Salome Schillack:

Hello, and welcome to episode number 138 of The Shine Show. Today's episode I'm going to share with you my friend Toni Bache, who recently ran a launch that was very unconventional. Toni made six figures in her launch without a sales page and without any content being inside her membership. So if you're wondering who's this girl, Toni Bache is a membership growth strategist who helps busy women build and scale their memberships without sacrifice so they can have freedom, flexibility, and fulfillment that first attracted them to starting their own business in the first place. Let's listen to my interview with Toni.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack and I help online course creators launch, grow, and scale their business with Facebook and Instagram ads, so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you are ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner, and grow your online business faster, then tune because you are ready to shine and this is The Shine Show.

Toni thank you so much for joining me on The Shine Show.

Toni Bache:

Thank you so much for having me Salome.

Salome Schillack:

I'm so happy to have you here. I am excited to share the unicorn that is Toni Bache with my audience, because you truly are a unicorn. You're so smart and you are tucked away in a secret little corner in the Gold Coast and I feel like the whole world should know about Toni Bache and should know about all the amazing work that you do. So before we dive in, just tell us a little bit about your journey with online marketing.

Toni Bache:

Yeah. It's been a wild ride, let's just say that. My background is corporate. I grew up in corporate. I worked there for many, many years at a super senior level, was at a VP level, youngest VP ever in the company, working in business strategy in HR. I was business coaching all day effectively and helping people manage people all day effectively, but I always had these little side hustles. I was always doing something, there was just always that entrepreneurial spirit that I had and where I really got into the whole online marketing world and online coaching world was I... Its funny story, actually. I was really exhausted and I was sick and I kept going to the doctors and they were like, "Oh, we don't know what's wrong with you." And I tried all of these treatments and it wasn't working.

And I went, "I'm going to take care of this myself. I'm sick of not getting answers." And so I thought, "What can I do to take control of my own health and wellbeing?" And I was working a lot, I was working ridiculous hours and traveling all of the time and I thought, "I just need to exercise consistently." So I decided to exercise for every day for 30 days and not like the massive exercising crazy thing, but just five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day to build the habit and build the momentum. And that 30 days became 60, 90, and then it became 365 days. And I got to the 365 days and I said to my husband, "What do I do? I achieved this crazy goal." And he was like, "Oh, you should write a blog about it."

And I was like, "I've never written a blog in my life." And he had this blog that was a running blog, but only our friends and family read it. It wasn't a very popular running blog. So I just bashed it out there one morning. And it went off into the universe and somehow it got picked up by Arianna Huffington's publication Thrive. And so then all of these people started reaching out to me and saying, "Hey, I want to do the same thing. Can you help me?" And the little entrepreneur in me went, "Yes, I can. Yes I can." And so that's when my first online course was born and I basically in two weeks created a business, created a website, created a course, marketed my course. And I spent $50 on my domain and hosting and I got 300 people in my course.

It was just over 300. And I didn't know that that was special, I thought that was normal because I hadn't done in my mind a whole lot to promote it. And that went very successfully. And then after a while I was like, "Well, I just taught them one little thing. There's so much more to teach them." There's more I need to show them, there's more I need to help them with. So I said to them, "I've got this idea. What do you think about if, instead of just having this course, if you pay a monthly fee and each month I'll teach you something new and I'll help you implement something new." And they were like, "Great idea." I literally thought I created memberships. I thought that I was the person that had that idea, but then it became this very successful membership.

And all the while I was still in my corporate job. So I had to make it work in just a couple of hours a week. I had to really make it work in a way that I could run this without taking much time away from myself and help all of these wonderful women. And from there a whole bunch of people kept saying, "This is really successful. How did you do it?" I took all of my coaching experience and qualifications and wrapped that up into, well, this is how I do it and this is how I build successful memberships. And that's how I became a membership coach. That's a short way of telling a long story, but I hope that gives you the background you're looking for.

Salome Schillack:

That is so cool. That's accidental success. Then also, I want to say nothing about it is accidental because I know how much you invest in your own learning. I know how committed you are to supporting your students and not just your students because you and I met in Stu's community, and I see you just every day in there supporting his students as well. So I want to talk about your recent launch of your higher level membership. I saw you develop this. I saw you brainstorm this. I saw you in every stage of, am I doing this or am I doing that or am I going to do this? And then it's like magic, you just pulled it together. And what felt to me overnight, you went from, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do to I'm launching my membership and it is blasting off into the universe and it was incredible watching you. So I want you to tell us the story of how you launched this new membership. Let's start with, where did the desire come from for this new membership?

Toni Bache:

Yeah, it's really interesting. So I had a low ticket business coaching membership and then I had a whole bunch of one-on-one clients. The one-on-one clients, I loved working with them, but here I am telling people, "You need to scale your business without sacrifice, you need to leverage your time or you need to do all of these things." And it felt really incongruent that I was still doing one on one coaching, but I also still had this belief that I didn't want to be another cookie cutter coach. I didn't want to be another person that's like, "Sign up to my coaching program and follow this exact blueprint to get to this exact same outcome that a whole bunch of other people are following." I wanted to make sure that it was a very individual experience, an experience where people could get more out of working together as a group than what they could get working one on one.

So it took me a long time to wrap my head around that and I think blast past some limiting beliefs that I couldn't create that curated custom experience for each individual person in a group. But also I think it just took a little bit of strategizing and figuring out like, how can I do that? Because I see my one on one clients saying, "I feel so alone. I have these struggles. I'm the only one." I'm like, "You're not the only one. I just spoke to three other people today having the same problem." And time and time again, they're like, "Can you help me with this?" And I would spend time helping them and then I would get off the call and jump on the next call and somebody would want help with almost the exact same thing.

And I'm like, well, they're paying me really, really, really good money for me to repeat myself. What if I could do it in a way that I could create a cache of these things that I'm repeating myself over and over again. And give them those as baseline things to scale their business, like a pick and mix, but then get the coaching from me in a group environment because the sum of all of us together is greater than just one [crosstalk]. So that's really where I was born, too much demand for one on one coaching, me wanting to leverage my time and me realizing that there's actually a better way to do it and get a better than one on one experience within [crosstalk].

Salome Schillack:

Oh, that's amazing. And at the point, how many followers did you have on social media?

Toni Bache:

Business wise?

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. Zero.

Toni Bache:

Yep. Zero. Actually, in fairness, I probably had a couple on a Facebook page that was dead that I wasn't using, but I wasn't even active on Instagram. I wasn't active on Facebook from a business perspective at all.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. What about your email list? You would have a fairly healthy email list, but for this offer, did you have people on your email list that were right for this?

Toni Bache:

Not really. For people that I knew could be right for this, I had an email list of about 400, but I knew a lot of them wouldn't be right because all of them were in the right niche. They all had memberships, which was the people I was serving, but not many of them were at that six figure and above group of people that I was targeting and I didn't have them pre segmented. So it was a very small number of people on my email list that would've been the right fit.

Salome Schillack:

That's fantastic. Now let's talk about your not sales page. So we know you didn't have a social media following. We know you didn't have a lot of people on your email list. You also had a not sales page.

Toni Bache:

Which is ironic because I actually love sales pages and I'm really great at making sales pages, but I was just like, "It doesn't feel right." This launch, I wanted it to be intimate. I wanted it to be different. So what I launched with was a PDF and it was not even a pretty PDF, you know how you can make PDFs pretty and put colors and stuff. It was black and white.

Salome Schillack:

It was a Google Doc.

Toni Bache:

Yeah, it was a Google Doc that I PDFed.

Salome Schillack:

Yes.

Toni Bache:

It was literally nothing fancy at all. And I didn't even follow... If I was to tell somebody how to write a sales page, I didn't even follow that structure. I literally just wrote from my heart what I was creating and why I was creating it and what they would get if they wanted to be part of it.

Salome Schillack:

And I do want to say, because I read your non-sales page and the beauty, beauty, the absolute, incredible beauty about your non-sales page was not that it didn't look fancier, that it was just a PDF. You really nailed the pain points of your ideal customer. You really nailed the desires of your ideal customer and you really, really nailed the offer. Nailed it. And that's the only things that matter. It doesn't have to look good. It doesn't have to be pretty. Doesn't have to be fancy, it's just does. So copywriting wise, you did all the copywriting yourself?

Toni Bache:

I did. I didn't outsource any of it, because I didn't know how it was going to go. Right. You hope for the best, but plan for the worst. And it probably took me maybe two or three hours, because I just sat down and bashed it out and then went back and went back, actually makes no sense at all. Two weeks things, but it probably took me two or three hours in total to write it.

Salome Schillack:

That's amazing. And I want to say the reason why you could write it in two or three hours, which is actually short, I would say that's short. It would take me three days to write the same page you did, is because you understand your ideal customer so well. So if you had no social media following and very little email list, tell us about how you got to understand who your ideal customer is so well and how to make this incredible offer to her.

Toni Bache:

Yeah, for sure. And I'll say just before I jump into that Salome, as well, is you said that I nailed the pain points and the desire and the offer. It was so easy because they'd all told me exactly what they wanted. So I literally just used their words. And so the people who are trying so hard to come up with the right words, please just listen to your people. All of the answers are there in your people. So how are I guess, launched this and it wasn't really a strategy. It sounds terrible because I am a strategist, but I tend to think much more about other people's businesses and what strategy they should be using than my own. And so a lot of things, when you connect the dots, looking backwards, you can go, "Oh, that was a really good strategy."

But at the time it's me just being me. And I think one of the things that my values are really around contribution and connection. And so that's really what I've always done. I have certain expertise around certain things around online business, online marketing, and specifically around memberships. I have a lot of expertise. So if I'm, and you and I have had this conversation a lot, if I am scrolling through a group that I'm a part of, and it doesn't matter what group it is, whose group it is, but if I'm scrolling through a group and I can see somebody who I can help, they've got a quick question. I answer that question. And I answer that question with no intention of ever trying to convince them to become a client of mine. Which might sound really strange because I'm sure that most of the gurus should tell you and like, "Always get your sales pitch in and follow up with a DM and do this and do that."

But I never, I just give generously, I contribute where I can and I genuinely love connecting with people. And what tends to happen is I give, I give, I give, and then people start to come to me for advice and say, "Hey, you've helped me so much with this. Can you help me with this as well? And how can I work with you?" And that tends to happen. My entire business has really been born through personal connections I've made and referrals and recommendations from other people. I've never really hustled hard with the marketing, I have in previous businesses, but in this business, I've never had to do that because people are just magnetized towards me. And not because I'm anyone special, but just because I take the time out to help them when so many other people just wouldn't give them the time of day.

Salome Schillack:

Well, that is very special. That is very special. And I can like testify to that. I see you constantly consistently just adding value. So it is no surprise to me that so many people just flock to you and have private messages with you and are attracted to you, because I think the gurus who do say, Yeah. How people show up in the groups and all those things. Sure. But if it's a hustle it's not sustainable.

Toni Bache:

It's not sustainable. And if it's inauthentic, you can see straight through it.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah, absolutely. And you are incredibly consistent with doing that and nobody would be consistent who's doing it as a hustle. If you're doing it as a hustle, you'll burn out. If it is who you are, like who you are, then you do it consistently. And I've even seen you do it at 3:00 AM in the morning. At 3:00 AM in our mastermind, my brain is completely fried at 3:00 AM, but you were there answering everybody's question and in our mastermind with Stu and just being present to every single person. So do not sell yourself short, that is your superpower.

Toni Bache:

Thank you.

Salome Schillack:

So you literally, once you decided you're going to launch this, you had a lot of people already reaching out to you wanting to work more. How did you funnel all those one on one conversations or all of those people that were reaching out to you? How did you funnel them into your membership in a launch way? Because there would still be a period of, okay, here's my thing. And the court is going to close now for my thing. There's still this kind of that element of launch where you have an event, but how did you bring all these people together with conversations to your non-sales page?

Toni Bache:

Honestly, because it was never a strategy, right? I hadn't ever kept a list of any of the people. It wasn't like I was, "Oh, here's the 500 people I'll reach out to or anything like that. I literally didn't have a list at all. So I made a post on my personal social media, not on any of my business pages or anything like that. And I wrote what I would call a love letter to my people. And I really said to them like, over the past few years, because this was a few years in the making. Salome said, "You went from, I'm not sure if I'm going to do it to I'm doing it." And it did happen quickly that phase, but there'd been two years prior to that of people asking me to do it and me thinking, "How can I make this work? How can I make this work over and over again?"

But during that period, and I just said in this love letter, so many people have asked me for this and there's a real gap in the market, because if you're a really amazing one on one coach, you keep putting your prices up and you keep realizing, I've got to leverage my time and you go to group. But not many of them do group well, not many of them do group where you feel seen and you feel heard and you actually get the support you need when you need it. There's a lot of people out there that are really just going, "Oh, here's my mastermind." Or here's this or here's that but you really don't get that genuine support where somebody understands your business and is there to help you when you need it.

And so I just wrote a love letter and said, "I figured this out. I finally figured this out. I think I'm going to do it. Let me know if you're interested." And from that, quite a few people actually wrote and said, "I'm interested. I'm interested." A lot of people DMed me. And from there I was like, "Oh crap, I better actually do something [inaudible]." When I actually went back and wrote my non-sales page and started to just have conversations with them. But I actually, when I say have conversations with them, I only jumped on the phone with one person.

Salome Schillack:

Wow.

Toni Bache:

And the reason I jumped on the phone with them was because I didn't know them from a bar of soap and they'd been referred to me and I wanted to really curate a whole bunch of very high quality women in this group. And so I wanted to make sure that everybody was a 100% the right fit for it. And there was an application and you got a good sense from that, but there was... And I said no to a lot of people, but there was one person who I was like, "I think it's a yes, but I'm not sure." And so I got on the phone with her, but everyone else I just chatted to through DMs and I would leave them little voice recording, Salome knows I do that all the time. I would leave them little voice recordings and we'd go back and forward on that.

And other than that, I did one more post on my socials, like the week before it closed to just say, "Hey, if you missed it, I've launched this thing. If you want more information, let me know." And that was literally it, it was like one of those tiny little posts that you put the colored background on, that was it. And I sent one email to my list and just said, "Hey, I've launched the thing. It's not for everyone. Here's super high level what it is. It was a very short email. Hit reply and let me know if you're interested."

Salome Schillack:

That's awesome.

Toni Bache:

Yeah. That was it. That was my entire launch.

Salome Schillack:

And do you want to share any numbers of students or revenue? Anything you don't have to share anything but any numbers you're happy to share?

Toni Bache:

Yeah. Well, I can share that we did our first a $100,000 month that month. So it went okay. We did well.

Salome Schillack:

That's fantastic.

Toni Bache:

Yeah. So we did our first six figure month, which was great. And we've been trending that direction, but to actually crack that six figure month was amazing and really... And I think, you can talk about the financial success and I'm really grateful for the financial success that we've had in our business. And I love the possibilities that that creates for us, but I think what lights me up so much is I literally get goosebumps still when I think about, this is my business. The women I get to work with on a daily basis are incredible, they are just incredible and what they're achieving is out of this world.

I just pinch myself going, "Is this real?" For real, I just get to talk to people who I really love talking to all day about how they can grow their businesses and have more time with their families. Is that what I get to do all day? It seems surreal after so many years in corporate where you like your job, but you have to do things that you don't always like to do. And now I literally get to do what I love doing every day and I have an amazing lifestyle to go with it.

Salome Schillack:

Oh, that is just incredible. For me, when I have those moments where I feel exactly the same way as you do. And I go just, "This was the dream. And here is the dream." When I think back on that, I want to hug Salome from six years ago. I just want to hold her and hug her and tell her, "It's all going to be okay. It's all going to be okay. And you're going to get to work with these incredible people." And one of the things that I love most about what you said, the group is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Toni Bache:

Yes.

Salome Schillack:

Is when these women create these businesses. And sometimes they would give me credit for some something they achieved and I go, "No, it's all you. It's all you." But the fact that you facilitated an environment where she can have the skills or believe in the fact that you already had the skills, which I think is in a lot of cases, true. They already have the skills, they just haven't seen the evidence of it. Then to see it come together and to see the success that they create is really is a privilege, isn't it?

Toni Bache:

It's amazing. There's one person in particular I can think of and she constantly credits me with so much in her business. And I'm so grateful for the credit she gives me, but I'm like, "Don't discredit yourself. You've done so much work." She literally, not even 18 months ago, she was only doing $2,000 a month in her membership. Fast forward to today, she's doing 32,000 a month in her business. And honestly is on the trajectory. Mark my words this time, she'll kill me for saying this, but this time, next year she'll be doing six figure months. So I have no doubt in my mind that she will. But in that time, she's also gone from working 40 hours a week down to four hours a week. And now she creates work for herself because she's like, "Surely I should be doing something in my business, but we've just got it automated so much."

There was things that I helped her with in terms of strategy and structure. And there was all those little things that happened, number one thing that changed for her was belief. I believed in her that she could do it. I believed, I remember when I said [inaudible]. She said to me, "Do you really think it's possible that I can do 10K months?" I'm like, "Absolutely." Do you really think it's possible I can work just five hours a week? I'm like, "Absolutely." And that belief is what fueled her and having somebody to believe in her. And so I think if you're listening and there's somebody that is a business besty with you, the biggest gift you can give them is believing in them because sometimes they need somebody else to see what's possible and to encourage them that it is really possible for them.

Salome Schillack:

Absolutely. I love that so much. It makes me think of the saying the rising tide lifts all the boats. Because we need to see evidence sometimes in order to believe it. And if somebody else can create that, if we can see somebody else creating that, then we know that it can be done and then we can do it. And even if that person is a competitor or almost, especially when that person is a competitor, then you go, "Well, if my competition can do this, then I can do it too." And then it can have such an incredible impact in your own life.

Toni Bache:

Exactly. And there's enough room for all of us to succeed. So you can totally just embrace collaboration and not competition. And don't be afraid of your competitors, literally use them as inspiration and then inspire them yourselves, because you've got a lot to learn from one another and there's enough room for everybody to win. You don't have to fight it out tooth and nail, it doesn't [inaudible].

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. I think our little brains can't wrap our heads around how big the internet is sometimes. We still think, "Oh no, there's an end to my ideal customer." But there is no end to your ideal customer, if you're using the internet. There is no end. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's great. You've launched this now a couple of times, is it evergreen? Is it open all the time or are you doing more launches?

Toni Bache:

Yeah, so basically what I have done, I closed the doors for a little while, well, because that's another cool thing to share is I built nothing. Literally there was nothing, there was a concept. And so once I got these members and I was very transparent about that, [crosstalk] it was all perfect behind the scenes. I was very transparent about the fact that this was new, we would be co-creating it together. And we have done that. So I initially shut the doors and didn't let anyone in, because I wanted to sort out that backend a little bit before I was like, "Bring more people in." And so now I've gone to an evergreen model, but because it is invitation and application only. I'm really just having one date a month so I can onboard people together.

My intention is never to make it huge. I don't want it to be a huge membership. It's high ticket, but it's because it's high touch. And in order to continue to give that individualized service, I want to make sure that we've got a tight number of people in there. So I'm never going to be onboarding a ton of people at once, but just for efficiency reasons, I'll just bring people in once a month, then go from there. And if there's nobody in that month, great. If there's a lot of people in that month, great. I'm not really assigning much meaning to it because I'm very selective about [crosstalk] to go into the membership. And for me, that integrity around keeping the caliber of the women at the right level is huge because I don't know about you Salome, but I've been a part of plenty of masterminds and group coaching experiences in the past where they're pitched at a certain level. And then when you join it, you're like, "Ah, cool."

Salome Schillack:

Yes.

Toni Bache:

I remember I joined one and I did quit, because they promised me, I was like, "I want to be really sure. This is high ticket. This is blah, blah, blah." Yes, we promise. We promise. We promise. And then I join. And then I go into the group and the first ask question I see is what's a pixel?

Salome Schillack:

Oh, damn.

Toni Bache:

That's more important to me, the integrity and the caliber of the people is way more important to me than hurrying up and getting a number of people in there. We've got other arms of our business we can grow quickly. If we wanted to grow this quickly, we could. But we're really happy to just continue to use that. I guess, magnetic marketing strategy and people can come, people [crosstalk]. I've already got a bunch of people I've spoken to that are like, "I want to join in the new year." And there's also no scarcity. I'm not like, "No, you have to join now." I'm like, "No worries. It's going to be open. Come back in January, come back in February, come back when you're ready." There may be points where the price goes up and I'll be honest about that, but I'm not going to be like scarcity scary tactic, because these women are smarter than that. They don't need to and I do change those strategies. I'm not anti them, but I don't need to do that on women at this level. They don't need that. That's not what they're looking for.

Salome Schillack:

What I love about that so much is... And you and I spoke to our friend Maria, she's doing a similar thing and she's going to be on the podcast next week, by the way.

Toni Bache:

It's amazing.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. So it's this shift back to a gentler, more feminine, more easy. I don't know. As women, we have monthly cycles, right? Whereas men are more like short, aggressive bursts. Apparently somebody told me a man goes through his entire cycle, every 24 hours. It's like, I don't know if that's scientifically proven, but if somebody can prove that, but we are more slow pulses. Right. And they're more short, sharp bursts. So I do you feel like the live launch model with all of its high energy and really a lot of just energy that goes into a short period is a more masculine way of launching.

And this is more feminine and we're going that way with the launch next year as well, where it's just this sort of open card once a month. And when you are ready, you come and join us. And if you're not, that's okay, you don't need it this month because it will unfold perfectly. And I just love that. I don't know if it's one of those things where my eyes have just opened up to see other people doing more of this, but they've been doing it all along. Or if more people are actually doing it this way, but I'm just loving it.

Toni Bache:

I think more people are doing it this way. There's nothing wrong with the traditional live launch method. I still teach that to a lot of the people I work with, it still works in a lot of situations, but depending on your niche, depending on what type of thing you're offering, it doesn't always fit. And it also, the most important thing with launches is it has to fit with you. And it has to be really aligned with you. And I think that it has increased because I think during COVID what people craved more than anything was connection. And so when people see another sales page chucked up in another webinar and another this, this and that, and there's nothing. I don't want anyone to think I'm poopooing webinars or sales pages. I love them both. I do. But I think that just people are a little tired of that and they want to be seen, they want to be heard.

And that individual personal connection is so meaningful to them right now. And obviously if your strategy is to have a low ticket course or membership where you're going for volume, you can't have that personal connection easily. There's some little strategies you can use, but it's a little bit more challenging. But if you're going for a higher ticket, more higher touch approach, then it's really easy and it's actually less work. All of the hours I saved on not doing a perfectly formatted WordPress sales page and all of this stuff I could put that time and energy into just chatting with people in DMs. And that's what people really want is to know that it's for them and it's going to work for them.

Salome Schillack:

I love it. I can't wait to watch how your membership grows and to see how you grow in it and to see how the way that you launch it grows. It's very exciting. And I feel so lucky to have a front row seat to what you are creating. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go?

Toni Bache:

Yeah. I'm actually finally on Instagram now. So you can come and find me on Instagram, it's just Toni.bache at Instagram and same on Facebook. So you can hit me up in either of those locations. I still don't have a webpage. That's coming soon. That's coming [crosstalk].

Salome Schillack:

No, no, I think you should just not have a web page ever.

Toni Bache:

I know. I'm in that phase now where I'm like, I've not had one so long. I feel like I just want to keep resisting it, but I'll probably do it eventually, honestly, and feel free. The help via DMs stands and I'm not going to try and sales pitch you into anything. If you need anything, feel free to reach out.

Salome Schillack:

That's fantastic. We'll link to Toni's Instagram and her Facebook in the show notes. Toni, thank you so much for joining me.

Toni Bache:

Thank you for having me. I'm so grateful.

Salome Schillack:

You're very welcome. Well, I really hope that that interview with Toni inspired you and showed you that there are so many possible ways that you can launch your membership, that you can get started and that you can get successful. You don't need ads, you don't need a big audience. You just need a very good offer and you need to know that there are people who are willing to pay for your offer. I hope you enjoy that. Let me, you know what your biggest takeaway is and come and say hi on Instagram and tell us what you learned.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button, so you never miss a thing.