How I Built My Online Business as a Work-at-Home Mom (So You Can Just Copy Me)

[00:02] and actually by the time this video is published, I will have had this baby. So, I will officially be a mom of six, which is pretty exciting. But what I want to talk to you about today is how I have managed to build this online

[00:14] have managed to build this online business of mine and earn over $2.6 million with it over the past several years, which is just crazy, while being a mom of five kids who I homeschool and how I balance those two things. But I'm

[00:29] video on the balance part. I've made a few other videos about that in the past, few other videos about that in the past, like my schedule as a work atome mom and those things. But in this video, I really want to just explain to you in

[00:43] simple terms how my business works, kind of backwards engineer it, talk to you about some of the different like systems and processes that I use in the business that has enabled it to earn over $2.6 $6 million with me working less than 20

[00:57] hours a week on it. And really, my hope for this video is that you will get some ideas for how you might be able to build an online business of your own that is highly profitable, but also sustainable and flexible and fun. Something that you

[01:11] can do on your own time, make really good money, and also support your family. Okay, so first things first, let me explain to you how my business works today. And I'm going to try to keep this super simple. So, what does my business

[01:24] sell? Well, two main things. So, one part is education. Basically, online and grow successful online businesses. And then the other part is coaching, with the people to do that. And as you can probably imagine, the courses being

[01:40] a do-it-yourself type option are somewhat more affordable. And then the coaching a done with you option where it requires the time of my team and myself

[01:52] is of course a bit more expensive. But for both of these my business model is to be on the more affordable side. Now certainly not a discount model and we don't sell products for 105 $20 or anything like that but I just don't

[02:07] believe that it should cost thousands of dollars to learn a basic skill like how to start and grow a successful business. And so most of our courses are priced in the few hundred range. But even for the coaching, I just try to keep the prices

[02:20] really reasonable at a reasonable kind of markup of our actual costs because I want to help people start online businesses. I don't just want to try to make as much money as possible but hurt other people in the process. I really

[02:34] something that's really important to me. And it makes I think the business so much more fun to run when I feel like I'm helping people and you know doing something good for the world. But it also means that of course it's somewhat

[02:47] easier for us to make sales because the products aren't overpriced. So that's what we sell and kind of the pricing strategy there. But now let's take a look at how we sell it. Okay. So big picture here is what my business's

[03:00] salesunnel looks like. So a funnel at the top obviously you've got the big part goes down to the small part. This is where you are actually making the money and this is where traffic is coming into the salesunnel. And most

[03:13] funnels have three main parts. You've got how you're getting the traffic. This is like your visibility strategy. Then you have how you're turning those people into warm leads who might be interested in buying your products. And then

[03:26] finally, how you are actually closing the sales. So for me today, we've got YouTube. This is by far my biggest source of leads. of how most people discover me and end up going to my website. And then we've also got um SEO.

[03:43] Basically, this is like blog posts and articles on my website that rank on Google. So, people find me via Google search. And then the last one is joint venture partnership. So, I'm just going to put JV for joint venture. So this is

[03:56] me working with other people who have brands to get my offer or my content featured to their audience so that their audience can discover me and discover my ways people come into my business. And

[04:10] then from there, how do we warm them up? There are again three main things, although one of them is by far the biggest, and that is email marketing. So most people who come from one of these three sources we're trying to get them

[04:24] on my email list. Now the other two places they go are my website. My website obviously it tells them about the business, tells them about what we the business, tells them about what we offer. It's not nearly as like effective

[04:37] as email is because we're not necessarily capturing the lead. So we It's totally dependent on them choosing to come back. But it is where a lot of these people go on their purchase

[04:50] journey and it does lead them to ultimately purchase a product. And then the third one here is the podcast. And the podcast, a lot of people think that podcast is for visibility because they see some really big podcasts out there

[05:02] that clearly are helping people to reach new audiences. But podcast SEO can be kind of tricky. And for me at least, and I know this is true for a lot of people, people normally find me one of these ways. Then they go to my website or they

[05:18] go and discover my podcast or they go straight to my podcast and then that's where they really get nurtured either email or the podcast. They get to listen to my voice. They get to hear my teaching. They get to hear that I know

[05:30] what I'm talking about and learn things from me and then they're interested in buying my product. And as far as selling the products, there are basically two sales strategies that I use and they just both complement each other. And

[05:44] they are first of all email marketing. So we use email midfunnel to nurture them but also to close them and then the other part is webinars. So webinars are work. Sometimes people are like do webinars still work and if you are

[05:59] asking that question it might be because webinars don't work on you anymore while. Maybe you've attended a lot of webinars yourself in the past and you or you got desensitized to them. So, there are people out there who webinars

[06:14] don't work on anymore, but there are also millions of people out there who webinars still work great on. And webinars give me by far the highest conversion rate. So, I get about 10% conversions on webinars, meaning that

[06:28] 10% of the people who show up at one of my webinars go on to buy my product. Warning to you, right? Don't show up at my webinar if you aren't interested in maybe working with me. But obviously, not everybody wants to go to webinar.

[06:41] Not everybody will. And so I'm able to reach a lot more people via email. And the conversion rate via email is way lower. It's more like about 1%. But I might be able to email like a 100,000 people about the offer and that could

[06:57] turn into a 100 sales right there. Whereas a webinar, I probably can only get like a thousand people to a webinar. And that right there can also turn into a 100 sales. But both of them are worth it. Both of them create a lot of sales.

[07:09] the numbers are just a little bit different. But anyway, that's the basics of how my business today attracts leads and turns them into paying customers. Okay, so it is time for a little behind the scenes. So, for over a year now,

[07:23] I've been using the payment platform Mlio to pay all of the contractors on my team and it has been making my life so much easier. So, I'm really excited to share that they are the sponsor of today's video. So basically, Melio is

[07:36] this super simple digital payment platform that allows you to pay all of your vendors and your contractors and get paid by your business customers all in one place. Your business clients can pay you by a transfer or by credit card

[07:51] anything to be able to do that. Or you can make it even easier for them by sending them a custom payment link so they can pay you instantly. Melio makes it super easy for them and super easy for you. Now, one of my favorite things

[08:05] about Mlio is that their basic plan called Mlio Go is totally free. There's no monthly charge at all. So, you can get started with creating and sending invoices and getting paid completely for free and right away. Now, Melio also has

[08:20] features like putting branding on your invoices. And also with their paid plans, you can have your invoices sync with QuickBooks automatically. So, it will automatically reconcile your

[08:32] don't have to like dig through spreadsheets and try to figure out what matches up with what. For me, using Melio has made getting paid so much easier and paying my team stressfree. So, I would definitely recommend that

[08:47] you give it a try. You can give it a try right now at this link right here on the screen and we will also pop that link into the video description down below. really easy to use and it will save you a ton of time. So, now that you

[09:00] understand how the business works today, and that's basically how it's made the and that's basically how it's made the 2.6 million, let's talk about how I got started. I made a video a few months ago about like the whole detailed story of

[09:13] started. And so I'm not gonna get into all that, but I do at least want to get into how I got my first few customers because I don't think that it is very helpful to just hear about like how a successful business works today and how

[09:27] doesn't really help you figure out how to get from where you are to that point at all. So first year or two was a big struggle for me. And throughout that whole time, I only managed to get a handful of customers. And I feel like

[09:42] mostly I learned a lot of things that didn't work. When I did finally happen to get a customer, it was almost luck. Not quite, but what I mean is I was just wall that it was like, "Oh, yay. Finally, something stuck." But that

[09:56] didn't really mean that that strategy was a good idea or that that strategy just because I was trying so many different things. And so I think really the most important lesson there isn't the specific strategies that did work to

[10:10] get those first few customers, but rather that you might have to go through lot of things that don't work before you find the things that do. Now, my hope with, you know, making videos like this is that I can save you some of the

[10:24] guesswork, that I can give you some kind of shortcuts by telling you what did work for me. But just know that most business owners go through this phase And it might be getting your first customer or it might be hiring your

[10:39] first employee. It might be creating products. Whatever it is, but it's normal. Now, what did finally work for getting customers was testing some different product ideas, but keeping it as simple as possible. Because when I

[10:52] was trying to get customers and it wasn't working, I was trying to take of people. And I think that there's some value in this advice, but that it can also go way wrong as it did for me. And the advice is that you should sell

[11:07] premium products, premium services. So sell things you can sell for thousands of dollars because that way you need way fewer customers. And if you have a tiny audience, then uh it makes sense to sell something that you won't need a lot of

[11:20] customers for. So I hope that I explained that in a good way. But for explained that in a good way. But for me, it backfired because I didn't yet didn't have confidence that I had a winning product idea. So, I was trying

[11:33] to sell these different services and programs for thousands of dollars or sometimes not even thousands, but like several hundred and then nobody was several hundred and then nobody was buying them. And I didn't know if it was

[11:46] because there wasn't demand for it. In a lot of cases that was the case or if it want at that price. So I didn't have very much confidence behind my selling. But what finally did work for me was to kind of strip it all back keep it super

[12:00] simple create what might be called like a minimum viable offer an MVO something like that. um and actually sell some courses for just 27 or $29 so that I issue and I had a ton of confidence that I was going to overd deliver, you know,

[12:17] And so it was when I did that that I started seeing dozens of sales come in from my small audience. And then from there, I was able to take some of those winning ideas and turn them into higher priced products, build them out into

[12:33] bigger, more helpful things that I could sell for more money. Next, let's talk about how I scaled my business. And by that, I mean how I went from getting those first few customers to going on to earn over $2.6 million. How did that

[12:47] happen? Well, there were three main things that had to grow. The first one was my customer base. I had to somehow figure out how to get more customers and that is of course the thing that directly drove that revenue growth. So

[13:01] a minute. But first let me tell you what the other two things were. I also had to scale the systems and the products that I was selling. The business kind of had product mix and the right price points and that sort of thing. And then third,

[13:16] I had to scale the business itself. And by that I mostly mean the team. I needed customers that were being acquired with these new systems and with the audience growth that was happening. Okay, so

[13:30] these things that had to scale. And this one was definitely really challenging at working, it just took off like a rocket. So when I first started this business, I was using social media, or at least I was trying to use social media to

[13:45] attract customers, but it really wasn't working for me. So after running the business, I say that kind of in quotes, running the business, I wasn't making much money, but that was what I did for the first year or two and after all that

[13:58] time, I had just a couple hundred email subscribers. It wasn't very much. It was enough to make those first few sales, but I knew that it wasn't growing nearly as fast as I wanted it to. So, I decided to just completely scrap social media

[14:13] and come over here to YouTube and focus on YouTube and YouTube alone because I saw a huge potential here. And that's what I did. And it took off like a rocket. It really did. Um, of course, there were like a couple slow months,

[14:26] but by month three, I had over 1,000 subscribers. And my channel doubled for the next several months. So, in month four, I got another thousand. In month five, I got 2,000. In month six, I got 4,000. In month I'm getting my numbers

[14:40] all mixed up here now, but in month seven, I got 8,000, I believe. Anyway, it kept doubling up until about that point when I got 8 10,000 in a month. And then it just steadily stuck to that rate. 8 10,000 a month for years and

[14:55] eventually it slowed down a little bit, but it's still growing to this day, which is just so cool. And once the audience really started growing, then I was able to layer in some other strategies because I was able to make

[15:08] more sales and so I was able to grow my team. So I had more, you know, bandwidth and more time and energy kind of because I had other people who were helping me. So we ended up using other strategies to scale further. But most of the scaling

[15:22] of the audience was YouTube. And by the way, if you are interested in learning a 1-hour master class where I break that all down. It's called three secrets to reach 1,000 subscribers in just 3

[15:34] months. And I will leave a link to that down in the description below or you can just go to creatorfasttrack.com and you will find that workshop there. audience. Now, the next thing was scaling my products and sales systems.

[15:49] And obviously there were a lot of different parts of this. First, what it looked like was creating more and more products, trying to, you know, find products that were the most popular, the most in demand that my audience was most

[16:02] interested in, testing out different price points. And then once I found some winners, then came the hard culling of practice. So, kind of decluttering the could let go of. It was a lot like cleaning out your closet. We were like,

[16:17] occasion and this dress is good for that occasion. I don't wear either of them very often, but you know what? If I have one of those events, one of those exactly how it felt. I had all these different products. They all served

[16:31] their own unique purpose, and I had to make the tough decision to decide which because I knew that if I wanted to be able to scale the business further, I process took a couple of years, but I ended up streamlining the business down

[16:46] to just four main products. So today we've got Startup Society, validate 100K mastermind, and then Creator Fastrack. And that's pretty much it. And I think that an important lesson there is that when you think about scaling your

[17:01] products, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are adding more and more products. That was part of the scaling process, but part of the scaling process also was cutting things down and minimizing them actually so that we

[17:14] could scale those products further and make more money with them. So don't need to sell more and more products necessarily. Okay. And then the last part of scaling was scaling the team, scaling the business itself. And this

[17:29] steps forward, one step back. Started with me hiring a few different virtual assistants to just help me out with different kind of random tasks. That did take almost as much time to manage those people as it would have taken me

[17:43] to do the tasks. And often the tasks didn't end up done as well as I would have liked for them to have gotten done. And of course, you know, that's just delegating. But I wasn't really satisfied with both losing the time and

[17:57] also having the quality be lower than I wanted. So what ended up working for me really well was hiring a business manager because I saw that as a weak point of mine. Um, and also kind of my biggest bottleneck, managing the people.

[18:10] up my business, got things more organized, and figured out how we could more strategically delegate. And so then we were able to hire some different virtual assistants, customer service people, um, and other support people

[18:25] throughout the business, graphic designers, video editors, etc., and create like a really welloiled machine. And I didn't have to spend my time managing the people. That was just the business manager's job. And that left me

[18:39] free to keep brainstorming new products and figuring out ways to improve our sales system and make YouTube videos to grow the audience and do all the other things that were scaling the business. So, we've talked a lot about strategy at

[18:52] this point, but now let's talk about kind of the really practical side of things of the software and the tools that I used to build this business. You might expect that I have some really expensive funnel software that is

[19:07] running my sales systems or something like that, but I actually don't. I don't use any sort of dedicated funnel software even to this day. But I do use a few different tools to make my sales funnels and make them work. And most of

[19:21] actually. So let's talk about what those things are. First of all, pretty much any business these days obviously needs a website. And that was the first thing that I set up for this business. And when I got started, I used WordPress.

[19:35] exactly what I wanted my website to look like. And I actually spent a whole lot trying to figure out how to make WordPress work, how to get my website to look halfway decent. And it was a combination of WordPress being

[19:51] challenging and me not knowing what I wanted it to look like. So, I regret and to talk about some more mistakes later on toward the end of this video. But on toward the end of this video. But mistake that I regret is that I spent so

[20:05] much time working on getting my website right and biting with WordPress. Now, eventually after about a year, I did get WordPress to work for me pretty well and years in my business. Eventually, a couple years ago now, we switched over

[20:19] to Squarespace and I did that mostly just because I wanted to simplify things. I didn't think that Squarespace was going to be better than WordPress or do more for us. And you know, it it met my expectations there. It is a more

[20:32] limited, more simple platform, but it is which is save us a whole lot of time. Now, next thing that I set up was email marketing. Now, this isn't a must for every business, especially if you're

[20:46] more of an offline business, but I would rank it up there as only right behind your website. I think pretty much every business should at least be collecting email addresses, at least be building an email list and should be regularly

[21:00] emailing those people because it is essentially a list of leads and if you want to make sales, you need leads. So, I really do believe that it is and that it certainly can help any

[21:14] business make more money. So, what I got started with for my email list is ConvertKit and that's what I still use today. Now, there are some great other favorite somewhat more affordable options is Mailor Light, but I do love

[21:29] for a reason. They've got a lot of advanced features and great deliverability that I think are well worth the call. Now, if you're running products, then you will need some way to deliver those digital products. And for

[21:45] me, there have been two softwares that I've loved for this. One is teachable online courses when I was just selling online courses. And what I love about it is that it works really smoothly like zero glitches which is so nice. So it

[22:00] creates a really good experience for your customers and it's easy for you to use and they have some of the best priced plans for that sort of software on the market. So that's what I got started with and that's what I would

[22:14] courses. Now, eventually I wanted to start my membership program, Startup start my membership program, Startup Society. And when I first did it, I used soon as we launched and that first launch was so successful and we got 300

[22:29] members right off the bat, I knew that it was worth investing more time and it was worth investing more time and even some money into creating a more professional platform. So, for that, I used Access Ally. Um, this is basically

[22:43] a premium WordPress plugin, but it is head and shoulders above any other membership plugin that's out there. Uh, it just it works really well and it is really robust and has so many like advanced features. Lets you build a very

[22:58] custom platform for a membership and it can look any way you want. So, highly can look any way you want. So, highly recommend Access Ally, but it is not for beginner. You will probably need some tech support. When I set up Access Ally,

[23:12] I worked with a design company that specialized in setting up Access Ally and it did cost a few thousand dollars to get that all set up. But at the end of the day, we had this custom membership platform on a beautifully

[23:25] designed website and we've been using it for years ever since and it has made me dollars. Okay. And then the last two tools I'm going to tell you about real quick are both for more like managing your business. So one of them is Aauna.

[23:41] So ASA is a project management software and I started using it when I hired my something like this. I would recommend a sauna. I was like okay sign me up and never looked back. It's been great. Now

[23:54] I don't think you necessarily have to use a sauna although we do really like highly recommend especially because they have a free plan that works really well. So there's kind of no reason not to use it. But I do think you should use some

[24:07] sort of project management system, some sort of advanced to-do list system where you can schedule tasks and assign them to people on your team if you have a team and you can put information in the tasks, that sort of thing to keep

[24:21] yourself organized and keep yourself on track because I think that makes a huge difference as you're building a business. And then the last software is optional. you would only need it if you have a team, but if you do have a team,

[24:34] then I think Slack is a great option for communicating with them. It keeps things a lot more organized than email threads do. And I also like that it keeps things more organized than texting does, but also it really helps me to maintain work

[24:49] life balanced because it keeps my personal communications totally separate from my work communications. And I really only see the work communications when I sit down at my desk and I log into Slack on my desktop. I can't access

[25:02] it on my phone and sometimes I do when I'm on the road or something, but it's communications in my tech. So, I love And that's actually what we're going to talk about. Next, let's talk about how

[25:16] I've managed to build this business while raising five kids. Now, of course, the business because this was several years ago. In fact, I only had one kid when I first started trying to start this business. But as the business grew,

[25:30] so did our family. So, one thing that really helped me was having really firm boundaries. As soon as the business actually started to grow, I just immediately settled into this boundary of not working more than about 20 hours

[25:45] a week. Now, I'm not super strict about it. If I need to work 25 or 30 hours a week, I do it. But I don't let the hours creep up or continue to grow. So it's

[25:57] next week 25, a few weeks later I'm up to 30. A few weeks later I'm up to 35. Like I have built a business that takes 20 hours a week of my time. And most 20 hours a week of my time. And most weeks of the year I am under 20 hours a

[26:11] week. And then there's just a few weeks of the year when I might get up to 25 if new product or something like that. Another thing that made this possible isn't very exciting to talk about, but it is being very intentional about what

[26:26] always know exactly what it was going to look like, but I knew in general where I look like, but I knew in general where I wanted to go with it, and I spent a lot of time throughout these years of building the business. There's been a

[26:40] lot of time where I sat at my desk and stared at the wall and thought about what I was trying to build because it was something that I didn't necessarily have like automatic clarity about. But at the same time, I do think that it is

[26:53] important to be clear that I didn't wait until I had the perfect plan. While I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out the plan, I also was figure out the plan, I also was consistently taking action on whatever I

[27:07] perceived the next step to be. So, I had spent a fair amount of time, you know, thinking about what that plan should be. But every single week, and pretty much every single day, I was figuring out what the next steps were and I was

[27:19] actually taking action on them and getting things done. But the only way that was possible was by having time set aside to work on the business. And that's I think perhaps the thing that most people kind of like feel the pain

[27:32] around. They think that it's hard to find the time. I think though that once you know what you're trying to do that it's relatively easy to find the time. Even if you are a busy mom, even if you work a job, whatever it is that is

[27:47] taking your time, you still have gaps. It might be waking up earlier, it might be staying up later, it might be working while your kids are napping. It might be trading child care with somebody. But as moms, I firmly believe that it is

[28:03] important for us to let our kids have time where they are self-directing, where they are playing on their own, that we are not constantly nannying sure your kids have supervision and they're safe and whatnot, but that

[28:17] doesn't mean you need to be constantly interacting with them or constantly entertaining them. And so whether that is again like you working when they're sleeping or it's you telling them, "Mom's going to work now, so leave me

[28:31] alone, you know, go play on your own. Go find something to do in your room, you it is." I think that's really important and good for them. And it also makes it possible for us to pursue our passions as well. Now, the last thing I want to

[28:44] share with you today is some mistakes that I made that I'm hoping I can help you avoid. And it's kind of one main mistake that I want to talk to you about, but there are a few different ways that I made this mistake. And the

[28:57] big picture version of the mistake is trying to optimize or systematize things that aren't yet working. See, when you optimize something or systematize or automate something, you just get more of the results that you are already

[29:13] early on in my business, I tried to automate my sales process. Now, I'm a big proponent of automating your sales process because it allows you to consistently make sales around the clock, whether you're working or not. I

[29:27] think it's great, but I tried to do it way too soon in my business. I tried to do when I didn't yet have any sales. So, I didn't have a manual process that was working well. So, when I automated it, I just got more of the result I was

[29:39] already getting. And the result I was already getting was zero sales. and zero times, you know, any number is just still going to be zero. So instead, what I would highly recommend you do is that for any process, any system in your

[29:53] business, first you do things very manually in a way that quote won't scale and then once you're getting good results with it, then you delegate or automate or systematize that so that you can scale it. Let me give you a few

[30:07] other examples of how I made this mistake. One was that I tried to create online courses and sell those before I had done like a live version of the course. So I created the product before I sold it. Whereas what I should have

[30:21] done and what ended up working much better was to just plan a live workshop, a live training, a live program and promote that based on the plans I had

[30:33] for it. And then when I saw that there was interest in it, then I had real students come into the program or come to the workshop and I was able to work with them in this live more manual way and figure out, you know, what they

[30:46] really needed help with and help them to the best of my ability. And then I could take that and automate it by creating an online course and selling it where Another way I made this mistake was hiring people too soon. So, I tried

[31:02] hiring people before my business was actually making any money. And my thinking was that, and this wasn't just my thinking, but I'd heard this advice that you need to, you know, get rid of those tasks that don't make you any

[31:15] money so you can focus on the important work. And that makes sense. And, you know, once your business is making money, it's a great decision. But again, when the business wasn't making any money yet, trying to automate some

[31:30] just made me get more of the same results, which was more of earning zero example, and I actually didn't quite make this mistake myself, but I see a it's another great example of what I'm talking about here, so I want to share

[31:45] talking about here, so I want to share it. And that is with YouTube. I waited until I was getting views on my videos and actually until my channel was making money before I brought a video editor into the mix. Now, I know video editing

[31:58] don't like doing it very much, so they want to outsource it right away. But really, it is best to do it yourself for a little while so you can figure out your video style. you know what you want your videos to end up being like and you

[32:13] can learn what when you're filming makes the video easier or harder to edit so editor you're able to get the results you really want and also you might find out that you don't like making videos or you might struggle to grow your channel

[32:28] happening if you don't have your hands in it and you're not doing it yourself. Overarching lesson here is do things manually. do things yourself first and then once you have something that's working, then delegate it or automate it

[32:41] or somehow make it into a system. Now, finally, if you happen to be new here, you to do. One is subscribe because I make new videos all about online business and growing your online business every single month. And I would

[32:55] one. So, just hit that subscribe button down below so you don't miss it. And the other thing is leave me a comment and tell me a little bit about your business. Whether it's a business you've already started or a business you want

[33:07] business is and where you are in the process of it because I would love to get to know you a little bit, learn more about you and your business. And also, it's a great way to give yourself a little bit of free promo. All right.

[33:20] up, if you're looking for something else to watch, I would recommend you check out one I made a few months ago called Five Practical Steps to Start Your First Business as a Stay-at-Home Mom. In that video, I talk about the process that I

[33:33] went through, kind of tell the story of how I started this online business in a lot more detail than I went into today about blowby-blow of exactly what I did to start it. But I also break down five really practical steps that you can

[33:46] successfully started. So, you'll definitely want to check that one out.