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In today’s podcast, we weigh in on several different strategies to help Glen and Annmarie take their business to the next level.
Each month we allow one of our audience members to call in and ask us questions about their online business.
We record the call and then share it with our listeners so everyone can learn from the consulting call!
You will learn:
- How Glen and Annmarie moved from a physical course of teaching kids to be safe to an online business
- Why it ain’t gotta be perfect
- Our biggest tip for overcoming the fear that no one will buy what you create
- Should you work together on one project or test out your own?
- How to let go of control and hire VAs to help your business grow
- How much money do you really need coming in before you start outsourcing
- How to figure out which product to make and how to price it
- What we (personally) determined to be a good financial threshold to quit our day jobs
- All about our upcoming LIVE event in San Diego from March 28-29 with Jill & Josh from Screwtheninetofive.com
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!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- The Flip Your Community
- Check out Glen and Annmarie’s site ChildSafetyFun
- Elementary Librarian
- Podcast 3 – How to working with your spouse/significant other and not kill each other
- Find a VA on Odesk or with a service like Virtual Staff Finder
- OptimizeMyPodcast – our podcast editing and shownotes team
- Logonerds – the logo design company I used for CoachXO
- I used Donald the Voice from Fiverr to create some voice over work
- Podcast 22 and Q&A 17 answer how to price your digital products
- Screw the Nine to Five – listen in to their podcast
- BONUS: Sign up for our LIVE event in San Diego on March 28 & 29, 2015
Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
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 Glen and Annmarie take their online business to the next level.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to today’s Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. We’re super excited today to have a Flipped Podcast with Glen and Annmarie Evans. We just know that they are going to have some awesome questions. We have worked with Glen and Annmarie several times in the past. They have been students in our Flip Your Life course and we are so very excited to have them all today. Welcome, Glen and Annmarie.
GLEN: Thanks so much for having us.
ANNMARIE: Thanks for having us.
SHANE: All right guys, tell us a little bit about what you are trying to do online and just let our audience know kind of what your online business is about.
GLEN: Okay. Well, about 10 years ago, maybe a little bit more than that, I was a police officer in a town where a young lady, about 9 years old, went out for a walk and never came home. After that happened, I was able to go to some training throughout the country. My department sent me and I was learning basically how to teach kids how to stay safe. It was a great program but it was really long and a lot of people didn’t have time for it.
What we did is we came up with our own curriculum, went out, started talking to people about it, and we found ourselves quickly overwhelmed. At this time, Annmarie was staying home and I was working. So she was at home taking care of four children. I started dreaming a little bit. Shane, you know, you and I, I think we have something in common. The thing that got my attention when I first heard you was your story about jumping off the lawnmower and running inside and telling Jocelyn about your newest idea.
SHANE: Right.
GLEN: We share a lot there so anyway, we came up with this program. At the time, it was called Assert. We started going around teaching boy scouts, girl scouts. We were going to churches and it was providing a really nice income for us in addition to my police salary.
SHANE: So you were doing this on the weekends? These are actual physical courses that teach kid safety, right?
GLEN: Yeah, the typical model is Stranger Danger and that is probably one of the worst things you can teach your kids. So what we did is we came up with instead of telling kids what not to do, which is don’t talk to strangers, we want to teach kids what to do. So that’s what we were doing and we came up with different programs for preschoolers. We were doing backyard parties. We were going out on weekends, on my days off, we were constantly teaching and it was really kind of wearing us out.
ANNMARIE: And at that time, like Glen said, I was staying home with our four kids and we’d always said when our youngest went back to school, I’d go back to teaching. When our youngest went back to school, that’s kind of what I did. I jumped back into the classroom. That’s still what I do right now, teach first grade. So the online business is kind of a way for us to share that information we have with families but it doesn’t, we don’t need to physically be there to do it.
JOCELYN: Okay. Tell us a little bit about the site that you have right now and what are you doing on there currently.
GLEN: Well currently, basically, when I signed up to your Flipped Lifestyle course, it was a dream of mine to get back and really of ours, to get back to this topic of child safety. It’s something I’m very passionate about. It’s something that we’re known for. I started a blog. I was kind of messing around with it. I wasn’t posting regularly and when I heard your story on Pat Flynn’s SPI podcast, I was like, “You know what, this is an opportunity for me to do a couple of things. One, it was to kind of learn a new way to create information products and the second thing was, I knew I was going to have the accountability that I needed.” One of my gifts, I guess, is to start a lot of things and never finish any of them.
ANNMARIE: Yeah, the accountability was awesome because I come home from work and Glen would be like, “I got this, this, and this done.”
SHANE: You’re talking about Flip Your Life now, right?
ANNMARIE Yes, just going through that class, just that accountability for his type of personality was wonderful.
SHANE: All right. So you went through Flip Your Life, you’ve got these digital products that you’re trying to create, and the goal, I guess, is you’re trying to stop trading time for dollars on these safety courses, right? You’re trying to create something where people can log in and use online curriculum instead of you having to physically be there. Is that your goal?
GLEN: Yeah, basically what I was able to accomplish through Flip Your Life was I was able to write a book and I pulled from some old material I had but I created something totally new and the initial thought was I was going to sell that but I decided that I was going to test it as a free giveaway. So the idea behind the website is it’s kind of a membership website in order to obtain the information and download the book. They can also access videos and have access to me as well.
There are different levels within this. They can either just buy the book or they can buy, if they have younger kids, we have a less expensive option and it goes all the way up to a $97 course where it’s the full course. They get everything that we have to offer and then a future goal within the next year hopefully is that we want to help other people throughout the United States and really worldwide take this program and develop their own business at home.
JOCELYN: All right, that is amazing. We are so glad that we could be a part of just helping you get that ball rolling. That is so great.
SHANE: And what an awesome mission too. You were one of the students, it’s an amazing thing when all the people in Flip Your Life create and it was like “These are such awesome goals” and like, just to be able to have a part in teaching hundreds of people to keep their kids safe. That is just an awesome, awesome product.
GLEN: You know the biggest thing is parents are scared today and we know that. I used to go out and speak to MOPs groups, Mothers of Preschoolers. Their biggest question was, how do I train my children without scaring the heck out of them. Unfortunately, a lot of parents do that. So what this website will do for not only us but also for people that we’re trying to really serve, administer to, is that we want to reduce fear and this is going to allow us to scale it so that we can reach not only our little community here in Dayton, Ohio but worldwide.
JOCELYN: Right. That is so exciting. We are so, so excited for you. Let’s go ahead and get into your questions. What is the first question that you have for us?
GLEN: Well basically, the first question I have is we’ve done a physical business where we’ve gone out. I have actually instead of selling the product that I developed through your course, I decided that I was going to go full on and not only do the product but develop the website, the videos, and put the complete package together so that when I start marketing this, which is starting this month, everything was going to be ready to go. I could have sales funnels going on so really, I want to know what you think would be the best thing to take it to the next level really to get it rolling.
SHANE: All right. The first thing I think you should do is don’t wait until everything that you just said is done completely to the nth degree. I think that’s a huge mistake that people make really early on is they try to wait until they’ve got this grand scheme, this grand architect thing done and what happens is you keep getting behind, you keep getting delayed, you keep moving backward. It’s almost like that two steps forward, one step back kind of mentality because you’ll get something working and then it will break, or you’ll miss a deadline and something’s not working when you’ve got all these other stuff kinda there.
You’ve already got the first part of the funnel done. You’ve got that ebook, that digital product created and you’re ready to start collecting leads, so make sure that’s in place and I think that if I were you, I would go ahead and start preselling all of this stuff that you’re creating. Go ahead and start seeing if people want to start to buy it. That’s what we actually did with our very first Flip Your Life course and we’ve used this strategy a lot with other products that we have.
We will put out there, “Hey, we’ve got this outline. We’ve got this thing we’re going to create” but we’re going to go ahead and make sure people are going to come first and we’ll go ahead and charge for it, and then we can create it as we go and finish it out.
You might want to go ahead and start preselling some of the bigger things like for example, you’re going to teach the course but you’ll also going to have a way where people can come in and kind of become, I guess, coaches where they can learn your system and then go out and present it live, right? That’s one of the things you’re planning on doing later.
GLEN: Yeah, ultimately.
SHANE: Yeah, you might want to go ahead and get people in and say, “I’ve got my course material. If you’ll go ahead and purchase now, I’ll let you in that at half off and I’ll show you how to turn this into a business in your local community.” I think that you should just go ahead and roll out with what you’ve got and present it like you’re finished and the whole product is done. Don’t wait for everything to be done until you get it going.
JOCELYN: And there’s really nothing that lights a fire under you quite like selling something to people that are not complete. That means you’re definitely going to get it done and the good thing about doing things like as you go like how we started in Flip Your Life is that you kind of get to know the questions that people have as you’re going and you can address some of those in your course materials.
People in our first course, I think you guys were in our first course, people came up with questions that we didn’t even think about and we were able to include that information in the course material. So there are other benefits to doing it that way as well.
SHANE: We’ve done this strategy a lot. When we first started like some of our early websites, Jocelyn, with her ElementaryLibrarian.com site, she did not create a whole year of lesson plans and then try to sell them. She created one month and then once people bought those, she created the next month and those same people bought them again.
Then she said, “All right, how much would you pay for a year? Well, I’m going to buckle down and finish it now.” Same thing with our football products or my weightlifting products, if it’s a monthly deal or if it’s multiple modules, sell what you’ve got and create a base of paying customers, and then you can just build right on top of that. I think you all got a great foundation but I think you shouldn’t wait until you’ve got everything in perfect place. If you want to take it to the next level, then start tomorrow.
ANNMARIE: Okay. So what are your thoughts on overcoming that fear of, “If I put this out there, what if no one buys it?”
JOCELYN: Prove it. That’s what I say. Prove it’s going to happen. If it does happen, that’s great. You didn’t fail. You just figured out that you didn’t have exactly what the audience was looking for. So now you can go back and just ask them that.
That’s a fear that we all get, we all say to ourselves, “What if this, what if that? What if no one listens to me?” Really, the only way to overcome that is to just straight jump off the cliff. That’s the only way to do it.
ANNMARIE: Okay.
JOCELYN: Spoken by the person who jumps off the cliff with a parachute.
ANNMARIE: Yes. Here’s the parachute, honey. Put the parachute on. So that kind of leads us to our next question. Do you guys feel that both partners in the marriage have to create separate products? Obviously, we’re doing something together but…
GLEN: Well, the inspiration for this question is that I’ve always got a great idea for her.
ANNMARIE: Yes, lots of great ideas for me and we have a child. Like this past summer, Glen is like, “You are the teacher. Go ahead and you can write lesson plans for this Child Safety Fun?” I’m like, “Sure.”
So I work on these lesson plans for hours and hours and I give it to him and he’s like, “Mm, not really what I had in mind.” I’m like, “Well, I think that it’s in your mind so you just need to do this by yourself then.”
JOCELYN: Yeah, well Shane and I were talking about this questions before we got on the call and I was like, “Do you want to stay married?”
ANNMARIE: Yes.
JOCELYN: You know it is challenging to work with your spouse or your significant other. We don’t deny that. We actually talk about it a lot. We have a podcast about it, how it is challenging to work with your spouse.
You know, we have different thoughts on this, I guess. I think that you can definitely work on separate projects if that’s what you choose to do. That is how we started out mostly because we didn’t know for sure which one was going to work or if any of them were going to work. We kind of just started working on several different projects and now we work together and both of our strategies have worked so it’s hard to say like which one is better but there are definitely advantages and disadvantages to doing it both ways.
SHANE: I would say that the way we started out, we had all these ideas, well, I had a ton of ideas and Jocelyn had one laser-focused idea which is why hers worked. We had all these things and we tried two or three different things and in that way, once one hit, we kind of geared more energy toward it. Does that make sense?
So if you do start total different projects, like if you’re only making lesson plans for first grade and he’s only making child safety, you are dividing up your labor up a little bit but you’re giving yourself, I guess, more chances to succeed. If you can work it out to where you can work on one project, it definitely does kind of help make things go smoother especially if something gets traction.
Once something gets traction, you’ve got to throw all your effort into it and build that because when you hit something online, you ride it until it goes away. What I would say if you’re working together on a project, and this what me and Jocelyn do, we focus only on the things we’re both really good at, like we make sure that we delegate.
We don’t do the exact same task because if we’re both trying to work on the same email, we’re going to kill each other. Delegate and then get out of each other’s way. Don’t work on everything directly together if you’re on the same project, but I would say there’s nothing wrong especially at the beginning when you’re trying to get something to hit, to work on totally different projects separate from each other.
JOCELYN: You guys were talking about like writing lesson plans for the child safety program, right?
ANNMARIE: Yes.
JOCELYN: What I would say to that is to get an audience first. As you start building your audience, see if that’s something they want because you don’t want to spend a lot of time making these lesson plans and then nobody really even be interested in them.
SHANE: The hard part of a marriage is who’s the project leader, you know what I’m saying?
ANNMARIE: Yes.
SHANE: Because there’s always…
ANNMARIE: Both of us can be project leaders.
SHANE: I know we’re both the project leaders, that’s right, so there really is a 50-50 pull kind of deal whenever you’re working on these projects. It’s not like it worked when someone is clearly the manager and someone is clearly the guy under the manager or whatever. There has to be that give and take.
Basically, you have to just kind of let go of some things, like Glen, if you want her to make lesson plans, it might not be perfectly what you want but it’s still additional content and it may be exactly what your audience wants.
So I think if you work on the same project, you got to be like, “okay, we both did something. Let’s put it together and give it to other people” and then they can decide.
Remember, it’s never about what we want. It’s about what the people want. If you can get your audience to kind of give you some feedback and then divide and conquer a little bit, create everything and put it all together. Who cares if it’s exactly what either one of you would have done, and you’ve probably got something that other people are going to love.
GLEN: Well this is something that I think I struggle with. I’ve had a lot of different projects over the last 10 years and they have grown some but they have never taken off. One of the things that attracted me to your story was the fact that you both had projects that had taken off and I know in my heart that there is something to information products online. I just know it because I’ve had small successes.
One of my issues is, is that I feel like I need to do it because nobody else is going to do it like me, even my wife, and that’s a struggle. I know that it has really kept me from growing and I’m committed to that not happening with this project. Have you guys ever experienced anything like that?
JOCELYN: We’re sitting here laughing at each other right now.
GLEN: That’s why I don’t hire a virtual assistant. It’s just like I can’t let go.
JOCELYN: As the control freak in this relationship, I feel your pain, Glen. I really do because I am also a person who needs to have everything in my control. I’m just starting to let go of some of that and it has been hard. I mean, it’s not something that’s easy for me at all, not only just in business but in my life in general. It is so hard for me to give up control of anything and it is not because I think that I am like the best at something necessarily. It’s just that I …
SHANE: Nobody does it like her.
JOCELYN: I have expectations if I want things to be done and I don’t even know that I can meet my own expectations, to be honest, but I can probably come closer than somebody else in my mind. I see where you’re coming from and I know what you’re going through.
SHANE: I am a delegator and I think it comes a lot from being around football for so long because, in football, you have to trust everyone around you. Whether you’re in a team or a coaching staff or anything else, it is a total huge effort. There are roles and some roles are more important than others but everything has to be spread out.
If I’m the quarterback, I can’t rely on the left tackle on pass protection. I just got to trust that he does it. I think I’m the delegator kind of in this relationship so I don’t care to let all this stuff go to these virtual assistants. The main thing I will tell you is this. This month, we just took our fourth major website to a 4+ figure income per month. We’ve got a lot of different income streams now but we have four major websites that make between 4 and 6 figures a month.
The biggest I can say about each one is they all took off when we started letting things go. When Jocelyn started letting go some of the customer support in Elementary Librarian and we hired someone to do that for us, that side exploded.
When I hired out some of the content creation for another one of our websites, that website exploded and started making money. I can look at the trend back on almost everything that we have done and when we let go and trusted other people, that’s when the growth happened, whether it was trusting our audience to tell us what they wanted. We all think, “I know exactly what people need.” Not really, we need the audience to tell us what they want. When we started letting all that go, that’s when we started making money online.
JOCELYN: And you know, there are ways to sort of protect yourself or like give yourself a fallback, I guess. On all of the tasks that I have virtual assistants help me with, we have videos for them. I explain exactly what I want them to do. I show them how I do it with like a screen capture and that takes away some of the lack of expectations, I guess you would say, between what I want done and what they think I want done. If I show them an exact video and say, “This is what I want. This is how you do it,” it takes a lot of that away.
You can also make a list of things that need to be done, things that only you can do, and then things that you can pass on to someone else. That’s what I have done on my Elementary Librarian site. I still take care of all of the content creation, a lot of the blog posting, things like that that only I can do but then I turn over things like answering emails and creating blog post pictures and things like that. I mean, I am still picky about those things but I know that if I can turn that over to somebody else, I can get a lot more done that only I can do.
SHANE: And real quick before I move on to your next question, the last thing I’d like to say about this too is they are not going to do it exactly the same. For example, take Flipped Lifestyle, our podcast show notes with the e podcast makes up the majority of the content on our site because we do three shows a week. We outsource that entire show note and transcript process. All we do is draw up the pictures in and they listen to the show and they make sure all the links are in, transcripts are in, and they even write down the descriptions and stuff like that for us.
The reason we did that is because we do not have time to do it anymore. We just cannot do that. It’s never 100%, the show notes never look 100% like if I would have done them but the thing is, it takes me five minutes to glance over them and tweak it a little bit whereas it would take me three hours per show if I were doing it by myself.
Even though I’m still involved, right before we publish, I look at it or Jocelyn takes it and looks at it. We still save ourselves 95% of the time by not doing that. So you don’t have to totally let go of everything. You can look over it, you can check it, and just change a few things and make it a little bit like you would like it and then you move on.
GLEN: So when you decided you needed a virtual assistant, did you go with like Chris Ducker service or were you doing something on Odesk? How did you go about finding these people to help you?
JOCELYN: We are considering Chris Ducker service right now. So far all of the virtual assistance that we’ve worked with, all the overseas ones we found on Odesk, and we’ve been pretty lucky so far in that we found people who have been loyal and they have stuck with us for several months now.
We’ve been working with two overseas assistants for a couple of months. I also have two United States VAs and they are actually friends of mine, which is sort of a gray area for me. I don’t usually like to work with friends in that way but it just happened to work out. I have a stay at home mom friend who needed some extra things to do and I had some things I needed done. It just sort of worked out and that has worked out really nicely, and then I have another person that works with me as a virtual assistant. She and I actually worked together in the corporate world for about five years, several years ago. She was so good at what she did and I was like I need her to help me.
SHANE: She was an executive assistant for a CEO, basically.
ANNMARIE: Okay.
JOCELYN: Yeah. So we are friends but we knew each other in the work environment first so that one is also working out really well. I prefer US VAs. It is more expensive but I feel like they understand what I need done better and also that they work on US time, which is important for me because I need them to do customer service like in emails.
SHANE: What we always tell everybody when we are hanging out with people and talking about our virtual team, we have people in, I think, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Thailand. We have two Canadians that live in Thailand that do our podcast for us and I will put a link to them in the show notes. But the difference between them and the American VA is really, is not much because even though those people that work in America, they are still remote, you know what I’m saying?
ANNMARIE: Right.
SHANE: We never wanted to hire a VA that worked for us for 40 hours a week. I think some people do need that and I think that’s more what Chris’ service leans to. We are probably getting to the point where we are going to have to have a GVA, a general virtual assistant, to do a lot of different task for us but what we prefer is to put together a coalition of people that do very specific tasks for us.
Like maybe this person only does product inventory and they work five hours a week or maybe this person only manages some of our social media accounts, so they work 10 hours a week. Then like our virtual assistant that works in America that’s close to us, she may only work 10 hours a week for us some parts of the year and maybe 25 hours a week another part of the year.
We’ve kind of built teams that do jobs for us as contractors and we just hire them as we need them. That way, we are not sitting here going; I’ve got this GVA for 40 hours, I’m not filling their time. It’s not stressing me out. Now we say, “This has taken me six hours a week. I’m going to go to oDesk.com. I’m going to find a virtual assistant that can do this task. I’m going to hire them for six hours a week.” It might be an American that you pay $15 an hour and it might somebody in Bangladesh you pay $4 an hour.
That’s kind of how we’ve built our team as we find the job and then we go and find the VA that can do that job and we only hire them for that. That might be a permanent position, most of ours have been, but we’ve went the full GVA route where they try to do everything. I think you get better work when you let people specialize.
GLEN: I found that a lot of the sales copy on websites selling information products on how to start your own business where you are making money, sitting in your underwear, looking at how much is rolling into your account. I guess my question, I found that that’s completely not true.
SHANE: It’s totally not true.
GLEN: But the other thing is, how much money do you need rolling in before you decide that you are going to go with the virtual assistant? It’s kind of like, we all want to be profitable really quick but I’ve always struggled with, “Okay, I need money to like pay the bills for the business.” When did you decide that “I’m making X amount of money, we are hiring an assistant?”
JOCELYN: Right, that is definitely a good question. I think it’s really kind of different for each person or each situation just depending on if you are still working a normal job, if you are paying your bills. Obviously, if you are not working regular job, you want to be able to pay your bills before you start hiring a VA.
SHANE: That’s probably a good idea.
JOCELYN: Yeah but if you are just making mostly profit and you are ready to grow, I think it’s a great idea to start thinking about hiring some help from a virtual assistant.
SHANE: And what we did when we looked at our situation, we basically just said, “Okay, we want a virtual assistant.” This isn’t true for everybody. We said, “What can we give up?” We tell a lot of people that we basically canceled our cable. That was one of the first sacrifices that we made to free up money for that. So we had this extra $100 a month that we were paying out for cable. A $100 a month for a virtual assistant when you are hiring small jobs will go a long way.
I can remember when we first started getting some logos made. we went to a site called LogoNerds.com and after we had canceled our cable, I had an extra $100 and I was like, “Okay, this place charges $27 to make a logo and I need a logo for CoachXO, and I don’t have time to do it.” I hired that out. I used that money.
Basically, that’s like hiring a virtual assistant. I hired someone to do that job. It’s the same thing if you wanted to get like some voice over work done for a podcast. I have a great voice over guys who did the intro for my podcast at CoachXO and he does voice work for us. He works on Fiverr.com. He’s awesome. His name is Donald the Voice if anybody is looking for some good work out there. Go to Fiverr and look for Donald the Voice. I hired him for $25 to do work for me. So that’s hiring virtual assistants.
I think a lot of people think a virtual assistant is this person sitting at a corporate desk somewhere in the Philippines with their glasses on, scheduling everything for you and making all of your life easier and doing all of your WordPress, but really, that’s not how virtual assistants work. It’s more like; use that money for the job. If you are making a little money set it aside, if you can sacrifice $50 somewhere in your budget, just set that aside as virtual assistant money and go hire out two or three tasks that are getting on your nerves.
That’s usually our litmus test is. We are sitting there and we are staring at each other through like the fog and we are going, “This sucks, this is terrible. I do not want to do this.” That’s when we pretty much just fire up all the oDesks and Fiverrs and Google and we like; I’m finding someone to do this for $100 because I can’t take it. That’s a good way to look for virtual assistants.
GLEN: How many products do you have to create in order to make a 5-figure month? I know there are many different products that you can do. I know that making or creating more expensive products is probably better than making less expensive products but how does that work?
JOCELYN: You just answered your own question, my friend. This is a really tricky question. I wish there were some like magic formula that we could tell you because if we could, we’d probably be making like tons of money.
SHANE: Millions and millions of money.
JOCELYN: Unfortunately, there is not a good way to answer that. It really depends on so many things. It depends on your audience, the size of your audience, what they are looking for, how much you can charge for your product, how many people are out there looking for your product and want to buy it. It depends on so many things and that’s why it’s so difficult to answer this question.
What you can do, we like to make fewer products and make them more value packed and therefore more expensive. If you charge more for your product, you are going to make so much more money.
You have to sell much fewer of them to be more profitable and that is how we have really been successful in the past year or so. Back in 2012 when I started my website, I had no idea what to charge for my lesson plans. I was totally just guessing about what people would pay and I was charging way too little. My full year of lesson plans, it was like 200 and something lesson plans, 240 I think. I was charging $89.
GLEN: Wow.
JOCELYN: I don’t know what I was thinking and like this was the month that we sold five figures like three or four months in a row and it was at this $89 price. Think of what we could have done if I would have raised it.
SHANE: How much do you charge now?
JOCELYN: In 2014 I decided, “Okay. This is ridiculous. I’m going to make a new full year of lesson plans and I’m going to sell them for what they are worth. I listed them at $300 or $297 for the digital package and I charged $447 for the premium package or the Deluxe package which has printed lesson plans and several little bonus things. We had several 6-figure months this year.
SHANE: Jocelyn actually sold more copies at the higher price than she did at the lower price. When we saw that, we did the same thing. I was charging $75 for my football product. I more than double that up to $200. The same exact thing happened. It sold more copies at the higher price than it did at the lower price.
The big thing about it is I think people think about Kindle and they think, “Oh, I can get a book for a $1.99,” but the problem with that, you can’t think about digital products that way because Kindle just has books. You have solutions that help people have better lives. Your solution is to keep children safe. How much is that worth? I’m talking about your business right now, guys.
Your solution is to give someone a way to make an extra $500 on the weekend and keep a dozen children safe. That is worth a lot of money. All you have to do is create a product and a value to prove that, and then you can charge a higher price. If you are really looking for those 5-figure months, you’ve got to look at the higher end. You can’t make it on $20 products.
If you’ve got 100 $20-products, that’s a little bit different. You’ve got a huge inventory of different products that you can make. That’s one way to go about it. But if you’ve got a ridiculously valuable product that solves someone’s problem and helps people have a better life then you need to charge accordingly. If you charge a higher premium price, it’s going to be much easier to get those 5-figure months.
GLEN: I think that’s one of my struggles is that we have limited incomes. We have jobs like most people so what I always think, “Would I pay this for that or for this product?” I might not be in the same situation as my customer.
For example, I know for a fact that if someone did this business in their community, last spring we went to a preschool and we taught a class. They let us come in, we only charged, our normal charge is $25-$35. We really charge $10 per student and they will let us come in and do six 40-minutes classes. We walked away with a $1,000 for about six hours worth of work. I know that this is valuable if people would take this business into their community. I know that they are obviously helping people but they can help their own family too.
SHANE: Imagine this, Glen, here is how you sell that. So let’s say your course, to learn how to hold that course and to certify people to do that is $500. Let’s say you charge $500 for that. Then you tell them, “All you have to do is this” and you’ll make a $1,000 the first weekend. That’s how you sell that it is worth this much.
JOCELYN: What we like to do is actually do tiered pricing and it’s also called anchor pricing where you have different levels for people to choose from. So you have one price a month that is what you kind of want to steer people towards and then you are going to have a bottom level price, like a tier one, and then you are going to have a super high-level price.
This is exactly what I do on my Elementary Librarian page. That way, you can get people in who are sort of like the value pricing people and then you can also get people in that want the high premium experience but then most people are going to go with the middle of the road because it has a little bit more option.
GLEN: Thank you. I appreciate you are saying that. On our website ChildSafetyFun.com, based on a consulting call that I had with you, I’ve changed the site completely. When they go to the site, there is a letter. It’s a sales letter and it’s basically telling them why we are doing what we are doing and how we want to help them, and the bottom I’m doing exactly that. I’m tiering the prices from, “If you don’t want to buy anything, here’s some stuff we can give you for free. But then it goes $27, $57, and $97,” and then ultimately, I want to give them a business so that they can improve their life. I appreciate the input that you had there.
SHANE: What I’m thinking too with yours is just kind of just on a side is; you want people to get into your program who are looking to keep their kids safe, right? That’s one product but you also want to then convince some people, “Hey, would you like to go teach this to other people and make money? Do you want to make $500 a weekend and keep kids safe?”
You might want to separate those two from each other and say, “Okay, I’m going to get all the people that want to keep kids safe and get in the program,” then you might want to upsell the weekend course to the people who’ve already bought. That way you know they are interested, you know they’ve got this, you know they appreciate your material, and now you can say, “How about we turn you into a child safety Fun ambassador for the weekend? You are going to go out there. I’m going to show you how to make $500 extra a weekend and you are going to keep kids safe,” but then you remove the clutter.
So now your options can be, one, two, three, only for your course. One might be a course with the videos, one might be a course with just the ebooks and then the big ticket might be you are going to work with them personally on a consulting call, really guide them through the process. But then after people buy, that’s the people you want to sell your, “Hey, by the way, you can turn this into a business on the side.” It kind of removes the clutter of, “Do I want to become a teacher? I don’t really want to do that. I just want to keep my kids safe.”
JOCELYN: Yeah. People will realize the value more like once they are already in it. What you could do on that higher anchor, that higher tier, is that you could bundle some extra additional smaller products in. That’s what I do on my Elementary Librarian site.
SHANE: Like those books that Annmarie made.
GLEN: Right.
ANNMARIE: Yes, thanks.
SHANE: There you go. Get those in the picture.
JOCELYN: Yeah. We are trying to help you out here, Annmarie.
ANNMARIE: Thank you.
JOCELYN: Guys I’m so sad to say that we are just about out of time. So we have time for one quick question if you have something that you could throw in here at the end.
ANNMARIE: Yeah, real quick, what do you think is a good threshold to decide to quite your day jobs?
SHANE: Alright, this is a doozy right here.
ANNMARIE: I know, in two minutes answer that question.
SHANE: We’ll extend the show for about three or four minutes extra here. This is disclaimer, we are not telling anyone to quit their jobs until they are for sure they can quit their jobs. If you end up homeless and penniless, don’t blame us. Here we go, there is our full disclaimer. I am going to tell you what we did and how we looked at it, and it might be different from you. Jocelyn was the safety net person.
ANNMARIE: That is totally me. Yeah.
SHANE: Exactly. I was that, “Let’s quit” while I was still halfway on the lawnmower.
ANNMARIE: Right, that is Glen.
SHANE: I’ll go first and then I’ll let Jocelyn bring everything back to sanity. The way we did it was this. When we started making money online, at first we were like, I think when we were at $3,000 extra a month, we knew we had something and we knew that at some point, we were probably going to be able to quit our jobs. But we didn’t do it then. What we did was, we kept making money.
We kept looking at things and we started immediately reducing our lifestyle. We canceled cable. We had a really big nice 100-ft2 house, sitting on half an acre, pool. We sold that. We moved into a smaller house that’s 1800 square foot. Still had met all of our needs, had all the rooms that we needed, has a great backyard, but we reduced our mortgage by half.
We started this process of reducing our life to where, when we got a good indicator that our money was going to be okay, our lifestyle was going to be a lot more reduced. That sped up our process. What happened was when we hit that big month, we made $30,000 something in one month.
Now, you got to pay taxes on that. You don’t get to keep all that. When we saw that big hit, that’s when the conversation really started of “If we can do that in one month and we are only doing it part-time, can we make that happen again?” So that’s where the conversation started to quit. I’m going to turn this over to Jocelyn now because she still wasn’t totally convinced yet.
JOCELYN: Yeah. We just started asking ourselves like what could we do with this if we did it all the time. That’s when we knew, we started looking at our teaching salary. We almost made, in a couple of months, we exceeded one of our teaching salaries for a year and so we were just at that point where we were ready to take the plunge.
SHANE: We also had to look at our finances. We basically had to say, Okay we made that but how much do we actually have?” What is our payout? What are our debts? What are things like that? Could we live 3-6 months if we didn’t make a dime online? You have to look at yourself too and say, “Okay, we just made all this money. It’s not like next month we are going to make nothing.”
You are going to generate that income when you quit. We got two kids. We had to do the right thing. Do we have to roll the dice and take a chance? Yes. Was it scary? As all get out. Yes, it was. Even when money kept coming in, we were like, “I know this is going to dry up tomorrow. What have we done?”
But there is a thing we always do like an exercise, like what’s the worst thing that could happen? We kind of say that out loud and we are like, “Okay, we quit our jobs and yeah, we made $36,000 next month but then next month we don’t make a penny. And I fall down and I break my leg and it cost $30,000 because there has to be surgery and we now only have $6,000. Then we lose our checkbook and someone steals it and they take it and we have no money, and then the IRS comes, they want all their taxes. We don’t have, so the government puts Shane and Jocelyn in jail and our kids end up in foster care.”
GLEN: Funny where the mind goes, right?
SHANE: Exactly. I just took you down the rabbit hole. Once you say that out loud, it’s totally ridiculous. So the moral of the story is this; when you feel comfortable that you can roll the dice and understand that it might not work and you might have to go fix something, that’s when you can quit your job. You don’t quit the first month that you make any money online.
We made a considerable amount of money before that $36,000. We had been doing it for over a year at that point. So we have been saving money, we have been selling houses and canceling cable, and preparing all these, we had prepared for that for over a year, so we were ready when it hit and that’s how you have to do it. When you are ready, you go. You prepare for it but that’s when you quite is when you are actually prepared for it.
JOCELYN: Guys, I hope that was helpful for you. It’s so fun to talk to you and just hear about you guys are doing, we can’t wait to see how the launch goes, how the sales are going, and we hope that you’ll keep us up to date on all that.
SHANE: We super appreciate you guys for being a part of Flip Your Life. You guys did a fantastic job and you got in there and you were kind of leaders in the group. It was just awesome. That group was so fun, that very first group and you guys were a huge part of that. It was awesome having you guys in it.
GLEN: I just wanted to say thank you very much. I appreciate all the input that you’ve had in our lives over the last couple of months and the value that you’ve given me as far as focus, getting something done, and moving forward, has been very inspirational to us. So we really appreciate you.
JOCELYN: Yeah, you are welcome. You guys have been awesome, we have really enjoyed talking to you and we can’t wait to see what you guys do.
SHANE: Thanks for being on the show, guys.
ANNMARIE: Thanks for having us.
JOCELYN: All right. We hope that you guys loved today’s interview with Glen and Annmarie Evans as much as we did recording it. It was a lot of fun. You can check out their site at ChildSafetyFun.com and see what they are up to in their big product launch. We’re super excited to tell you about this week’s Can’t Miss Moment.
SHANE: Our Can’t Miss Moment this week is a little different. Usually, it’s something with our family or something with our kids or something that we’ve done. We’ve done a lot of things like that that we could have used here but something that we have really, really enjoyed in the last week has been working with s me friends of ours, Jill and Josh Stanton from ScrewtheNinetoFive.com. We were on a mastermind call one night and we all started talking about doing live events. We were like, “Yeah, we were thinking about doing a live event” and they were thinking about doing a live event. So out of nowhere, we jumped into this awesome idea where we are going to have a live event with Jill and Josh in San Diego California on March 28 and 29, 2015.
We have just been spending every night for the past seven or eight days talking to Jill and Josh about this live event and working with them. We have been having an absolute blast. We’ve been looking at venues, picking events, and talking about how we’re going to do it, what we’re going to eat and somehow a yacht got thrown into it. We’re going to take a boat out apparently in the bay on the second day of the event.
It’s just this crazy awesome experience that we’re planning and nothing like this, nothing like doing anything like this or even planning or hosting an event like this would have ever been on our radar as much as a year and a half ago.
So it has just been an awesome Can’t Miss Moment this week that our online business is taking us to a point where we can talk about doing these crazy outlandish bold dreams with friends of ours and especially Jill and Josh because only an online business could have brought us together. They were a couple of Canadians living in Thailand and we’re a couple of Kentucky kids.
JOCELYN: That is not the beginning of a joke.
SHANE: We’re sitting over here in Kentucky. We met them in California and we’ve struck up this great friendship. It has just been awesome to see what has come from our online business. That is our Can’t Miss Moment is planning this live event in San Diego on March 28 and 29 with Jill and Josh.
JOCELYN: I always say that Jill and Josh are the R rated version of us so if you need a little bit of…
SHANE: If you need some swearing, you can go listen to their podcast over at ScrewtheNinetoFive.com but they are an awesome couple. They do a lot of what we do. We focus on helping couples and families reach their online dreams and man, just a lot of fun planning this event. We laughed and had a good time in the last week. We were not getting a lot of sleep but we are having a whole lot of fun.
JOCELYN: We hope you guys will join us in March. It is going to be an absolute blast.
SHANE: All right guys. That’s our show for this week. Hope you enjoyed our Flipped Podcast with Glen and Annmarie. If you need help with your online business, we are here for you and we’ll see you next week. Catch you on the flipside.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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