Salome Schillack:

Hello, my dear friend. It is so lovely to be with you today here on episode number 58 of The Shine Show. Today, I have a special guest, her name is Steph Taylor. Steph is going to tell you exactly what goes into becoming an overnight success. And yes, you guessed it, because this is my podcast and I share the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the behind the scenes, you're going to hear Steph's journey and all of her struggles and all of the hard work and all of the mishaps and the fails that happened on the way to her creating a nearly seven-figure business that she has today. Steph is an amazingly, wonderful person, and I'm going to give you her formal intro and tell you a little bit more about her.

Salome Schillack:

But before I do that, I want to say thank you to everyone who has been tagging themselves, or tagging me on Instagram, showing me where you're listening to the podcast. I appreciate that so much. I love seeing your beautiful faces and seeing what you're doing while you got me in your ears. So thank you so much for that. I also wanted to share with you some exciting news.

Salome Schillack:

We are launching at the end of July, the Launch Lounge, which is a brand new membership that's going to help you go from frustrated, confused, and racking up credit card debt on Facebook, to having a clear plan for which ads to run next to fill your profitable launch with buy-ready leads so that you can confidently launch your next course over and over again, and start scaling your business to match your dreams. So if that is something that you want to find out more about, go to shineandsucceed.com/waitlist, and make sure you get your name on the wait list so that you can get all the juicy deets about what is happening at the end of July when we are going to set this beautiful, new thing free on the world.

Salome Schillack:

But before you do that, have a listen to today's episode with my friend, Steph Taylor. Steph is an ex-corporate square peg, much like me. She's a launch strategist and the host of the very successful podcast, Socialette. She helps entrepreneurs launch digital products and podcasts to reach more people, grow their audience, and become the go-to in their industry. Steph does what she does so that fellow entrepreneurs can achieve more impact, create more profit, and have more freedom. And I am so happy to have a friend like Steph who lives near me and that I can share this journey with. I'm excited to share our little chat with you today.

Salome Schillack:

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Shillack, 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.

Salome Schillack:

Hi Steph. Thank you so much for joining me today. I am thrilled to have you and to share your knowledge with my audience today.

Steph:

Thank you so much for having me, Salome. I'm so excited to be here.

Salome Schillack:

That makes me so happy because I know that you and I... I have to tell a little story of how I noticed you. Last year, September, we were both doing Amy Porterfield's DCA Affiliate, The Digital Course Academy Affiliate Launch, and there was this girl on the rankings list that I'd never heard of before that was just climbing up and up and up. I've been in Amy's community for a while so I don't know how I'd never heard of you before. Of course, there's all the big name affiliates that everyone knows, but you did so incredibly well and I was like, "Who is this chick?" And then to find out you live what? Two suburbs away from me.

Steph:

Such a small world, isn't it? Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

It is such a small world, and we have so much in common, mostly that we work with online course launchers, and then we have our own courses as well. So I wanted to bring you on to tell us a little bit of about your journey with launching online courses. But I guess, can you just start by telling us a little bit about who you are and who you serve and how you serve them?

Steph:

Yeah, so I work with online business owners to help them launch digital products and podcasts within their businesses. Mostly I work with people who are launching online courses, memberships, group programs. Occasionally I work with people who are launching things like design templates or eBooks, but those tend to be like the higher-end priced templates, not so much the ones that you would buy on creative market.

Steph:

Yeah, I've recently been helping a lot of people to launch their podcasts because everyone's wanting to get into podcasting now.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah, and you have become quite the go-to girl for learning how to launch a podcast. Can you tell us a little bit... You have a course called the A to Z podcast launch plan, and today it's a very successful evergreen funnel, but take me back a little bit to when you first launched it.

Steph:

Well, actually before I launched this one, there was actually even the original thing that I launched back in October last year, October, 2019, I decided I was going to launch a group program teaching people how to launch a podcast.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

There were going to be 10 spots. It was going to be an eight-week program. And by the end of the eight weeks, they were going to have launched their podcast. I had two people who signed up before I even launched it, just people through my network. And then I launched it to my list and it was absolute crickets, nobody signed up. I thought, "What's going on here? This is really weird. My audience has told me they want to learn how to launch a podcast, why is nobody buying?" I got into my Instagram DMs, I got into my inbox, I started emailing everyone who said they were interested in launching a podcast, and I said, "Okay, what's holding you back?"

Steph:

The big thing I've found out there was people didn't want to show up every week. They didn't want to be in a group call. They couldn't commit to it because it was October, by the end of the eight weeks, a lot of their kids would have been home for summer holidays so they wouldn't have been able to commit to the calls, They then said, "Well, actually we just want a step-by-step plan for how to just do it ourselves, and if it takes us a month to do it, or it takes us six months to do it, that's fine." That was where the idea for this A to Z Podcast Launch Plan came about. Look, it's $197 product, it's not a huge comprehensive course or anything like that. I launched that to my list, the first launch only brought in about 1200 in sales. And then-

Salome Schillack:

Okay, so hold on, before you go any further, this is October last year-

Steph:

Yes.

Salome Schillack:

... that you launched the group thing.

Steph:

Yes.

Salome Schillack:

I thought you had this... It's just the other day?

Steph:

Yeah, literally it's about seven months old.

Salome Schillack:

That's literally the other day.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

Wow. Okay, so launched the group course, that didn't go very well. You got the feedback saying they don't want the live calls and the support. And then when did you turn it into this $197 course?

Steph:

October. I literally created it in a week. I pre-sold it to my list, created it once people bought it and then thought, "Okay, this is going to work." Then I started doing webinar launches for it. I must have done about four or five different webinar launches. Each time it only brought in around 1000, $2,000. But each time that I did it, it was still profitable. I was only spending three, four, $500 on ads and only-

Salome Schillack:

How many people were you getting to register for those webinars if you can remember?

Steph:

I've got my spreadsheet here.

Salome Schillack:

[crosstalk 00:08:15].

Salome Schillack:

I love it. When people pull out the spreadsheets, because I tell most people who are launching webinars, you can launch a webinar without a lot of ads that you need to get at least 400 people to register for that webinar. So you either need a large list, which I don't know how big your list was at that stage, but I assume you had a healthy list.

Steph:

Yeah. Yeah. So, but at that point I'd already launched the product to my list. Right.

Salome Schillack:

Okay.

Steph:

The webinars I had, you know, maybe about 200, 150, 250, roughly that each time that I ran them.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

And because some of those people were warm, the webinars converted really well. They were converting at about 10%, 15% of people who showed up were-

Salome Schillack:

Fantastic.

Steph:

...Buying from the webinar.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. That's wonderful. You worked really hard to get people to show up live.

Steph:

Yes. Yes. So what my little hack when I'm doing live webinars is, I have a little Zapier Zap set up. So when somebody registers, they get an invite sent to them for the Google Cal event.

Salome Schillack:

Ooh, I like that. Can I see that?

Steph:

Please do.

Salome Schillack:

That's very clever.

Steph:

So you just set up in your own Google calendar, you set up the event, you set the link to the webinar and you can set up as many reminders as you want. So then even if they have a Google, if they have a Gmail address or Google account, and even if they don't accept that invite, it still fills in the space in their calendar and they should still get the notifications depending on their settings. So you can set it to remind them, you know, three days before, one day before six hours before, like, I think I had about eight different reminders on these. And I got a, I think it was about a 40% show up rate.

Salome Schillack:

Whoa. That's phenomenal.

Steph:

Sorry. 38%. Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

That's spectacular. I'm definitely stealing your little hack. That is a brilliant idea.

Steph:

Because otherwise people don't put it in their calendar, they don't treat it like it's a real event. Right.

Salome Schillack:

No, they don't. And because they're so well trained now, but they're going to get a replay, especially if they're buying something in the marketing field, you know, if they're buying something that teaches you how to be a better parent, they are more likely, I think, to show up than they are with something that you or me sell because they know we're marketers, we're going to send them a replay.

Steph:

Exactly. And they probably, they know they're going to get 50 emails reminding them about the replay as well.

Salome Schillack:

Correct. Okay. So then you started doing the webinar and you got a really good sign up, you got a good show up. Right. And you had good sales on there.

Steph:

Yes. Up until this point, I had still just all the copy that I'd done myself. I've always been very scrappy in my approach. And you know, I was tight on cash in October last year and I wrote the sales page myself. So only once I'd actually already brought in a few thousand dollars and validated the product, did I then spend money on a copywriter?

Salome Schillack:

Fantastic. I love that. That's so good. Okay. So then you're running the webinar and you make a thousand dollars. How did you feel about that?

Steph:

It wasn't a great feeling because I thought, "Oh, you know, I should be bringing in more than a thousand dollars", but then when I actually sat down and filled out the spreadsheet and I could look at the numbers and I saw the conversion rates and because I work, obviously I work with a lot of launches. I know what sort of benchmarks to look for. I thought, "Oh, actually, this wasn't bad". Even though, it was yeah, a thousand dollars, a thousand dollars can be amazing.

Salome Schillack:

I know, it paints the right picture. Yeah. Yeah. If you know how to identify that picture. So I'm always telling everyone, I... Because you know, I quit the online courses business and went back to my day job because I made $2,000 in my first launch.

Steph:

I didn't realize that. Two thousand dollars is still, you know, that's... people paid money.

Salome Schillack:

It was at the end of three years of trying to get a coaching business up and then trying to get a social media business up and then trying my hand at this online course thing and worked my tail off as you know-

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

And I was exhausted. It was the end of three years. I was $40,000 in debt, and making $2,000 just, it was such a disappointment. And I wish that I had someone then who told me, no, no, this is the best story. You just need to do it again.

Steph:

That's the thing.

Salome Schillack:

Which is why it's so important to me to tell this story for everyone.

Steph:

And you know what, Salome, I had two other large courses that I've launched in the past and I just never stuck with them long enough and relaunched them enough times to start seeing those results. Right.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

And I just looked at the one launch and I thought, "Oh, this was a failure". What a waste of time? And didn't even think about relaunching it. It was only this time around, I thought, "actually, let me just try again and try again and try again". And after a while it became clear that the funnel that I was taking people through was actually profitable, it was working. It was just a matter of getting more numbers in.

Salome Schillack:

Yes. And you know, we're lucky that we have worked on so many launches and we know the data. So we.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

You know, we can now look at a spreadsheet of data and tell the story. You know, I always say you look at the data, but what's the story that it tells of that customer that went through this funnel, where did she decide she's not going to buy. Where did she decide she's still interested. You know, what were the decisions that she was making as she went down this funnel and you and I, because we've worked being on the back end of launches. We know that story, but most people don't. So they don't know which numbers to look at, which means the only number they look at is revenue and profit.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

Based on that, they are either highly disappointed most of the time. And they don't know that actually the story tells a story of massive success.

Steph:

And also I find that people often don't set goals for their revenue and their profits. So even though they might make a really good revenue, they might make a really good profit, in their mind it's never going to be enough because they haven't said, "okay, well, you know, I'll be happy with, if I get this amount, like that's my minimum that I want to get, or this is like my better goal. This is my best goal". So because there's nothing to objectively measure it against, you always end up feeling a little bit disappointed

Salome Schillack:

That's right. Or feeling incredibly disappointed to the point where you're feeling depressed. I've had clients who spend $5,000 on a launch, making $25,000 and then need to go antidepressants. That's how big a disappointment it was.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

So, okay. So talk me through. So you had the webinars, you made a thousand dollars, then you looked at the numbers and you knew that you were onto something. What told you that you were onto something?

Steph:

Oh, look, I mean, for every dollar I was putting into ads, I was getting three, $4 back at this point. And this was still early days. Like I hadn't scaled it. I was spending such small amounts in ads, but I thought, "Oh, okay. This is, you know, this is bringing in a lot more money than I'm putting in". So that was the sign where I thought, "okay, this is now time to think about putting this on evergreen".

Salome Schillack:

Okay, cool. And tell me about that process. So I'm really happy to hear that you launched it live so many times before...

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

Evergreen. So what made you decide to go evergreen?

Steph:

I love doing live webinars, right? But for me to be doing multiple live webinars a week is just not feasible. I'm an introvert. I get very drained by doing webinars as much as I love them. I, it just ruins me for the rest of the day.

Salome Schillack:

I've been there.

Steph:

I thought, okay, well I want to actually be able to help more people. I want to be able to scale this up, but I don't want to be doing it live because also with live, you know, there's always that risk, the tech's going to go wrong and you've spent $20,000 on your ads to get people to show up for one live webinar. And it goes belly up. So evergreen doesn't have that risk. So, that was the thought process behind it. I thought, you know, "I really want to help more people, more people need to see this training".

Steph:

And I want to be able to scale up my income without having to show up and do live webinars all the time. Yeah. But I like it. It was a scary decision to do because I had previously tried to evergreen a course that I hadn't live launched and that didn't work. And in my mind I was like, "Oh, but evergreen doesn't work".

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

That was the story I was telling myself, right. Like, "Oh, evergreen doesn't work for me". It works for all these other people out there, but this is just going to be something else. I set up, I sink money into ads and it doesn't generate any profits.

Salome Schillack:

And we all think that way, because it takes so many failures to get to that places, right.

Steph:

It was scary.

Salome Schillack:

Well, I'm really glad that you did dive in because you have such an amazing story. So what happened after you started the evergreen? How did you dive into evergreen? How did you get started with it?

Steph:

Yeah. I basically took the exact same funnel that I'd been using for the live webinars and just prerecorded the webinar. Prescheduled the emails. I did this all myself as well. I did all the I'm good with piecing together the tech. And like I said, it was very scrappy. It was in January this year. I had had a very quiet December, very quiet January. Didn't have much cash in the bank. And I was like, "Oh, okay. I need to do this now". Like this needs to be up and running and bringing money into my business now because otherwise I'm going to run out of cash.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. I love how that urgency stimulates the creativity, hey?

Steph:

I've been sitting on it for so long. It was something I was meant to do pre-Christmas, but because I was so afraid and I didn't have that urgency, I thought, "no, I'll just I'll deal with it next year. I'll deal with it in January and they'll deal with it in February". And suddenly it was when I was looking at my bank, I thought, Oh, okay. "That's it looking a little bit emptier than we'd planned".

Salome Schillack:

That's funny. Okay. So then you recorded it, you put it all together. Do you remember how much you spent, how much you started out spending per day on your ads?

Steph:

Probably wouldn't have been more than $50 a day.

Salome Schillack:

Okay.

Steph:

Actually, here we go. I still have the numbers here in front of me. So that first week I spent $303 on ads.

Salome Schillack:

For the whole week?

Steph:

For the whole week and I made $458. So it wasn't like, it was 1.5 times return.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

It wasn't a huge return. And that kind of freaked me out a little bit because I thought, "Oh, this is not going to scale". Yeah. Then I opted in the next week I spent double that. And so I spent $700 the next week and made $2,000.

Salome Schillack:

Yay. Okay. So yeah, there is a tipping point where scaling, where it becomes more profitable, you might look at it and go, well, it's not scalable. And then literally by adding double, all of a sudden you're making.

Steph:

Exactly.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. And so are you just tracking all your numbers every week-

Steph:

Every week.

Salome Schillack:

Where are you at now with it?

Steph:

So at the moment I'm spending about eight grand a day, nine grand a day.

Salome Schillack:

That's fantastic. [crosstalk] I know there's people who just... If you're driving, pull over.

Steph:

It's crazy actually. Now, like I very rarely stop and reflect on the spreadsheet, but yeah, from $300 in a week to last week, I spent $35,000 in a week.

Salome Schillack:

That's so good.

Steph:

Crazy to look at those numbers now.

Salome Schillack:

What was the revenue from that 35,000?

Steph:

Last week wasn't a great week. It was 44,000.

Salome Schillack:

Okay.

Steph:

But that's, you know, that's still a $10,000 profit.

Salome Schillack:

That's a 10,000 I'll take that any day.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

And so how much have you spent overall and how much have you made in this funnel?

Steph:

Oh, goodness, Salome. If you guys are driving, I suggest, you know, or you do pull over here. So total expense, 247,000 and I've made 498.

Salome Schillack:

Oh my goodness.

Steph:

498,000, not $498. Let's just clarify that.

Salome Schillack:

$498,000.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

That is like, you deserve to be celebrated and high fived.

Steph:

Virtual high five.

Salome Schillack:

Yes. Congratulations.

Steph:

Thank you.

Salome Schillack:

That is spectacular. If I saw you in December last year and I told you, "in the next five months, you're going to spend $200,000 on ads"

Steph:

I would cry.

Salome Schillack:

You would cry, yeah.

Steph:

Yeah. But the funny thing about it is how quickly it's all happened.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

You know, and I think back to December when I was setting my goals for 2020, and my revenue goal for the whole year was 300,000 US.

Salome Schillack:

Wow.

Steph:

And I've hit that and it's May.

Salome Schillack:

And it's May, and we've had coronavirus.

Steph:

And we've had coronavirus. Right. So it's amazing how quickly things can change in January, there was probably a point where I had maybe a hundred dollars in the bank-

Salome Schillack:

Wow.

Steph:

Because I've had to pay, I paid for a complete rebrand and website thinking, waiting on some government grant money to come in, the grant money didn't come until April.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah, I know. I was waiting for mine too.

Steph:

I was expecting for it to come in January. And I'd kind of budgeted that money to cover my branding and my new website. So I paid for that in January. I was going to a conference in the US that I booked and paid for. And suddenly I thought, I have like a hundred dollars". And now it's, you know, it's gone from one extreme to the other. It's been crazy

Salome Schillack:

Here you are four short months later-

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

And you've made $400,000 from this funnel. That is spectacular. I just want to say congratulations.

Steph:

Thank you.

Salome Schillack:

That's massive. I know that you've been doing the work behind the scenes and I know that you've been, you know, you've been working the numbers and paying your dues and you have an amazing podcast yourself where you add value to people. What three times a week?

Steph:

Three times a week.

Salome Schillack:

Holy cow. Three times a week. I thought it would be a good idea in April to do a podcast episode every day in April.

Steph:

Oh good.

Salome Schillack:

[inaudible 00:22:14]early, dead.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

Three times a week. Congrats. That's amazing. You really deserve all the success, you've done, the hard work-

Steph:

Thank you.

Salome Schillack:

And you know, it's hard when you start, when you fail.

Steph:

It is. But it's also hard, and this is quite funny, but it's also hard when you succeed.

Salome Schillack:

Okay. Tell me about that. What's hard about that?

Steph:

Because there's a lot of mindset. There's a lot of mindset stuff behind the scenes. You think, you know, when growth starts to happen and your business starts to get traction, you think it's going to be easy. And in some ways it is. But then in other ways, our brain tries to trick us and it's like, you're not worthy of the success. That's a big one that comes up a lot. And you know, the money mindset like, Oh yeah, like you're making money this week, but it's going to stop next week or it's going to stop next month.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. I had the same thing when the agency started working, I had this constant fear that the other shoe's going to drop.

Steph:

Yeah. You know, that's how I've been feeling. And of course compounded with Coronavirus and you know, there's a recession around the corner, then it has been yet waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Salome Schillack:

And so how are you dealing with that?

Steph:

A lot of meditating and a lot of journaling.

Salome Schillack:

I do the same thing every morning.

Steph:

It's been very tough. And what I've had to do is I've started, you know, working fewer hours and actually spending a lot more time on my own self development, which then also means of course, dealing with the guilt of, Oh, I should be working right now, I'm not being productive-

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

But it's been realizing that, you know, the time that I'm spending journaling, meditating, doing courses around mindset, learning, all of those things, reading those books that is productive in its own way, just because it's not in the business, doesn't mean its not worth my time.

Salome Schillack:

Do you know how I...What helps me with this is I did an online training by Joe Dispenza. Dr. Joe Dispenza-

Steph:

Yes. I've read his book.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. Like he's just phenomenal. And he was talking about, and I mean, he explains all the woo-woo stuff in such a great way that I am definitely not going to explain it as well as he does. He helped me understand that there is an energy field that is pure information, pure knowledge, right. And in the mornings, when I, when I do my meditation, I'm sitting there and what he talks about is forgetting about our bodies. So it's out being outside of time and being outside of our physical bodies, right.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

Because on that level, it's just, then all you're left with is information and information is in your brain and you have access to it already. And in a way, to me, it is creativity.

Steph:

That is creativity.

Salome Schillack:

And so when I sit down in the mornings to meditate, I kind of think of this, like the creativity, the source of creativity, the source of information, the source of inspiration is already out there. I just need to plug into it. And if I can plug into it long enough to forget about my, my body, which to me is kind of anything that makes me feel self conscious.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

Or forget about time, which is anything that's happened in the past that I'm carrying with me or anything I'm hoping on for the future that I'm also carrying with me. And if I can open up to the source of ideas, the source of knowledge, the source of information, then that information will flow through me more freely, which ultimately every time I open my mouth and help a student, that's because of information.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

It's because of information that flows through me. And what I've noticed is when I go on holidays, my husband likes to book these long three to six week holidays. Every time I've been on one of these long holidays, I've had my best epiphanies about where the business should go so that we can serve more people. And every time I do this meditation regularly, I see the results in the business because I see it, all of a sudden the feedback, the quality of the feedback becomes better. So that's really helped me in this whole, Oh, it's going to go away, kind of shift the focus to ,hold on I just need to tap in. It's like, I just need to know as long as I stay tapped in. And I'm just the source that it flows through.

Steph:

Yeah. I think it's that space, right? You need to allow that space. I noticed the same, I mean, over Christmas and new year's, I took three weeks off, which is the longest I've taken away from my business ever.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

And that was when I had all of the amazing ideas. And I think it's because you get out of, you get out of that every day, survival mode, the fear that comes around there, and you've actually got that space in your brain for the ideas to then come in. Last week, I booked myself four days in Noosa and I left my laptop in Brisbane.

Salome Schillack:

Lovely.

Steph:

And in those four days, I just, I thought, okay, all I'm going to do is read novels, journal, meditate. I turned my phone off for 23 hours a day. My assistant was told she could only contact me between eight and 9:00 AM-

Salome Schillack:

That's fantastic.

Steph:

If she had any questions. And the ideas that came from that. And there was something in my head that clicked and said, "okay, from now on, you only work four days a week and you have one inspiration day". And that day is for, if you want to go and go drive down the coast and go for a surf.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

Do that. If you want to work on that day, you can work on that day. But only if you feel called to do it-

Salome Schillack:

Yes.

Steph:

Not because you feel like, you know, the week's so busy that you have to work on that day.

Salome Schillack:

Correct.

Steph:

So yeah. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be adding a whole day off, but even if you have, if you allow yourself maybe three hours once a week or something to just chill and allow that space.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

Or valuable.

Salome Schillack:

It comes to you in those downtimes, doesn't it?

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

It's just like, it really, It's like whatever flows through you need that downtime. It needs that space in order for you to hear it. Cause I feel like when I'm stressed and I'm just go, go, go, go, go. Like, I'm just putting one foot in front of the other, but I'm not even thinking about where I'm going then.

Steph:

And then you also start to resent your business a little bit. When you're so busy and you can't see anything outside of your business, you start to not enjoy it. You start to forget why you started your business in the first place.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

Whereas when you're, when you're away from it for a little while and you start to get a little bit bored, that's when you think, "Oh, actually I really love what I do. I'm so blessed to get to do what I do".

Salome Schillack:

And, and I found that in those moments, I can then go, Oh, hang on I resent my business because of this activity. That actually, if I think about it, I can outsource.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

I can hire someone to do this.

Steph:

Exactly.

Salome Schillack:

And then I would take the steps to do something about it, and three months later you have someone who's working for you and it's outsourced and it's up and running and you look back at it and you go, "why didn't I do that earlier?". It's kind of, you live in the frustration and you're so in the frustration that you forget, you're actually in charge of it.

Steph:

I know it's like the little stone in your shoe, right.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

And it's like, it's not that much of a deal. Each time you take a step, but then over time compounded, it becomes really painful and it's not a huge thing to fix. So yeah, I can relate.

Salome Schillack:

Oh, that's so good.

Salome Schillack:

Okay. So what happens next for this evergreen funnel of awesomeness?

Steph:

Well, at the moment, it's now, you know, changing up the ad creatives. So I did a video shoot a couple of weeks ago. So it's fresh video content, fresh copy, just changing things up because I mean, as you would know, when you're spending this much money on ads, it gets exhausted very quickly.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

Your audience gets sick of seeing the same ads over and over again. They do get a little bit more expensive. I mean, I'm not getting $3 for every dollar that I put in anymore, but that's okay. I mean, honestly, I'm going to keep scaling this for as long as I can.

Salome Schillack:

Yes. You do that.

Steph:

I've got other things, other products in the pipeline, so yeah. I've got a membership coming up, which will be fun.

Salome Schillack:

That's awesome. Do you want to tell us a little bit about?

Steph:

Yes. So it's based around the concept of launching and relaunching and relaunching, right? So instead of being a monthly membership, it's a three monthly membership.

Salome Schillack:

Oh, I like that.

Steph:

And so everyone comes in at the same time. And over the process of the three months we launch together-

Salome Schillack:

I love it.

Steph:

It goes through the whole launch process and the next three months they go back and they relaunched the same thing, again.

Salome Schillack:

I love it.

Steph:

Because nobody looks at relaunching, right?

Salome Schillack:

Yeah, you're right.

Steph:

And there's always something you can tweak, even if your launch went well, there's always a way you can make it better.

Salome Schillack:

Absolutely agree. Oh, that is such an amazing concept. I love it.

Steph:

And it's going to be strongly community focused because I know how terrifying launching can be. And having, you know, when you've got other people around you who are doing it with you.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Steph:

Then it's just slightly less daunting.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. I remember sitting behind my computer in Perth where I lived then, which by the way is the most isolated city in the world, sitting behind my computer in Perth and feeling like I'm the only person in the world building an online business. And then when I got on that airplane and went to America for the first time and I went to Amy Porterfield's V school bonus event and sitting in that room with 500 other people who are in exactly the same boat as me, I couldn't stop crying because I was just like, I am finally, I found my people.

Steph:

Yeah.

Salome Schillack:

And now some of the people I met there are to this day, my sisters, and you need that sisterhood.

Steph:

You do. Getting on a plane. What a foreign concept that is now.

Salome Schillack:

Now, yes. I know I do have a little bit of withdrawal symptom.

Steph:

I know this wasn't meant to be. I had all of these US conferences and events I was going to this year. It's not helping. Oh, well.

Salome Schillack:

Me too. I'm mourning the loss of my conferences. But you know what? We have a lot to be grateful for.

Steph:

So much to be grateful for, especially the fact that we're in this online space.

Salome Schillack:

Oh yes.

Steph:

I think there's never been a better time to have an online business than right now.

Salome Schillack:

And I'm so excited about the way that this is going to change work, and how people view flexible working and working from home. And I think that archaic definition of work being a thing you do in an office from Monday to Friday, nine to five, is going to go out the door with Coronavirus. And I'm very happy.

Steph:

Wait, I can't wait. I mean, I think back to my corporate days and I just bought my apartment and I needed to get curtains installed. And of course the people couldn't come to install the curtains outside of business hours.

Salome Schillack:

Of course.

Steph:

And I remember saying to my boss, and this was in a corporate office that was fully set up for flexible working, if we needed it, right. But it was a team by team thing. And I said to my boss, I said, "Hey, is it okay if I work from home this Friday morning so that these guys can come and install my curtains?" And he said, no, and this was not even that long ago. This was maybe five years ago.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah, yeah, no. I just actually on a previous episode, told my audience the story of how my daughter, the thing that made me quit my job the first time was my daughter needing to drop her off at daycare. And it was the mother's day, morning tea. They were hosting mother's day, morning tea. And my boss just said, well, I have to be in Kalgoorlie for a meeting that... I was just like, well, okay. So while all the other moms are going to be at mother's day morning tea, I'm going to be on an airplane. And that, and that to me was just like, that was the like, okay, yeah. This job thing is not this working for a boss thing. It's not going to work for me, but you know, what, what I'm thrilled about is it's not going to have to be a choice between working for a boss or working for yourself anymore. There's going to be bosses who embrace flexible. Like I think I'm the boss that embraces flexible working, but there's going to, it's going to be more the norm. I'm excited about that.

Steph:

I'm excited too. This is a very interesting time we're living in and I can't wait to see how it impacts everything in the future.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. That's very cool. All right. Stay full. Thank you so much. Can you tell everyone a little bit more about where they can learn more about you about the A to Z podcast launch plan or about your membership?

Steph:

Yes. So you can find everything on my website, on my homepage, stephtaylor.co you can find my podcast, it's called Socialette it's in all of the major podcast apps, or you can find stephtaylor.co/podcast and I hang out over on social media on Instagram, @stephtaylor.co.

Salome Schillack:

Awesome. Well, we'll link all of that up in the show notes, and I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your journey and huge congratulations.

Steph:

Thank you much Salome. This has been fun. I really enjoy being able to share this with your audience. And I hope that they get a lot out of it.

Salome Schillack:

I know that they will. I can't wait to hear what they think about it and I'll have you on again, so you can come and tell us more stories about successful launches you're doing.

Steph:

Yeah. Get me in a year's time for the after story.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah, not then it's like the... Now it's the $400,000 evergreen funnel, then it'll be the $4 million evergreen funnel, hey?

Steph:

Amazing.

Salome Schillack:

Thank you so much Steph.

Steph:

Thank you.

Salome Schillack:

Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate every time you come back here and listen to the content I create for you. And remember, if you want to find out more about the membership that's coming up at the end of July, where we're going to help you go from frustrated, confused, and racking up credit card debt on Facebook ads, to having a clear plan for which ads to run next, to fill your profitable launch with Buy-ready leads so that you can confidently launch your course over and over again and start scaling your business to match your beautiful dreams. Then I want you to go to shineandsucceed.com/waitlist. Get on the wait list. We're going to start releasing some goodies soon, and I can't wait to tell you all about it. Have a lovely, lovely week. And I'll see you again next week. Bye.

Salome Schillack:

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.