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Hey y’all! We have something different setup for this week’s episode.
Joining us for a round of next level flippin’ is FYL community member and the owner of Gratitude Goodies LLC, Diane Campbell.
Diane is a woman with a passion for food and an exquisite eye for detail. She is also a firm believer of the indispensable quality… Gratitude.
Her company, Gratitude Goodies LLC, was born right in their basement. Armed with their concept and skills (goodies, baskets and bows), the goal is to help corporations send wonderful, heartfelt tokens to show their sentiments.
She has been in this industry for over 8 years and has gone through the highs and lows of the market.
With life events looming at the corner, Diane must make a tough decision for the benefit of her family, her employees and her business.
We’re going to help her gain the much needed insight to keep her business moving forward and transition online.
Let’s get to work!
You Will Learn:
- The importance of knowing what you want & making hard decisions
- Why content is good, but delivering results is better
- How to lay out clear results
- and so much more!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
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 moving into our new house. Now, we wouldn’t be super honest if we said that it was all fun and games, and went perfectly smoothly. We definitely had some bumps along the way, and it was a little crazy trying to move in in the middle of the holidays, and just having a lot of different things going on.
Shane is always talking about how we never would have been able to do this as teachers, and that is so true. We are just still thankful that we have this business, and that is doing well, and that we are able to live here where we do now.
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 help Diane make a huge pivot in her business.
Shane: Welcome to 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. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. 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 be new to our show, we are a little different than most online business podcasts you listen to. We do not bring on guests, or experts, or anybody like that like pitching a new product, or telling you the latest and greatest widget that is going to take your online business to the next level. We bring on real people who run real businesses online, and we help them take their business to the next level. These are actual members of our Flip Your Life community, and we are super excited today to have Diane Campbell on the show. Diane, welcome to the show.
Diane: Thanks so much for having me today.
Jocelyn: Yes, we are very excited to talk to you. You have a little bit different situation than most people that we talk to. You are currently running a, what we would call traditional business, and you are wanting to bring that home or change it up a little bit. Before we get started, just tell us a little bit about you, about your background, where you are right now, and why you are wanting to make this change.
Diane: I am the owner of Gratitude Goodies. We are a corporately focused gift basket company located in North Georgia. You could say we are a suburb of Atlanta, and that is our market. We serve the corporate clients all over the city of Atlanta. The pivot part is, I’m sitting right now and 1500 ft.² of space and I’ve had upwards of five employees on the floor, Christmas time is especially busy for us. But I’ve never been able to pay myself because we’ve reinvested the money back into the business.
This year, we turned the Christmas corner and not enough to sustain us through the summer, so that natural choice, which is not an easy one to make is to take it back home again. In addition to that, I am attempting to launch a training site for would-be DIY gift basket developers, which is quite an interest out there among mostly women, 30-55 age range.
Shane: Basically, you have this business, a corporation will call you, they will have a meeting or something, and they will send 10 people a gift basket that all came, or something like that. And then it started as a home-based business, and then you moved into a more of a warehouse environment, right?
Diane: Exactly. We’re in industrial warehouse space, so you won’t find us in a retail location on the road in a high traffic area. However, we can receive guests into our brick-and-mortar facility, which has worked really well for us. It’s always nice when people can come and see our facility because it is quite amazing thing. It is a lot of inventory here, and it’s a lot of ribbons and bows and sparkly things that are all lined up. It started out of my home, but I’ve always, always in focused on the corporate client. I do a ton of networking to build relationships.
Shane: You are working basically 12 hours a day, every single day, and you’re not paying yourself because you were paying for inventory, you are paying off for employees, you are paying for all this other stuff. What started as a, “Hey, I created a profitable business at home, let’s scale it,” ended up getting bigger than you could actually make profitable, it sounds like.
Diane: Well, it is a combination of a lot of things. We started in 2009 when the economy tanked, and a lot of real estate market drives a lot of things that go on in regular business, whether you realize it or not. So, we are just starting to see major things returning a little bit, so that makes the decision even harder. We did purchase a business midway through the eight years that we’ve been here, and we’ve lost two $20,000 clients in one season.
It up or down, and based on the economy, and people sometimes don’t prioritize expressing gratitude to their clients. That is the first thing that usually goes. What people don’t really realize is their ROI will increase when they say thank you. Your return on investment is that client that receives a gift wants to tell others, “Use this company because they said thank you to me.” It is a big deal.
Jocelyn: Well, it’s not just the business things that is kind of weighing on your mind right now. I know that you told us in our questionnaire, we’ve talked about in the community, that you and your husband are short on your retirement age, and you guys are wanting to change for that reason, too.
Shane: And you’ve got a lot of other people in your business who this affects, and they are not really handling the pivots so well, you’ve got partners and things like that. Could you tell our listeners about that?
Diane: Yeah, I have a business manager, and I love her to death. She and I have chosen not to take a salary because we reinvested everything back in. Part of that was because our husbands had really, really good jobs, and we did not need the income. As retirement gets closer and closer, it has to pivot to being profitable. But this move, as you know from the forums, we’ve talked about, is a massive, massive decision, not only from leaving the 1500 ft.², but bringing all that back into a home is incredibly difficult, just from the logistics of getting it all to fit. I’ve moved this business several times, and I know what’s coming and I am dreading it.
Shane: Okay, basically where we are, there is a massive of amount of overwhelm, there is a lot of people involved, it’s time-sensitive because you are starting to feel that crunch of, “I’ve got to do something now because retirements around the corner.” You’ve got life events that are pressing, and basically, we are in this point where we’re going to have to do something. We don’t know what it is, we probably aren’t going to be able to figure out if it is right or wrong until we do it.
We are just going to have to try to make the best decisions possible going forward. What is very interesting about your story, and when I think of it, it will help a lot of people that are listening right now, is every business comes to pivot points, every business comes to hard decisions. We just had to let go one of our employees recently, and it was brutally hard. It was the same situation, we knew them personally, they’ve been with us for a while, but we had to do that hard thing that was best for our business going forward.
If you are going to be in online business, and we always tell people, “You ain’t going to succeed in two months.” It is not going to be a miracle, and magic just happens. Everyone is going to have to make hard decisions, and this one, instead of just straight Q and A’s, I just want to go back and forth, and let us just try to work through some of this, and figure out what part of the elephant we’re going to eat first.
Diane: All right. Let’s go.
Shane: Alright, right now I think the best thing to do is just talk about where we are with bringing the business home, closing this down, let’s solve that first.
Jocelyn: Well, first of all let’s talk about, have you decided 100% that this is what you are going to do?
Diane: Well, that is a great question because in the off-season between Christmas and New Year’s, when I wasn’t in here, I had great clarity about what I wanted to do. But as soon as you get back to the office, the phone starts ringing, the inventories is being done, my business manager, Marian, her father just passed last night so we haven’t gotten to our long-range planning meeting yet where we are going to hash out all these details. I think there is three answers to this is yes, no, and wait. This might be a ‘Wait’ until we get to that long-range planning to see what happens next, and how exactly we’re going to do this and bring it home.
Shane: Here is what you should do in situations like this. This is a good general rule. Yes, there is always other people involved. Yes, there is always life events that happen, like deaths or kids going to college, getting married, being born. One thing that we’ve learned to always do in our business is to try to step away from the emotion, and say, “What do I want?” That is not a selfish question. That is a, “What do I want my life to look like in a year? What do we need our life to look like in a year?” Maybe even sketch that down, write it down, and ask those hard questions like, “Do I want to be in this business?”
When we get entangled with other people, and we have partners and problems and things like that, because you are a good person, because you care it kind of blinds you to the cold hard decisions that sometimes have to be made. I think that, yes, there is a planning meeting. You have to do things in the right way, but you actually sent me a Facebook message before you joined the community, and told me this whole story. We went back and forth there, your story just really hit me like, man, this person is overwhelmed, this person needs to talk through this. Then you joined the community, and we’ve been through it more, every ounce that I’ve heard from you is, take this business home or stop doing it.
You have to say to yourself, before you have any of those conversations and remove all those things that are happening in your friend and your partner’s life, and say, “This is what I need to happen. This is what I want to happen.”
Jocelyn: Yeah, and we talked about this in the forums, and I told you a story about how, when we were thinking about quitting our jobs, Shane and I made the decision that, yes, this is what we are going to do. When we started telling other people like our friends and our family, like the closest people to us, 9 out of 10 people were like, “This is stupid, don’t do it.”
Shane: These were the people who we had always relied most on. The closest people to us and our inner circle, the people who we went to. I had one person in my inner circle that was wholehearted like, “Jump off the cliff, baby.” You know what I mean? “I’ll call the ambulance if you hit bottom.” Everybody else was kind of against that, and it really did make us doubt. It was kind of the same situation you are in. We were only making a couple thousand bucks a month when we quit the year before that, and we said, “We made this big chunk of change here, we can carry us through three or four months.”
Jocelyn: It’s now or never.
Shane: It’s a massive risk: we are giving up health insurance, we have two small kids. This is a whole lifestyle change, and we just finally had to look at each other in the eye and say, “What do we want, and are we willing to make that bet on ourselves?”
Jocelyn: It comes down to the people who are primarily involved. You told me in our community that you are the 100% owner, so it is 100% your decision. You can take other people’s opinions and you can take that into account certainly, but don’t let it cloud your judgment. If that is what you really want, you have to go for it, regardless of what happens in the mix.
Shane: We do find people in these pivot points, and they don’t realize that other people are involved. We always want to take care of our people, we always want to take care of those around us, especially people we’ve made promises to; business arrangements and things like that. But it’s in the execution of decisions that you take care of them, not in the decision themselves. Only you can really make the call on what is best. I think, from everything you’ve told us, you know what is best. You just have to figure how to execute that in a way that takes care of your business manager and the other people around you, does that make sense?
Diane: It makes perfect sense. There’s nothing to say I can’t still have them working with me. It just means that I’m going to be able to pay them and me.
Jocelyn: Exactly.
Diane: I’m pretty tired of doing all this stuff, and not getting compensated because, let’s face it, an entrepreneur, a business owner, has the most passion and works the hardest all hours of the day and night, worries throughout different things, and stages of your business, that I need to be compensated.
Jocelyn: Absolutely. You know, if you make these decisions, and you offer these people the opportunity to go along with you, and if they decide, “Hey this is not for me, this is not what I want,” then you are going to have to cut ties. I mean, not from a personal level. If you still want to be friends, that is fine, but from a business perspective, you just have have to say, “Well I’m going on Path A, you’re going to have to go on Path B because that does not fit in with what I want.” It just always comes back to that.
Diane: It’s exactly right. There are no hard feelings. It’s just it’s a matter of a little bit of pride here that built it up so big that it is hard to bring it back home again. Then the displacement of my own family’s lifestyle is going to be a little bit hard, and I did tell them that this is what we’re thinking. I did not get all that favorable responses from my kids. But they understand, and ultimately, they are supporting that. But it is a major, major thing to be dealing with this.
Shane: It is, and it affects a lot of people, and that is part of business. That is what the do. We work for ourselves.
Jocelyn: But you know what? I like to think of it this way. I like to use language that is more positive when I talk about things like that. Instead of saying, “I’m a failure because I went out, and I had this great warehouse, and now I am bringing it back to my house.” That is not a failure. That is, “I’m changing my life for the better. I’m creating a better client experience because I’m not so stressed out about everything all the time, and I’m actually making some money and enjoying what I am doing because I have made these changes.” It is about making things better for your clients. I mean, at the end of the day, once everything is moved and you are actually making money from this endeavor, do you think that it will in fact be a better experience for your clients? Because I think it probably will.
Shane: Yeah, I bet your workload cuts, your time cuts, there are going to be other problems like or inconvenience to all the stuff. But you are actually going to have money to spend on the weekend. That is a big difference.
Diane: To answer Jocelyn’s, or to comment on that, at least when I made the decision to bring it back home, and I looked at that as not a bit of swallowing pride and embarrassment. I looked at that experience, and I said, “Wow, now I have something to sell to the gift basket builders site.” I went full circle, and here is what I found, here is what to do, here’s what not to do. It is okay to bring it back home again. Don’t do this.
Shane: Yeah, I have a saying in our business. Whenever we feel like we screwed something up, because we do it all the time too, we have to make a change in our business to make more money or whatever, Jocelyn always says, “You only got to be right 51% of the time to win.” If that is 51 to 49, I win every time in a basketball game. Also, if you take two steps forward, and one step back, the rest of the world gets really mad about that. “Oh! Took two steps forward, one step back.”
Every time, I take two steps forward, one step back. If you keep doing that, you are moving forward. You are only moving one step at a time, but you are still going forward it. I think that that is what this really is. When you first sent it to me, we always say people usually write us at of desperation or inspiration. I really felt like yours was one of the desperation ones, when I first got the email.
Diane: Yeah, we turned the corner over the holiday season. You don’t come out with bukus of money to sustain you through the summer, and especially in a seasonal business, you have to be a little bit concerned.
Shane: Yes, exactly. But what I feel like is, it is two steps forward, one step back. The one step back is often not a bad thing. It is the correction to make it right going ahead.
Jocelyn: That is how we get better. All of us get better that way.
Diane: Every company has to reevaluate what they do every year, and adjust accordingly.
Shane: We never pressure anyone to make big decisions like that on the air, but I think hearing you, talking to you, and now especially that we can actually say it to each other, I think you have made the decision, and you just need to say, “This is the decision. How do we execute it to take care of the most people and myself and the business, and grow something new and make it better?” And never look back. Don’t worry if it is right or wrong. That is where people freeze. You won’t know until you do it.
Diane: I had a situation this morning. I do a lot of networking, and I can still do that, that is not going to change. But I delivered a gift to someone I felt had a posh office downtown Atlanta. I deliver it, and it is to his home. He is a mortgage broker. I said, “What am I worried about?”
Shane: Oh, without question.
Diane: Not looking professional, I’m bringing my business back home to my built-out basement and garage which we have to finish, but I’m worried about how I’m being perceived in a gift basket company, when this guy is in his home? I’m like, “Get over it!”
Shane: I had a buddy who sells online, and I will not name him here because he would kill me. He did the same thing. He was like, “Man, I need an office. All these people have an office, and they have a film room where they record their podcasts, and their stuff.” So he went ahead and rented an office, and all this stuff, and I’m like, “What are you doing, man?” He said, “Man, I’m getting an office, I want an office. I want to feel like I have somewhere to go to work every day, and blah-blah-blah,” and I’m like, “Well, isn’t that why you sell stuff online so you don’t have to feel that way?”
He does it, he does it. About six months later, we got online and we were talking. He was like, “Man, I got to get rid of this office. I don’t know what I was thinking.” But the thing is though, he could have been mad that he paid the rent, he could have been mad that he did this, he did that. He was like, “Yeah, but I tried it, and now I know. I know that that is not the right path for me, and I am back on the right path.”
Jocelyn: I think a lot of times, we worry about that unnecessarily. How many of your clients will really know that you are even operating out of your home? It is not something that you were trying to hide, necessarily. I’m just saying, how many times does that really even come up? I just don’t feel like it is going to be that big of a deal.
Shane: That is called Spotlight Syndrome, where you think everybody sees everything you do.
Diane: Yeah, I have a client that is picking up a gift today. It is ultimately going to end up being more work for me to get gifts to clients. I’m going to have to take it outside and the drive it to them. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it does not matter because the essence of what we do is deliveries. I can hire a courier instead of putting myself on the road.
Shane: See, that’s the thing.
Jocelyn: That’s how you scale.
Shane: That’s execution. That is what we’re talking about. The decision is not the hard part. It is what comes after. And we are already just spit-balling, “Oh, the hard part is this. But I could do this.” There is always a solution to every problem if we just step back and work for it.
Jocelyn: I even like it for what you do. If somebody does want to see your facility, bring them to your house.
Diane: I have done that, but it is going to require a little bit of fixing up.
Jocelyn: Well, that is the thing. Well, see, now you have that $3500 a month or whatever it is that you are paying for your facility. Put that into your house.
Shane: Exactly.
Diane: I’m not looking forward to the work part of it, truthfully. A lot of blood, sweat and lugging things– it’s heavy. It’s hard work.
Shane: Here is another thing, too, though, that is true. But remember, we were just talking about this today. There is 100 right ways to do things. And there is also 10 solutions to every problem that you come up with. I think that in the business world, everyone is like, you have to be the most productive, most efficient. You have to be taking your bulletproof coffee, and you have to be sleeping 4.3 hours a day, and you have to have your miracle morning– all these things, if you are not the robot of business world, you are not succeeding. But some people say, “Just do it yourself, and save the money.” You could also hire someone, a moving company, to move out your stuff for you, and then you just organize it. Like Jocelyn said, you are going to have upcoming more money not paying rent to do stuff like that.
Diane: Exactly. That is one of the reasons why I don’t want to give up the business entirely, is because it is very profitable. It is profitable in this location.
Shane: Exactly, and see, that is the two steps forward. You tried something. Let’s take one step back to where we know it was profitable.
Diane: And I have to be proud of what we have accomplished in the eight years of taking it from absolutely nothing to be able to support five employees, courier drivers, FedEx, there are a lot of moving parts, and everything that’s going on. That I’m proud of and I do have a good reputation out there. We are a five-star gift company. There’s a lot to be thankful for, and to be grateful for.
Shane: I think what you discovered wasn’t a bad thing. You discovered the point of diminishing returns. We talk about this a lot when we do Facebook ads. We will put $10 on an ad and maybe it makes 50 back. We were like, “Woah, that was cool. Let’s try that again. Let’s spend 20 on it, and maybe it makes 80 back. We just keep spending money, but maybe we finally like, “Hey, we spent 100 and made 90. Well, we need back that up to where we spent this much, and made this much.” You just found the point of diminishing returns for that moment, and now you are just going to move back to where you know that you can be profitable.
Diane: Well, the other thing that I thought of also is with that extra income coming in that I can pump that into developing a better website, increasing my SEO. The networking is probably not going to change, but it can if I wanted it to, now. I don’t have to work so stinking hard on building relationships over and over again. I can probably have more clarity of where I’m going to focus my networking efforts.
Shane: I think, too, going forward, one thing we tell everybody in the Flip Your Life community is– and we are not pushing this as an affiliate product. We have no relationship with this person at all– but there is a book called “Profit First” by Mike– what’s his last name?
Jocelyn: Michalowicz.
Diane: I got it.
Shane: Okay, good.
Jocelyn: Best book ever.
Shane: Yeah. If you will take that book now as you pivot and as you launch your online stuff, the valuable lessons you learned is, don’t build a business that does not pay you first. We see on Shark Tank, and all these people are like, “Yeah, you are not taking any money out of your business yet, right?” “No, man, I’m paying myself in three years.” Why? That don’t make any sense. You’ve got to eat. Use that book, make the business profitable, pay your salary, and you will still have extra money to spend on that other stuff, to make that things happen that you want to happen.
Diane: Yeah, then it will grow again to, I will have to move out again.
Shane: But, this time, you’ll be profitable when it happens. Okay, so, let’s do this. Do you feel more comfortable now about going forward? We can still help you in the community go through the details and the execution of the pivot. But do you feel better about it now, just talking it out?
Diane: Well, it’s a huge relief because when you talk to certain people, you get different answers. Nobody is trying to strong-arm me into staying here, or leaving. It’s just, I have to make the decision. It just weighs you down sometimes to make the right thing and make everybody happy. It has to be for my husband and I. This is our retirement.
Jocelyn: Exactly. One thing that helps me a lot that we will do when we are dealing with other people’s emotions, and what we think other people are going to think, because I’m a pleaser. I like to keep the peace. I don’t want to rock the boat at all. One thing that really helps me is, I always say that I’m taking my personal hat off, and I’m putting my business had on. As a business owner, I have to say what is the best thing for my business. Regardless of anybody else’s feelings, or whatever, what is the best thing to do for the business.
Shane: I’d like to transition to your launch now, and talk about the gift basket, helping other people do this on a smaller level in their house. Last thing that I really want to say on this is, you said earlier, we’re going to have a business meeting to figure out how to do this. I think that the decision needs to be made and broadcast before you have the meeting to become, “Well, what if we didn’t do it? What if we did this? What if we do that? Is this okay? Is this really good?” That’s just, “No, I’ve made the decision. This is the decision.” Then, when you get there, that way you can say, “All right, guys, how do we do this exactly?”
Diane: Yeah, that was one of the things that I talked to Marian and about. She is my business manager. I said, “We need to talk. There is a huge elephant in the room, and we need to deal with it.” I knew all this before we even had the planning scheduled. Once we get to the planning, it is going to be, execute the plan and take it home.
Shane: Alright, let’s transition, then. That part is done. We’re going to figure out the details as we go.
Diane: You guys are going to help me move, right?
Shane: That’s right, I’m only about five hours away. I’ll head out 75, we will be right down there. Let’s transition now. You’ve learned all these lessons, you done all this for eight years, you are clearly the expert in this field. Now, you want to transition to where you can help, kind of like a business opportunity for women, stay-at-home moms, or anybody who wants to do this is, “Hey, you could do Gratitude gift baskets in your local community. You can make extra money a month. Have margin. Have extra money for mortgage, vacations, things like that.” What is that looking like now?
Diane: I have the name secured. It is going to be called Gift Basket Builders, and settling on the logo. Other than that, I have the domain name. I haven’t built anything in regard to that yet.
Shane: Tell us than about the concept. What are you going to be teaching people? What is it going to look like? Is it going to be a product, is it going to be a membership community? What are your big picture thoughts about this business?
Diane: Well, over the holidays, I just took a Post-it notepad, and wrote down a bazillion different ideas of all the different facets of what this business looks like. The business plan, getting your domain name, where to network, what not to do, choosing ribbon, what components look like, how to work with distributors. There’s so many things that I can teach on, but I want it to be little bite-sized pieces. I’m kind of thinking in light of what you do, the football playbook, I can do that. Same kind of concept with the little bites of information to sell.
I’ve seen models like this where they have a bronze, a silver, a gold, and platinum level of participation. At the bottom level, you’re getting blogs and emails, and you get to participate on a Facebook page, and the higher up you go, then you get a 30 minute coaching call. The highest level, it’s an hour, you can split it up however you like. I kind of wanted to do like you do here, and talk with the actual gift basket people who are wanting to build. They want to do it, but they have no clue what they are getting themselves into.
Shane: That’s the execution. Let me ask you this next question. What is the result for this person? That is so important. What are you selling them as a result? “Hey, you could sell X gift baskets a month to make an extra thousand bucks for your family.” Or “Hey, you could do this as a part-time job, and everyone in your family can quit, and make it the family business, like in your local area.” You are going to know what the content is. But what is the result you are going to deliver to these people in these local areas when they take on this as a side business?
Diane: Well, I think the result will be, it is up to them, but there is upwards of 500 to a thousand. It could be 5000 a month, if they want to.
Shane: Alright, so let’s break that down then. You can’t really say in your results, “Hey, you could make $5 or $1 million.” That doesn’t work. You are going to have to figure out the result you want for people. For example, like in our education businesses, we have a very clear result. It’s, you don’t have to plan lesson plans anymore. That is it. Not, “You are going to be the greatest teacher on earth, and win awards, and all these other stuff.” Or “They’re going to promote you to principal because you are teaching your class so well,” and all these things that we could say to help them move up the ladder, whatever.
It’s just, “You’re not going to have to plan lessons anymore. You get to go home, and get two hours of your life back.” It is really important to understand what result you want to deliver to these people. If they get a better result, that is awesome. If they get a worse result, that is their fault because they did not do it right. But you’ve got to zone into something that is reachable, people could achieve, and that you can deliver. You don’t want to tell someone, “Hey, you could make up to a million dollars,” and nobody ever does.
If you were taking yourself, and you taught yourself 8 years ago how to do this in your house, you knew ahead of time. You had a crystal ball, and you said, “I know what your business is going to look like in 18 months,” because you lived it. So, you went back in time, you taught yourself. In 18 months, you know, what did that look like for you? Then think about your area, and how does that scale down to a smaller area?
Diane: Well, I think that streamlining the guesswork is going to be an important factor for would-be builders and the ability to put their efforts in the right direction. Instead of floundering around trying this out of the other, I can help them streamline that.
Shane: Maybe, the result is, you want to start a gift basket business. If you do it on your own, it’s going to take you a year and a half, and you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. I can get you there faster. That might be the result they were trying to deliver.
Diane: Yes.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, it’s what you’ve done before, it’s what you know. I think you can easily help people get there.
Diane: One of the things that I noticed is when there are coaches out there who are teaching this sort of thing, they are never really giving actual ranges of numbers. A networking group cost $395 to do. if you want a business plan, you’ve got to do this. If you want to register your company name, it costs this amount. Those kind of things are never communicated to a business builder who wants to do baskets.
Shane: Yeah, the problem with including some of that is, it might be different in Georgia, Kentucky, California, things like that. But you can always give ranges. I think what you are getting to is kind of like how we do it for Flipped Lifestyle. A lot of the gurus don’t talk about the stuff we talk about because it doesn’t polish everything good enough for them. They don’t want people to hear that before they start because then, they won’t start. We are more kind of like, “No, we want you to hear that,” so when you start, and you get to this, it does not mess you up and that is kind of what you are wanting to do.
Diane: This is the part that Marian didn’t care for, or I guess the whole concept, and that will be last I talked about that was, to be painfully transparent. This is what QuickBooks looks like, this is how much this component costs at wholesale, this is how much you should charge at retail. This is how much 3 feet of ribbon costs. They don’t get that kind of information.
Shane: Well, you’ve found the point of stop scaling so fast. Things like that will really resonate with a lot of people. It might make you grow a little bit slower to be that painfully transparent. Not artificially transparent, because a lot of people are artificially transparent. They say they are transparent, but they’re only telling you the parts they want to be transparent about. But you will have more leg. It is more a marathon, not a sprint. People will know, like, and trust you better, faster, and longer if you are very painfully transparent like that.
That is what we try to do. We don’t try to sugarcoat anything. We are as blunt as we can be, and while some people are turned off like that, we have found that those people are the people that are chasing their passions and dreams, and never get there. It’s the people that really get their feet muddy, that make it. We want to make sure that they understand, there is going to be some mud up ahead.
Diane: Well, yeah, business is not an easy path. It’s an uphill climb, and you do have plateaus, you do have setbacks, there is blood, sweat, and tears and all of that, but it is always moving forward. That is the important thing.
Jocelyn: Yeah, definitely. We always say that baby steps are better than standing still.
Shane: So, what is your next step, then? What do you think? I’ll be honest. Do you think that you can even handle this right this second? Until you have got your plan to your team on what is going to happen, and you moved on– Jocelyn, what is that thing you say? You only do 3 out of 7 things, or something like that?
Jocelyn: Yeah, I read this article once that says that you have to pick three. There are different areas of your life like health, sleep, work– I can’t remember– family, obligations, and I don’t know, there are several others. But you have to pick three, basically. We are not really able to concentrate fully on more than three things.
Shane: We have been in a disaster, lately moving. You are about to move a warehouse. Not good. We actually had to look at each other. We were trying to do a launch, we were trying to change something else, we opened our Patreon page, we did all these different things at once, and we just had to put a freeze on everything for two weeks, and move, and get everything where it’s going to be.
I just wonder if maybe, it’s so easy to say, “Well, your next step is to build this website, and get your infrastructure, and do this.” But I think your next step might be just hit pause on this for a second. Get this other stuff, not perfect. It is never going to be perfect. But where it’s like, we’ve started the moment. The glacier has moved over here, so we can go over here and we can start kicking this iceberg.
Diane: I agree with you, and I said earlier, there is three answers to it: it’s Yes, No, and Wait. I’m feeling very strongly that this is a ‘Wait’ because at the end of the day, I’m the one who is going to have to write all that little booklets. I’m not opposed to writing, but I have to have the bandwidth to be able to do that. I don’t know if I could do that and move this business into my home, and fix that home. It’s just a big domino effect. Waiting is probably wise.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I think so, for sure. As someone who has recently gone through a move, not quite to that extreme, but I understand. You only have so much mental space available, and you have to use it wisely.
Shane: Sometimes, putting something on hold actually is way better. If you try to do it piecemeal over the next couple of weeks while you are transitioning, and you are like, “Okay, I’ll take an hour here, I’ll take 10 minutes here.” Some of that is okay, but you’re not going to do as good a job. The frustration from all this other stuff is going to leech into what should be exciting, into creating this new business. Don’t do that, people. If you are listening out there, yes, you can start things. Maybe you go higher than the person who is going to put up the basics of a website. Maybe, you do that. Let them work on anything that can be worked on while you are doing all these other things, maybe you can outsource some of that, and we can help you figure out what that looks like in the forums. But if all that can be done on the side, and just put off what you have to do until you are ready, which will be soon, it’s not going to be a year from now, it’s going to be closer than that, then you can come back to it with full speed ahead, I can only focus on this for a couple weeks. Get it launched, get it out there, and it is going to be more successful in the long run.
Diane: I agree. I mean, I’ve invested in the Flip Your Life community here because I felt very strongly about it but now I don’t know what we’re going to do together here.
Shane: Here is exactly what we’re going to do. The first thing that we need to do is figure out what can be done that you don’t have to do– Diane does not have to do this part– while you are taking care of the other stuff. We need to figure out how to turn some people loose on that. Get your website up. You’ve got the domain, get it installed, get it there, have someone go ahead and make a layout, get your sidebars the way you want them. They can just do that for you. That might take a day of planning. You turn it loose, and in two weeks from now, when you’ve got some other stuff going on, we will come back to it.
Jocelyn: I think that it is also just figuring out where to invest right now as you are making this transition. I think a lot of times, people want to put online business in its category, and regular business in its category. But there is a lot of spillover there. I feel like that we can probably help you to hash through some of the other things that you have to deal with in your physical business.
Shane: This is a brilliant opportunity to deconstruct where you are, and tell your story. You need to be creating content while you are moving. You need to be filming you guys moving out of the warehouse. You could create so much content just recording the next three weeks of your life.
Diane: It is interesting you say that, because one of the things I wanted to do with the Gift Basket Builder’s site, not the actual gift basket site, was to do the videos. I do a lot of videos, and I put them out on YouTube, so I’m going to be doing that as we transition from here to home just so I have that archive.
Shane: This will create a content plan. You’ve probably got enough content for six months to tell a compelling story about how you got here, where you came from, and where you are going next, which is going to resonate with your avatar, because we know who that is. Okay? So, let’s do that. Let’s just document everything on this other thing. Let’s get some people working on some stuff that you don’t have to do, and let that be finished when you come back to it. You can hire people to do this for a very, very cheap. They can do all these things, and you can do all your thing, and then when you come back together, you will be ready to kind of hit the ground running and be farther ahead.
Diane: This feels so relieving just to be able to air this out with somebody who is not emotionally involved in it. The 35,000 foot view is always way different than when you are on the ground doing it.
Jocelyn: Yeah, definitely for sure. It’s beneficial for us even just to talk through things with our clients because it helps us learn things about our own business when we do that. It is pretty awesome. Well, our time is about up for today, unfortunately. But I think it has been a really good conversation, and just good for people who, maybe, are in traditional business out there to know that there is a way to marry the regular business and online business together, and to make big important changes when you need to do so. Thanks for talking to us so openly and transparently today. I think that people out there will really relate to this kind of story.
Diane: Thanks for having me, and I look forward to what’s ahead. Sort of.
Shane: Hey, listen. One way or the other, we will gather together okay, Diane?
Diane: Alright.
Shane: Alright, guys, that wraps up another call to 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 as well.
Jocelyn: Alright, next we are going to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment, and these are things that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at a normal 9-to-5 job. Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is moving into our new house. Now, we wouldn’t be super honest if we said that it was all fun and games, and went perfectly smoothly. We definitely had some bumps along the way, and it was a little crazy trying to move in in the middle of the holidays, and just having a lot of different things going on.
We are probably like, I don’t know, 60% unpacked, maybe 70. So, we are getting there. It’s been really nice. We have been able to just hang out, we check out the water outside, and it’s been a mild winter here, so far in Kentucky, and we are just enjoying the outside, being able to get out and run around out there.
Shane: Yeah, we don’t have half of our furniture yet. This house is almost 5000 ft.² total, by the time we got all our stuff into it, we realized, there are three rooms that don’t even have furniture. The next mission is to get out, and buy the furniture for our bedroom, our living room, and we need some stuff out for on our porch. But it has been really cool. It just blows my mind every day to go out, and sit out on our porch, and watch the sun set over our lake.
For those of you who may not know, when Jocelyn and I first started this online business gig, we sold our old house that we used to live in and downsized into a much smaller house, and a much tighter community, where everybody was kind of on top of each other. Now, we have bought a 30-acre estate, it has a 10-acre lake, it’s been just amazing. Kind of coming full circle to, hey, we sold the house we had, went to our ‘Freedom House’ that we like to call it, and now we are in our ‘Forever Home’, when we get to see stuff like that.
Jocelyn: Shane is always talking about how we never would have been able to do this as teachers, and that is so true. We are just still thankful that we have this business, and that is doing well, and that we are able to live here where we do now.
Shane: Before we go we like to close every one of our shows with a verse from the Bible. Today’s first comes from Proverbs 10:2, and the Bible says, “Tainted wealth has no lasting value.” Keep that in mind while you’re building your online business, guys. Always treat every customer with honesty and fairness. That’s all the time we have for this week uppity 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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