Making A Final Stand In My Business After 5 Years

All right, this is the final video in the Trina Leno eras tour and it's 2020. And we all know 2020 was a hot mess, but it didn't start out like that. In January, none of us had any idea what was about to come. Now, in yesterday's video, my Wildest dreams video, I talked about how I unlocked kind of this secret, this realization of what I needed to do in my business. And it was creating these multiple revenue streams, balancing pass of products with courses with digital downloads, with client work as well. And honestly, that's what's been growing my business since 2019. And it's what I've been teaching my clients inside of my program 10k on replay because it works. And 2020 was the time to test my theory and throw fuel to the fire. But due to a few more things that ended up happening in 2020, I would have to say that year became my Taylor, look what you made me do era. 2020 was also the year that I finally cracked six figures. And like I said, I feel I truly can attest that to finally understanding your product suite idea and creating this value ladder behind your business, I also brought in more team members in 2020 and would end up making a major decision decision in my business that would honestly change the direction of my business. Now, like I've been saying this whole week in this five video series for this entire eras tour, planning is important. And going into January 2020, I had my plan in hand. I knew exactly what I needed to do in the first 90 days to kick start this new test that I wanted to try and my new theory of this product suite idea. I was also not going to be winging my launches anymore because if I hadn't mentioned the past few video, I've been having so many launches in July, like one of the worst months. So much so it is called no buy July. But because I wasn't thinking about the bigger picture and how my product suite would be rolled out, I was just picking random times to launch. And in 2016 and 2017, and I believe in 2018 as well, I was launching in freaking July. I was ready to be strategic about my launches and how they flowed into each other. I also so finally had funnels set up that were going to be driving me money while I was planning for that next big launch, which would be a cash injection, not the only cash that I made because I was going to have these funnels rolling, making me money while I prepared for the big money. It also allowed me to make money while I was working with clients because I'm going to tell you, 2020 was a flood of clients for me, which again, all just kind of added up to. It was time to simplify to scale. I really needed to simplify everything that I was doing in my business if I wanted to get people helping me and if I wanted my processes to actually work. Seriously, 2020, I literally wrote as my goal was to simplify. Like, I can't get any clearer than that. Simple scales. Fancy fails. So the very first thing that I did in 2020 was cancel the membership. Cut that off right there. You know, don't leave it hanging. Just do it all at once. No, this was a great opportunity, again, for two reasons. Like I mentioned yesterday when I launched YouTube for creative. Now, when I decided to cut the membership off, obviously I didn't want any confusion about YouTube for creatives. Is it a membership? Is it not? So we decided to launch a brand new program again, unfortunately. But I was hoping that this would really clarify any confusion. This was not a membership. Video Strategy Academy was not a membership. The other reason I needed to change my name is because to avoid having the name of my program stolen Again, like YouTube Bootcamp was, I wanted to get it trademarked. I can't trademark anything with the word YouTube in it because YouTube owns YouTube. Right? So that's where Video Strategy Academy came from and why we changed it to that. So it'd be clear this wasn't a membership. And second, we could trademark it for legal reasons. Bringing up legal things, I will say this was also the year I decided to take my business seriously. And I'm embarrassed to say, I was not an llc. Up until this point in time, I did not have legal contracts in place with my contractors and my clients. And like I said, it's when I started sending in trademarks. This was the year that I took things seriously. I knew this was going somewhere. I was starting to simplify to scale and it was time to button up all the buttons. This is also the time where I hired an accountant. My husband was helping me with a lot of the numbers prior to. He's a finance person and he could handle it. But after hitting six figures in 2019, we started to get a little bit more complex for him. He didn't want to waste his free time figuring it all out. So this was the time that I did invest in having an accountant and a bookkeeper to really help me keep my numbers in line and more importantly, make sure I was paying my quarterly taxes the right amount and on time. I also made plans that first 90 days to start taking my webinar on tour to do joint venture webinars. This is going to be a great way for me to get in front of more people to build an audience without having to pay for it. Now I was going to be paying kind of on the back end because when I approach a partner to do a JV webinar with, I usually gave them a percentage of sales, 40%, 50%. They allowed me to pitch to their audience. Whatever their audience bought, they got a percentage of. And I had a full game plan of going out with JV webinar pitches. And then it was time to go to, to California to Social Media Marketing World in March. Yeah, I said March 2020. It was honestly a great time. I got to see my friend Ashlyn, who was a client and by now a really great friend and a business buddy of mine that I was asking questions about. And we were bouncing ideas and just someone to talk about. As she was building her copywriting agency, I was building my YouTube agency. So we had a lot in common and to be able to just have kind of that brainstorming person with you was fantastic. Get new ideas at all the sessions at Social Media Marketing World. And I also had the opportunity to livestream with a lot of the tubebuddy guys and to be a female on a couch with a bunch of YouTube men educators. I felt really proud to be a woman there, you know, talking about YouTube and the importance of YouTube as a female creator. Then it came time to come home and the world pretty much ended. All the progress on my business basically halted for about two months because it's kind of hard to do anything with a three and a five year old at home. One thing that I did do every single week was get out a weekly newsletter to my email list and a YouTube video. This is something that I have been doing every single week since 2016. This is the one thing that I do every single week in my business. Bare minimum, a newsletter and a YouTube video every single week. But even though I was working less, the business continued to grow in the inquiries continue to come in because all online business started to see a boom. More people were working from home, more people were trying to start their own business. They had extra time and so people were looking to me to outsource a lot of their YouTube stuff because they were building their business and we just couldn't keep up with the amount of people that were asking to hire us. I started offering YouTube production services. This is where the agencies Started to be built prior to I just had like three or four clients. I was editing their videos, I was giving them ideas for YouTube videos. There wasn't like a clear system or like a, an overall process, but this is where things became processed. Exactly what I will do. What is covered Agency style services. I also started offering more editing services and really taking on any kind of video or YouTube service that came at our door. Because again, mid 2020 we had no idea what was going to happen. And I was just trying to take on as much as I could to keep the business going and to make sure that my employees and my contractors could be paid. I'll correct myself, I didn't have actual employees. I had contractors at the time. But summer of 2020 I was making it happen. It was stressful to say the least. And I did have my own office mate for a few days until we decided this probably isn't going to work out. And so he moved to the basement, which is where he's at to this day. Almost three years later. When I looked at my numbers at the end of the half of 2020, I had made the amount of money that I made for an entire year that second year in business back in 2017, working probably a third of what I was working back in 2017. In fact, after announcing Video Strategy Academy and the new program in the structure, we had made over $40,000 on that program already. I struggled to make $40,000 in 2018 alone. I continued to focus on what I believed was true. Diversify your revenue. Balance your product suite out with small ticket items under $50 with mid tier products like a course 500 to 1000 with services as well. That way one can ebb and flow, but you're still making consistent income in your business as they ebb and flow, which they are most likely to do to say it worked. I mean I made over $250,000 in my business in 2020, as I said earlier, working about a third of what I worked the previous years. 2020 was also the first year we went on a three week vacation so we had nothing else to do. The kids didn't go back to school, they had virtual schooling. So we went back to vacation. In September, my oldest started kindergarten. Although it was virtual and this is where something interesting really happened. I could not handle virtual kindergarten. It wasn't for me. I couldn't balance work. My little guy did start going back to preschool and he did have child care through my parents fall of 2020. But kindergarten wasn't going to cut It I ended up hiring my cousin who is a teacher to take care of her learnings in the morning and for me to hire her the money she needed, I asked her if she could work in my business as well. So this is really where Erica started working with me part time as my daughter's kindergarten teacher, part time with me to a point where now in 2020, she is my chief marketing officer. She handles all my marketing promotions and really is a huge piece of my all. Starting back at 2020, being my daughter's private kindergarten teacher, since things were going well and I had more support because I had more money coming in, I decided to launch another course. Now, I don't recommend launching as many courses as I've launched. I think it's more important to be strategic upfront in your product offerings and then go from there. And really working with my business coach that I have right now, I can clearly understand what the product suite looks like. And 2020, I was still figuring out. I had the concept in my mind and I was trying to figure out where the pieces went. So I was trying to just throw a bunch of pieces in there to get it to work, like cram it in there. But now I see how it works. And I teach this process with my 10k on replay clients because I understand it and I've implemented it now. But in 2020, I was going to throw another course out to see where that sucker fit in. But I do want to say the one thing that I do require my 10k replay clients to do when they start working with me. Have their value ladder built out and send it to me for review. Now, you may not have a value ladder and you may not have a product suite, but you just put out on the paper what you have and then we work together to really figure out what that looks like. Because if you have your product suite and you have your value ladder, then you can start being strategic about launches, you can start being strategic about courses, you can start being strategic about digital products and how it all fits together. So that's why that's really a major first step for my 10k clients. Now that I've realized the mistake of not having that in place first. I got a lot going on, so how am I actually finding time to do this? I got a kindergartener working beside me doing virtual kindergarten. I still have a 4 year old. How is this all fitting into my schedule? Right. I've taken three weeks of vacation, so what am I doing? Where am I finding the time? I think it was pretty clear throughout this entire series, it's having a plan, knowing what the end goal is. This is a planning process that I've been doing every single year since 2020. I really started to map it out in 20, but I got real solid on it in 2020 and even better on it in 2021. This is a planning process that I do every single year. And for a year like 2020, it's something I revisit every 90 days. You hear me talk a lot about 90 days. So like you can create this overall plan for the year. But guess what? Things change, something happens, a pandemic hits. And so I also build in the time to revisit this plan every 90 days to make the shifts and the changes that need to happen. If you want my planning and you want to learn how to do my process of planning so that you can epically plan your 2023, I'm hosting a CEO planning day where I'm going to show you how to plan your six figure year for 2023. This live workshop is going to be on Zoom. It's about four hours because like I said, we're planning the whole year and then we're going to dive into your first 90 days of the year as well. So you can go into 2023 knowing exactly what you need to do. This is happening Wednesday, December 14th. Not only are you going to get this time with me, you're going to see how I do it. You're going to get a workbook, you're going to get all the back end stuff that you need to do it, but you're going to be able to send it to me for feedback, get some advice, ask me my thoughts, because I've done this now for over four years and I know when we start to add too many projects, which is why we have a process for prioritizing projects and figuring out which ones to actually focus on and then how to actually break those projects down into a way you can achieve it to make more money in your business and really move that needle. So go to trina little.com forward/CEO to sign up for this event. It is a four hour Zoom event where we are going to plan out your 2023 to help you hit a six figure year. I mentioned that because again, those first two years I had so much guilt not tying in time with my family. But when it came to using this planning process that I do that I'm going to share with you at CEO Planning Day, that's how I was to still cut my time you know, down to a third 2020, we had more pool days than ever. We went to the pool more days than before, probably total ever. Because I was using my planning process. I used the 90 day shift when the pandemic hit to figure out how I was going to pull this all off. With a very minimal amount of time that I had, but still had time for family. I was also able to pull off my biggest launch to date in the fall of 2020 as well. I hosted a challenge called the UP Video Editing Challenge and pre sold that course that I mentioned. I didn't create the course until I pre sold it. So I had people actually buying it, which is a huge part that I talk about inside of 10k on replay as well. But I pre sold my program editing for conversions and it was honestly, like I said, the best launch to date. It was an over $40,000 launch and we had over 160 people purchase this brand new course that I hadn't created yet. That signaled to me, okay, I got time to create this course. There's definitely a need for it and I was paid for it before I even created it. I honestly really hit my stride. My business brain just really kind of came out and the confidence in my business decisions just really started to shine. Even though it seemed like everything on the outside world was going up in flames. But 2020 did bring the end of something big that was a big part of my business. There was finally, I guess I'd say a that broke the camel's back when it came to working with the client, that I was basically working part time and I was putting in a lot of my creativeness and spending a lot of time building his business. And I had been working with him since 2017 and I am a very loyal person and I had a lot of loyalty for him. But it became time this situation happened and it was time to say goodbye. That happened in November of 2020 and it. It basically ripped out that safety net for me. I didn't have that safety to fall back on, that comfortableness. Like if things got hard in my business, well, I could just skirt away from it and go this way. That was gone now. Taking that out, taking that safety net out forced me to really make those big steps to go out on my own really and realize the potential that I had instead of always having something to fall back on. I would love to help you reach your potential in 2023. That's why I said I am hosting a CEO planning day on Wednesday, December 14th. This is going to be so great for you. If you really need to figure out what you need to be doing in your business to really hit those revenue goals that you want to set and move that needle finally on your business and go from you know, $500 a month to a thousand dollars or 5,000 or even 10k months. If you want to start phasing out client work, if you want to start making core sales and passive product sales, if you want to finally your 9 to 5 job and do your business full time, you need to know what it's going to take and you need to make sure you're working towards that and not getting distracted by other things. If you want to plan going into 2023, save your seat now at trina little.com forward/CEO. You'll get to be there live with me on Zoom December 14th and if you have any questions about this day and if it's a right fit for you, leave it down below in the comments or feel free to email me personally. Trina little.com okay, I want to know what are your thoughts about the past five videos in this era series? Do you want me to finish out my business journey with 2021 and 2022? If you would like me to finish with 2021 and 2022. I stopped here at 2020 because the what I learned in 2020 and the model that I set up in 2020 is really what I've been doing in 2021 and 2022. But if you want me to continue, what would you like to see differently? What would you like to see more of? Let me know down in the comments. So I know if you want to see those last two years like I point in my business and really how I've run my business since, but I've obviously learned quite a lot since then and I actually joined a mastermind at the end of 2020. It's not only changed my business, but changed my life. Thank you so much for watching this Eras Tour and I hope you continue to subscribe because in 2023 I've got a lot of great business content that's going to really help you get to your six figure year. And if you've missed any any of the five eras in the Trina Little Eras tour, check out the playlist that is on your screen right now to catch the entire series.