An Honest Behind-the-Scenes Of My Multi-Pillar Business

Portfolio careers. What is these? How you can create one? And we're really going to talk about the how-to. So the first thing is, what is a portfolio career? I have no idea when was the first time that I heard that term, but I can tell you the moment that I heard it, I was like, oh my God, that's me! I don't want to have a niche. I'm multi-passionate. I really love trying different things, failing a lot, failing forward, so that I can really grow not only professionally but also as an individual. And so I really love this idea that your career doesn't have to be one single path, which is a traditional way that we've always done in the corporate world where I was for many, many years. But instead, it's more like this spider web where you can have different paths, you can have different skills, you can have income streams. So that's really the whole idea. And hi, Michael, uh, Plain Talk for Women. Love, love your name. So that's really what a portfolio career is about. It's about trying to have like these different buckets that, uh, you can pull and you can use depending on the season, depending on your energy, depending on even how the business and how the market is going. And so what I would love to do today is to share a little bit about my own journey, starting from zero 3 years ago to growing a business that I do define as a portfolio career. I would love for you to participate. I would love for you to share, to ask questions. This is really much more fun when we do it together as a team and we have more lemon trees. So let's get started. And a little bit of background. I started my journey as a creative entrepreneur in early 2023. So that's when I published my first book, self-published on Amazon. That's also when I launched my newsletter, which is called The Elementary Mindset. And what I realized is that, to be very candid, it was really hard to be able to really turn my hobby into a business. I did find that growing my newsletter was very hard. I did find that selling my books was also extremely challenging. And so I realized that instead of having just one income stream or one line of business, I could really start to explore and expand and find different ways of reaching new audiences, of using different formats and being able to have something that is more sustainable. So I'm going to be sharing the different income streams that I have today, the different parts of my portfolio. If you have specific questions, feel free to share them. So I'm gonna start with the one that everyone is interested in, but it's not gonna be the only one. Let's start talking about having a newsletter, having a publication. We're all on Substack, so I assume that you have your publication as well. And the great thing about having your publication is not just, I want to gain pet subscribers. The beauty of it is really to grow your community. So even if you have a smaller audience, the key is not to have metrics for the sake of having metrics, but is really to engage with people who want to be part of your community. So that's really the beauty for me. It took me a year and a half to become a Substack bestseller, which means having 100 paid subscribers, and today I have over 250 combining my English newsletter with the Spanish one. But I can tell you that the most valuable thing of my community is not really the numbers or even the monetization, which is really nice as a side gig, but it's really more creating those connections because what I did realize, and this is one of the key messages that I would love for you to take away from today, is that the people who are very loyal to you, the people who love reading your newsletter, the people who show up on your live sessions, they might not necessarily become paid subscribers, but they're probably going to be the people who buy your book when you launch it. They're also going to be the people who join a cohort, for example, which is something that I do very often, or they might be people like myself. I don't really subscribe to other newsletters or services that recurring because I like to have something that has a beginning and an end. So what that means is that you're gonna have people in your community who might want to purchase your course, for example, because they want to have a completion date, which for people like me, for example, is something that we really like. So focus on growing not your audience, but your community. I think there's a very different distinction there, and I wanted to give a few tips for each of the different income streams that I'm going to be talking about. So in terms of your newsletter, in terms of growing it, in terms of monetizing it, one thing that works extremely well is to give a lot for free and to treat all your subscribers or treat your free subscribers as if they were paid. This session, for example, is free for all my subscribers. I'm not going to drop the ball. I'm not setting a lower bar because it's free. It's the opposite. I'm trying to give my very, very best with everything that I do so that when people come to my free stuff, they're like, wow, If this is the type of resources and level and value that she's giving us on the free stuff, I really want to know what's behind the paywall because I know that it's going to be better. I know that it's going to be more premium. So going with this mindset of treating every single person as really an opportunity to build that relationship is really going to help. In terms of the how, one thing that works very well for me, and I would love to invite all of you, is to join the group chat. I use it twice a week. So once a week I use it for an open conversation for everyone. We have debates, topics that are really relevant to creative entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, and we have a lot of like really cool experiences, peer-to-peer sharing. This week's topic, for example, is what are the channels or digital platforms you're using and how it's helping you in your digital business. And then the second that I do is one that is premium. So that's very targeted for my paid subscribers where we talk about specific questions. They might want to have personalized feedback. And so that feels more like a cozy coffee chat that we have once a week. So that can be very helpful as well when you're trying to build this community that we're talking about. And then the last piece, and this talks more about this strategy, is many people ask me, but what should I put behind the paywall? You have many, many different ways of doing it. One strategy that works really well for me is the following: give all the information for free, have an abundance mindset, share what you know. However, the part that you can really paywall and the part that is more likely to be monetized is the implementation. It's the how-to, it's the practical, actionable stuff. That's what people are most likely to pay for. So think about it this way, information is for free, implementation has a fee. So I hope this gives you a bit of an idea on paid subscriptions and growing your newsletter, but that's just the number one. So we're gonna be moving to the second pillar, which in my case, and there's no particular order to be honest, is digital products. I'm gonna ask you to put in the chat if you have digital products it's also a good opportunity to promote your own portfolio and whether you have ebooks, perhaps it might be courses or it could be templates or whatnot. So digital products work extremely well and they're a very good item to complement your writing because chances are whatever you are talking about already in your newsletter can be repurposed into a different format. In my case, for example, when I talk about digital products, I decided to be very specific on courses. Courses. I love digital courses. I only launched my first one last year and I chose Gumroad as my platform. I found it easy to use. They have a 10% commission, which I think is very reasonable. It works as a marketplace. I'm not affiliated. You have so many other platforms out there, but I want to talk about courses specifically and why I think they add a lot of value to your portfolio. And the one thing about courses is that first they have a more elevated perceived value, meaning if you're already writing about topic, let's say that your newsletter is about productivity, for example, you can actually turn that same content into a mini course, 8 sessions. You can add some videos, you can add some tutorials, and all of a sudden that perception for the user goes from here to here because of course it feels that it's more guided, it's more structured. If you add videos, it also adds a really nice value. And so I love it because it's very sustainable and you can already repurpose what you're already doing. Which makes a lot of sense. So I'm going to challenge you. Look at what you already have. You probably have a long list of an inventory of stuff that you have already written. Is there a possibility? Is there an opportunity for turning that into a course? My first course was How to Grow Substack because that's what I talk about a lot, but I have published a few other courses. I think I have 5 in total. Another one that I did, my most recent one, is called The Anti-Procrastinator, and it's actually based off my book that I have here somewhere. I'm going to show it to you, The Anti-Procrastinator. So that was my book. And after a year, the sales started to go down a bit. It started to be a bit flat. And I was like, what a shame that I have all this amazing content that can help procrastinators stop procrastinating. So I said, okay, let's do it. I'm going to turn it into a course. So I really want you to have like this very nimble mindset of how can I use stuff that is already around me that you have already spent so many hours creating and you can repurpose it. So challenge for you, how you can create a course. One thing that's very interesting as well about courses in terms of monetization is that the price point is going to be significantly higher than an ebook. To give you some references, and this is just on average, what does an ebook cost on Amazon? It might be somewhere between $1 to $5, maybe $9 if it's something a bit more technical. When you're talking about courses, and I'm going to talk specifically about mine, it can be much higher if it's a more complex course. In my case, my course They tend to be very simple, quite short, very actionable. I have videos as well because I do think that they elevate the overall experience for the students and they go between $88 and $128 in my case. So all of a sudden we're talking from a very low price point to a more of a medium price point. And that's how we start to talk about sustainable business and how we can really have a bigger impact, not necessarily by having to reach hundreds of students. Questions, anyone? Do you have courses as well? Do you have experience with other platforms? I would love to hear. But courses are fantastic. And one little strategy that I use is that before I go on holidays, which is usually summer or Christmas, I know that I'm gonna be less active. I know that I'm gonna have less time because I have young kids. And so I try to strategically plan my courses just before I go on holiday so that I can have passive income during those periods. And that's what I meant at the beginning of the session about a portfolio career is about having like these different levers that you can pull really based on your lifestyle. The goal is not to be rich. The goal is really to build something sustainable so that you can really have something that is still going, is still producing, is still generating income, even when you are on holidays with your young kids or with whoever it might be. So that's the second one, which is about, uh, digital products, and I would love for you to think about what that could look like in your case. I said courses, but it could be something very simple to start with, like an ebook or maybe a template. So number 3, now we're gonna switch gears a little bit. So we've talked about paid newsletters. The second one is digital products. One thing that I started 2 years ago was one-to-one coaching, and in my case, that coaching is really focused on strategy because it's the part that I love. I really love to help people take an idea, take a vision, and really add a strong strategy to be able to turn it into a product, into a business. So that's really my area of expertise. And the one-to-one coaching, it goes very well again with your newsletter, with Substack in this case, because you will see that for many of your readers, they want a higher level of personalization. They want the high touch. They want to be able to have someone who is more whole, handholding them at the beginning. And so for me, I think that that's a low-hanging fruit that you add it as a call to action. In my case, the way that I started with the one-to-one was simply adding it as the main perk if you become a founding member. I recommend that you have that as part of your premium offer, whether it's for the paid subscribers, whether it's for, for the founding members. You can change your strategy as you go as well. If you're just starting and your goal is to attract more paid subscribers in that first batch, you can add it for the annual members, for example. And once you start to have enough people and you have a quorum and you have enough paid subscribers, then you can elevate it and add it to your founding members. So I started talking about monetization. When I started with my one-to-one coaching, the price was quite low. I think I started around $99 or even lower because my goal at first was to really get mileage, to be confident, to start coaching people so that I could develop that line of business. And what started to happen as I started to gain more credibility, as I started to have more clients, I also started to increase the price. I went from $99 to roughly $150. And at the moment, I'm charging as part of my founding members fee, $238. US dollars. So that means 2 things actually. The first is that I started to have fewer coaching clients, but that was by design because it got to a point, and I don't know if we have other coaches on the call, where to be honest, I was really pivoting and becoming a full-time coach, which was never the idea. The whole point of a portfolio career is that you're not just doing one thing. You have different lanes and you can really switch gears depending on what you want in that time, in that point in time. So I started to have too many clients, which was a good problem to have. But at the same time, I started to feel that I was burning out because I found those sessions extremely draining. So if you want to be a full-time coach, that's fantastic. My reality was that I was going on calls back to back, also because of the time zones. I had calls in the morning, calls at noon, calls in the evening. And so I would say, if you want to go down the coaching route, just be mindful of your time, make sure that you set some boundaries, make sure that you're also protecting your time because it is very consuming. And if you want to dedicate your mind to other projects and to other priorities, it might be hard. So that's why in my case, I decided to still keep the one-to-one coaching, but I have it, it's not something that I promote very often. I have it more on the side for those people who proactively come to me and say, hey, Veronica, would you help me with public speaking? Would you help me with growing my community? Would you help me with publishing a book or whatever that might be that relates to strategy. But I do find that it's the low-hanging fruit, especially when you're starting, and it's the fastest way to monetize one-to-one. So that goes the one-to-one coaching. From there, and now we're going to go into number 4, and I hope I have enough time to cover all the pillars. From the one-to-one coaching, the next logical step is to scale. And the way that you scale the one-to-one coaching is by doing the exact same service that you're providing to one person, but now you're going to do it in a group. And the beauty about it is that you have different ways of doing this group coaching. It can be a one-off masterclass or a webinar. It could be even a paid live session if I wanted to talk to turn today's session into a workshop, for example. What I did after having done a few of those one-off masterclasses and webinars, I started to take it step further and create group coaching like cohorts and bootcamps. In my case, for example, at the moment, I'm hosting, I'm going to host in September, a bootcamp that is on public speaking, not the skill, but people who want to monetize public speaking and get paid to speak, whether it's on stages, whether it's on webinars for corporate, because that's what I do. That's one of my pillars. I will talk about it later. And so many people who come from the corp, have a corporate background, they really want to find a way to repurpose that expertise into public speaking. And so I do cohorts. They tend to be quite packed. I do them in 3 days. They're very hands-on. They tend to be small, 8 to 10 people max. If you're interested in that topic, by the way, let me know. I'm running it in September. But group coaching is definitely a great way to scale the one-to-one. For those of you who have a passion for teaching, who love being in this group setting, I think it's a fantastic way. And I personally love having these group sessions because it's not just one speaker, but we really learn from each other. We have people who have different experiences, they come from different walks of life, so I do find that that experience is very enriching. From a monetization point of view, it's obvious that if you have 8 people instead of one, you're gonna be able to monetize and scale your business much quicker. So how do you start when it comes to this group coaching? I would say start with a one-to-one, feel very comfortable first with the content that you're deliver. That's one thing. And then the second thing is start small. Start with maybe a 45-minute session that could even be for free for your subscribers or your paid subscribers, but really starting in a smaller setting is going to give you the confidence to then be able to scale and do something that is maybe bigger, something that is a little bit more curated, more sophisticated, but really start small, see what you can improve Groove, and you can take it from there. By the way, I think there's a background noise. I think they're doing some construction work. I'm so sorry. I didn't know that that was going to happen, obviously. So anyways, we've covered group coaching and I want to say hi to some of the newcomers, Leo, Tony, Ondusser, John, Rosemary. Hello, lovely to see you. And we're halfway through the portfolio career. So we're going to move on to number 5, and this is really one of my personal favorites, which is the B2B. B2B means business to business. So instead of selling a book to an individual, you're selling a masterclass to a company, you're selling a keynote to a conference. You have many different ways of doing the B2B sale. In my case, it's really about public speaking, and I encourage you, especially if you have a corporate background, to think bigger and think, how can I use the experience that I have as an employee and turn it into an offer that other companies would be interested in paying money for. And to me, it was a lightbulb moment when I realized, oh, wow, I worked at Apple for all these years in retail leading teams. I can turn that into a workshop for retail companies that want to lead teams. Or for example, I worked at Estée Lauder managing many different teams in Asia Pacific, different cultures, different backgrounds, different ways of doing business, I now turn that into a keynote where I talk about cultural agility and how you can be a leader and manage effectively teams across many different countries. So I encourage you to think about your past, especially if you come from corporate, but not necessarily, it could be any type of experience, and see how you can repackage it and turn it into a service that you're going to sell to a business. And you would be surprised by how much demand there is when it comes to developing teams, when it comes to digital transformation. At the moment, there's a lot of demand, obviously, on when it comes to the future of work, usage of AI, how to do change management for teams. So all of these are some of the topics that I know companies are actively recruiting trainers, corporate facilitators, speakers. So it's definitely an interesting area to explore. One tip that I will give you here, and some of you will want to kill me for this, but the best platform to develop your B2B business is actually LinkedIn. And you're gonna say, it's so cringe, I don't like it. I know, I know, but I tell you what, it is less cringe when you start to talk to heads of HR and directors of learning and development and you actually get clients. And the reason is, of course, because when it comes to business, when it comes do corporate sales, your ideal decision makers, your stakeholders, they are going to be in the professional platform by excellence, which is LinkedIn. So my strategy is very simple. I use Substack for everything that has to do with my B2C creative business, writing, having my community, selling digital courses, talking about productivity. All of these I host under my Substack LemonTree. And when it comes to my B2B speaking business, I have my own website, veronicallorcasmith.com, and I use LinkedIn as an incubator for my leads, as an incubator for my business. So if you're interested in that part, it's extremely profitable. Every market, every industry is different, but at the moment I'm charging between $3,000 and $5,000 for 1-hour to 90-minute session, which I think is extremely good, especially when you compare to the B2C. So if you are interested in repurposing your corporate experience into public speaking, let me know. I have this bootcamp that I think is pretty good actually. Sophie, who is in this call, was one of the participants in the previous one from Australia. So I have already done it and I think that the feedback was quite good because there was no BS. It's really, this is how you can get paid to speak on a stage. So that's for the B2C, sorry, for the B2B speaking. You can also have consultancy, Side note on this part, and that would be pillar number 5, is what I did find that was very hard at the beginning was to land your first clients because it's the chicken and egg situation. If you don't have clients, you don't have testimonials. If you don't have testimonials, you don't get booked. So it can be a bit challenging when you're starting. What the strategy that I used to get started as a speaker was Yes, I was trying to get my clients directly, but I also started to freelance for all the companies that were looking for speakers. So if you do a search of corporate training companies, workshop providers, and so on, they often outsource or they hire freelance speakers and facilitators. And so that could be a really good way for you to get started. And I'm so sorry about the noise. I hope it's not too distracting. But these two go hand in hand. You can start freelancing. In my case, I work with different companies that provide corporate training to organizations. And what I do is I try to find the gaps. If they don't have someone on inclusive leadership, for example, or cultural agility, I tell them, hey, this is my expertise. This is the type of knowledge, the type of know-how that I can bring to your organization. I would love to freelance for you. You as an external speaker. So that can be a nice way to get started. And I do both. I do direct clients. Now I'm 3 years plus into this. Oh, thank you. You can't hear any background noise. Okay. So you can really do both. You can really try to develop your own clients. And today I have a portfolio that is quite good in the sense that I have quite a few global organizations, banks like UBS, SMP Global. I work with the EU here in Hong Kong, but I also work on the side with companies that provide the corporate facilitation themselves. And in that case, of course, the fee is lower, but it allows me to have different options. And sometimes when I don't have my own clients, it's really nice to have partners that come to me, hey Veronica, we're gonna have a project that requires your expertise. Are you free? These are the fees. And so it's a really nice way to have have other options. And with this, we're gonna go to the final one, and I left it at the end because it's one of my favorites, and it's books. So question, how many of you here have published a book or intend to publish one? Because I believe that most of us here are writers and publishing books is something that we all love. But to be very honest, I find that writing a book is hard, but selling a book is harder. And I say this as someone who has published 4 books. I started with my self-published book called The Lemon Tree Mindset. Then I published another book myself on Amazon as well. Then I had my first contract with an indie publisher for this one, for my memoir. And then I had a contract with Penguin Random House for The Anti-Procrastinator. And to be honest, it was quite hard to monetize the books only with book sales, only with royalties. So if that's your case, I'm gonna encourage you not to be disappointed and to keep going because it's normal. I've been here for 4 years and I still struggle to, to sell books. But what I find that is, um, very interesting about books is that it gives you a layer of authority. It gives you a level of credibility that none of the other pillars are going to give you. And in that regard, especially if you're in nonfiction, I don't know about fiction, it's not my field, so I only talk about the things that I know about. When you have a book, you're able to build credibility across all the other pillars that we've talked about today. To give you some examples, as a public speaker, very often they love having someone on the stage who has a book on the topic that they're talking about because it really really helps you elevate your profile. If you want to sell a course and you already have a book on the topic, like the example that I shared before about The Anti-Procrastinator, well, I already have a book that has been published by Penguin. It's not an incredible New York Times bestseller, but it does give me credibility for all the products that I want to publish afterwards. It's beautiful also when you start publishing books, you can open and explore new opportunities like speaking in international festivals, Literary festivals, fairs. Earlier this year, for example, I went to India, which was incredible, to talk about my book. So a book is not only about the royalties, it's really about helping you strengthen the ecosystem that you're building. And so with these, we are coming to the end of my session. I like to keep those pretty short. We've talked about 7 different pillars that are part of my my career, my portfolio career. Everyone's is going to be different. We talked about your community and how you can grow a paid newsletter. We talked about digital products. In my case, I love courses. We talked about coaching one-to-one and then how you can scale with group coaching and group initiatives such as cohorts and bootcamps. Then we talked about B2B, how to sell to corporate. In my case, I was talking about public speaking and corporate facilitation. Then we talked about freelancing and how instead of going only for direct clients, you can try to partner with other companies that require your expertise. And the last and my favorite is publishing books, not for the sales only, but also for what they do to you, for what they do to your brand, for what they do to your professional growth and also your personal growth. I hope this was helpful. I hope it gave you some ideas on how you can develop develop your own portfolio career. By the way, I have a series on this topic. So if you go to the Dilemmatory Mindset, I have one section that is specifically called Portfolio Careers. Every week I have been sending one post on those different pillars. And next week I'm going to have a business roundtable. This one is exclusive for my paid subscribers. So I see that many of you are in that group already. If you want to join, that's going to happen happen next week, and we're gonna go deep into how we can use these levers, how we can really grow a sustainable business with the power of a portfolio career. So I hope this was useful. It's really great to see some, so many of you after a month in Spain. And, uh, I hope you stay well. Keep in touch. Thank you. Bye, Timothy. Bye, Nicole. Bye, John. Thank you. Feel free to add your questions afterwards. I will be posting these in my publication.