly leadership team meeting. And then at the end of it, she's collaborating with AI and plays a song based on everything that we did that day. And. And everyone loves it. And it's this beautiful thing that just kind of adds her special sauce into the company.

That's amazing. I love it. And so I'm hearing that we've got to get the structure right. We've got to get the foundations right. We've got to know who we serve, what we serve, get into a niche rather than being super general. So I guess people got to get that right first. Then I find a lot of people have great ideas. They maybe do know who they want to serve, but there's this hesitance, this procrastination. They never launch. How do we get to that stage where we launch and we sign up for the teachable thinkific Kajabi whatever we want to do and actually get it going and make our first sale?

You know, that's really interesting. I had just written a class that I'm about to teach in success school about entrepreneurial the key to entrepreneurial courage, which is actually committing fully and not looking back. And so Dr. Benjamin Hardy worked with Dan Sullivan on a book called 10x is greater than 2x. One of the things that he discovered in his research on kind of leadership is that this notion of the point of no return, and apparently Diane Sullivan says that, you know, nothing happens until you commit fully. And the thing that separates successful entrepreneurs, business owners, from people who are not as successful is that they've committed fully. Right. And so I think a lot of the failure to launch is a failure to commit. And part of that not wanting to commit is this desire to keep your options open or let's just try and see what happens. And. But in this particular market right now, where there's so many options, you need to be fully committed to really make it succeed. Now, that doesn't mean you have to commit like 100% of your time and work 80 hours a week. Like, you can say, I got 20 hours a week, and I'm going to commit fully for that 20 hours a week, and then I'm going to create a business model and strategy that works in 20 hours a week. You know what I mean? There's all different ways to make that happen, but a lot of people hesitate to make the commitment, right? So if you're looking at, okay, well, this is where I am and this is where I want to go, and then here's the gap and here's the score story that I'm telling myself that might be preventing me from, you know, moving forward. And then you start to do some of the, the identity work. Right? Because it's your. Yeah, because that's going to change the way that you are approaching business. So you've got to commit and ask yourself, why now? Why you, why this? Because as long as you're like, yeah, let me just see, let me just start experimenting and see what happen. You can be in that for years and years. I've got people who come to me who've been playing around with this idea of entrepreneurship for 10 years. Right.

What a shame.

I know. You know, it's a huge shame. So that, that's the thing is like the, in terms of how to do it, it's not just, you could say, just do it, right. But you won't do it because. Because before the action, you know, comes the belief. Right. And then before the belief, it's like the identity and. Or do you have the identity of someone who's like, you know what my identity is? Say I am, you know, I'm just looking at you. It sounds like you're doing leadership development.

Yep.

Yeah. Like, I am a successful leadership, you know, or I, I'm a successful leadership development coach for the top companies in the world and I'm worth every penny they pay me. Right. If that's your identity and then from there, you know, you've, you know, cultivating the beliefs and the actions from that place. But if the identity was, you know, back to my background, you know, I'm an artist who's never going to make money with what I do, then I might be hesitating to take the action too, and I might hesitate to make the commitment because I don't believe that I am going to actually make it work. Right. So part of that is, you know, you might have to look at your beliefs and your identity in order to be able to commit. And then once you commit, commit fully and then say, you know, no matter What? I'm going to make this work. I want this, I'm going to make it happen. I'm going to be successful.

That's powerful. There's research to back that up as well. Marisa. So like you look at James Clear's work around habit formation, atomic habits, and one of the key focuses is identity. You've got to identify with the identity of the person who's already doing the thing you want to do. And so I love that you're suggesting that's really powerful.

So you kind of got to make that point of no return. And the point of no return is a concept that comes from like basically planes. The point of no return is the point on a journey, a plane journey, where the plane does not have enough fuel to turn around, meaning it's got to go to its destination, it can't go back. Right. So it's like that point where you can't go back, you can only go forward. So how do you find that in yourself? And sometimes it's necessity, sometimes people have to hit bottom. Sometimes people have to have a near death experience or a wake up call or a diagnosis or get fired. Sometimes that's what it takes for some. And if you don't want to wait for that to happen to say, well, what do you need to flip the switch for yourself?

100%, I love that. And in fact, I'd never really thought about a point of no return until a few weeks ago I sent us down in Antarctica. So we went down on a US Air Force Hercules plane. And essentially to get onto the ice, if the wind turns or the blizzard comes in, you can't land. And so we, we passed the point of no return. So we couldn't go back to New Zealand, there was yet not enough fuel. And so we had to land, good, bad or ugly weather wise. So yeah, it was exciting but scary at the same time. And I imagine when you hit the point of no return as an entrepreneur, it's exciting but also scary 100%.

And so you know, you can't create this new belief for yourself, this new life for yourself sometimes in the identity that you're currently inhabiting. So part of it is making that shift and a lot of that is getting out of your comfort zone. And it is willing to do things you've never done before and it is willing to be scared and uncomfortable.

Yeah. I want to share something with you about my kind of experience with like on the online world of courses and so forth. So create a product, create a course. There's clearly Been some demand for it, or customers that I've met in person have said, we would love this. So you develop the thing, you create it and you put it out there. And crickets. And you might get a few people sign up. Those few people are like, my God, this is awesome. I loved it. I'm like, great, where's the other 5,000 people? Right? So I guess for the entrepreneur that gets clear in their niche, takes action, sets up their online offering digital product and puts it out there and nobody comes. Or a few people come and they say it was great, but I don't know how to get another few thousand people. How do we do that in this day and age? Because ads are obviously way more expensive than they used to be. There's a lot more people in the market vying for attention. What, from your experience works in terms of you've got a great product, you have got credibility. How do we get people? How do we bring them into our world and then, of course, sell them?

Right. Well, assuming that you've got the great product, because if you have crickets, you might not have the great product that you think you have. And so let me start there first and then we can talk about skills, scaling your marketing and kind of opening the floodgates for everything else. So what I will say is that one of the things that I lead people through in our experience Product masterclass is testing your offer with an mvp, a minimum viable product. Right. Because a lot of people go and they have this idea and maybe they talk to people about it, no one's paid for them for it. And then they spend just a huge amount of time developing out the idea in isolation without talking to their potential people. Then they go to market, and then it's crickets, because they're not delivering exactly what people want in the way they want it. So this kind of is the MVP framework where if most people want to build a jet plane, they just might spend five years developing the planes. But is that what happened with the Wright brothers? Is that actually what happened in terms of developing flight? No. So the idea is that understanding, well, what is the core solution that you want to deliver? So if I think about what's the core solution behind flight, it's, well, if you put wings on something, will it fly? Right. That is the core solution. It's putting wings on something so that it can fly. So the easiest way to test this core solution is actually with the paper airplane, Right? And then once you have that working, you can gradually make it more sophisticated, going to the Hang glider, you know, the propeller plane, the bi. The biplane, the propeller plane, the jet plane. But so many people try to start here, and they don't go simplest enough. And one of the best examples of the MVP that I have ever heard is Airbnb. So Airbnb got its start because the two founders, Joe Gebbia and Brian Ceschia, had been graduates of the Rhode Island School of Art, which is actually one of the places that I went, and, you know, came out with art school degrees and living in San Francisco, which cost a whole lot of money back then, and they were struggling to pay their rent, and they noticed that this industrial design conference had come to town, and all the hotels in the city were booked solid, so they thought, well, what if we buy a couple of air beds and just rent out rooms in our apartment? And so they got three airbeds, and they rent out rooms for the whole weekend, I think at about, like, 99 bucks a night or whatever it was. And so they had three people paying for three nights each, and they made about 1,000 bucks in a weekend. So what was the core solution they were testing? You want to guess?

Core solution is, I guess, just accommodation. Like a shelter.

Well, if we get more specific than that, it's will people buy rooms or pay for rooms in some random person's house that they don't have?

Because there's risk to that, Right?

Yeah, that's the core solution. But can you imagine if they try to start with the Airbnb today and countries around the world that would be almost impossible to pull off?

Yeah.

So what they did is they started in one city, one house, one weekend.

Super small, low risk, very little investment, quick results, quick feedback.

Yep. And then from there, they rolled it out to San Francisco, and then they added Los Angeles, and then they added New York. And then, you know, they started going abroad, and then they added Airbnb experiences, and. And it was off to the races. But they didn't start with this giant model, and that's what also allowed them to get the funding. And so I think so many people try to go too big right out of the gate versus using this kind of MVP approach. And for me, an MVP approach equals minimum viable product combined with minimum viable technology and minimum viable marketing. Right. To get sales and to prove your model, to prove whether it will fly. Right? It's gonna fly. Then you see here, this is the MVP launch. I say first sale. All right, that's great. But then you want to actually prove your idea with at least three sales, because one could be, you know, an accident. Two could be a fluke. Three, starts to be a proven model before supercharging your marketing, right. As well as your program delivery, making it more and more robust. So when it comes to supercharging your marketing, how do you get it out to more and more people? Well, there are certainly a lot of different methods. One is to become, you know, build a following on social media. Another is to develop partnerships. And these can be, you know, partnerships for other people like you. You could also have embedded partnerships or deals within larger organizations where you're selling bulk into say, corporate or other companies or whatever else it happens to be. Rather than focusing on one selling one thing, one time, you're having partnerships with agencies or larger organizations who might be buying 100 licenses. I've certainly got students who've done that. The third is, of course, figuring out the cold traffic and the evergreen ad and a model that's going to return on investment. Another one is working the speaking circuit, doing events. You know, some people figure out how to do influencer marketing, some people figure out how to do pr. There's certainly a lot of different channels that you can go down. So it's figuring out what's the channel that's going to work best for you. Because just because you can become a creator on YouTube doesn't mean you should because maybe that's like, like working against yourself. So finding, okay, what is the model that's going to work best for you? But also the question is, maybe you don't need to go big. Maybe small is the new big. So a lot of people want what I have. They want this, you know, multi, multi, multi million dollar business serving thousands of students every single year. But they're not willing to do what I've done to get what I have. So the question is, what do you want and are you willing to do what it takes to get what you want? Because you might decide that, okay, you know, maybe I want a hundred thousand dollar business or a $500,000 business or a million dollar business, but I want to keep it alarmingly simple, right? And then the option is to go premium. And I've got a student, you know, John O'. Bacon. I think his membership is $24,000 a year and he's got, you know, 20, 30 people in it, right? Beautiful. He's selling, you know, community design and building into corporate. And so they're in startups and they're sending people through. So there's a lot of different ways to do it. And that does not require a huge marketing machine. Because to make these, you know, 20 some sales at the $24,000 price point, he's got the product, he's got the credibility. So there are different ways to scale and he went kind of upstream. I actually teach and I've got all my models. I'm kind of geeky. I love this, that revenue equals volume times price. So I teach there are three ways to scale. One is through price. You can stay one on one and go low volume, high price, make the million dollars. Ten people paying you a hundred grand, 20 people paying you 50 grand, right? Whatever that happens to be 50 people paying you 20 grand, that's a million. You can go one to few, which is maybe a group coaching program, a mastermind, whatever it happens to be mid tier price, mid the number of volume, maybe it's 20 people, 50 people who are working with you. I've got about 220 people in my year long program. I only work with one to five clients a year privately. I got 220 in here at the 15 to $25,000 price point. This is the $60,000 price point for two days and then the one to many. I've got my experience product masterclass that we had, you know, about a thousand people a year go through this program at $2,500 price point. Then I've got programs at $97 a month. I've got programs for $9. You know, I got all of these other programs. So this is what most people think scale is with an online course. Business is high volume, low price. This is the hardest thing to achieve without a marketing machine. So the question is, you know, what kind of business do you want to build? And maybe the answer is it's not this. Maybe it's this or maybe it's that, right? Especially considering low ticket can be more easily replaced with AI and automated solutions. But high ticket and high touch and really premium exclusive experiences cannot be replaced. So thinking about where the market's going, thinking about your own preferences, do you have what it takes or are you willing to do what it takes to build a marketing machine and then what it is that you really want? I mean are you looking for a $10 million a year business or would you be happy with a really simple half million dollar year business and then go about building that? Because I think a lot of people just see what someone else is doing and then try to replicate that versus getting really clear on both what they want and how to go about building it in a way that works with Their skills and what they're actually willing to do in the amount of time they have available to devote. And this is one of the ways that I really try to coach people when they're joining our year long program on understanding that like, what is your mission, vision and goals? Right. What is your stage of business growth? Where are you, where do you want to go? What is the pace that you want to have? And then building and designing the business based on all these factors versus just like, oh, I want to do what that person's doing.

Yeah. Which is easy for many of us to do. Just point and look and go, I want to do that. But actually do you, do you want to do it and are you willing to do what's required to get there? That's brilliant. That's so helpful. And I think for people to see that there is different ways to reach the outcome in terms of if people do want to go low ticket, say it's a low ticket membership or something like that.

In terms of marketing and that kind of evergreen funnel, what have you seen in the last 12 or so months that works really well as a lead magnet and to drive people and to warm them up and give them value.

Yeah. So it's interesting with the mess, Google's report last summer was called the messy middle. And now the average buyer cycle is 49 days. It's taking people on average 49 days before they're ready to buy. So you actually have to either warm an audience up before putting them into a funnel or warm them up through a funnel with multiple touch points. So obviously if it's super low ticket, you might be able to get someone to buy right away at a low price point. Like I've got a $9 profitable micro niche mini course that a lot of people come through from YouTube or interviews like this, you know, because they buy, they hear me and they're like, okay, I'll buy $9 based off of hearing her talk for an hour. You know, but there's also other kinds of, you know, price points. So if you're going for like a higher price point, people are going to need to get to know like and trust you. And that means being consistent and regular on social and, or also means kind of being able to extend the funnel to have more touch points or deliver more value. Sometimes people need to see you, you know, up to up to five, six hours with you. I've had people on my list who bought after 10 years of being on my list. And so I think a lot of people are looking for the wham, bam, instant conversion. But this isn't an instant conversion market. If you look at all the studies like the Edelman Trust Barometer, we've been in a crisis of trust for three years where, you know, people don't believe what other people are saying. They feel like they're going to be burned or they've been burned in the past. And so the biggest objection to buying a lot of times is trust. So you have to kind of think about how do you develop that trust in the one and done. Like, webinar doesn't work as well. And the other thing that I'm seeing right now is that people are buying on their own timeframes, meaning that the whole, like, stacking of urgency and countdown timers, and you gotta buy it right now if you want this, this and this. People are like, yeah, it sounds great, but I'm not ready to do this thing right now. And so I'm willing to say no to this offer and then come back to it when it's the right time for me. I think people used to get more swept up in the excitement and the marketing and buy, but I think they've had that experience and it doesn't work because then they don't follow through. And so a lot of this is people need to buy at the time that's right for them. So it's about really prioritizing that deeper relationship that requires consistency. So in terms of the actual format of the funnel and things like that, I mean, it really depends on what you're selling, what the price point is, what the niche is, and things like that. But those are some overall trends that a lot of people overlook. Right. And so I think the biggest problem is people just want to make the grab. I just want the students. Well, great. And then also considering, you know, is it. Do you just have a single offer? Because if you only have one offer, it might not be worth even going to cold traffic to acquire a customer, because most people break even or less on the front end. So it's about having a kind of integrated product suite where you ascend people after they buy the first thing so they stay in your world for a lot longer. So most people come in through our $2,500 experience product masterclass to kind of follow this MVP approach and design and launch, you know, a profitable online course that actually delivers real results and transformation. But then many of them ascend and are with me in my Momentum business coaching program. Many of them stay with me for years. And so we have 47% of the people who come into our world buy from us more than once. And a lot of that also means creating extraordinary customer experience in the programs that you do create and not thinking about it as a one and done, but as an ongoing relationship, both leading to the first sale, but then the next and the next and the next. So if you want to kind of scale up and go that one to many approach, then I think you have to start thinking about the entire product suite and not just the one offer. Because that's the only way to make the economics work. Unless you've got a massive YouTube following or something like that where you can just send tons and tons and tons of clicks. But even. And then you're also balancing it with revenue from say that the sponsored ads and things.

That makes so much sense. And I love the idea of this is a long game. This is a. I'm the same with like networking events. When I first started in entrepreneurial Word, I went along to a BNI business networking event and I hated it. I really did. I mean, it's great for lots of people, but I just hated it. And it was like, wham, bam, fast. Your business card, my business card. Let's do business, let's keep track of commissions. And I hate that. So I'd rather go slow burn, long game, get to know the person. If we add value to each other's lives over time, do business together, that's awesome. If not, that's fine too. But I don't like this kind of transactional thing. And what I'm hearing from you is that actually your business and the way you train your students is to do a similar thing like build genuine trust, build genuine relationships with real humans.

Yeah. And I'll say that, you know, because of that, I'm not for everyone, because there's so many people looking for the shiny object, you know, that the silver bullet that's just going to push the button and make the money, you know, but if anyone's telling you push the button, make the money, it's not true. So that's the thing. And this is why a lot of people are frustrated. They've tried those push the button, make the bunny promises and it doesn't work because we're talking about value creation. And there's not a shortcut to value creation. I mean, even if you get a certificate, like you can get a certification, it's going to give you, you know, skills, it's going to give you credentials. So there are things that you can do, but you still have to develop up your skills, you still have to develop up your audience, you still have to build the credibility, you have to build the trust, you have to build the competence to get the confidence to get the clients. Then you have to serve the clients to get more clients. You know, so there's this, you know, value ladder that you really have to be willing to ascend, which is why you have to reach that point of no return and fully commit. Because it's not just something that, you know, people go in for freedom. And like I said, freedom's incredible. And I have a lot of freedom and I actually can, you know, travel the world and I do build my business from all over the world. And, you know, just this year, you know, the trips that I've got coming up are super exciting. We're going to go to Italy and we're going to teach a workshop in Lake Como, Italy. I, you know, for just in, like an intimate workshop which is fun. I'm going to go to Greece. I'm going to go to Austria and Czechia and, you know, in Germany and.

Norway and Finland. And so I've got all these trips coming up and I'm going to be doing business from all of these places. So I've got this level of freedom, but a lot of it is also the commitment, too. So. So freedom and commitment for me go hand in hand. But a lot of people think freedom is like the state of no responsibility, no obligations, no commitment. But like I said, you got to sacrifice the. The superficial level of freedom to get the deeper level of freedom.

That's. To me, that's like an epic quote that, that will sit with me for a while. It just is a really great reminder of what's most important. And I love that you're able to take this global and you're able to create that freedom for yourself and enjoy travel and new experiences whilst adding value and doing the work that you love.

Yes. And I was in New Zealand last year, so. Yes.

Amazing. Were you doing a bit of work or holidaying?

I married an Australian, so we were passing. We just stopped off on our way home from Australia.

How nice. I hope you had fun.

Definitely did, yes.

Good. Yeah, it's a beautiful country.

I got to get to the South Island.

That's where we are. We're in the South Island. It's stunning. Definitely biased. I spent a lot of time in the north island flying out this afternoon again, but South Island's my favorite, that's for sure.

Now AI, just before we kind of move to wrapping up. AI, obviously it's been with us for decades, but LLMs have came in in the last year or two. We're, we're getting used to using them. There's this idea that all the social media is going to be covered with AI generated avatars and they're going to be producing 50 pieces of content a day. They're going to know what the audience likes, they're going to read the algorithm and game the algorithm. So I'm hearing from lots of people, you've got to get on the train, you've got to make sure that if you've got a personal brand or if you've got a business, you've got to create one of these avatars and you've got to have it functioning. What's your thoughts on that in terms of the work that you do?

Well, 100%. I mean, AI accelerates and simplifies things and at the same time it can't replace all value, you know, creation and it can't replace the stories and the lived experience and, you know, the things that make you you. And so 100%, you can have AI do a lot of heavy lifting for you. But I don't think we're at the, the point where you can run a super successful personal brand with no involvement whatsoever. So you still have to prompt, you still have to share with AI. Okay, this happened, this happened. And I know that many of the people that I'm reading that I love what they do the most, they're still heavily involved in working with the AI to get the result. So AIs can be an incredible collaboration tool, an incredible way to speed up the process. But I also think it's more important to have elite level skill sets now than ever before. So you can still differentiate from people who just know how to use the tools. Right? You're adding an extra level of depth beyond kind of what's out there. So it's hard to know exactly what's going to happen, you know, but then be able to look for what you uniquely bring that cannot just be replaced by AI. One of the things that I know and one of the things that I teach when it comes to courses is that people don't buy information, they buy transformation. And if you think about it, you can search Google, YouTube, ChatGPT for anything you want to do in life and all of the information is there. But why haven't you done it? Why don't you already have? And maybe you do, but why don't you have like six pack abs? I don't have six Pack abs. Why don't you have, like, a completely overflowing bank account where you can buy absolutely everything you could possibly want and then some? Why don't you have, like, the absolutely perfect relationship with your partner that never has any frictions or challenge? Like, why don't we have everything we. We want? It's because all of that does not support and facilitate our transformation. You know, people need a guided process. They need handholding. They need, you know, personalized feedback. They need community. We need all of these things to get these results in our lives. And that's not something that AI alone can, can provide. And so value isn't about information. It's about results. It's about the experience that you have. And so looking for ways to differentiate by providing more extraordinary results and experiences, that's really the name of the game.

I love that. And I have to agree with you on that as well. I think that community and connection are going to be the gold as the AI starts to kind of ramp up. I think connection's everything, 100%. And, Marisa, one last question. If we were to fast forward many years into the future and you're highly aware that it's your last day here on Earth, someone very young comes into the room and says, marisa, how do I lead my life on purpose? What might you say to them?

Well, my favorite quote of all time is from Zig Ziglar, and he says, if you can help enough other people get what they want, you can have every. Basically, you can have everything you want in life if you'll help enough other people get what they want. For me, being on purpose is not just doing what I want and giving the gifts that I'm here to give, give, but doing it in a way that helps other people get what they want. So it truly is a win, win. And if you can add a win, win, win, which is not only is it good for you and the people you serve, but it's good for the world, then for me, that's a life well lived. That's a life on purpose.

That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. And if people are listening or watching and they've loved what they've heard and they want to get in touch or they want to take the first step to start working with you, how might they do that?

Yes. So I am@liveyourmessage.com for everything. And I have put together, based on this conversation, a special link@liveyourmessage.com leadonpurpose liveyourmessage.com leadonpurpose and you're gonna find my $9 profitable micro niches mini course. So if you're thinking about, well, what is that niche? What is that million dollar niche for you? This is a mini course that I created that will help you find it within just a few days.

So amazing. What a gift for people. So thank you for sharing that. I'll make sure and put it in the show notes. I'll put all your socials in the show notes. And just to get something for less than, I guess a cup of coffee or a couple of cups of coffee, and to get that kind of clarity is gold. So, Marisa, thanks for everything you do in the world. Thanks for empowering people to step up and do what they love doing and to make a living and to be more free. So I really appreciate it.

You're welcome. All right, take care.

Thanks a million. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages co nz. Thanks for tuning in to Lead On Purpose. If you find this episode valuable, please share it with one person that you think might benefit from it. And if you're serious about levelling up, please make sure you're subscribed to the show and continue to lead your life on purpose.