Hello, and welcome to episode number 163 of The Shine Show. Today's episode is called How to Transfusion Out of one-on-one Work Without Losing Income, and I share with you a little bit of my own experience. 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 businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world.

If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine, and this is The Shine Show. Hello my dear friend, it is lovely to be here with you. It's Saturday morning here in Brisbane and the sun is shining. It's a little cool outside, it's winter here in Australia and my family, and I just got back from the most magnificent 10 days in Fiji.

If you have never been to Fiji, put that on your bucket list. The postcards are accurate, it is just an absolute paradise, and I'm so grateful to be back here with you. I have rested, it's amazing for me to see how my creativity and my ability to problem solve just a hundred times. It explodes when I come back from a holiday. It really, really does matter that we switch off and that we learn to look after our brains.

I had such a wonderful, wonderful time just clearing my mind from the clutter. Highly recommend it. If you can, book some time away today, it really makes a difference. Okay, today, I am going to tell you the story of how I transitioned out of mostly one-on-one work into one to many work. A lot of you are still working as coaches. You may be agency owners like me or freelancers or done for you specialists or consultants. Maybe like me, you started out as a Facebook Ads Manager, and you are looking to turn your business into a one to many model which is why you're here, and which is why you want to learn more about launching an online courses business with me here.

Now, I will say that I still bring in I would say at this point of time, maybe two-thirds of our income in Shine And Succeed Pty Ltd which is the business that I run is two-thirds of it is still income coming in from our clients, our one-on-one clients in the agency. And another I would say at this stage, oh goodness me, you would think, I'm not telling you the truth. We're leaning towards half-half. Every month is a little bit different, but on some months, it's two thirds, one-on-one, one-third online courses, and other months, it is kind of getting close to being half-half which makes me really happy because in the agency side of the business where we work with people one-on-one, where I work with them one-on-one, but my team also does a ton of work in the background for them, we only need a handful of clients to bring in two-thirds of our income which sounds incredible.

It is if you think about only needing a handful of clients to make a large amount of money, that is wonderful. And we definitely are incredibly lucky to have been able to build it that way, but there's a lack of security in that. I have a team of people that I have to hire that has to be available. So it's not just contractors, it is employees and it is semi-permanent contractors that I have an agreement with to pay them every month, but clients come and go and, it's not always as easy to get a client as it is to get a few more students inside a course.

So in order to mitigate that risk, it is important that even if you want to hang onto your one-on-one clients like I do, that you balance that out with some one to many work. It's also good for your sanity because you will possibly lose your mind if you are only working with one-on-one clients, and you're the only person doing all of the work there. So I do want you to substitute your income even if you love one-on-one. And even if you're okay with the ups and downs of the income from one-on-one work, I do still want you to work on getting your one to many model, one to many your courses launched, or even group coaching programs launched because it does provide more stability.

It also gives you the power. If we've seen anything from COVID, we've got to build our businesses for pivot. Do you also see Ross pulling a couch up a stairway when I say the word pivot? I still see that picture of Ross and the couch pivot, pivot. If I'm seeing one thing, it is the world is changing faster I feel, and maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I feel like it's changing faster than it used to.

And maybe that's because of the speed of the just information models changing, this handful of big companies that we are at the mercy of with our online course businesses, Facebook, Apple, Apple makes one decision one day and the next day, the algorithm changes, and it impacts the algorithm, it impacts the pixel and suddenly advertising is different and we all have to adapt to that, and then we all run back to social media and organic, but we also have to be able to adapt for that.

And so I am all for building sustainable businesses that are built for growth, built for profitable and predictable scaling, not for throwing a lot of spaghetti on the wall in one or two places, and then publishing those results and telling everyone how this is the new magic pill. Well, I think you know that about me already. Okay, so let me tell you how I did it, and then I'm going to give you some step by steps for how you can do it, and then you're off to the races my friend.

Then you will have pretty much a step by step method for how you can bring more one to many work into your business, into your life and how you can do it in three to six months and what you can expect it to look like in about a year. So at the beginning of 2018, I quit my job. I had just been to San Diego to Amy Porterfield's B-School live event, met my mentor, Rick Mulready there, I met James Wedmore there, I met Jasmine Star, I met Pat Flynn. I'm trying to think who else was there.

I met Amy, of course, was introduced to Amy, and she is as lovely as you think she is. She's just the warmest, most wonderful person. And I signed up for clients for my Facebook Ads Freelancing Ads Manager Business. Came home, gave my boss the bird and started freelancing at the beginning of 2018. Now, this was three years into trying to build a business. I had already launched an online course that I thought had failed, it hadn't. I had already done social media to the point of burnout multiple times.

I had been on every platform available to mankind. I had tried every tactic, I had bought every online course. I had burnt out, gone back to my day job and realized no day job is definitely not what I want. I had come back from $40,000 of debt. So January 2018 really was a pivotal moment for me. Suddenly, everything I had worked so hard for three years started working. It started paying off and all of the knowledge I collected over the three years, I was able to pour into helping other online course builders run ads.

I also did some other marketing work for them. Suddenly I realized I had a skill like building a webinar for someone that I had developed, and there are people who have $2 million businesses who don't know how to build a webinar. Who's happy to pay for things like that. So 2018 was mostly made up of making money from whatever my skills were I could sell to any online course creator who was willing to buy from me.

I also really built my systems and processes for running ads. And so by the end of 2018, I was able to hire ... Initially I hired three people on hourly rates to help me run ads. I think I had 12 clients at that point, managing them all by myself. And I hired three ads managers to help me while I was going to go on holiday for six weeks with my family. I learned a lot about hiring people, learned a lot about firing people, and learned a lot about keeping people accountable during that holiday, but that's a story for another day.

One of those three people was Caroline, and Caroline is still in my business. Caroline is the person who writes the monthly Facebook Ad update that if you are one of our clients, if you're one of The Launch Lounge students or an A-Lister student, you would get this monthly report that tells you exactly what is the lay of the land in Facebook Ads world. At the moment, Caroline is one of the members of the geek team in my business.

She's one of our main geeks. We proudly refer to ourselves as geeks because we geek out to a degree that is laughable on some techy stuff and on funnels and on marketing, all things, online course marketing. So Caroline was one of the people who joined me at the end of 2018, and that meant that most of 2019 was spent working with Caroline, and I also then hired Hannah who is my absolute work wife. Hannah is one of the cornerstones pillars of Shine and Succeed, and she has just the most incredible brain.

She is the geek of all geeks, and that girl can do data and analytics and create a story for what your data and analytics tells you like nobody can. I am the luckiest person ever to have Caroline and Hannah in my business. And I'm sure my clients agree that Caroline and Hannah are both worth their white and gold. So in 2019, I started handing off all the work to Caroline and Hannah to the point where by the end of 2019, Caroline and Hannah were doing pretty much, most of the day to day client work with the exception of sales calls.

I was still doing all the sales calls and I was still taking the one-on-one calls with the clients because we were based we're based in Australia, as you know, and most of our clients are in the US. And so I was the only one who could really talk to them sometimes at four o'clock in the morning. And so I would have the strategy calls with the clients and then Caroline and Hannah would execute the work. And I realized towards the end of 2019 that that really gives me freedom to start focusing on diversifying the business and to start focusing on bringing in additional income streams so that I can mitigate risk.

And so that we don't have to rely on a handful of people to pay all of our salaries that if we lose some clients, we don't necessarily lose income. We have some other income streams that we can leverage to make some money. At the end of 2019, I started growing my email list. I knew I had to build an email list, but I knew it conceptually, but I didn't know it in my bones despite the fact that everyone who's successful tells you to build your list, I knew it conceptually, but I did not know it in my bones.

Today, I know that I have to build my email list in my bones because I have seen the absolute magic of having a responsive email list who adores you, who engages with you and who wants to hear from you and who wants to buy from you. If you take one thing away from this message today, I want that to be build your email list. Okay, so I started building my email list towards the end of 2019, and I launched the podcast.

I knew that I need content. I need free content to go out every single week. I also knew that I did not want to fall into another social media hustle. I had done the social media hustles in the first three years when my business failed to the bitter end, and I was just so over doing a social media hustle. So maybe I didn't know this at the time, I know it now. I can now look back and say there's definitely two types of content. One is large format content content, I have spoken about this on other episodes, and one is small format content.

Large format content is your podcast, your blog or your video blog or yeah, it's written, it's recorded in large format, or it's recorded in audio, video blog or a podcast. Now you can have that video on YouTube which is great and it qualifies the social media, but I still count a YouTube channel as larges format because people can binge and they can consume a lot of content, but a podcast, a blog or a video blog is your large format content, and those pieces of content really are your most important pieces of content.

Social media is small form, and those small form platforms really only serve one of two purposes. It's to get people to your large format content, or to get them onto your list, that's the only two things that they serve. So I'm going to go deeper into this. I'm getting sidetracked here. I started the podcast at the end of 2019, and I just started speaking. I just started podcasting, and by January 2020, I knew that adding podcasting and sending weekly emails and having consistent list building activities, publishing the podcast, marketing the podcast, driving people from social media to the podcast, driving people from social media to the email list, all of that required a lot of work, and so I hired Ashley.

Ashley was a VA, I would say a high level VA to help me with the marketing. And I had already started working on A-Lister when COVID hit. I was launching A-Lister right as COVID hit. And within 12 months of starting to sell to my list, I made $200,000 from A-Lister and The Launch Lounge combined. Now, I want you to think about that. The financial stability that that creates when you can add $200,000 in a year to your income by doing the same thing over and over and over again, it's not like client work where even though you're doing the same thing, you have to do it from scratch every time.

It is you do something from scratch once, and then you rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And within 12 months I had added $200,000 to my income, to the business's income with A-Lister and The Launch Lounge which really set me up well for 2021 when I started massively expanding my team and massively building out the course's side of our business, and I wish I can tell you what we're working on right now. You are in for a treat.

All I can say is buckle up because you are about to see the courses and membership side of this business really, really take off, but more about that on another podcast when I have some more concrete things to show you, but let me just say, I'm doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes that you're going to want to see. Okay, so how are we going to do this? What is the step by step?

You must be thinking, "Okay, thanks Salome, I love hearing your story, but give me this step by step. Tell me what I need to do if I'm going to transition from one-on-one work to one to many work or to building a more sustainable, scalable business with online courses." And I'm going to give you five steps. Now, let me give you, I'm going to give you the five steps and then I'm going to take them one by one and unpack them a little bit, and then I'll recap the five steps, and then you're on your own, then you're going to have to go and implement them.

And of course, I would love, love to hear from you either on Insta, DM me or send me an email at hello@shineandsucceed.com, and tell me what your plan is for shifting over from one-on-one work to one to many work. Okay, here's number one, step number one. Have you got your pain in your paper ready? Step number one, identify the work in your one-on-one business only you can do and hand the rest off.

Step number two, build a platform for your large format free content. Step number three, build your list. Step number four, pre-launch your course before you build it. And step number five is take your student's feedback and create your best value course that you can sell with the lowest amount of work at the highest possible price. Those are your five steps. Now, let's take them one by one and unpack them a little bit.

Let's talk about identify the work in your one-on-one business only you can do in handing the rest of it off. I realized when I hired Caroline and Hannah, there were a few things that only I could do at that point in time, I was the only one who could do strategy. I was the only one who understood both online course funnels and Facebook Ads. Today, I think Caroline and Hannah knows more about that than me, but back then, I was the only one who could do that.

So I had to work with them to teach them how to marry the relationship between Facebook Ads and online courses. And I had to meet with the clients to do strategy. I was the only person who could do creative quality control. So advertising and basically marketing is creative communication. It's the reason I love it so much. It's my musical theater days that I just cannot put it behind me.

I love creative communication, and I love seeing how you can take people on a journey with creative communication, advertising and launching and funnel building is nothing other than creative communication, and sometimes, people forget that an ad does not exist in a vacuum. An email does not exist in a vacuum. Sales page does not exist in a vacuum, a webinar does not exist in a vacuum.

There is a thread in all of it that runs through all of it. So creative quality control was something I knew I was the only person who could do that because I was the only person with the big picture for the clients. And with the ability to connect the dots between the strategy, the ads and the creative. I was also the only one who could take client meetings. I was the only one who was willing to get up at 4:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m., sometimes 2:00 a.m., yes there were 2:00 a.m. calls to talk to clients in the US, and I had my life arranged around that.

Whereas Caroline's kids were still quite little and she lived in Perth, so the timezone was an issue. And Hannah, I had to protect Hannah from clients. Hannah doesn't love working with clients which is great because she's really good at other things. So I realized that strategy, creative quality control, and client meetings were the only things I could do. I also realized I did not need to do any admin. I was not going to continue to do any project management.

I stopped creating reports and sending out reports. I stopped setting up ads, I stopped managing ads, I stopped scaling ads. Basically I stopped using the ads manager for the clients. Now, that was a big one to let go. I think it took me a proper year to really fully let go of that one because I thought this is a Facebook Ads business, so therefore I must do Facebook Ads. Today, I can honestly say, I think I have students who are more comfortable inside the ads manager than I am because I only go in there every now and then, and every time I do, it's changed, but the one thing that I still do better than everyone else is strategy and creative communication. That is just where I shine.

And so that is what I do and everything else I've handed off to other people. What I did have to do that I didn't know at that stage was develop my leadership skills to support Caroline and Hannah, to be able to learn and make decisions based on the needs of our clients. Leadership takes up a lot of time and you have to know that you're stepping up into becoming a CEO, a leader, and a manager, even when you hand off responsibilities to other people.

So make a list of your one-on-one business and the tasks that only you can do and then start brainstorming what everything else is that you can hand off to someone else. And if it scares you, you're doing it right, it is scary. So number one is identify the work in your one-on-one business. Only you can do in hand off the rest. Number two, build a platform for your large format free content.

In my case, that was a podcast. What I don't want you to do is to start hustling on social media. That is absolutely the last thing you as the CEO of your business and the keeper of the high level strategy information or strategic information should be doing. Social media is a beautiful, powerful tool that relies 100% on your energy to grow. It is a monster that needs feeding and that feeding can pie off really well if you love it and you can sustain it, but the only real purpose of social media is to drive people to your long form content, your podcast, your blog, or your videos to get people to your website and to get people onto your email list, and don't ever forget that social media is not a means in itself.

You only need social media to drive people to that long form content. All of which should be sitting on your website and be optimized for SEO. If you love social media, go for it, but always know that social media is a means to an end, and that end is building your list and driving more people to consume your larger content. Your fans are the ones who listen, who learn and who read, not the ones who double clicks likes, and then continue scrolling.

Do you hear me on that? Your fans are the ones who listen, learn and read, not the ones who hit like and keep scrolling. Now, I know it can be a bit scary when you start planning large format content. When I started the podcast, I had already tried my hand at video blogging and I enjoyed that, I really did, but I felt that I needed a larger, I needed something longer than five or seven minutes to communicate what I want to communicate.

Here, this episode is 27 minutes long so far, you know I love to talk. So I decided I'm going to go more casual and do podcasting. And I, of course immediately all the imposter syndrome stuff came up. So what I decided because I'd already done video blogging, I'd already tried blogging. I had already done, the shine show was originally a Facebook live broadcast that went for an hour long once a week. I'd already done that, and I decided because I had done it and given up on it, I didn't want this to be a do and give up on situation.

I just decided I'm going to do this, and I'm just going to close my eyes and run into it and embrace it and do it as well as I can for as long as I can without judging it. So I made a decision. I made a commitment to myself that I will not make a call on whether or not the podcast, whether the podcast is good or not until I hit 100 episodes. I just said, "I am going to give myself 100 episodes completely judgment free and see what happens."

I didn't want to subject myself to my own brain giving me 700 reasons why it wouldn't be good enough. I'd been there too many times before with the live broadcasting and the vlogging. And I just decided that, "Well, who am I to decide whether my podcast is good enough anyway?" So I want you to let all of your not good enough thoughts be there if they come up for you. Just sit with them and just watch them appear without personalizing them. It is just your brain doing what your brain is supposed to do when it detects danger and you are in danger, but it's not real danger.

It's pretend danger. Let's call it pretend danger because you are making yourself vulnerable. You are being judged by others. Let's not even mince words about that. Let's not even say what if people judge me, people are going to judge you and that's okay because you know what? People are judging you whether you do it or not. People are judging you every day for things that you don't even think that they are, and it doesn't bother you then, so don't let it bother you when you're doing big things.

You must still do it, that is the way. So sit down, decide which large format you're going to create. Video blogging, podcasting or blogging, reading, watching, or listening. One of those three. I don't know about another one yet. If there's another one, let me know. You can either write a blog, you can record a video blog or a video of some kind, think Marie Forleo and the MarieTV or podcasting like I do.

So step number two is build your platform on your large free content. Step number three is build your list and build your list, build your list, build your list, build your list. I wish I started this sooner. All the time, you should be building your list. Use ads, use ads, use ads, use ads. It is the easiest way to build an audience without selling your soul on social media. It can be cheap.

It is not cheap when you follow shitty advice and you throw spaghetti on the wall and you do all sorts of different fly by night strategies, then it's not cheap because then you're just making Zuckerberg richer. It is cheap. If you have $5 a day, you run engagement ads and talk about your lead magnets on your socials. If you have $15 a day, you run lead gen ads that are cheaper than conversion ads. Might not give you the best quality lead, but it will build your list, and if you have $25 a day, you run conversion ads, that'll get you good quality leads and they will open your emails.

So I have talked about all of these strategies, the $5 a day engagement strategy, lead gen ads and list building strategies to ... There are hundreds of hours of podcast content created for you about that. So just go to shineandsucceed.com, find the podcast page and dive in there if you want to learn more about building your list with any of these three strategies. Really if I shout it from the rooftops, it's one of those funny things that sometimes you may have noticed, I'm moving away from talking about Facebook Ads the whole time because my mission is just so much bigger.

It started with Facebook Ads, but now, my mission really is to help women use their knowledge and their skills to build wealth because when women have money, the world is a better place. So Facebook ads just seem like such a small part of that, but if you want to learn about those Facebook Ad strategies, they're all on the podcast, you can just go there and listen, and you will hear all about it. Of course, these are also strategies we go deep in with our students inside The Launch Lounge and inside A-Lister as well.

So don't forget to sign up for the white list. If you want to find out when The Launch Lounge opens again, and you can do that by going to shineandsucceed.com/launch. So step number three is build your list. Step number four is pre-launch your course before you build it. This is often called a founding member's launch or a pre-launch or a beta launch, and I will tell you the happiest day of my journey as an online course builder, a marketer and a launcher was the day I sent three emails to my list and I made a thousand dollars.

It was the first time I felt so empowered, and I finally understood what people meant when they said it can be easy to make money on the internet. Before that, it being easy was not my experience. Everything felt hard. Creating a webinar felt hard. Running ads felt hard. Doing sales felt hard. Building the course felt hard, but before all of this, I did not have a podcast and I did not have a list, and now I did. And now, strangers were reading an email from me every week.

Now, strangers were getting to know me. Now, strangers were learning with me and from me, and they weren't telling me that they were doing all these things. So I still felt like I was talking to myself most of the time until I sent the first email to say, "I'm starting a membership. Do you want in?" I didn't even know what was going to be in the membership. I just told them, "You get first dips, the best price, and we're going to hang out together once a week." And they wanted that, they wanted in, it was like magic.

Once you have an audience of about a thousand people and they get a weekly email from you with a podcast, a video or a blog post that adds value to them, then you'll be amazed at how easy it becomes to transition from one-on-one to one to many. So step number four is pre-launch your course before you build it. Step number five is take your students feedback and create your best value course that you can sell with the lowest amount of work and the highest possible price.

Now, once you have worked with that first batch of students for let's say six to 12 weeks, you send out a survey to them. And some of the things that you want to ask them is why did you sign up to this? What was your pain point? What were you struggling with before coming into this program? And then you want to know how do you want that to be? What is your goal? What does it look like when it is exactly the way you want it to be?

And what they're going to share with you is their pain in their language and their desire in their language. And that my friend is the copy for your sales bite, your webinar, your emails, for everything that comes in your next launch. That is the copy that you use to base the promise of your course on. That is the copy that you use to connect with them and show them that you understand the problem they have, you have a solution for it, and you understand the desired end result they want.

And when you can have all of that in place, then you build the best course possible to get them that end result. And you sell it at the highest price you can because you have proof of concept, because you have proof of the offer working, because you will have testimonials, because you have evidence of it working for some other people. And that is the five steps to transitioning from one-on-one work into one to many work without losing income. The transition doesn't have to be hard, there really is a recipe, and if you work the recipe, you can start successfully making that transition within three to six months.

And within a year, you can also look back and say, "Wow, I've added $200,000 to my income without working any harder." I love sharing this journey with you. I love telling you my story and sharing with you, pulling back the curtain and showing you the good, bad, and the ugly of my journey, and I share all of that here on the podcast. What I would love to ask you is if you love the podcast and you have some other friends who would also benefit from listening to this, all of those people in the online courses with you, your mastermind at your online course building buddies, share the podcast with them.

I would really appreciate it, and if you want to write and review on Apple, that would also make me super happy. Thank you so much for listening. I love hanging out with you. Have a wonderful week. I'll see you next week. If you love this episode and you are a committed online course launcher who wants to learn how to grow your profits in your next course launch, and you want to know how to successfully scale your online courses, business to seven figures and beyond, then I'd love to see you inside The Launch Lounge.

The Launch Lounge is the only community online that is dedicated solely to helping you develop every aspect of your online courses business so that you can build your business to scale. With no one size fits all solutions, just the right education you need when you need it. Coaching from our team of experts in different areas of launching and scaling and the best community on the internet.

The Launch Lounge is your online course building home if you want profitable launches that scale your business to seven figures and beyond. To get on the wait list for our next enrollment season, go to shineandsucceed.com/launch. 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.