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Want to know how Rina became successful in her first year in online business?
Listen in today’s episode and hear her amazing story about her online business.
This week, we are celebrating the amazing success of one of our Flip Your Life members, Rina Orellana.
Rina is a one-of-a-kind artistic director and master teacher. With her strong yet feminine style and dedication, she seems to naturally inspire her students to hone their skills with so much authenticity and love.
She has been a professional flamenco dancer for over 2 decades and is the owner of Rina Orellana Flamenco, which recently celebrated its first anniversary online.
From the last time we had her on air, she had about 30+ members and she has more than quadrupled that amount 33 episodes later — a really huge leap in numbers!
Join us as we retrace Rina’s online business roots… what worked, what didn’t and what else needs to be done to expand her reach.
Her struggles are something we can relate to and her successes are definitely something exciting to look forward to.
Don’t miss it!
You Will Learn:
- Rina’s backstory
- Take always from Rina’s first year in online business
- What she learned from Shane & Jocelyn
- How the Flip Your Life community helped her overcome challenges
- How to get help and transition tasks to your VA
- Plus so much more!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- Rina’s First FL guesting
- Rina’s online flamenco studio
- Flip Your Life community
- Elementary Librarian
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Can’t Miss Moment:
Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is another field trip. Jocelyn and I got to go with Isaac on a field trip to a local camp at a lake. The kids did all kind of cool things. They put a sock on and they were walking around to get dirt all over their feet so they can take them back and look at microscopes.
They got little baby jars, and they got some water out of the pond, and they had like, a scavenger hunt where they had to go find pine cones, and leaves, and things like that, and it was just an all-day thing. They ate lunch there, and we got to go and hang out with Isaac, walking around the trails with him.
We got to actually got to volunteer at the field trip. There were very few parents there, I was very surprised. We got to actually teach the kids how to fish. We got to show them how to cast fishing rods and reels.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Jocelyn: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we recap Rina’s first year in online business.
Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to Flip Your Life? All right, let’s get started.
What’s going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, maybe your first time tuning in, welcome. This show may be a little different than what you’re used to from an online business podcast.
We do not bring on a lot of experts, or gurus or people promoting their latest book, or their latest affiliate lines. No, we bring on real people, real members of our Flip Your Life community people. People who are building actual online businesses in every niche imaginable, and we help them by answering their questions on what to do next in their online business.
Now, this episode is a special version of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We have a guest who is coming on today, and she just wrapped up her first year in online business. We’re going to talk about that: the ups, the downs, the successes, the failures, the starts and the stops, and kind of give you an idea of what it takes to make it online. We want to welcome to the show today, Rina Orellana. Hey, Rina.
Rina: Hi, I’m happy to be here.
Jocelyn: Yes, welcome. This is my favorite kind of show because I love it when we talk to people and our concepts are proven. It is one thing for us to talk about how we succeed in online business, and how our businesses are successful, but it’s another thing to take someone who is in our community and show how they have succeeded using the same principles, and all of the different things that we talk about every single day in the community.
I love that you’re here, I love that we’re celebrating your one-year anniversary, and congratulations. I mean, it’s been an awesome year for you.
Rina: Thank you, it’s been a crazy year, and just looking back on the whole year and the process, I’m amazed. And I’m grateful.
Shane: Oh, I’m amazed by you because we get to know each other so well over the time because we all spent together during this. Your story is like the epitome of the online business person, I think. I can look back and think about the starts, the stops, and everything that happened and now where you are today is just awesome.
Let’s tell everyone a little bit about just about you, where you’re from and review for everybody what you do online and then maybe I can take us back to the beginning and we will just walk through that year together.
Rina: My name is Rina Orellana. My online business is an online flamenco dance studio. Flamenco is Spanish dance and on my membership sites, I have video lessons that takes people from absolute beginners all the way through advanced levels of dance.
I have various lessons. Right now over 100 I’m very excited about that. I’ve been a professional flamenco dancer for the last 20 years. I’m based out in California in Los Angeles right now. I have my regular group classes. I also have kids and a husband. Flamenco is a nighttime kind of a gig. It was very limiting on how I could spend my time teaching because I love teaching and performing.
But I can’t be away from my kids every night, it’s a hard life that way. I wanted to create something that I could do that would be flexible. In the beginning I never thought to do a flamenco dance studio online because I didn’t really think anyone would want anything like that but it turns out that people do. I’m glad that I went that way.
I had a website advertising my own flamenco classes and then about maybe three or four years ago, I started a blog and that is how I started gaining an audience. I was collecting emails. But in the beginning, it was just very simple. You just blind copy a bunch of people and then I started off with MailChimp.
And then people started asking me, like “I wish you would teach over here,” or “Do you have any videos?” I created a bunch of really short videos for YouTube and I got positive feedback from there. Then I realized, well, maybe I could possibly start an online studio. That is when I found you all, and you help me with that.
Shane: I know you are in California, but you’ve got to say “Y’all” when you are in the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. You can’t say “You all.” Everybody’s got to say “Y’all” when you come on the show. Let me just go through a couple things. About a year ago we started working with you– and we’ll talk more about that in a minute because there is a funny story there.
And then we talked about six months later in May. You were actually on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast on episode 89. At that time you had 30-ish members or something like that. We have launched and done that. Now tell everybody where you are now just about six months later.
Rina: I have 135 members.
Shane: That is incredible. Absolutely amazing. I mean, doesn’t it feels so good to lead a community like that? People think you have to have millions of people following you and stuff, but no, you can make money online and make good money online and lead your tribe even with like 135 people. That is amazing. These people have found you and love what you do and loved the dance and they get to learn from you.
Rina: Yes, it’s amazing who finds me because obviously they are passionate about flamenco. And I love teaching and it’s amazing that I can actually teach these people what they love in faraway places. I have people all throughout the United States and you know Australia, Canada, I have one in India. It is crazy.
Shane: I remember the first time people internationally started joining Flip Your Life, and we would just look through each other like, “What!” Now, it is like there are people in the Flipped Lifestyle membership that are from 20 countries all over the world and we’re sitting here in Kentucky. It’s amazing.
You know, how you can just reach out and do that. So let’s go back real quick, we will start at the beginning. You figured out that there has got to be something that I can do online. Tell us about joining Flipped Lifestyle, and then tell everybody what happened like really soon after you joined Flipped Lifestyle.
Rina: Okay, I found you through Pat Flynn and I just loved the way you’re messaging, and I just love that I really connected with that. Then I joined, but it was right at the beginning that you started switching to your membership model because I thought maybe I was going to just produce a DVD of some sort.
And when I joined with you, you said, “No, try a membership.” What are you talking about? But I joined and I did that and I started the whole membership process. But I got frustrated with the technical aspects and then I quit. I dropped the membership but then about two days later, I realized, “Oh, wait that was a mistake.” I joined back again.
Now, I’ve been following you ever since. But that was a really big lesson because getting so frustrated on the technical aspects, I realized that I made a rash decision. Now whenever those technical aspects come up, which they do all the time, I take a deep breath walk away and then I come back refreshed and I’m able to handle it. That was a good lesson there.
Jocelyn: Yes, for sure. I mean, technical problems, we still have technical problems. In fact, today, I was trying to deal with something on one of our other websites that makes no sense. I mean that happens all the time. I love how you said you know you just made a mistake and you came back. I think that is awesome because there is a lot of people out there who would not do that.
Shane: I remember that day you quit. I really do. I remember it because I thought, “No, you’ve got a plan, it’s so close,” you know what I mean? Even though it was not launched, Even though you did not have your first 20, 30 members yet. I knew that you were taking the action steps you needed to take.
So many people we see here– they run into one problem with coding or maybe they have to go spend $50 to hire someone to fix something, and they are like, “This is too hard,” or “This is not possible,” and it is important to realize that every single person who survives the first year in business has technical problems. I don’t care how good you are with computers, you are going to use a tool every day in this business that you’re not going to know exactly how to use and it is going to get frustrating and you are going to get stuck.
Rina: Right, right. I think after that, it was just seeing the big picture. Or at least taking incremental steps. I had the big picture in my mind. Okay, open a membership, get people in. But that is also overwhelming to think. I just thought of what is the next step or what are the next three steps that I can work on.
I remember at that point when I quit and then joined again, it was like, “Okay, what can I build right now to open it?” I first I thought I had to create a gazillion videos. That to me was just so overwhelming. I realized I could just use my free content, put that in the membership, add a few more videos, and boom, I can just open it to a small group of people just to test it out.
Shane: I think that is even more important of a take away is, you looked at what was causing your frustration, and you were thinking about the entire marathon instead of the 15 foot of road in front of you. That is where you got overwhelmed, and then when you came back in, you said, “I think part of being in a community like Flip Your Life is important.”
You see people at so many different stages and you can kind of look at like, “Well, wait a minute, that person just launched and got 25 members.” What did they launch with? What did they do? You can kind of say well, wait a minute I’m trying to do A through Z, they went A-B-C and got it out there. That gives you a benchmark to go by and say it is okay to just do it one step at a time.
Rina: Yeah, I can definitely see. At least on my end, I had experience with websites just because I had been building my own website throughout the years. But still, all the technical aspects of locking it down with a membership plug-in, getting a new email provider, it is just overwhelming. Just knowing that you don’t have to do everything now, it does not have to be perfect now, it just needs to be workable. You can fix it later.
Shane: For sure. Exactly, it ain’t got to be perfect, it’s just got to be done. Something’s got to be out there to have some kind of a baseline for it, basically.
Rina: Right.
Shane: So what happened next? You get back in, I’m sure everything was pie-in-the-sky perfect after you joined the community again. How did the launch go? How did the initial part of deep-breath, hit-send-email, opening-the-doors, we get through the technical problems, we get your content in there, we work through all of that. What happened on your launch, and then how did you feel about that?
Rina: What I did was, I had been communicating with my email list saying, “I’m getting ready to launch some sort of online program. If you’re interested, click here.” “Give me ideas of what you would want in this membership.” The people that clicked or filled out the survey, I sent out an email to them saying, “This is it, I’m launching this program. You get in at a low rate for a founding member. It’s only available for the weekend.” I launched it. It was to about maybe 25 people, but I think I got about 10 members from that, from the initial launch. And then I worked with them for about a month, like taking care of all the technical details that went wrong. But they were really forgiving and really helpful. I think what was really useful is that I kept communicating with them.
Let me you know how you think, if you’re having any problems I want to help, I want to make sure that you’re learning from this. I don’t want to just take your money and walk away. I want you to actually use it and learn it. That was good. A month after that, I launched it to my entire list. And I got more.
And then just slowly, but surely, I started getting more and more members. But I think what really picked up the pace was switching from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign because I was able to have more opt-ins, and be able to reach more people, and accommodate all their needs of wanting different information.
Shane: For sure. How big was the second list that you launched, when you launched to it?
Rina: It was about 500 maybe, 400 people.
Shane: Gosh that is incredible so many people come to us, and Jocelyn can vouch for this. And they’re like, “Well, I only have 300 people on the list. We always tell them when we first launched Elementary Librarian, there was, like– what Jocelyn, was it 400 and something?
Jocelyn: : Yeah I didn’t have very many. Maybe around 500.
Shane: Yeah, you can see here, you pre-launched to a list of 25, launched to 500, and that created a foundation that built into the 130+ members marching towards 200. Also, too, something else that really stood out to me there, maybe you can expand on it, is how you invested in a tool. So many people try to go the cheapest, the freest, the “leastest”, you know what I mean? I just made up a word: “leastest.”
What was the difference in making you say, “You know what, I’m going to go for something more robust. ActiveCampaign can do more, it may cost a little more but I know it’s going to do that.” Did you see other people using ActiveCampaign, or what made you do that?
Rina: It was actually in the forum, where it was just like all of a sudden a bunch of people wanted to change their email providers. We all worked on it together, basically, figuring out how to use ActiveCampaign. MailChimp was great because it was free, and then you could pay a little bit for one single list and automation.
But then if you want more options with it, it wasn’t capable of doing that. It was basically like, “Okay, this is driving me nuts.” It’s basically peace of mind and make things easier and more effective really.
Jocelyn: Right. I don’t think that spending money on stuff is the magic pill. I don’t want anybody out there to think, “Well, if I get ActiveCampaign all my problems will be solved.”
Shane: “Where is the affiliate link? Click!” you know what I mean?
Jocelyn: That is not true. It is because you already have built a foundation, you saw that this was going to save you some time, and therefore you invested in it to move your business forward even more. We kind of did the same thing. We worked with AWeber for a really long time, and then we realized, “Hey, it would be better for our business if we switched over to the CRM, which is like Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, Entrepot.”
We also did the same thing. Part of growing your business, I think, is to realize that you need more capacity or something different and then to move forward and then go with that.
Shane: I think what is important, too, Rina, in your story, it took us a year and a half to realize that we needed to upgrade things. I think a lot of that was because we were really doing this totally alone. We had nobody to talk to.
We just stumbled in the dark a little longer than I think we should have. It is fascinating to me to see how much better your business got so much faster because you were willing to say, “Hey, this is what I’m doing. These people are doing it. We might as well do it together, and let’s just invest in something in our business.”
That is a great lesson for anybody in their first year of online business or maybe you’ve been stumbling along by yourself, trying to figure all this out, when you hit a roadblock, you are going to spend time or money to fix it and you might have to invest a little time on the learning curve like you did with this group of people in ActiveCampaign. But you did that, and all the other side you saved a lot of time in the back end of it.
Rina: Absolutely. It works great, it does what it’s supposed to do, and I don’t have to think about it anymore. You put the work up front.
Shane: So we’ve got it launched now. We did this to a list of about 500 people. About this time, you are probably sitting at about 30 to 40 members.
This is another huge moment in any online membership that we’ve seen. We see so many different business and so many people with memberships in our community. It seems like they are sticking points. There is always the launch.
We see people kind of plateau and stick in that 30 to 60 range. They get stuck a little bit. And then maybe they hit 60 to 100, and then 100 is the next sticking point. You’ve got to bust through that plateau. We’re sitting here right now, we’ve got our 30, 40 members, what happened then? Did you hit a plateau? Did it just keep growing exponentially? Where was this and what happened?
Rina: I did hit a plateau, and I’ve been slowly adding more video lessons to my membership site. I knew it was getting bigger, and the quality was getting better. What my next step was, I raised the price.
I sent out an email to my whole list it, and it has been slowly growing and I said, “Join now, get locked in at this rate because I am raising the prices.” That bumped it up to maybe 60 people, between 60, 70. And then from there, it just stabilized.
It was getting so close to 100, but it was just not moving. That is when I joined the mastermind, and I created a whole really great course for brand-new beginners. I just made a launch for that. I just offered a 30-day free trial of my site. That just bumped it over to past 100.
I think that was very surprising to me because I’ve always had free trials or one-dollar offers for three days, five days, 10 days. But that was like the magic number for this site. And it worked because people actually stay. Like if I have 20 people join to that offer, maybe two will leave in that trial period. But it’s been surprising that that has worked for me.
Shane: Yes, 60 to 100, you said something else interesting there, and I’m about to go back and talk a little bit more about the trials and the more members. Did you notice your churn kind of level out a little bit when you get past 60 or close to 100? Did less people quit, or did your churn go down?
Rina: I think so, it was just like more I was getting more members in than leaving.
Shane: Once you got these new members I think the next lesson that I want everybody to hear, too, is– actually, we just recorded a couple podcasts this morning and we said to someone else, people get so locked in with their original offer that they won’t evolve and grow.
The biggest thing I saw when you did our month-long mastermind, the kind of exclusive deal we do was, you realized you could offer something new to the same avatar at a different segment, basically. That is kind of what added 20, 30 members. You did it with a different price, you were going after a more advanced people than you went after the beginner and you realized it’s still flamenco.
How do you think adding a new segment to your membership is what really threw the doors open to 100 and got you to 135?
Rina: I think it just added more variety to my membership. I was being able to serve two different people because, just in my niche here, there is going to be the crazy, obsessive people who loves flamenco and have had experience with it, and so they know exactly what they are getting into. And they’re willing to put in the time.
There is the other ones who love flamenco, never taken it but are very passionate about it, too. It is just a different door. I feel like, now, I have all these doors open that can lead people in. But I think what I found was that people have been following my emails, or they’ve been on my list for months before they actually buy.
It is important that I build up the relationship with all the people in my email lists and they understand my style, what is meaningful to me, having that offer really helps them come in.
Shane: You’re basically saying now, it’s like you had Step 5 through 10 on your membership. But now you’ve got Step 2, 3, 5 done, and you let 1 be free. They see Step 1, and they know where to get step 2, 3, 4… so they don’t have to be at Step 5 to join. You’ve opened up a whole new world for a different group of people.
Rina: I love it how you are just not scared to do something new. I think a lot of times people get stuck in what they think is going to work, and maybe it did work for a while. Then something happens, and it is not working so well anymore and they are just like, “Oh, well, this just isn’t the right niche for me,” or “This membership is just never going to grow,” and they don’t try anything new. But for you, you went out there. You tried something different, and it worked.
Shane: It’s like when you make your first money online. Not that it is easy, but when that first money happens you are like, “Whoa, it’s so crazy!” Then people realize that it’s not the miracle that all the gurus say where you just start making millions of dollars, and money is rolling in passively and you never work again. It’s like you get to 50 members, and you’re like, “Oh, man, I’ve got to put more work in to grow this thing.”
Rina: Right. My challenge right now is that the more it grows, it seems like there is more plates to spin. That’s like the biggest hurdle right now. It is just dealing with all these new plates. I’m spinning all these plates.
Jocelyn: Yes, right, that is what we do in online business, right? Okay, so we talked about all of the amazing things that have happened so far. But what is maybe something that you feel like is a big mistake that you made, or something that you would change if you had to do it over again?
Rina: I think the biggest challenge has just been staying focused, and not getting bogged down with trying to create something massive at once. One important thing is I communicate with all my members weekly. I send out an email, I’m always asking them questions, and if I asked them what they want, then I get 1,000 different responses.
The biggest challenge was not trying to accommodate all those requests because it was just physically impossible. The biggest challenge there was not getting overwhelmed by the grand vision of what I would like this membership site to be. It’s just one step at a time. And then the other challenge is just keeping track of all the little details of customer service, updating a blog, or editing a video.
That’s like the biggest challenge that I’m still working through right now. But another big thing that I’m happy that I could constantly overcome is working with advertising. We’re playing around with Facebook ads, and knowing that I don’t have to get it perfect now is just a process — that’s good. Just figuring out different ways to communicate more effectively, and getting my members engaged with me.
Shane: That is all awesome. It is so funny because we’ve been doing this now for four or five years, you’ve been in this now for a year. We talk to people every day that have only been in it for a couple months. All kinds of different levels. Those challenges just don’t go away, do they? Those things you just said like–
Jocelyn: We have those challenges now.
Shane: Yes. We still experiment with ads everyday. You have to. We still have technical challenges. We all have the car ride, or you take a shower for an hour, and you’re like, “I have the greatest idea that is going to change the world!” You get this big overwhelming thing, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, how do I eat the elephant?” How do you think the Flipped Lifestyle community, not just me and Jocelyn, but how do you think being in the Flipped Lifestyle community helps you get by some of those challenges?
Rina: Well, it is definitely having a community of people that are at my level that I can talk with, and they can talk me off the cliff, or take me down from the ledge. That is always very helpful, and just to know there’s other people like me who are passionate about online business, and helping people that way, that we are all sharing the same experience, and so that is very, very, very helpful
Shane: Awesome. I just want to say it, before we go on, because we don’t like to let anybody off here without talking about the next level. Even in our success stories. But I am just so impressed by you. We always say this to people when they make it, like, “Wow, you did it!” It’s so different hearing someone’s random story on a podcast like a lot of people are doing right now. We literally have watched you daily for this whole year. To see you– like I get emotional. I’m going to cry. Okay.
To see you when you quit, and I remember that, and then you came back. You just really tore it up, and then you threw caution to the wind. You got those first members. Then you realized it was real. You were like, “Okay, I’m going to prove this is not a fluke, and you doubled your membership. Then you broke 100. Now, you’re setting these big goals. We want you to get to 300 members. That is kind of our goal for you right now.
Rina: Oh, that is my goal too.
Shane: Exactly. To see all that happened is just so amazing. We just want to congratulate you and really give you the respect that you deserve, because 90% of the people out there probably won’t fight through it. Kudos to you for making it happen.
Rina: Oh, I’m going to cry, too, now.
Shane: Jocelyn is crying right now. We’re all crying.
Rina: It feels great. I mean, it feels great. Another thing, like totally random thing, it would be a wonderful example to my kids, too.
Jocelyn: For sure. I mean, just to have this community, and people who are out there making these huge successes like you are– it just makes what we do so much more worthwhile. We love what we do anyway, but I get more excited over the successes of our members than I do about our own. It just really makes me happy.
Shane: That’s what puts the chills on the back of the arm.
Jocelyn: That is what keeps us here, doing what we do every single day. We just love what we do, we love our members. We are just really happy for you, so congratulations.
Rina: And another thing about it is that, it’s not buying vacations to Hawaii, or anything like that, like the amount of money — it’s breathing room, there is hope for how much more we can grow.
Shane: That is one of the biggest words that we always use. It is what makes me angry when I hear– I’ve almost stopped listening to any other online business information. I hate it when people do that, like, “Oh, I rented a Lamborghini,” “Oh I have a trip to–” you know what I mean?
Like it’s the margin in your time and money that really matters. It’s like, I don’t have to do X because I have my online business which makes enough money to where my mortgage is paid, my rent is paid, and it’s a membership, it is going to happen again next month. I can go to my kids’ ballgame right now because I automated something last night.
And that margin, that breathing room, that was the first thing that we really noticed about online business that made it totally worth it. I can breathe. Life is not weighing down on me so much that it is heavy . Life becomes lighter when you have that online business work whether it is full-time or on the side.
Rina: Absolutely, and thank you for helping with that. It would not have happened without you guys for sure. Absolutely.
Jocelyn: All right we have had a great time today talking about all you of your amazing success over the last 12 months, and what we want to do now is sort of talk more about your future. What challenge are you facing right now that maybe we could help you overcome, say for the next few months.
Rina: I think there is two. I know you asked for one. But just take your pick. One would be, I see that there is so many things that I do, and it’s time to have someone else do some of them so I can concentrate on what is most important for me on that element I can deal. I think I need help figuring out how do I get help.
Then the next thing would be reaching out to different avenues, because I know I’ve asked my members, “How did you find me?” Over a half of them said, “Google.” I’m just wondering if the next step was, okay, Google ads or how do I do that?
Jocelyn: The first thing I would say to do right now before you even start looking at hiring someone is to start creating procedures. This step takes forever. It is a pain in the neck, and it is not fun at all. But it is essential as you move forward.
One thing that I would recommend if you are not already doing it is to move to a customer service system like Zendesk, or something similar. The reason for that is because it saves all of your responses. So when you are responding to customers, all of your responses will be saved in the database.
When you do eventually hire someone, and there is a question they don’t know how to answer, they can just search and they can see your response that you’ve already put in. You can also do what’s called canned responses in there, and you can have things like, “I forgot my password,” “I don’t know how to login.”
All of those things that you type over and over and over again, you can make canned responses for those and your VA’s can use those. I would start using something like that immediately if customer service is one of the things that you would want to have them do– I assume that it is. Yes, so I would definitely do something like that first of all.
The next thing is, every little thing you do, whether it is cancellations, anything that you do repetitively, start creating procedures for them as you do them from day-to-day, start creating procedures. Make a video, make a screen capture video. Make a document off that video, so that there is a large amount of procedures. When you get ready to transition that off to someone else, you know for sure that it is going to be done the way that you want it done.
Rina: I like the idea of video and screen capture as opposed to just a written document.
Jocelyn: Exactly that is true, that is what I do for pretty much every procedure that we have.
Shane: We do also have checklists with the videos. One of the things that we say on all of our assistants about is following the checklists. You have to have bulleted lists, you have to have procedures, and they have to be followed every time. I just talked to our main assistant last night. She left one step off of a thing, and she forgot to sticky post the member call.
She was like, “Oh, I’m sorry, you know, I thought I had that memorized.” She has been doing this for almost 6 months now. I said that is the problem. We can never memorize all the little things we have to do. It’s just like an airplane. If the pilot doesn’t check the list, airplane crashes. We have to check the checklist every time.
I would say, just to follow up on Jocelyn’s, maybe set yourself a 60-day runway right now. It’s early December when we are recording this. Maybe at the February 1, you are going to start looking for your first person. You are going to document everything you do from now until then, so that the day you hire, you can start handing off tasks and then you are ready to go. You already have the training, you don’t even have to think about it..
Rina: I like the idea giving a 60-day time window, because just that whole idea of writing down all the procedures and creating videos, it just gives me hives.
Shane: Here is the biggest mistake we started hiring people. We just hired people. We said we will just make the procedures as we go, blah, blah, blah. Of course, that was a giant dumpster fire. If we had just waited, and said, “What are all the things we want to off load? What are the things we hate the most so we can get rid of them first?” Then go find someone to do those tasks. We got frustrated, we couldn’t train fast enough, we wanted to dump everything on them, we thought they could figure it out. It was just a mess.
Rina: Okay so have procedures in place before hiring.
Jocelyn: Yes, and also you can think about things that you would like to do in a perfect world. That is something else that I do with our assistants. If I had all that time in the world, what would I do? I go ahead and do a spreadsheet of twitter posts per year. I would do a spreadsheet of emails for a year. They go in and set all that stuff up for me and so I don’t have to think about that anymore.
Shane: Basically, you are going to invest your time now over the next two months to save time later when you offload those things, and you buy back a year of your life every year. Now let’s jump into the Google stuff. There is a big principle here that everybody needs to hear. The simple answer is yes, you should be using Google ads if that is how most of your people are finding you.
But the big picture answer is this: you must find your audience where they are. Apparently, your members are on Google trying to find flamenco information. This could be different for someone listening. Once again it is like ActiveCampaign. Google is not the miracle, Facebook ads are not the miracle. The most important thing you can do whenever you’re going to do promotion is go where your people are already hanging out. Okay.
I think in this instance, if you’ve surveyed them and you’ve talked to them and they said, “Oh, I found you at the Google search,” “Oh, I found you at the Google search,” “Oh, I found you at the Google search,” then you probably do need to go into Google. Don’t forget that Google is much more than just the search engine. I think YouTube is a major place for you–
Jocelyn: Which is now married to Google.
Shane: It is the second biggest search engine in the planet.
Jocelyn: it is going to be in your top search results, too. That is definitely a place you need to be.
Shane: If you are promoting your videos, those are going to appear in search results. I think that you might need a search engine strategy as opposed to a social media strategy that can work with each other. We just had someone the other day in the same situation. They found out that most people were finding them on Google. Their Facebook ads were not converting.
Here’s what we’ve changed. Let’s buy clicks off of the Google search engines, get them to your site, Facebook pixel them, and then show them ads on Facebook because now, you know you got them. Maybe that is the layers that we need to add in to this, go where they are looking, figure out who they are, and then go get them on Facebook because that is where they live. That might be the strategy we need to look at going forward.
Rina: Okay, I will write that down.
Jocelyn: All right, Rina, I think that our listeners have lot of things to learn from you. I can’t wait to see what happens as we move forward into the second year of your business. I think that there are going to be a lot of exciting things to come, especially when you get that automation, and your virtual assistants really working for you. Just take into consideration all the things that we talked about today.
We always like to end our calls with an action step. What’s one thing that you are planning to do, based on what we talked about today, say, in the next 24 to 48 hours, to continue moving this business forward.
Rina: I am going to write down everything that I do, and I think that would be the big master list, and then from there I could start writing out all the details that go into doing what I do.
Shane: That is awesome. Start a post in the action forum that you’re going to do that, okay, the Action Plan Forum. Then I want you to take one week and write that list down every day, okay. That will give you a much better idea than just sitting there and brainstorming it, because you’re actually like, everyday what did I do today? Everyday what did I do today?
When you are checking email, when you catch those customer service responses, then we can have a big bulleted list, and Jocelyn and I can go in and be like, “Oh, you can outsource this. Oh, you can outsource this. Oh, you can outsource this. We will figure out exactly what we can get rid of first, okay?
Rina: That sounds great.
Shane: Alright, Rina, well, we are going to wrap this up. I just want to, once again, without making this too much of a lovefest, you are an absolute rock star. You are a shining example of someone who persevered, and made it happen. You have an amazing niche. It’s like Jocelyn’s Librarians. Me and my buddies always are like, “Librarians! Who knew?” Like Flamenco dancing. Who knew, right? I just want to thank you for being part of our community, and for being part of this show today.
Rina: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Shane: That was another information-packed call with one of our Flip Your Life community members. If you would like to become a member of our Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and we can help you with your online business.
Jocelyn: All right, it is time to move into our Can’t Miss Moments segments of the show, and these are moments that we were able to experience that we might have missed if we were still working at our normal 9-to-5 jobs.
Shane: Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is another field trip, Jocelyn and I got to go with Isaac on a field trip to a local camp at a lake. The kids did all kind of cool things. They put a sock on and they were walking around to get dirt all over their feet so they can take them back and look at microscopes.
They got little baby jars, and they got some water out of the pond, and they had like, a scavenger hunt where they had to go find pinecones, and leaves, and things like that, and it was just an all-day thing. They ate lunch there, and we got to go and hang out with Isaac, walking around the trails with him.
We got to go and eat lunch with him, and see him during that time period. Not only that. We got to actually got to volunteer at the field trip. There were very few parents there, I was very surprised. We got to actually teach the kids how to fish. We got to show them how to cast fishing rods and reels.
That was really cool because a lot of the kids, even in the rural area, just never had the opportunity either to go fishing or they don’t have a parent in their life that is taking them out to do that. It was cool, not only to see Isaac and be able to make a difference in his life, but also to spend some times with some kids that may not have other adult figures in their lives as well.
Jocelyn: We had to relearn how to cast a fishing rod.
Shane: Neither one of us has been fishing in a long time.
Jocelyn: I’ve done it before, but it has been a while, so we’re going to have to learn that though because in our new house, we have a lake.
Shane: I used to fish a lot when I was a kid. But once I became an adult and I started adulting, I never had time, and we had 9-to-5’s and I was working jobs, and living life for our first 15 years to do that, to go fishing. We just had too much else going on.
Now that is going to re-enter our life quickly, I think, when we get out on our lake, and when the kids get off the bus, we can now take them outside and go fishing. Great Can’t Miss Moment going out to the lake and hanging out with Isaac and his field trip. Cannot wait for the next field trip with either one of our kids. Before we sign off today, we would like to close every show with a verse in the Bible.
Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible. We would like to share some of that with you . Today’s verse comes from 2 Corinthians 9:8, and the Bible says, “And God is able to bless you abundantly so that in all things, at all times having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.” Take that to heart, get out there, and do some good work in your online business and be blessed. That’s all the time we have for this week. As always guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, and until next time get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life. We will see you then.
Jocelyn: Bye.
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