When You're Starting With Just An Idea

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, 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, what's up? This is Julie. And today I am back with a new episode inspired by a coaching call I had with one of my clients. Now, before I dive into why I think this is inspiring and hopefully helpful for those of you who have ideas but haven't gotten them out on paper yet, I first want to say thank you to my audience because I am about to get on a plane. I'm headed to New Orleans and then Miami. I have lots of presentations, and I wrote an email to my list the other day asking people to give me what is top of mind for them right now in this moment, and I got hundreds of responses. And so I asked my assistant to put all of those responses in a Google Doc, and now my goal is to try to get through as many of them as I can on this podcast, because what better than to actually answer real live in-time questions and problems that you guys are having? So thank you, thank you, thank you, and I appreciate it so much. And I'm always down for feedback, like I love feedback, and I love to know what what it is you want me to talk about on this podcast. So today what I wanna do is kind of bring people back to the beginning. I had a coaching call with a client yesterday, and she's starting from scratch essentially with this brand. And many of you, even if you are successful business owners, maybe you have an idea that's like outside of the sphere that you work in, and so you wanna build a new brand, a new business, a new company, and it just feels like, The steps are so muddy and there's a million things that you have to do from social media to offers to list building to email sequences to tech. And it's like you tangle yourself up and then you start doing lots of things and then you get completely sidelined. So I wanna walk through how I would advise someone who has an idea, how to get it from idea into an actual workable plan. All right. So we are going to go with one big disclaimer here. Before you launch a new business or a new offer that could turn into a new business, I want to make sure that you actually have expertise and social proof around the program that you want to create, whether it's a course or coaching, it doesn't really matter. The steps are kind of similar, slightly different for a course than a coaching program, but you actually have to have the goods. So do not try to build a business around somebody else's idea that you don't have a lot of social proof for. So typically when I'm sitting with someone new, I'm asking them questions like, tell me your story, tell me what your background is, tell me where you have expertise, right? Because you don't want to build a business unless you can actually solve a problem, a really painful, obvious problem that the market wants solved. So that's where you start. So if you're listening to this and you're like, well, I have an idea to build a funnel building agency, but I don't know how to build funnels, you're going to need to get that skill first. If you come to me and you say, listen, I am an expert in growing Chinese money plants and I have 17 of them in my house and they are big and they are beautiful and people are always commenting on them. I'm going to say, listen, maybe you're not going to make millions teaching people how to grow Chinese money plants, but you can do that and you can develop a skill, maybe like a funnel building skill or something that you can then turn around and monetize as well. So come to the table with something that you have expertise in. Okay, so this client came to me, she's highly— like, she's a, an expert in lots and lots of ways. And so she wants to build out an entire business around helping people in trauma recovery. And after talking with her for just a few minutes, it was very clear she not only had a story, but she had education, she had work experience, she has social proof. Okay, so that is the big sort of disclaimer walking into this. Once you know you have that, all the steps are pretty simple to say, not so easy to execute on. So the first thing you want to do is create an offer. And whether it's a course or coaching program or one-on-one coaching or, or done-for-you services really depends on the problem that you are solving. So you want to ask yourself, what problem am I solving? Then once you've identified that, The next thing you want to know is, how am I going to solve that problem? Do I need to do it for them? Is it something that I need to do one-on-one? Is it something that I can do in a course? And a lot of you might come to the conclusion that you can do all of those things in all those different ways. And if that is true, I would say start with the more expensive, more customizable option. So that's usually either done-for-you services or coaching, and do it in a one-on-one capacity. Yes, it is not scalable, but it is easier to get traction from, from a financial perspective versus a course, which is going to require you to have a larger audience. So once you've identified that problem, you're going to craft that offer. And we have lots of tools to help you with that. Uh, one of our courses, Offer Cure, at offercure.com helps you craft an offer, but we have other products that work specifically for coaches. So Scalable Coach Method, Method, which is this course that I'm building, would work great for coaches specifically, versus Offer Cure, which is a little bit more designed for people with courses. Okay, so you craft your offer, and when doing that, you want to make sure that it's tied to a problem, tied to a specific person, and that there's something unique or different about what you're doing. Okay, now this can be tricky because a lot of us don't think anything about what we do is that exciting, right? We have the curse of genius. We don't, you know, we don't see how our way of thinking about things is different. So this past summer, I worked with about 70 students in the Course Chemist Accelerator. This is actually something we're going to sell the replays to on Black Friday weekend. And one of the trainings was about visual frameworks. So sometimes you don't think what you're doing is different, or you don't think the way you think about something is different. And so my recommendation is you go through an exercise where you actually create like a visual infographic of your solution, and you start to look at the patterns and the shapes to see if there's something unique, right? And so let me just give you a really quick example. A Venn diagram, right? We learned about those in school. It's got the two circles, and then where the overlap is, is like where there's similarities. Well, now imagine a Venn diagram with three circles. So when Kathy and I set out to design a course, what problem were we solving? Well, we were solving the problem that a lot of people wanted to become funnel builders but couldn't figure out how to actually build funnels that would work, that would be profitable. And so we looked at, well, what makes a great funnel builder? And we sort of, you know, discussed that and we said, well, it's all about what the offer is. It's about what the copy is and it's about the design. And so as we were kind of circling on these three concepts, we put them into a Venn diagram, you know, and we kind of added some names to it like irresistible offer, you know, clairvoyant copy and beautiful design or gorgeous design. And then we looked at where those three overlap. And that's where not only do you have a great funnel, but you have a great funnel builder. And we called it the triple threat, right? So a triple threat marketer is someone who can do all three. And that became the framework for our course, FG Society, which was aiming to solve a very specific problem. So as you're working on that offer, you want to develop some sort of framework or something that makes you different. Now, once you've done that, the second thing you have to do is get that offer out into the marketplace as quickly as possible. If it's coaching or done-for-you services, this is pretty easy. You do a basic application funnel and then you start pounding pavement. You start going in Facebook groups, you start talking to leads, going to networking events, you know, talking to people in your Gmail contacts, getting yourself out there to get those first 1 to 2 to 3 clients. It's grueling hard work. It's easy to say, it's not as easy to do. If you are deciding, hey, you know what, I'm going to put out a course, this part is going to be actually much, much harder. Even though courses are scalable, it's hard to get financial traction when you don't have an audience. So you have to kind of pause and build an audience for a while. And if you don't have money, it's going to take quite a bit of time because you're going to need to kind of rev those organic engines. And if you do have money, then you can use Facebook ads. And you can build a list and then you can launch. But this is the part that people don't tend to do. They, they kind of get stuck here. And this is why we have our coaching program Launch Gorgeous that we've been running for the past several years. And it's because this part, once you have that offer, getting it out there and getting that market validation is so incredibly important. And on the coaching side, when people do it on coaching, it's hard to be rejected. It's hard to do sales calls. You know, people have to kind of get used to that feeling of putting yourself out there and having people say yes and then having some people say no. So this is sort of the validation phase. I want you to notice that I really haven't talked much about starting an LLC or writing up an operating agreement or doing logo and branding or any of that, because those are very, very important business building skills, but they will slow you down. And so yes, in order to take payment, you're going to need a PayPal account or you're going to need a Stripe account. And so yes, you're going to need a bank account to attach that to. I'm going to tell you that when I started, I just opened up a personal checking account and then I went into my online banking and I labeled it business, but it wasn't a business account. It was a personal account because I didn't have a business yet. And that is okay. You can always go get your LLC, get your EIN, then you can open up a business business checking account, you can hook that bad boy up to your Stripe account and call it good. So, and PayPal is always an option. So try to reduce the friction to getting money. You are not a business until you have acquired cash in exchange for the offer that you've put out. Now, once you have that, it could be one client or two, it could be selling 3 courses or 4. There is something that changes in you. It's momentum, and it's very, very important to get. And even though it's fun to sit at the whiteboard and draw out an entire customer journey and a path of how you're going to build all these courses, and maybe you're going to have a shop and, you know, you're going to have a community and you're going to have all this kind of thing. Every single one of those ideas has to be put through the grinding test of validation. And so if you're listening to this and you've had ideas and maybe you have a whiteboard full of like a multimillion-dollar company all built out, you've got all these amazing ideas, that's fine. That's totally fine. But now you have to start at offer number 1 and you have to put it to the test first. And, you know, Launch Gorgeous has been the way that we have done this and we've always done it in kind of 6 phases and it can take anywhere from 6 weeks to 12 weeks to get an offer out, right? Because first you have to make sure you understand the problem that you're solving and the person that you're solving it for. And that can sometimes take a little bit of wrangling and then you got to slap a name on it and that's some right-brain thinking. And then you have to build a funnel and there's all different types of funnels depending on the offer, right? So we've done Launch Gorgeous rounds where, hey, you want to launch a coaching offer. Okay, so we did Launch Gorgeous Elite, which was an application funnel. Right? Or maybe you wanna launch a course and you wanna launch it to a list. So that's like what we would call a pressure launch, a classic launch, right? So we did Launch Gorgeous Classic Edition. Okay. Maybe you decide you have an offer and you wanna sell it through a webinar. Well, that was our Launch Gorgeous Evergreen Webinar Edition. And each of these different ways of selling are valid and important, but you want to make sure you choose that right mechanism. So in a future podcast, I plan to kind of dive into which way to sell is the way, right? Because this is another area where you can get tripped up. And so in Launch Gorgeous, we talk about the offer, then we actually build the funnel. So a lot of people get stuck here because it becomes a question of tech, right? And if you don't understand tech, you can think that tech is your problem. And I promise you, Tech is not your problem. Tech is the easiest problem of all the problems to solve in online business. Does it take some money? Maybe, perhaps. Does it take some time? Yes, perhaps. Does it take the right set of tools? Yes, perhaps. But this is not a true problem. A true problem is when you can't make money, and tech is fairly easy to solve. And so then we go into sort of an audience building phase. And again, if you are going into coaching or consulting or done-for-you services, you don't need a big audience. You just need to be able to interact with people and have conversations and get them talking and then close the sale. If it's a course, you do need an audience just because usually courses are less expensive than coaching and done-for-you services. And you need— because courses are what we call an unassisted sale, meaning someone's just going to go to an order form and they're going to buy. They're not going to be on the phone with you. They're not going to get an invoice. The conversion rate is lower. So you can close 30 to 40% of people that you talk to face to face, but you can only close 1 to 3 to maybe 5% of people who are staring at a sales page. So your audience needs to be much larger. And then we go into sort of a pre-launch phase where we're building out all of that buzz and anticipation. And so if you are, you have an idea, you want to give yourself anywhere from 6 to 12 weeks to get that offer going and to get money in the bank. And then once you have that, and once you've proven that this offer is something that people want, you can continue to build your empire. So I hope that was helpful. I hope you have a great day. 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 keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.