Clover: Conversations with Women in Leadership on Visibility, Authority & Owning the Room

Growing a group on Facebook can be a powerful tool in scaling a business, and, in the case of our guest this week, it can be the foundation of the business itself.  Erica Marie created and runs Erica's Steals & Finds VIP Group. We met via another successful entrepreneur and social media guru, Jasmine Star, who runs the company and group Social Curator.

Erica is a mom of four boys and when her youngest headed off to school, she realized she needed to do something for herself. Like many stay-at-home moms, she had dedicated her life to her kiddos and found she had lost herself along the way. Seeing 'influencers' posting pictures of perfect outfits, perfect homes, perfect lives started to make her feel badly, she wanted to create a safe space for women to be themselves.  She loved her friends, she loved shopping, so her deals Facebook group was born. 

In two years she has grown her group to over 45,000 women and has expanded her team to 5 virtual assistants. Take a look at our discussion highlights: 

The Business of Affiliate Programs

• Becoming an Amazon affiliate, navigating the rules
• Expanded to Jane, Shopstyle, and rewardStyle 

Attracting Members

• Growing a deals group from 40 members to over 45K
• The power of authentic posts and genuine community
• Giveaways with specific incentives

COVID and Facebook Rules

• Navigating Facebook rules for deal groups (and most groups that take traffic off the platform)
• Posting 50-90 times a day with a shifting algorithm
• The drastic drop in Amazon commission during COVID-19
• Change of focus from cute clothes to personal care essentials and supplies

The Reality of Being an Entrepreneur

• Continuing on no matter what, this is business #6
• First two years reinvesting in the business
• Working 16 hour days with a household of essential workers

Business Game Changers

• Getting super clear on niche ideal customer
• Tracking engagement on public page to grow private group
• Encouraging group members to post their buys and experiences
• Hiring help, Chalene Johnson's program 'How to Hire'
• Empowering 5 overseas virtual assistants

 Growing an Email List

• Suggested platform, Flodesk
• Hosts strategic giveaways
• Reminds audience that Facebook could shut them down, email is forever

 Moving Forward - Goals and Visions

• Empower her team to grow and take on more 
• Continue to increase the pay rate for her virtual assistants so they can buy homes, etc
• Expand upon ways her group can impact the world

Muscle Creative Wrap-Up

If you could listen to only one music artist for the rest of your life who would it be? The Offspring

Where can people find you online?

• Erica's Steals & Finds VIP Group
• Instagram
• Facebook

If you've ever thought about starting a blog, or have a blog but are stumped as to how to keep it growing…this episode is for you. This week we chat with Alex Cook, creator of the It's Not Complicated recipe blog. After leaving her career in in real estate and aviation, Alex started a blog combining her two passions - cooking and writing. She assumed it would be a hobby on the side, but within four months of starting her blog it was growing so quickly that it needed her full-time attention. Two years in, Alex continues to run her blog business full-time, having grown her page views beyond what is required to partner with an ad network. 

Cadence and Content

• Avoiding the temptation to expand your niche
• Stuck with a cadence of 3 posts a week on set days
• The power of consistency and quality over quantity
• Start with what you can, improve over time

Monetizing a Blog

• Leveraging viral posts
• Hitting required page views to partner with ad networks
• Strategically planning content around prime keywords
• Measuring competitive rank of keywords
• Focusing on what audience is searching for

Key Steps When Starting Out

• Getting a good host
• Researching the right website platform
• Recipe cards and other perks to rank in Google

Growing Your Audience

• Grew her Facebook business page to over 26k
• Engage with fellow bloggers
• Ways to build relationships with readers
• Strategies to inspire audience to share
• Tactics to grow organic traffic from Google

Moving Forward - Goals and Vision

• About to hire a Social Media Manager
• Double blog page views by the end of 2020
• Diversify income streams including new e-book and product line
• Expand to a commercial kitchen, increase video content

Muscle Creative Wrap-Up

If you could listen to only one music artist for the rest of your life who would it be? Queen

Where can people find you online?

• Website
• Instagram
• Facebook

Imagine you own a beautiful brick and mortar boutique a gem of the neighborhood. COVID-19 hits, you face a mandatory shutdown of your business. Three months later you are preparing to reopen, getting all safety requirements in place, abuzz with excitement. Then a phone call at 3AM, a mere two weeks before the reopening date, changes everything. The neighboring business that shares a wall with yours is on fire. You race down there to find the worst has happened. This is the reality that Alta Alexander, owner of the gorgeous boutique Altatudes, is facing. Below is a quick overview of our important discussion.

Opening and Scaling a High-End Women's Boutique

• First and only African-American owned upscale women's boutique in Austin
• Located in the heart of historic East Austin
• Curates gorgeous apparel locally to globally

COVID-19 & Fire Disaster Impact

• Mandatory shut-down on March 18, 2020
• Was hopeful to reopen around June 15th
• On June 1st, a fire broke out in the business next door
• Smoke, soot, and water entered her shop destroying her merchandise
• Austin Fire Department has deemed the fire to be arson
• Looking to rebuild the brick and mortar shop while also focusing on building out ecommerce presence
• To support the rebuild: Go Fund Me or PayPal

The Strength and Resilience of Entrepreneurship

• The heart of her shop was to help women feel confident
• Felt as though her dream was demolished with the fire
• Hopeful to rebuild via support of insurance and community
• Prepared with the necessary PPE and social distancing options
• Working with manufacturers and designers to curate pieces 
  • Had pieces from local designers such as Nina Means and Amberleaf 
  • Curated from countries in addition to the U.S. such as France, Spain, Denmark, Australia, UK, Canada. 

Advice and Insight to Fellow Entrepreneurs

• Push through fear - procrastinated before originally opening but just jumped in
• Launch your business during COVID regardless of fear an uncertainty
• Building through fear builds your confidence to accomplish the next thing
• Ensure your ecommerce platform is up and running
• Build social media presence

Building Clientele

• Leveraged earned media strategically
• Worked with the community 
  • Take Heart shop created a map for a boutique tour for the area 
• As President of the East 12th Street Merchants Association, she encourages everyone to shine some light on other merchants 
  • CNBC reached out to do a piece on Altatudes, Alta worked with them to create a piece on E. 12th Street as a whole. Check out the video here. 

Moving Forward - Goals and Vision

• Graduating with her MBA this year
• Rebuilding her brick and mortar shop
• Building out her ecommerce presence further

Muscle Creative Wrap-Up

If you could listen to only one music artist for the rest of your life who would it be? Beyonce (although Brian McKnight is a favorite too!)

 Where can people find you online?

• Website
• Instagram
• Facebook

Lorena (Lo) Hixson is not only a full-time nurse who at one point practiced in ER and Trauma, she's also the founder of a powerful monthly subscription box, Passion & Growth. The idea to combine two of her favorite things - receiving something fun in the mail and helping to empower women to accept who they are, expand their mindset, and change their narrative - came to her while at a winery in Fredericksburg. (side note: if you are ever in the Austin area, we do have quite the array of wineries, distilleries, and breweries throughout the Hill Country). As it is with most entrepreneurs, she took 'messy action' at the beginning, learning as she went - starting with creating a website and a blog and building her business from there.

Some discussion highlights:

COVID-19 Impact

• Anticipated numbers would drop, decreased her inventory
• Numbers increased; more people shopping online, looking for self-care products
• Anticipated one thing, had to shift when the opposite happened

First Steps in Building a Subscription Box Business

• Was a member of Sparkle Hustle, Grow, a box for female entrepreneurs. Turned to that community for insight. 
  • Discovered that the founder, Julie Ball, offered a digital course 'Subscription Box Bootcamp', enrolled in that  (she also has a podcast, 'Subscription Box Basics with Julie Ball' )
• The six things to do when embarking on your subscription box biz
• The #1 thing to ensure when identifying vendors to work with
• Ways to conduct vendor outreach
• The importance of continuing to niche your focus down
• Wholesale marketplaces mentioned: 
  • Faire
  • Tundra
  • Abound

Growing Your Clientele

• Consistency on social media to gain traction
• Running Facebook and Instagram ads as top of the funnel tool
• Converting your email list to subscribers, the power of nurturing with consistent content and messaging
• Showering your early adopters with perks and insider access

Lessons Learned

• Ask for dimensions and/or samples - product size is everything for a subscription box
• Remember that you came this far by figuring it out, use the same mindset for any obstacle you come across

 Future Goals

• Leverages the Start Today Journal to write out gratitude and goals as if they've already happened
• Meditating from time to time and sets a time to read and be present
• Long-term goal: grow this full-time
• Short-term goal: have box subscribers in every state. Only state that is missing is Mississippi - come on Mississippi, where you at? Time for some self-love!

Muscle Creative Wrap-Up

• If you could listen to only one music artist for the rest of your life who would it be? The Beatles 
• Where can people find you online?
• Website
• Instagram
• Facebook

This week we chat with Wendy Jensen and Linda Sidhu of The Email Collection. This duo left full-time executive roles in their respective corporate careers to jump into entrepreneurship for something most of us crave - more time and schedule flexibility. What they found, after spending some time in an MLM, was that they could impact small business owners with the business acumen they absorbed along their career path. 

While most entrepreneurs were leveraging the hamster wheel of social media to grow their client-base, Wendy and Linda introduced them to the wild world of email marketing. They quickly discovered that many small business owners weren't adept at even the basics of email marketing, so they decided to create a course to teach it to them. When thinking of the best tool to leverage for lead gen in order to grow an audience for this upcoming course, they landed on quizzes.  A 60% conversion rate and a strategic partnership with quiz platform Interact later, this duo is flying high and ready to take their business to the next level, while helping other entrepreneurs along the way.

The Online Quiz as an Audience Personality Tool

• How personalities play a big role in buying decisions
• Leveraging the DiSC assessment model when creating quizzes to learn about your audience
• Created email marketing templates for MLM team and network to use
• Discovered the #1 obstacle facing entrepreneurs they were working with
• Quickly learned they needed to teach email marketing from start to finish
• Launched email marketing course 

Leveraging Quizzes as a Powerful Lead Gen Solution

• Created a quiz to increase lead gen to market email marketing course to
• Used the Interact platform, quiz had 60% conversion and a high share rate
• How they landed a strategic partnership with Interact
• Top 3 ways a quiz can grow your business

Creating a Successful Quiz: The Nuts and Bolts You Need to Know

• Personalizing your marketing strategy through quizzes
• How to tie a quiz to your product messaging in order to grow your list
• The content you need to include on your quiz results page
• The 3 common mistakes businesses make when creating a quiz and how to avoid them
• 6 ways to get your quiz out there to new leads
• How to use your quiz to segment and personalize your offers to your ICA

Muscle Creative Wrap-Up

• If you could listen to only one music artist for the rest of your life who would it be?
   Linda: The Lumineers
  Wendy: Eddie Vedder as musician but Odessa is always playing ODESZA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW935N0msb0eDy4zQmxTwQg or Odessa https://www.facebook.com/thisisodessa/
• Where can people find you online? 
  • Website 
  • Instagram 
  • Facebook 
• BONUS: Grab their latest quiz, 'How to Build the Perfect Lead Gen Based on your Pop Diva Personality' here. Upon completion of the quiz, you'll find tons of free, valuable content such as '10 Tips for Email Marketing'. 

This power couple each run two completely different businesses, but their biggest commonality is building them based on acts of service - the key marker of a true entrepreneur. We welcome Laney and John Sturdivant, owners of Back Office Drafting and One People's Kitchen.

Perhaps one of the biggest examples of confidence in a relationship is to have not one, but both members take the entrepreneurial path. Laney started her own company, Back Office Drafting, over a decade ago to fill a need for attorneys looking to outsource services rather than take on the expense of full-time employees. She has grown her company to a team of 10, whom coincidentally are all empowered women, and some of which are family members. Her husband John is an accomplished chef, having been trained internationally and holding the executive chef role at fast-paced, upscale resorts and restaurants. After discussing how he could use his talents yet still be present with his family, they landed on One People's Kitchen - healthy, chef-prepared food (that caters to ANY dietary need) that is delivered to your door.

Please note: the audio is a bit rough toward the beginning but improves as the discussion progresses.

Highlights of our conversation include:

Using What You've Got

• Leveraging experiences from time spent in the Philippines, Spain and New Mexico to fuel the flavor of their business
• Leaning on knowledge gained while working full-time to create a sustainable business of her own
• Finding your passion and shifting your career to allow time to cultivate it
• Identifying ways to thrive during a recession career-wise

 The Key to Making it as an Entrepreneur

• The #1 thing that will make you go back to working for a steady paycheck
• How the will to serve supports the growth of their businesses
• Smoothing out fulfillment to round out a solid infrastructure amidst quick growth
• Managing expanding a business into a variety of new areas in parallel
• The top action to take when business is growing at a slower pace than desired
• The entrepreneurial mindset that can make or break a new business

It's Not You, It's Logistics

• Pinpointing the cause of communication issues
• Supporting each person's ideal working environment
• When your work-life vibes are at odds with each other

Their Method of Success

• Consistent acts of service fuels their energy for business and life success
• Community First plays a huge role in the foundation of their businesses
• Staying grounded amidst the daily grind
• Organic ways to build the right clientele for your business

Looking Ahead

• John embraces the New Mexico culture that has inspired his work with a special tribute
• Laney learns the hardest entrepreneurial lesson - letting go in order to give her team the opportunity to step up and shine
• A culinary school to serve the community
• Building the One People's Kitchen model as a natural progression that many restaurants will follow in the post-pandemic world

 Muscle Creative Wrap-Up

• If you could listen to only one music artist for the rest of your life who would it be?  Both Laney & John: Spearhead
• Where can people find you online? 
  • One People's Kitchen 
    • Website 
    • Facebook 
    • Instagram 
• Back Office Drafting 
  • Website 
  • Facebook

Raise your hand if you have dealt with the following struggles whether in your professional or personal life: accomplishing goals you thought you were 'supposed' to go after, making sure outward appearances on your life come across as polished and perfect, trying to handle every single thing yourself,  wondering why you're left feeling unhappy and unfulfilled.

We are not only raising our hands over here, but are waving them in the air like we just don't care. Sara Palmer of Sara Palmer Speaks is our guest this week. If there was ever a resource that entrepreneurs need in order to keep their momentum going in the right direction it's someone such as Sara. Coming from an abusive childhood, dealing with assault, addiction, an alcoholic marriage, Sara leverages the help, guidance, and information she received when working through all of that in order to serve thousands of people who are also processing tough and at times heartbreaking impacts of their lives.

Our conversation hits at the heart of why many entrepreneurs get stuck, and 5 simple steps to apply every single day to keep moving forward:

Permission to Choose

• How high-achieving women aged 30-50 find themselves lonely and overwhelmed
• Analyzing, 'Well, now what?'
• The bag of lies of 'perfect and polished'

Getting Over Yourself = Powerful Business

• The dangers of not asking for help
• Setting boundaries against attention suckers and joy stealers
• How to feel terrified but still let go

Your Business is Not Your Baby

• Personal You shows up as Professional You
• Why your business will fail if it's your 'baby'
• Identifying areas of delegation to scale your business

The Business Benefits of COVID-19

• The #1 business shift she hopes sticks around post-pandemic
• Group coaching vs. Individual coaching
• Serving client needs, even if not with her

The One-Minute Miracle Method

• Her top game-changer process
• 5 steps to make a quick yet intentional decision
• Eliminates drawn out decision making that can drown a business
• Free, direct access for our listeners: The One-Minute Miracle Method

Building Clientele and Daily Success

• Attack from all angles: client referrals, free resources on Instagram and through her email list
• Leverages Rachel Luna's Profitable To-Do List each day to cover 4 categories - gratitude, life and family, profitable and operational
• Sticks to 1-2 things each day for Profitable and Operational to stay productive
• Vision moving forward is to reach 10-20K women in the next few years via professional speaking, group coaching workshops and trainings - build impactful communities

Muscle Creative Wrap-Up

• If you could listen to only one music artist for the rest of your life who would it be? Anything produced by Dr. Dre.
• Where can people find you online? 
  • Website (under construction but group coaching section is up) 
  • Instagram 
  • Facebook 

As we continue to explore the role that content plays in a successfully scaling business, this week we chat about creating a solid content marketing plan. Without a clearly documented path, consider your content marketing strategy dead in the water.

In this mini-episode we take a look at what could be the missing piece - content. This is a HUGE topic, so we are breaking it down into bite-sized pieces and sprinkling them throughout our podcast series. 

Content marketing is one of the most powerful ways to grow and audience and sustainably scale a business, yet it is also one of the most overlooked. What can content marketing do for you? Listen to episode 2 of the Small Business, Big Mindset podcast, 'The Tool Every Business Needs to Succeed.'

Topics discussed:

• Identifying your mission and #1 goal
• KPIs as a measure of success
• Who exactly is your ICA?
• Pain points to solve for your audience
• Refreshing and repurposing content
• Yes, you need a content calendar

Resources:

• The Tool Every Business Needs to Succeed (Episode 2: Small Business, Big Mindset Podcast)
• Content Marketing Institute
• Marketing Charts

As an entrepreneur, many times it may feel as though you have multiple plates spinning in the air. You are doing so much, stoking so many fires and yet your business isn't scaling as you'd like it to. In this mini-episode we take a look at what could be the missing piece - content.

This is a HUGE topic, so we are breaking it down into bite-sized pieces and sprinkling them throughout our podcast. Here we explore the top content types to consider to attract your key audience. As stated in the podcast, do not attempt to tackle all of these. Pick one (maybe two) that most directly correlates with your target audience and business goals. Master that, then expand if needed.

Quick overview:

• 11 top-performing content types to grow your business
• The content type to choose for better Google search results
• Traffic that video can bring to your business
• Looking to increase your leads pipeline? This is the content for you.
• Engaging an audience with Q&As via live broadcasts
• The magic that is a case study

Resources:

• The Tool Every Business Needs to Succeed (Episode 2: Small Business, Big Mindset Podcast)
• Forbes
• Hubspot
• Spectrio
• Intercom
• Edison Research

This week we chat with Danira (Dani) Cancinos of Dani's Dulce Confections. Dani and I met as students of Amy Porterfield via her Digital Course Academy and Momentum Membership. Dani's story is one of true determination that resulted in breaking the economic and scarcity mindset cycle that was keeping her family from getting ahead.

Dani tells us how she went from making $20,000 a year working a part-time job to earning a six-figure income from building her own business. Starting in 2012, Dani would sell pastries to her local community on the side. From cheesecakes to cake pops to caramel apples and beyond, her local following continued to grow. Once she started to leverage social media to get the word out, people from across the country began to take notice and ask her to teach them how to create their own goodies.

Here's an overview of our discussion:

Growth Through Obstacles

• Launching a course during COVID-19
• The one shift that saved her sales goal
• Managing a one-person business during personal illness

From Employee to Entrepreneur

• When to know when to leave your job
• Impact on family and friends
• Managing growth expectations, pricing

The Impact of Online Courses

• Investing in online courses for business growth
• Exponential revenue growth when launching online courses
• How Dani's courses grew from $10 to $200
• Growing a business to six-figures in less than a year

Growing Your Audience Through Instagram

• Started with 15 second tutorials
• Building an audience through this one simple action
• How to leverage IG live and stories to grow client-base
• Key tip on figuring out what to post when you're stumped

Facebook Groups to Grow the Business

• How to utilize Facebook Groups as teaching platform
• Growing a course from 10 people to 700
• Showing up and over-delivering
• Segmenting courses into separate modules

Handling Guilt, Fear, Anger

• Growing from a single mom of three kids, financial struggles, scarcity mindset
• Overcoming anger and unhappiness
• Dealing with 'success guilt' when making more money 
• The impact of success while raising kids
• Identifying fear and pushing it aside
• Breaking a toxic generational cycle
• The power of therapy
• Book recommendation: Joyce Meyer - Living Beyond Your Feelings: Controlling Emotions So They Don't Control You

Moving Forward - Goals and Vision

• Porting content to Kajabi, social media as 'borrowed land'
• Continuing to create online courses, serve her community
• New membership offering
• Buying her first home

Muscle Creative Wrap-Up
If you could listen to only one music artist for the rest of your life who would it be? Bethel Music

Where can people find you online?

• Instagram
• Facebook
• Website