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Kristin wants to help you rock your brand, talk, and biz into multiple six figures…
CLICK HERE to enroll in the Start Me Up with Speaking Class with Kristin.
Its free and super rocking, and its the perfect next step.
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Get ready to rock your brand, your talk, and your biz. I’m Kristin Thompson. Welcome to The Rise Formula.
Let’s talk about The Team. I am nothing without my team because there is just no way to rock out a half a million dollars in sales three days a week without a little help. Let’s be real.
Here’s the truth. This was a huge shift for me and why I made this a step in of itself. If you’re going to catapult your income and your business, you’re going to need some help doing it. I find this is a place of resistance for a lot of people. They’re scared to invest. I try to remember that I was just like you. That’s the truth.
I forget sometimes how scary it was in the beginning even though it wasn’t that long ago. I was terrified to even hire a VA for a couple of hours a week. Yet, the more that I’ve invested in the right tools and support, the right team and technology, the faster I’m able to go in less time.
If you want those big leaps in your income without staying in the office all day and all night, then you have to be able to multiply yourself and as far as I know, that technology does not exist yet. What we can do is get the right team backing you and the right tools in your toolbox so that you can go further faster.
Virtual Assistant
In this section, I just thought I would take a moment to talk a little bit about the team. For the team you would want to have in place, the very first person, the first bit of support that I got and I recommend you get is a great Virtual Assistant.
I went through a couple of low-level – meaning very affordable – VAs in the beginning and just hired them for five hours a month literally just to get started. That’s my rule of thumb with my clients because once you do, you’re going to see how you can continue to free up your time to focus on the things that will actually grow your business which are the marketing and sales of your products, services, coaching, or consulting. The more you can stay right in the zone of your brilliance, the faster you’ll grow your business. So hiring a Virtual Assistant is critical.
Bookkeeper
Get yourself a bookkeeper if you don’t have one. Especially in the beginning, if you’re not making a ton of money, it’s not going to take them a ton of time. It’s also not going to cost you a lot of money. But you want that support of somebody keeping track of your expenses so that you can get it over to your accountant. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. Get a bookkeeper right out of the gate.
Transcriptionist
Getting somebody who’s good at transcription is really important because transcription is going to be helpful when you are creating your home study program from your signature system that you’re creating, or when you are doing a blog or if you have a podcast. There are lots of reasons why you’re going to want to have stuff transcribed.
A lot of people like to read. They want to print out your materials and highlight them. Also, for SEO purposes, it gives the search engines something to grab. In addition to offering your programs on audio and video, you always want to have stuff transcribed.
I have a great transcriptionist named Lainie Cotell. What I love about her transcriptions is that they’re “done.” My experience is that when you cheap out, you just end up spending more time and then more money. You can upload files online and get them transcribed. My experience was that they came back and they were a complete disaster. The punctuation was wrong, the words were wrong, and it wasn’t being heard correctly.
With my personal transcriptionist, it came back and I could just literally put it in a binder. It was edited with headers and everything looked beautiful. It was all correct. I didn’t have to do anything other than send it over to Vervante. They would put it in the binder and ship it out when people bought home study systems. So you want to find a good transcriptionist. That’s going to help you.
Photographer
A great photographer is great to have in your Rolodex because having up-to-date fun photos of yourself is really critical nowadays for social media, for your blog, for your e-mails. It’s that connection point and that brand point. We’ve got to express your personality. Find a good local photographer that you can have on hand and make sure you have a couple of photo shoots throughout the year so you have up-to-date, fun photos. Of course, you can just snap some of yourself with your iPhone. Selfies are allowed.
Housekeeper
At home, you want to get some help as well. Adding a housekeeper is a great first step. I started with a housekeeper once every other week. As you can tell, I’m a baby steps kind of gal. When it came to this area, I was baby steps. It started with bringing someone in once every other week, then every week. Then I started having her also help us out with our laundry. Now she’s helping us with meals. She brings one meal that’s prepped and ready to go; one that she’s just done the prep work that I can cook fresh.
Those are little things that just help me run faster. I get to spend more time in the office being focused here at work. I don’t have to worry about the loads of laundry piling up because they were. The minute I crossed that over six-figure mark, my business was rockin’ and my house was a wreck, and it made me feel bad. This isn’t silly stuff. Anything that bogs you down or makes you feel crummy, guess what? It affects everything else you do – how you connect with your spouse, your children, and your clients. It seeps in there. So get the right amount of support at home, as well.
Other things that you can look at outsourcing at home beyond laundry and cleaning are things like yard work, walking your pets (if you have pets) or some sort of pet care, errands. Anything that’s bogging you down, get it off of your plate.
Branding Expert
Having a branding person in your back pocket is great. Here at Speak Serve Grow, we transform so quickly that our brand is often in need of a refresh by the end of the year. It’s not uncommon here, so you’re going to find the same thing. As you’re leaping forward, you want your brand and your look to keep up. So find a great branding expert.
Video Expert
In the beginning, have just a nice digital camera. I’ve got a Sony HD digital camera, a tripod, and two video lights. That it; pretty simple. We’ve painted a wall in the office – just a nice clean, dark gray color. We have another wall in the office I painted white. I also bought a background, but honestly just painting a wall white will do. Set up your lights, put your camera on your tripod, and you’re ready to rock!
You don’t have to get crazy. Just get to rockin’ your video and have a good setup. But you might want to also have someone on your team that you can outsource to who can do editing or fancier video shoots for your sales videos should you choose to go that way.
Event Planner
An Event Planner is great to have on your team when you’re ready to start doing workshops and live events. You don’t want to plan that stuff yourself. Eventually, when you get into multiple six figures and more mid-six figures, you might even look at expanding with a sales team.
Accountant/Lawyer
Having an accountant and a lawyer on hand is always a good thing.
Let’s talk about tools before we wrap up. Some of the tools of the trade that I use to run faster farther are:
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Facebook
I don’t know if that sounds like a tool to you, but it definitely is. Especially having a great business page where you can chat with people and connect. And for your coaching groups, you can create groups that are private. It gives you a great one-stop place to go to answer questions and have connections. You can post videos and PDFs.
If you’re not in a position to create a private membership site, know that you can do a lot of that just inside of Facebook Group. That can help you grow your business and have a great group without the expense of starting a membership site if you’re not quite there yet.
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WordPress
Great for your websites. It has all kinds of great templates, tools, and add-ons that you can put on your website.
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ScheduleOnce
We use ScheduleOnce to schedule appointments. I don’t do any appointment scheduling. It was one of those things that was seriously irritating me as I was getting busier and busier and we’d be going back and forth.
“Can we meet at 11:00?”
“No, I can’t meet at 11:00 on Tuesday.”
“What about Wednesday at 3:00?”
“Aargh!” And I would start messing it up. So, (1) I don’t handle my schedule – my assistant does that – and (2) we use ScheduleOnce to automate it. It makes it a lot easier and you get rid of the back and forth.
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Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is a great tool for automating your follow-up. I highly recommend it. It’s what we use here at Speak Serve Grow. They sponsored The Rise Live event. They’ve been great partners for us and I rely on them to manage our e-mails so I can send out broadcasts, newsletters, automated sequences, sales funnels. It’s the bomb)
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LeadPages
Everybody loves LeadPages. LeadPages makes the cleanest opt-in pages in all of the land! Our opt-in pages or teleclasses, webinars, free trainings like the one that you opted into – we do them all on LeadPages. They’re clean, they look great, they’re easy to do, and they convert even better.
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Dreamstime
Dreamstime is where I get most of my Stock photos. I also go to iStockphoto, but 99% of the time, the pictures that I use in my presentations and on blog posts and stuff, if I don’t have them in my own little stock, I’m at Dreamstime.
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Vimeo
That’s where we host our videos. I’ve tried other platforms and found that the videos would spin out and they wouldn’t play properly. We were having a lot of problems. It is a good idea to put your videos on YouTube as well, but for sales videos and things that I want to look really clean, I host them on Vimeo.
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TeamworkPM
This is a really helpful tool that Marta, my team leader at Speak Serve Grow (and you can hire her if she has room) uses TeamworkPM and she’s in charge of that. I love it for our project management. It gives us all one place to go. I can put tasks and projects in there and delegate them to Marta. Marta can delegate them to the right people on the team, and we don’t get all wonky.
I was in the habit of always e-mailing tasks and projects and it became really hard to track. Did that get done? Did I send that to her? What happened to this? TeamworkPM is one place to go to organize all of your projects and who’s doing what when.
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Dropbox
Dropbox is another great tool to share large files. We use Dropbox most often for pictures and videos and things that are really large that are hard to e-mail. Dropbox is a great tool to have in your toolbox.
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iMember360
For our membership sites, we’ve been using iMember360. So far we seem to like it. It really works well. It looks good and easy to use. But again, if you’re not to a place where you have your team big enough and your business is robust enough to have a membership site for your group programs where you want to host all of your content, you can post stuff in Facebook.
I have seen seven-figure leaders leading groups and just putting all of the content into a private Facebook group. So know that if you’re not ready for iMember360, just create a private Facebook group and rock it out there.
These are all great ideas to help you get more leverage in your business. That’s what this is about. Multiply yourself by investing in the right people and the right tools to catapult your business to the next level so you can be rockin’ multiple six figures, working just a couple of days a week, living the life of your dreams. It does take a dream team.
Kristin wants to help you rock your brand, talk, and biz into multiple six figures…
CLICK HERE to enroll in the Start Me Up with Speaking Class with Kristin.
Its free and super rocking, and its the perfect next step.
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Next Module: The Rise Formula: The Life