Episode 73: Why My Business Switched From a Launch Model to a Shop Model

[00:00:04] You are listening to the Empowered Business Podcast, I’m your host, Monica Freaux, and if you’re like me, you want to grow a business you love that gives you financial freedom and fits your lifestyle. Every week you’ll get strategy and unfiltered opinions from me and other successful business owners that will inspire you to make big moves in your business. When we work together, we not only grow faster, we also amplify each other’s voices. Are you ready to build your business on your terms? Let’s jump in. Hello, hello, hello and welcome back to the Empowered Business Podcast. We were on a nine month hiatus and it is so good to be back. Today we’re kicking off a four part series for content creators. Now, when I say content creators, I specifically am talking to people who create learning type content. So if you’re a course creator, if you run a digital membership, or if you have a high ticket program, this series is going to be for you. Over the last year, I have noticed a big opportunity for content creators to double down on their existing program and launch content in digital e-commerce shop. So here’s the thing not all buyers are the same, and when we get our best content behind a paywall, we are missing out on the opportunity to make more money and serve more people. This series is all about how you can leverage what you’ve already created to make money and impact more people.

[00:01:39] Now, before we jump in, let me catch you up a bit on where I’ve been. So I shared nine months ago in episode 70 that I had a very rough personal year. In 2023, my marriage ended and I lost my stepfather. While I fully intended on being back on in the business coming into 2024, that simply did not happen. Post-divorce. Life is much different than I ever could have imagined it would be. One day I will launch a podcast under the Redefining Mom brand and tell you all about the lessons I’ve learned. But for now, I’ll say my life is nothing like what it used to be. While I was married, everything was just very consistent in terms of when I would work and how much time I’d have to work. My ex and I have 50 over 50 custody, and I would have honestly thought that I’d have so much more time with that 50% of my time being off. And I say off in air quotes, and anyone who’s been divorced is probably like, ah, that’s funny. You thought 50% of your time was yours, 100% not true. The reality is, when I am on, I have to be 100% on, which means that I do not have the same mental capacity for work on the days that I have my kids, and on the days I don’t have my kids, I am fully responsible for running my home and all the life tasks that need to get done that build up when I have the kids.

[00:02:53] On top of this, I am financially responsible for a lot more than I was in the marriage. So needless to say, I have been stretched pretty thin, like really thin. And there have been moments when I genuinely thought I would break, but I can’t. I won’t, and I have channeled my inner mantra of I don’t do failure. And here we are. About a month ago, I really hit a crossroads where I thought I was going to break, and the result of that moment led me to this. I have been operating at a capacity of four people and I am only one, and it is humanly impossible to continue that way, which means I really need to work smarter and not harder. It’s not just a cliché, it’s honestly survival at this point. And this is why I am fired up to tell you about what I’ve learned over the last 12 months about running our digital product shop, and what I’ve witnessed my students experience in terms of leveraging their existing content for more profit. So let me take you back right now to March of 2022, because I really want to explain to you where the concept of our digital product shop came from, so that I can catch you up to what I’ve learned over the last 12 months that I think is going to really help you double down on your existing content efforts instead of creating more and more and more.

[00:04:14] So back in March of 2022, we had just come off of a launch. So my business has historically operated in a live launch model. I’ve always had a signature program that is like the main thing that I drive people to in my business. Like right now. For us, that’s the digital shop experience. That’s my program all about how to create and launch your own digital product shop. So we came off this launch and the numbers were down. And the thing is, is that at this level of business that I’m at, when numbers are down, well, no one wants their numbers down. But my expenses are pretty fixed. I have things that I have to pay for in the business, and it’s not just as easy as, oh, we had a down month, so let me cut expenses. It doesn’t really work like that. So I was I wouldn’t say panicked at this point, but I was definitely feeling very stretched. And this is before anything in my personal life started like spinning out of control. So we were in Charleston, South Carolina at a team retreat, and I was so frustrated because that morning before we got there, my payroll at the time, there were three of us on payroll. Payroll had just dropped it from the bank account. We didn’t go negative in the bank account, but more money came out than had come in that month.

[00:05:31] And luckily I just had kept money in the bank account. So I had a cash flow. So it wasn’t like we went negative. But I was like, this is so frustrating because we just spent the last probably three months, two months working our tails off for our live launch, and it didn’t go as planned. And now we’re Were negative in numbers. And so we have to do something to get the numbers back up. And I remember just being kind of angry, honestly, that there was never any sort of rest period. It was like it was just run, run, run. I liken it to the second you put down the track in front of you, you roll right over it. And what was happening was, so we’re operating on these live launches, so we would live launch anywhere from like 3 to 4 times a year pretty consistently. So like every 3 to 4 months, we would have a live launch that would drive towards whatever our signature program was at the time. On those off months, I knew that we had to keep selling, right, because we’re in business. That’s what we do. That’s the whole purpose of us being in business is to keep selling. But what we would do is we would keep creating more new stuff. And I think the conundrum came in because without a shop, there’s no central place for people to come and see all the stuff that we’ve created over the years in one place.

[00:06:45] And they can check out one time, add multiple things to the cart in this digital product space. We’ve been taught that every time you spin up a new product, you have to create a new sales page and a separate checkout for it. And if you’ve been doing it for any amount of time, like eventually you end up like me with like 40 to 50 sales pages. And I will never forget the day that someone came to me and said, hey, I’m in your program and you have these awesome templates in this program, but I I’ve seen you also sell templates outside the program. I love them so much. I would really like to buy all of your templates. And in order for this person to buy all the templates I had, I could have offered them. They would have had to go to ten different sales pages. Like, I’m not even joking. And that’s when I’m like, we make it incredibly difficult for people to pay us money. Now let’s go back to March 2022. We had a down launch, and when we got to the team retreat, my message to the team was for the next 24 hours, all we care about is cash in the door. What are we going to do? Let’s put our collective heads together.

[00:07:49] What are we going to do to bring cash in the door? And we went back into the same cycle of, well, we can create a new sales page and put this on flash sale, and we can create a new product and get the excitement about that. That’s when I really was feeling angsty. And Haley looked at me and she was like, what would make you happy? Because I was just unhappy with the business at this point, and I was like, I just one, I want to have fun again. I want to enjoy selling. That was the first thing. It’s not fun because I feel like every time we have to, I will say a cash injection. If, you know the launch didn’t perform how it was supposed to or whatever. I’m like, all we do is create, we create, we create, and then we don’t leverage what we create. Well, because we talk about it once when we launch it, but now it’s on its own sales page. So we would have to split our email bandwidth. Like if I was going to email you today or back in March of March of 2022. If I was going to send you an email and be like, go see all the things I offer for sale, I’d have to link you to 50 different sales pages. Like, why are we making this so difficult? So that’s when I threw my hands up in the air and I was just like, I want this to be fun, and I want to be able to have a place where people can go and see all the things that we have done over the years, because we have created some amazing things and like stop creating more and more and start leveraging what we’ve already created.

[00:09:13] And that is where the empowered shop was born from. That was initially how we kicked it off. I flipped the mentality of my business from early 2022 all the way through mid 2023. I basically worked to shift the way that we sell, where as everything in my business prior to this was led with the launch model. Now, the basis of how we sell is all roads actually lead to our shop and the launches layer on top of that. And that’s going to be really important for this kicking off this series for you, especially if you’re a course creator or we can call it a program creator or whatever it is. When you have a higher priced program or you have a signature program again, however you want to refer to it. Usually you run your business around selling that program, but I flipped it on its head and instead the engine that hums in my business is the shop. So basically, when I sit down to map out what we’re going to do in a quarter, there are two major things that happen.

[00:10:19] One, like, let’s just say it’s Q1 and I will ask myself, one, when are we going to do our launch that quarter? When are we going to talk about that signature program? Because that’s going to take our email bandwidth. When we do that, when we’re launching, it’s basically all about what we’re launching. Right. And so I first determined that then any other period that we’re not launching during. It’s all about the shop, and the shop has allowed me to put products that either were hidden in these other programs that we created, you know, creating another sales page. And where would we even put the link to the sales page, or like products that were on order bump that never had its own sales page? [00:11:00] It allowed us to unearth all these products and make them into product listings in our shop. And now what happens is I’m able to send emails that highlight a product that honestly, probably never would have seen the light of day to get you into our shop. But once you’re in our shop, then you can add multiple things to your cart, and it functions similarly to what you’re used to as a sales page, because you can also do order bumps and upsells. And it’s really fascinating to see how much money we were leaving on the table, because we were not making it easy for people to buy from us. [00:11:35] Now, that was the first evolution of my shop again was from like mid 2022 to mid 2023.

[00:11:43] That was me really getting the groove in the fact that we lead our marketing calendar with our 3 p.m. Friday sales. It highlights a new product in our shop. Basically, we built our marketing calendar around the shop and then we layered in our launches. Then stuff in my personal life started imploding at me and I really couldn’t be as present. What does that mean? What was going to suffer the most with me not being able to be present because of what I was going through was our live launches. It was nearly impossible for like a 12 month period for me to show up live, and if I did, it was painful. Honestly, it was like the hardest season of my life. So this is when I started realizing the true power of our shop, because one I did not need to be present to sell out of the shop. I could make the marketing calendar and my team could completely run with it. The products were already there. But then we hit this point where, listen, when you launch something new, people get excited about it, right? When we run a marketing campaign to our shop and we’re announcing like a new shop product that is like the best performing campaigns we have because people love new. But I really wasn’t in a place where I could really be creating new, and this is when it really hit me how much content, how many products we still had that were hidden in these other programs that could be pulled out and made into shop listings.

[00:13:13] Essentially us having a marketing campaign around it as it’s new. And then the more we pulled out of our membership and some of our signature programs, the more I realized it really works together beautifully, because some people are not ready to invest in a higher priced program. Some people are not going to ever want to sign up for a recurring charge in a membership, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help them. And so two things happen. One, when you put content from your larger programs and make them into smaller priced digital products in your shop, it works like a funnel because some people are not ready to invest in those higher priced programs, but then they now have access to get in at a lower level, and some people will still never go on to pay you that higher price. But at least you are capturing money and you’re giving them another avenue, another medium to consume your content. But then there’s a whole nother group of people that may have never been convinced to buy from you via a launch or a free sales event, whatever you want to call it. And instead, when they invest a smaller amount of money with you and you are able to show how good your products are.

[00:14:29] And just like the breadth of what you can teach them, they are like, wow. I will absolutely go on to invest in the higher level program because they blew me away with these templates and tools or smaller workshops that are in their shop. So when I started to really make that connection between my shop can be basically a paid sales funnel into my higher price programs. It made launching way easier because I’m now emailing way more frequently when I’m not launching. And not only am I emailing more frequently, but I’m always selling. Have you been on someone’s email list where they operate in the live launch model? And I can think of a few people who are guilty of this, and I probably was too. You hear from them incessantly for like a month, and then they fall off the face of the earth until they come back for their next launch, and then they’re talking about the same program again. That’s actually not the most effective way to sell. Instead, what we do is between our launches now, we are strategically pushing people to certain products in our shop that are meant to keep them engaged and warm for the next launch of the program. And this is what this four part series is all about. I’m actually going to break it down for you and explain exactly how you can take your existing content that you’ve created for these programs, that you run, and break them down into different types of shop listings that basically will nurture people all year long into your bigger programs.

[00:15:59] I have some really cool ideas on how to do this, but right before I hit record, I made a decision that I really want to illustrate the power of these strategies that I’m going to be teaching you over the next few weeks, and I’m going to share my numbers from the Empowered Shop. The Empowered Shop is made up of basically all repurposed content, things that we have created for other programs. There are things in there that we created specifically just for the shop, because, I mean, we’ve had the shop for over two years, but a lot of the content in there comes from our other programs. And just to give you an idea of the amount of money that we were leaving on the table by not leveraging these models together, we have had 11,604 orders in the Empower Shop. Think about that 11,604 orders. And by the way, that’s just orders. In a shop model. You can add multiple things to your cart. So that’s not even like product quantity. And actually I don’t even know if I have I don’t even know if I have a report in front of me that gives me how many units we’ve sold in the same time frame, but I would have to assume almost every order that gets placed in our shop has more than one product on it.

[00:17:17] So I’m just talking about the number of orders that have been placed. Think of all the money that I would be leaving on the table if I only sold my programs in a launch model where when I launch, you can buy that one program from me. Maybe an order bump, maybe an upsell in between. I might launch other products, but then I go back to my launch model, and those other products get shelved because I can’t talk about them anymore. Why? Because now I have to be talking about my launch. The shop not only will allow you to nurture people into your other programs, but it will allow you to capture the attention of buyers who may just tune out because they’re not ready to invest in those higher priced programs yet. So I’m going to give you a few examples of some of my students who have done this really well. I’ve seen this done in many different ways from many different types of content creators. Let me start with my blogging friends real quick. So if you’ve been blogging for like the last decade, which a lot of my blogging friends have been, you’ve probably created a lot of free content, and you’re probably giving way too much away for free. [00:18:25] One of the things I’ve seen a lot over the years is this idea of a free resource library, where essentially you opt in to the blogger’s email list and they give you like a free printable in their resource library. [00:18:38]

[00:18:38]  [00:18:38]And if you go to the resource library, there’s like 50 to 100 different resources in there. And it’s all free. That is primed for a shop. Stop giving everything away for free. So I have worked with several bloggers over the last two years to get their free resource libraries, moved into a shop model, and they went from making nothing to making like five figure months on their shop. It’s honestly incredible. [00:19:02] So that’s one way to leverage shops as a content creator. And the other way that I’ve seen my students leverage their content. I have a lot of students who run memberships and they are putting out monthly workshops. They are doing template drops in their membership. They now also sell the stuff that’s in their membership in their shop. Again, this is giving people a taste of how great their content is outside of that gate where there’s no recurring charge, and shops and memberships work so well together because you can send people to your shop, give them a taste of what you do, and then after they buy a product that would also be in your membership, you upsell them into the membership. There’s lots of ways we’re going to talk about how to do that. I’ve also worked with a decent amount, of course, creators and high ticket program creators.

[00:19:50] Their courses are just so robust. They have so much inside of them. And they strategically, which we will talk about in a future episode. They strategically pull out different modules of their programs and make them standalone workshops. They’ll pull out specific templates, they’ll pull out spreadsheets, and they sell those in their shop. It works so well. So in next week’s episode, we’re going to talk all about how to leverage your course content to create profitable shop listings and double your sales. I’m going to get very, very detailed and exactly how you can leverage this model to do what? To work smarter, not harder. And now I am super excited to announce that the reason we are doing this four part series is because we are officially running our very first summit. It’s called the Striking Gold Summit for Course creators. During the summit, we’re going to help you unearth standalone digital products hiding in your course content, and we’re going to show you how you can make daily sales with an e-commerce shop. We have some phenomenal speakers and we would love for you to join us. We kick off on October 21st, head on over to Striking Gold summit.com to sign up and get your free ticket. I can’t wait to see you and make sure to tune in next week, where we’re going to go through the nitty gritty of how you can start repurposing your content and double your sales.