A Personal Update After A Crazy Week!

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie Chenell, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hey everyone, this is Julie Chenell. Welcome back to another episode of Million Dollar Grit. This one's a little personal. I have had a crazy Fourth of July weekend because my Instagram blew up, and as someone who has never really had a social media account blow up like this before, it was quite the ride. I'll give you a little bit of the backstory, just tell you what's going on behind the scenes and all of that good stuff. I am Jessie Jean's business coach, which I have talked about now a couple times, and she decided to talk about it on Thursday evening— Thursday afternoon. She posted posted one story. One story. Very kind, complimentary shout out to me as her business coach, as the secret weapon that, you know, she has in her pocket. She reposted a reel I did, and that was the end of my inbox. Rest in peace, my inbox. And it has not stopped. I mean, stories only last for 24 hours, But I did what any good marketer would do and, you know, tried to capitalize on the traffic with some Reels and a welcome hello post and, you know, just saying, hey, this is who I am. And that traction got quite the momentum in the feed and my account has just been growing and growing and growing. I started on Thursday somewhere around 17,900 followers, so I didn't have a small account, but I definitely didn't have a ton of engagement on Instagram outside of the DMs. I have a lot of engagement in the DMs. And as of this morning, I'm over 21,600 followers. And what's crazy is just how engaged and generous and kind and funny all these new people are. I can't get off the app. You guys are leaving amazing comments and you're sending encouraging DMs. And I'm like, I just, I just acquired 3,000 new friends, 4,000 new friends. This is amazing, but it's making it hard to get anything else done. Not only that, but it wasn't just your average shoutout. She gave me basically a, the highest sort of praise testimonial you could give by saying, you know, hey, she's someone that I have in my corner and oh, the world just watched me make $6 million. And my inbox for private one-on-one coaching is completely and utterly full, and I am drowning in applications, trying to work through them, trying to figure out who would be a good fit for private one-on-one coaching versus who maybe is a little early, but I could send them to a couple of products of mine that would kind of get them on the road. And that has been a project in and of itself. If you're listening to this and you put in an application to work with me, please be patient. But when I say be patient, I mean bother me. I mean, understand that it's possible that your application is, you know, in process. Just like bump it up to the top. Email me, DM me, nag me. That's the version of patience I'm talking about. I'm just meaning patient if I'm not responsive right away because I'm trying to wade through it all. So overwhelming. Another thing that has been really interesting about this whole thing is that I've had to quickly think about what it feels like to be a brand new person in my world. I mean, it's a strength and a weakness. I spend a lot of time nurturing the people that are already in my world. I have a lot of deep relationships with with private clients. I have a lot of people on Instagram and on email that are regulars that I hear from. I know their names, and this is a good sign of like a deeply connected community, but what it does mean is that sometimes I forget that there's an outside world, and then when I get a whole gaggle of new people, I kind of get paralyzed of like, "Okay, crap. What are the most important things they need to know?" about me in order to decide if they want to hang out with me or not. That was what I was doing on Friday morning or Saturday morning when I put up a reel just offering some free resources. I made a Google Doc. I said, here are a couple of free things that would be interesting to you. If you want to get to know me, read my book, Million Dollar Grit. Here are some low-ticket products. And I decided to just go ahead and give everyone what my coaching includes, about me as a coach, and my price. I thought, you know what? You're not supposed to do that in marketing. You're supposed to talk to people and prove the value and all of that. But I was like, there's no way I'm going to be able to talk to everybody, so let me just hand this out. And I think I looked at the comment automation, which was being very picky and finicky this weekend, but I think some— somewhere in the ballpark of 650 people requested that document. So anyway, it's just been a, a wild weekend. And something that is coming up for me as I do this is my fear of being visible, which I know, you know, I joined the App Challenge and a couple people mentioned to me, it was over on Threads, they said, wait, you're her coach and you bought her product? And I was like, yeah, that isn't that normal? They're like, "That is not normal." I was like, "Okay." I've bought lots of client products because I'm not good at everything, and I am aware enough to know that I am not like the foremost expert on social media, so I bought it. But now I'm trying to do it, but I also have all these new people. I am feeling so vulnerable and so exposed because I have a lot of insecurities around performative social media. And it was— there was an interesting experiment the other day over the weekend because I posted these two reels, which by the way both did really, really well even though they're longer than a minute and a half. They were a little bit mathy, but you guys loved them and they got me lots of new followers. However, I posted in my stories this sort of raw, slightly unhinged reaction to how I feel about doing this. And that got so much engagement. People said, oh my gosh, I listened to that more than I even listened to the reel. I was like, well, that's interesting. I don't— I'm not sure that— I mean, you know, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. I ended up taking that story and posting it as a reel just to see what the algorithm would do. And here is the interesting thing. That reel where I was unhinged did get— it's still going because it's not even been 24 hours yet. It did get more views right away. It did get more likes right away. I don't know that it got more comments right away, but I do notice that my mathier, deeper reels actually brought me followers. And that's interesting information because You know, as much as I love the views, the visibility to like, you know, bring my account up, I do want people who want what I do rather than just like, you know, want to watch me crash out because I can't do a video. Anyway, that was an interesting experiment. Okay, the other thing that's happening behind the scenes is that I am gearing up for 2 weeks of people at my house. Tomorrow begins the AI and Sheep Workshop. This is workshop number 2. I sold out 4 of these. In fact, I have one, uh, one workshop left in September that has some seats available. So I've got, I think 17 people are coming to this AI and Sheep. So they're coming, arriving late tonight, and then we will kick off 2 days of talking about how to use AI to make more money in your business. And then of course the sheep are just the fun side quest. The following week I have CEO Week, and CEO Week is for all my private clients who want to come to my farm, come to my house, spend 3 days hanging out, eating good food, masterminding, hot seats. I've got, I believe, 17 clients who are coming the following week. So of course, in the weekend where I get a bajillion new followers and more coaching applications in one time period than I have ever had in my entire life is also right on the heels of 2 weeks of hosting people. So my calendar is a disaster, but I'm going to get through it. I have opened up my calendar on Fridays, which is normally my day off, to talk to folks and just to figure out who is best for my one-on-one coaching and who's maybe a little early, but, you know, I'm excited to have you in my world, to learn from whatever I can offer the free stuff, which, you know, 80% of the content I put out is free, 20% is paid. And of course, over in the Funnel Gorgeous world, there's lots of courses and products that are pretty, you know, affordable and easy for a beginner. I— to say that I am grateful for the shout out and the transfer of trust is an understatement. I feel a little unworthy of it, even though logically I know that I'm very good at what I do and I've done it for a long time. It does feel scary to be put in the position of like, hey, you, you know, you were working with her when she did this crazy thing. And that's why I keep telling people over and over again, Jessi made millions before me and she will make millions after me. Just in case anyone thinks hiring me means you're going to make millions and millions and millions of dollars like a unicorn. I want to finish this episode by telling a story of a very typical client relationship. I thought, you know what, if there are new people listening to this, I want to explain what is the norm, because Jessie is not the norm. Jessie is a unicorn. There are some parts about what happened to her that are very normal, and I talked about them in some comments on the reels. For example, in her first launch, sh— her page converted similarly to most of my clients' pages. It's just she had outrageous traffic. The second launch was true unicorn. I have never seen anything like it in my life. But most of us aren't going for the unicorn. We're going for the average. So I'm gonna tell you a quick story. I hope she doesn't mind. I don't think she will mind, but this is a very, very common story. She came to me, she was in a mastermind, she heard me speak, and she hired me. And she's in a niche that's business-to-customer. That means she's not in a make money online niche, she's not in one of those, you know, high-ticket niches. And she helps people with multiple sclerosis. And she came to me with the belief that it was going to be very hard to monetize her expertise because You know, you don't want to capitalize on people when they're ill, and nobody wants to pay for expensive programs, right? This was her whole belief system. We started working together, and she built a program. I helped her think about the program. I helped her design it. I gave her feedback. I brain— just all the things. We got that that program sorted out, I helped her pre-sell it, you know, which was, hey, let's find a couple people in your audience. Let's go through that program with them, build that program out, and then we'll worry about how we're going to sell it long term. She did that. She got a couple of sales in the door. She got a couple students. She built the program. It's a great program, by the way. If you or a loved one are struggling with MS, it's called Healing Habits. And I highly recommend it. She's very, very good at what she does. And then we decided, once that was all built, we decided, okay, how are you going to sell this every day? And she still had a little bit of mindset blocks around, you know, is a stranger really going to pay me $500 for this program? You know, just because she had been in the world where her audience, you know, doesn't want to pay a lot of money. We decided to build a webinar funnel, and I would say probably 60 to 70% of my clients build these funnels with me because they are the highest leveraged funnel that you can build. It does so much for your business. Uh, I, I could do episodes upon episodes upon episodes of webinar funnels. Anyway, uh, I, Aline is a great student. She built the webinar, she launched the webinar., and it was a little quiet. It was a little quiet. There weren't sales right away. And Aline worked through my choreography. I watched her webinar. We changed things around. We had to get those, that texting enabled, get that show up rate up. We workshopped the hook and then she made a few sales and it was like, oh my goodness. Okay. All right. And she has been doing this webinar every week and the last couple of weeks She said, oh my gosh, I sold so many live, right? This was like a big deal because when you're first learning how to present, it's very easy to like underpitch and let people, you know, go without, you know, really asking them to make a decision. So now she's at the point where she is making regular sales every single week. I told her, I said, you join that, that, uh, YAP Challenge. She is starting to get traction on social media. It is so fun to watch. She's using ads as well. It's so fun to watch just as that momentum starts to grow and you can just tell she's becoming known. She's making sales every week. And this, this client example, I can repeat dozens of times. I, it's not a unicorn, but dozens of times I can tell you about people who built programs, built webinars, are selling webinars, $20K months, $30K months. $50K months, and they're doing this. And this is the normal trajectory for a client of mine. I do have lots of clients who come to me who already have a big audience. Those folks have an advantage. They do, because they have a giant audience and it doesn't really take much to get those first sales in the door. We can almost always validate an offer, and it's really fun to play with those clients because you know, obviously we can get data really fast. So if you are one of those types of people, you should definitely come on in because the work that I do can multiply very, very quickly with a large audience. But if you have a small audience, I want you to remember Aline because she is the average person who comes to me and what changes in their business over time. And that is what I offer, and I am just, I absolutely love my client base. And if you are someone who wants to work with me, just be patient and also nag me because my inbox is an absolute disaster. I hope you guys have a great week and I'll talk to you soon.

And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, Harness your grit and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.