Service Based Business Society Podcast

Season: 2
Episode: 3
Title: Knowledge is Power

Hello, and welcome to the service based business society podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany-Ann-Bottcher. At our weekly episodes, we will dig into everything you need to know about scaling your service based business without losing sleep. With my experience in creating over seven figures per month, and a passion for marketing, finance and automation, this show will provide tangible tips and techniques for scaling your business. Let's get started.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode. Today I wanted to share all about our recent launch. So our agency just launched our new business concierge services and while I will share a little bit more about those at the end of this week's episode, I also just wanted to share really the process of going through a launch because the actual launch process, whether that be a new service, or a new seasonal piece to your business, it really is important to to look at it as a launch to set that timeframe to really reverse engineer what needs to be done, and decide how you can best create the biggest impact. Now you really want to think about your launch almost as a snowball. And getting it rolling is often the most challenging part. So you want to think about creating some buzz so that people do know that something new is coming. But you also then want to follow that up with the necessary pieces. And one of the key marketing pieces that we see time and time again, with business owners is that people don't want to over talk about their launch. They don't want to Oh, I've already said that, or I don't want to talk about it again today. But the fact of the matter is, you really need to utilize the energy and the upswing of a launch, and really capitalize on that process and the excitement.

A lot of times people will share with someone else, or even have a conversation with someone that you wouldn't expect based on seeing your content or seeing more information about your launch. Very rarely will people immediately buy on first glance, especially on a cooler audience, obviously, on your warmer audience or your existing clients, you are more likely to get that immediate purchase. But when it comes to a cooler audience, that's not always the case. So you want to make sure that you have enough content planned to truly get the word out about your new launch, and carry you through the entire sales process.

So we started planning for our launch about six weeks ago, that is still a fairly quick turnaround. So I had been working on putting together this new line of services. And up until about six weeks ago, I wasn't sure exactly how I wanted to frame it. In terms of a sales process. I know this challenge that I was looking to solve in the market. And I knew how I was going to solve that challenge. But I wasn't sure how I was going to frame it in a way that it would make it accessible for all different business owners. So I started working through that process and determined that I wanted to run a program that basically had three options. So it was like a pay as you go option. It was a bundle and save option. So you could prepay buying a set number of concierge powers, or I could do an unlimited model. Now we're gonna get into a little bit about what an unlimited model can look like. Because oftentimes when we're in marketing, and we use things like lifetime access, or unlimited, it's important to frame exactly what that means so that everyone is on the same page, the expectations are super clear.

We have a very detailed Terms and Conditions page that isn't full of legal jargon, as much as it is filled with the actual terms and conditions of exactly what it will be like to sign up for one of these programs, we still have all of the agreements that are that more typical legal jargon. But honestly, those don't necessarily say when you start, this is what it's going to be like.

Oftentimes, if there is any kind of unhappy customer, it's usually due to a miscommunication on expectation. And so it's super clear anytime, especially when you're using words like Unlimited, that there is clarity on what that means. So we decided we're going to launch. We had gone through the process of what that meant and how we were going to bring that forward to the clients. Then came the point of What does that look like from a sales perspective? What is our sales infrastructure in the background? What does it need to be in order to facilitate this process. So once we had designed our systems now, this is something that we specialize in. But to kind of bring you in on what that process looks like, whether that is on a whiteboard, notebook, I absolutely love the giant posted notes for these types of systems pieces, but you know, first outline the loose process, and really think about all of the steps, things like the proof of payment or receipt, email, things like updating any of your CRM systems, every single piece that's involved in someone purchasing something.

Once you've got all of that, then it comes to actually designing that in your system. So I don't start designing and I don't recommend you start designing right in the system, it's always best to start with mapping it out. Because that's when you're going to see when you look at it, you know, in a very visual perspective, that's when you're going to see missing pieces, you're gonna see redundancies, all of these types of things. So first, we're gonna lay it out, then you're going to build it. One of the things I caution on any kind of launch, this is perhaps going to be the most controversial advice that you will receive. And that is, don't build the whole thing. Now you're gonna think, Hey, wait just a minute, I want to make sure that I'm completely ready. And yes, you absolutely do. You want to make sure you have a plan and you know what it takes to implement that plan. So if you have a plan and say it is 50 steps, and you know that for this project to be completed, it's 50 steps, that does not mean that you need 50 steps completed before you start selling. And here's the reason why you do not have at this point, what is called proof of concept, that means that you have not actually launched this offer and you are not sure, if you are going to run this offer the exact way that it is in your mind. Meaning you might change something, you might determine that there's a lot of interest in one part of your offer and not so much in the other, you might determine that you want to change the process or speed up a timeline or take something out. And you're not going to know that until you start running it.

So you want to have an outline. And you want to have built enough of your system that you're going to bring people in, you're going to start the process, and you need to know what it takes to finish that process and you don't want to invest everything upfront, not knowing if anything is going to work. There is nothing worse than spending a lot of times if you go back to like there's a lot of discussion online right now has been for the last number of years about creating an online course or program, which there's all sorts of studies and incredible resources that say that this is you know, the direction of the future. And I mean, it's a massive industry. But I wish that there was also some information about how many courses have been developed front to back, hundreds of hours invested in planning recordings, setting up infrastructure and all of these pieces. Never to sell a single subscription or membership, you might need to fine tune your marketing, you might need to fine tune your messaging, maybe you don't you start selling only to realize that the challenge that you perceive to be solving, maybe it means a little bit of fine tuning and so you don't want to be over committed to a certain direction, because that can be wasted time and money.

I really want to emphasize there's so many different ways of getting the same thing done. There are people that have made millions of dollars recording simple videos on their iPhone and uploading them to a coaching platform. There are other people that launch incredibly well edited multi angle cameras, film crews. At the end of the day, people are not purchasing for video editing or anything like that. There's always a balance between expectation, something that fits with your brand, the actual knowledge or value that you bring. Whatever you're launching needs to be in alignment with your brand and your business and be cohesive if you are a super polished brand and you released a program with very unedited raw videos. fairly basic tech just documenting these types of things, someone might say, hey, this feels rushed. But from another hand, if you have someone who really is their business model that's more in alignment. And so don't look at what other people are doing. And automatically assume you need to do the same thing, your audience and your message and your authentic brand really just needs to be cohesive, and whatever you launch.

So now you've decided how much of this system and infrastructure needs to be set up for launch day. So for us on the concierge system side, we'll really kind of dive in a little bit about what this concept of service is, but we have the ability to meet or out the timing. And so someone said to me, Well, what happens if you get inundated with work? You're slammed with work, what happens? And it's okay, well, that's no problem. Because A we are setting the timelines, and B, we are very talented at scaling a team, I have interviewed hundreds of people over the years. And one of my best skills is hiring great people, putting them into the right roles, bringing people in that fit culturally, and offering them the correct systems and infrastructure to help them succeed in their positions. And so in a agency setting, that is super key more so then, me knowing how to do every single job, but truly being able to find the right people to do the right pieces. And that is what scaling a business truly comes down to is identifying those other pieces, being able to hire being able to hire the right people. And those are the pieces that help with scaling. And so because we can, in this particular launch meter, things out in terms of timing, and have a great grasp on where we would find additional people, we have a great agency team to begin with. And so being able to share these people, our team with additional other businesses, is truly part of this exciting growth and offer.

So it's not always about having the resources that you need to fully scale your launch. But a matter of knowing where you're going to get that now if you need a specific resource. And you know, it's super hard to find like you don't even know where you would start, that would be a concern. So you don't have to be completely ready. But you do need to have a plan as to how you're going to get ready because all things go well, you're going to need to you know, be implementing that plan. So you've gone through these different pieces of the launch, you have decided when now it's a matter of really looking at what it's going to take to launch. So really from a marketing perspective. So you want to hit the ground with a little bit of oomph, you want to decide exactly what that launch looks like. And look at it almost as a sequence of events, try not to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of everything that needs to go on, but decide who you're going to launch it to first. So if you have an email list, or you have a Facebook community, you know, these are great choices. But you want to offer someone access first in a way that you can be 100% present and ready when that goes live. So that if there's anything that doesn't quite go according to plan that you're not, you know, driving down the highway and your phone is blowing up with these issues, those are the types of things you really want to avoid to choosing that next you know the time really when you're going to be sitting in front of a computer or in your office or available over the phone, whatever that looks like for your business and you want to release it to like a subset of your business.

So email list is fantastic. The Facebook community is a great one if you do text message or SMS marketing and also a great choice. If you do a lot of social media lives. This is another great resource. So our sequence of events we launched in the Facebook community. So if you are part of the service based business society Facebook group, you know that we started about five days early mentioning that the offer was coming up and asking if people had any questions from that post in the Facebook group. We actually had a few people booked some calls to ask some questions so that they could be ready when the actual launch occurred. So now you're bringing these people in so our plan with that and it actually worked quite well was that we had some people come in and ask some questions, and they have since shared when the launch went on. Now you have some people who understand they've asked their questions. And they are going to help share your launch with others that might fit the purchase. So, once we worked through the group and had some people, there was a little bit of chatter and buzz, and then we launched it on social media. So this was the next step. And through social media and some posts on all different platforms and whatnot, then we started down this, just creating some additional traffic to the site, making sure that everything was great. That happened on Friday. And we basically, if you think of that as your soft launch, now we've moved more to a full launch this week. So what does that look like? Well, that looks like some emails, it looks like some live social media, great tool to share. And that is restream.io. So you know, I always love the efficiency hacks and whatnot. And one of the things I've always found super challenging about doing live social media is you have to go live in so many places, or pick where you're gonna go live. And I really felt like there had to be a way to be more efficient about this, because if I was gonna go live, I really wanted to go live in as many places as I could. And I have done it a couple of different ways in the past, you know, using like webcam for Facebook and cell phone for Instagram at the same time, I never really loved the you know, it didn't, it just wasn't right. I didn't love it, it was hard to manage. And so we recently invested in a platform called restream.io, I will link it in the show notes. And basically, this allows you to pick several based on your plan, different platforms. So with this tool, we were able to go live on LinkedIn, Facebook group, Twitter, YouTube, all at the same time. There's also this kind of workaround to being able to go live on Instagram at the same time, this is the one that has been a little bit troubling for us.

It's a known challenge, Instagram, technically, you can only go live through the app on your mobile device. So anything else is kind of a hack, if you will, trying to go live on Instagram. And so through this, we were able to get a number of different audiences all at the same time. So in addition to of course, being live and all of those places, we also were then able to have created this video that is in all these different platforms. And so places like YouTube and whatnot, I was able to just go in after the fact and add a thumbnail, and it's a new YouTube video on the channel.

So looking for efficiencies, like using restream is a way that you can truly look at maximizing the impact of your launch, while still being mindful of your time. I only went live for about 15 minutes. But had I gone live for 15 minutes. In all of those different places. I mean, really, that could have been over an hour of time plus the time switching platforms and whatnot. So what really took me about 25 minutes could have taken, you know, an hour and a half. So to me that is a great way of truly utilizing that time, I felt really positive about taking that time and using it that way. Now, that doesn't mean it was easy. And I wanted to share that today. It seemed like every single thing happened to prevent me from making the commitment to myself to go live today. I had set up a restream. I connected all of my channels, I had set all of my titles, I was literally ready to hit the go button. And I had a meeting notification. Oh, you have a meeting in 10 minutes. And I was like, Oh, it felt like my morning had just disappeared. So I was like okay, well, 10 minutes is not enough time. So I'll come back. And then it was that kind of mid afternoon time. And I'm like, Okay, perfect. Let's do this. And I was like, Oh no, it's 10 minutes until my next meeting, and then with school pickup. And so suddenly now I have committed to myself that we're going live today. And now I have three kids at home. So I played a little bit of what I like to call live video roulette, similar to podcast or podcast recording roulette and decided to go live even now I had three kids at home and things were busy because I knew that if I just took the 25 minutes 15 minutes on air that I would be able to talk about our new launch and get it out there.

Now. I probably would not have put the same weight to it if I was only going to live in one place. But since I knew I was really getting that message out, it was more worth it to me really, that's looking at the return on that time and thinking, hey, this is really worth it. So I set the kids up with their after school snack and an activity and those types of things and made it happen. And truly, at the end, after I had not been interrupted, I felt super positive about that. So one of the biggest challenges is recording videos, recording podcast episodes, all these types of things when you're balancing children at home. And pretty much all of my clients have had my kids pop into a meeting here or there, sometimes it is a little more disruptive than others. And you know, when I first started, it would cause me anxiety, I would hear the kids coming and truly wasn't sure you know what to do, or, and I think part of that, you know, COVID, in, a lot of people working from home really changed that and made it more acceptable. But I also love my littlest who is at home a lot of the time. He chats away and knows who different clients are and says hello, and I mean, hopefully, they don't mind. But they all seem to have a friendly, ongoing relationship with my kids. And so I think that it's just part of who I am. And we all carry on.

I would like to think that the clients you choose to work with, they accept you for whoever you are, whether that is you have pets at home, or a noisy neighbor, or have kids that could potentially interrupt, you know, not using those types of things as an excuse not to carry on not to just do what needs to be done for your business. So I'll get off my soapbox now about not using it as an excuse. But I will admit, I felt like I could have failed out on the going live today. And I didn't because it was important to the launch.

So we've at this point done quite a few of the mainstream pieces of the launch. But there's a few other pieces that I wanted to share that can potentially offer additional value to a launch that you may not think of. You may or may not love doing live video, but it does pop up and offer additional notifications that sharing other video doesn't offer. In fact, I had someone in my live today. I mentioned that they hadn't seen me go live on LinkedIn in a while, and that it had popped up on their cell phone, and that they were tuning in that way. So Instagram Live is another one, it does pop up noting that you are live to your followers. So it can be a great way of connecting with more people than just sharing another type of style of video.

However, there are some other ways as I mentioned, that can offer some additional reach. So one of the things that we have done is issued a press release to different marketing channels. And so what this does is it does a few things. Number one we're linking, we're using backlinks back to our new service page. So that is helping with the reach of that page, we're getting additional keywords out on the internet, all in a variety of different places. And those are driving back to our new service page. We also have a couple of tools that help with indexing and using the appropriate keywords, all of these different types of things. And if you're interested in more of the technical side of using different press releases, and backlinks and all of these types of things, I'm happy to share any of that inside the Facebook community, it's a little harder to describe in like an audio podcast setting. But I do want to highlight that even going back to a previous episode, where we had Sabrina Childress, who is a CIO, she works in PR, really thinking of different press channels, different areas, different places that you can share your message that can help drive traffic to your launch. So we've got some of these press release type pieces, we've got a focus on some additional blog posts and articles on LinkedIn coming out that share why our new offer is super relevant to different business owners. And so, you know, these are the steps that you can take to really level up. You want to think about your launch as this new piece of your business that you want everyone to know about. So how can you truly ship it from the rooftops in a way that is going to continue to offer you value not just in the moment that you're standing there shouting from the rooftops, which is something like the live video, but also in a way that is going to continue to offer that value on an ongoing basis.

The other piece that we're going to continue to do is add some YouTube content that talks more about this. I am an executive contributor to brains magazine. So while you can't directly promote in places like that, we can discuss the challenge and potential solution and then add our contact information. And so sometimes it's looking for those opportunities to connect with the people who your offer is for, even if it's not a direct sales pitch, because a lot of these additional places, press releases, contributions to magazines, these types of things can't be a direct sales pitch. So looking at how you can add value in a way that brings that audience back to you.

So and just to touch a little bit on our concierge services, because it is something that I have been working on for a number of months, and I'm so excited to bring to the market because it truly does serve and help with a challenge that so many entrepreneurs experience. And a lot of times everyone at one time or another has said, I just want to pay to make that problem go away. Or I wish I knew what it costs to solve that problem. Or I just need an extra set of hands for like three days, any of these statements all can be solved with our concierge service. And that is because there is no commitment. So I kind of expressed the risk with three different pricing models. And so one of those is just pay as you go, you need some help, you have a challenge, you want it fixed, you submit a work request, which is not an authorization to get started a work request truly is just you asking for information. You say this is my business challenge. And then we come back within 12 hours and say this is our proposed timeline to solve that challenge. And this is what it's going to cost. From there, you can approve the work or you can decide, hey, this isn't the best time for that. Or you can say, well, that costs way more than I thought. But oftentimes, what I've noticed is entrepreneurs are shocked. Sometimes we solve these problems that they have had on their task list for weeks or months, quickly and for way less than they thought. Because if you don't actually know how to solve a challenge, you know, you've had a problem. And you're like, I don't know how to solve this, I know it needs to be solved. But you have to investigate in terms of the best method. You have to either learn or hire someone or all, you know, it's this multi-step process. And sometimes if it's something you don't know anything about in your mind, you almost grow it into a larger problem. And so sometimes it just takes someone coming in being like, Hey, that's a six hour solution. And it can be done by next Wednesday, and it's gonna cost you this much. And you can say, Oh, my goodness, I had no idea it was that simple. And so we bring this offer to the market in the hopes that we can take some of these challenges, and just make them go away. So that people can get back to focusing on the parts that they're passionate about, or the parts that they're really good at.

We don't want to be distracted by these pieces of the business backlog, or overwhelmed by all of these different things. So our concierge service truly is our whole agency team. So we have a bookkeeping and graphic design, video editing, podcast producing email management, I mean, the list goes on and on. And so when you have access to these different skill sets and different attributes by this talented team of vetted professionals, you can solve these problems in just a matter of a few clicks. In less than two minutes, you can have submitted your work request 12 hours later, you're getting your response saying, Hey, this is your problem. This is how long it's going to take us to solve it. And this is what it's going to cost. From there you are 100% in the driver's seat to say, yes, like, I want to go ahead, I want this problem solved. And I cannot believe that I can get it solved so easily. Or you can say hey, you know, this way just me gathering up some information. I'm working on my launch. And this is one part of it. And so now I have the information.

Knowledge is power. And so gathering up this information, so that you can utilize it in your business is truly a very powerful shift. And so it's truly exciting that the concierge is going to change the game because now without any commitment. You know, you may have one small problem in your business that you don't know how to solve, but you're wasting time trying to figure it out. And now it's just a matter of just let's just get it solved so that you can get back on track and focused. So that's all the time we have for today. And thanks for tuning in.

Well, we are all out of time for today. If you guys have not joined the service-based business society Facebook community, make sure you head on over to Facebook and we can continue the conversation. Be sure to also follow the show by going to any podcast app and searching surface-based Business society click subscribe click the fifth star and leave us a written review Have a great week and we will see you soon