Tina Tower [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to her Empire Builder show. Today I have for you a little bit of a different episode, the Ask Me Anything show. So the last time I did this was probably about two years ago. I think it was episode 100 and something. And so I wanted to bring it back again. I popped in our email newsletter and on my Instagram stories, any questions? And I have got quite a few that I have chosen to answer in this episode for you. So let's get straight into it. So the first question comes from Julia Blair who said, what is your process for taking an idea and making it into a fully fledged offer for your business? How do you test it? How do you refine it? The one thing that I will say is a lot of people will only see your successes, they don't see your failures.

Main Episode

Tina Tower [00:00:52]:
When I first started in online, I started in 2016 was when I did my first one. I actually couldn't decide on which idea being me, thought I will launch three completely different ideas and see which one I enjoy doing. Because I really think that to run a good online course business, your idea needs to be the cross section of three different things. It needs to be what you are passionate about, what you really love talking about because you have to talk about it so much that it needs to be what you're passionate about. It also needs to be what people want. So what people are asking you for already really helps. And then what people are really willing to pay for cross direction of those three things, what people are willing to pay for, what people want and what you love that will give you your perfect course. But for me, like a lot of people are quite multi passionate.

Tina Tower [00:01:47]:
And so I had the different idea because my background came from franchising. I had the idea of the tutoring institute of where I had ran tutoring centers for the previous 13 years. And so I thought I could teach teachers how to run tutoring businesses. And so I had the Tutoring institute and then I had the Happy Life. Because a lot of the life that I had built, a question I get asked all the time is how do you create such a happy life? Like what are you doing? And there's a system for that. And so I'm really into personal development. And so I thought running a company called the Happy Life could be a really good idea. And then I had scale up and scale up was how to systemize your business for scale because I had just obviously done that and built my business, systemized it, scaled it and then sold it with a successful exit.

Tina Tower [00:02:38]:
And so I had these three different pillars. And I was like, how will I know which one is going to be the right one? And I wasn't willing to just sprint off in one direction. So what I did was I started all of them. I shared them all with the different segments of my audience. So I already had quite a bit of a personal brand. So I was kind of got a head start with that because I already had a personal brand going, but with anyone that I knew that was a teacher, I sent it directly to them for the Tutoring Institute. For anyone I knew that had service based business, I sent them Scale Up. And for anyone else that I knew on my personal Facebook page, I sent the Happy Life.

Tina Tower [00:03:16]:
I ran a live event for each of them so that I could get a feel of like what was I enjoying, what was I lacking doing? And truth be told, I liked the Happy Life and Scale Up Tutoring Institute because I've been doing that for 13 years running tutoring centers. I was like, you know what, if I have to talk about this for another 13 years, I'm gonna stick skewers into my eyeballs. This is not something I wanna do. So that was an easy out because I knew that I didn't wanna talk about it again and again. Whereas Happy Life and Scale Up, I had about the same amount of people that were coming into it and I was enjoying both a lot. And so really what made the decision in that was I always look at it in the most commercial way possible. What am I going to enjoy, what is gonna feel impactful and what is gonna make me the most money? They're really the three things that I look at. And I knew that from a commercial point of view, scale up like servicing business owners.

Tina Tower [00:04:09]:
Business owners have a lot more money than general consumers and so I wanted to go in that direction. If I wanted to make more money out of the Happy Life, I would have to go greater volume. I would have to go low cost, greater volume of which some people love that. For me, I didn't want to play the volume game. When you're playing the volume game, you need to be a little bit more famous. And I wanted to go how could I be as successful as possible while whilst remaining as unknown as possible? So that is how I made that decision. So hopefully that answers your question. Testing and refining.

Tina Tower [00:04:46]:
I'm always testing and refining every time I've put a new course out. Most of my business at the moment runs off her empire builder our membership. But then we also have idea to launch which I'm doing a re recording of right now. And we're launching that again at the end of June. For me doing that, the reason that I'm bringing that kind of back to a launch model is because a lot of people have been asking me about it recently. And you listen to what people are asking you for, give the people what they want and then get that feedback, refine again and again. That is how we make those decisions. All right, the next one is from Jenny.

Tina Tower [00:05:24]:
Jenny's also got a great question here. A bit of a long question, but a great one Jenny has asked. Hi, Tina. My question is how do you get started with little to no funds? I am confident that I have knowledge and experience to create an online coaching series session or create an online workshop. However, with the rising cost of everything, my kids are our first priority and each week we are just making ends meet. I've done as much as I can trying to earn extra income, but every time I do it seems to go on to the next thing needed for school, et cetera. I know the long term outcome of starting an online platform would make us more money, but I'm so stuck with how to get started from nothing. Appreciate your time and valuable knowledge.

Tina Tower [00:06:04]:
Thanks, Jenny. Gosh, I hear you, I hear you. I see you. I relate so hard. Like I said at the start of Julia's answer, people only see the success. No one was following me when we had no money. So when we started to make ends meet, we could barely make our rent. So I was actually going on people's council cleanups.

Tina Tower [00:06:27]:
Like when you put the stuff out on the side of the road and I would salvage anything I could and then I'd sell it on ebay or Facebook Marketplace. I was doing anything that I could to make money and that way I was able to make our ends meet just enough while putting time and effort into the thing that wasn't paying me yet. And as much as it sucks, you've got to do that to start a business. Like, there's very rarely businesses start profitable in the first month or two. It usually is going to take you a few months to get your website built. Like, say Jenny, you want to bring your online course to life. It's going to take you a few months to build that social media presence, to start to build your list, to get your website built, to get your course all formulated. And so for that three months, you're not going to bring in revenue.

Tina Tower [00:07:14]:
But it's like that little bit of effort that can be taken at the start will pay dividends down the road. Like the life I have now is so wildly beyond my dreams that it makes all the struggle and sacrifice that we went through worth it. And when we had our hardest financial time, my kids were little. They were. They were babies. Like, we didn't start making good money until about 2013. So that was 12 years ago. So they were like 5 and 6 when we first had our first year of going, okay, the famine has ended, and it's never really gone back to that again, thank goodness.

Tina Tower [00:07:53]:
But it's hard, so I totally get you. It's hard to take that risk on doing something that you haven't done before when there's no guarantees that it's gonna be successful. And this is the thing. There's no guarantees. And I wish I could tell you that it would. You need to find the time and the way to back yourself in doing that if it's important enough to you. And that doesn't mean. I don't want to say that flippantly and going, like, she doesn't understand the reality of my situation, because I do.

Tina Tower [00:08:21]:
But if you want it enough, you've got to sacrifice to get there. It's like one of my favorite sayings. I say it all the time, but entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won't, so you can live the rest of your life like most people can't. And the start is going to be hard. You know, you've got your three kids, and you've got really tight funds. The good news is the cost to start a business now is next to nothing. So it used to be to start a business. I remember my first business that I started when I was 20 in 2004, and I had $8,000 saved up to start this business.

Tina Tower [00:08:55]:
And I thought that was such a huge amount of money. And all I did was gyprock the walls, put in some vinyl flooring, and some paint, and it was gone. So I was like, oh, no, what am I going to do now? So I had a retail store and a tutoring center. So I bought all of the stock on consignment and on accounts that I then had 60 days to sell and pay. And so I feel like since 2004, I had my hustle on from day one of starting that, in chasing my tail of being able to do that. It's a lot of hard work, and it's a lot of sacrifice. But I tell you, it's all worth it at the other side, because you get that freedom. And now when I look at my life with my kids and what choices I get to have available, it makes it all worth it.

Tina Tower [00:09:37]:
So if you do want to get started, idea to launch is my course to take you from exactly as it says idea to launch. You can go to her empire builder.com start and I'm launching a new version of that at the end of June which has all of the latest AI stuff. So that'll be a really good one for you to get. It's 997 so it is an investment. But to get that course, what I would like your minimal viable start, right, is to have idea to launch register your domain name, which is going to cost you about $50. You're going to start with Kajabi, which you can get on a 30 day free trial. So try and make some money in that first 30 days. But even if it takes you 60 days, it'll be, I think their starter package is about 97 or 149amonth.

Tina Tower [00:10:24]:
So have that factored into your budget. You can do free Canva and that's really all you need. And a Zoom subscription which you can also do for free. So it's a very low barrier to entry to get started now. So hopefully that helps you. Jenny, if you have any questions because I don't have your surname, you just put your first name, just let me know. Okay? The next one is Lauren. Lauren says, hey Tina.

Tina Tower [00:10:47]:
So I know you're the queen of helping legends whip up amazing courses. Oh thanks Lauren. But what if I'm not keen on making a course like at all? What I do want is to build a business that helps people in a meaningful way. Think hearts Sol, A dash of magic, more service space, less slides and modules. Do you mentor people who aren't doing the course thing or is that outside your wheelhouse? Well, I would say with 20 years of business experience, ain't nothing outside my wheelhouse. But it's not what I do anymore. So I don't do any one on one coaching ongoing anymore. The only thing I do is once a year I do a one month hyper focus month that is happening this year in August.

Tina Tower [00:11:32]:
So if you are on our email list, you will find out about that in July. I only do it like I said once a year. I only take five people for one month of super intensive. Like we have weekly coaching calls, we have voxer access, we build your Monday board like all of the different things. And because it's one on one, it doesn't matter whether your courses, whether you're service based, whether you're consulting, speaking, whatever you're doing it's working on you. Maybe that might suit you, Lauren, but I love anyone with a business idea and going for it. Next one we have. Emily, how do you know how to trust people in business, especially around money? I feel like I need more context for that question to answer it properly.

Tina Tower [00:12:14]:
Emily, I feel like something's been going on there. But I would say, how do you know how to trust people? I have trust issues. I'll say that up front. Right from the very beginning, the kind of scars left over from my childhood meant that I don't trust many people. I don't give my trust away very easily. But I have let my guard down a lot as I've gotten older and realized that most people in the world are really good people and working with people is really good. So one thing that I would say, how do I trust myself around money? The only person that I fully trust in the world is my husband. Unequivocally fully trust everybody else.

Tina Tower [00:12:54]:
I have provisions in place. So because you've said especially around money, I'm thinking maybe it's something to do with like a partnership or something that you're doing. I would always, I've done a lot of business with friends and I love doing business with friends. Looking at partnering with another friend at the moment and always doing collaboration. So the thing that I would say is always be super upfront. I am very, very clear. Clear is kind in going. This is what I think is in it for me.

Tina Tower [00:13:20]:
This is what would be in it for you. Have everything written down, have everything in contract form. If you're going into an actual partnership, make sure you have the contracts for that. So I always look at it like, like a. If you're going into business with someone or you're doing some sort of business arrangement, collaboration, JV partnership, whatever you're doing, have it all documented there so that if anything goes wrong, it doesn't get messy. It's just like here's what we agreed at the start, this is how we're going to split. This is what we know we're doing. So I would always trusting people with my money.

Tina Tower [00:13:51]:
I take full responsibility over my money myself. Even when it comes to my accountant, they're advising, but it's my responsibility. So I think when it comes to money, you've got to take responsibility for yourself and look after you yourself and protect yourself in there as well. Okay, next question comes from smart women. Create. If you were just starting out and needed to make money asap, what would be three things you would do okay, so if I just am starting out again, what I would do, it depends on your background. So I can answer what I would do. But for you and everybody listening, it depends on what your background is.

Tina Tower [00:14:30]:
So for me, what I would do if I was just starting out, you've got low volume. So even the first time you launch your course. So if I take it back to when I first did scale up, I had four members in scale up the first time that I started. So while it was good at $4.99 a month, it was definitely not enough to live on. And so I had to supplement that with things in between until I got enough volume to be able to have that sustainable, you know, the next launch we then had six people and then I switched over to her empire builder, which was when everything like completely took off. But what I padded that out for was mainly coaching and done for you services. So for most people, especially if you're looking at the online course side of the world, you've got expertise, you've got knowledge. So what I would do is start one on one consulting, coaching until you get that one to many off the ground.

Tina Tower [00:15:24]:
So you're going to start with your one on one, you're going to build that up. That's going to give you really good revenue, but it doesn't give you massive time freedom or scalability. What we want to do is we want to have time, freedom and scalability. So you start building your one to many courses, but you're going to not shoot yourself in the foot. You're going to keep running your one to one until your one to many starts to kind of overtake that. And it's going to depend on everyone's kind of risk appetite and how much money you need to live in order to do that. So for me, for example, I've been the breadwinner of our family for the last 13 years, so I didn't have the luxury or the opportunity of going, you know what, I'm going to put everything into the one to many and I'm going to drop down the one to one because I needed that money to pay our mortgage and our groceries and school fees and all the different things that are involved in life. And so that time is going to be tight, like you're going to be working the hardest in that messy middle.

Tina Tower [00:16:22]:
But a great saying that Oprah says is do what you've got to do until you can do what you want to do. I love that quote because I do think it takes people will talk about only do the things that light you up. But sometimes it's kind of grid in time. It's build time. Until you get that scalability, until you get that freedom. You've just got to do what you've got to do. Get in there, do what you got to do. The next question is from Michelle.

Tina Tower [00:16:52]:
The changes you've made in your health. Can you tell me specifically about your transformation? You look amazing. Thank you, Michelle. I will tell you, I also got a very similar worded question from Renee, Andrea, Jenny, Rebecca, Amber, Christina, and Liz. So a lot of people, I actually got more questions submitted relating to my health and weight loss than I did about business. Go figure on that one. What I will say is I am not a health influencer. I am very reluctant to talk publicly about health because I think health is such a personal journey.

Tina Tower [00:17:33]:
Everyone's got such different backgrounds and what they're doing. But the last few years, I have put a lot of time and effort into my health. And when you say, what have you done? There's probably nothing I haven't done. Everything that's available, I have done. There we go. Okay, the next question is, Janine, your take on social media trends. How would you approach it if you were just starting out now? Okay, so, Janine, probably the bad news. There's bad news and good news.

Tina Tower [00:18:04]:
Good news is I think it's easier because there's a lot less barrier to entry and there's a lot less judgment because so many are doing it. So I think that's the good news. The bad news is because so many are doing it, the competition and getting seen is much harder. Standing out from the crowd is much harder than what it used to be. So when I started, for example, like, one of my. One of my claims to fame was I got to a million dollars a year in revenue without spending a cent on ads. So I did no Facebook marketing and just did it all through organic marketing. I am not sure if I started from scratch now, whether that would actually be possible, because getting from zero to your first thousand, and I think that's the hardest part.

Tina Tower [00:18:55]:
Zero to a thousand. There's a great article by Kevin Kelly called A Thousand True Fans, and I think that really applies here. So going from zero to a thousand is the hardest part. And I think doing that organically now would be much slower than it was then because it's harder to get that traction and harder to get those eyeballs when there's so much competition. So what I would be doing is following the same strategy of organic marketing in terms of like inside her empire builder, we have our value marketing method that we talk about and our social media like Social Spark framework that we go through with social media and that is sharing different content pillars every week like thought leadership, customer and team Spotlight, having some fun and engaging posts, some promo of your services and something else that I can't remember. But when we go through all of those, you still want to be sharing all of that and you want to do it in all different formats. You want to be doing Instagram stories, you want to be doing lives on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram, you want to be doing reels, carousels, static posts, because you don't necessarily know what is going to be picked up by the algorithm at what time. So you want to be doing a little bit of everything, which I know sounds like a lot, right? It is a lot.

Tina Tower [00:20:12]:
If you want to go from obscurity to thousands and thousands of people following you online, you need to be entertaining, you need to put effort in there, you need to be educational, you need to be all the things. Because otherwise people will find someone else to tune into who's going to get give them all of that entertainment and education in there. So it is a lot. But the other thing that I would do now if I was starting from scratch is just running like a $5 a day ad to my lead magnets, just to list growth, just to get more eyeballs on it. Because I think that that would be a far quicker, more effective way to get where I wanted to go without waiting for organic to really take off. The only way around that is if you're going on a lot of people's podcasts so that you're expanding your audience that way, or if you're speaking on stages, that is also going to be really helpful. Okay, my final one is from Kirsty and Kirsty has asked, what is the most common struggle you see with clients and what advice would you give? There's a few actually. But the one that I will focus on here is people get stuck because they're afraid of failing.

Tina Tower [00:21:27]:
That is the most common struggle too often. So like when you follow Idea to Launch, Idea to Launch is my course I talked about before that takes people from nothing but an idea in your mind to a fully launched course. Now it has been set out so that you can complete it in eight weeks. If you wanted to take it a little bit slow, you could do it in 12 weeks. So when people are like full time employment, I always say allow 12 weeks to be able to do it because Your time's going to be a little bit more limited. But what I find is people will get three months in and they're still on module one and there is no reason to be still on Module one. Now, there has never been an easier time to get started. Like what we have the AI tools we have available and I'm just rerecorded the course this week, so it's being released at the end of June, our new version and that has all of the AI in it.

Tina Tower [00:22:26]:
And I tell you what, what used to take hours and hours and hours to do is now like a five minute job. It's insane. And so I look at it and I go, all right, if you're still there and four weeks later you're not through module one and you haven't implemented why, what is stopping you? It's not the strategy, it's not knowing what to do next. Because what to do next is all there. It's because we get in our heads. It's because we sit there and we worry, have I chosen the right thing? Is this going to work? Should I be doing this instead? Do I look good enough? Am I smart enough? Am I expert enough? Like all of the different things, self talk that goes on. And so while I'm a strategist, I am big on the strategy. I do think the thing that holds people back the most, the thing that people struggle with the most, is how to get themselves to do the thing that they want to do in order to get the result that they want.

Tina Tower [00:23:24]:
And that is a very personal journey. Because for some people, like we're complex as humans, we're both simple and complex. But when I look at it, I go, that is, to me as a business owner, there is no greater personal development journey you can go on. Because constantly you having to move through your edge, you get to the edge of everything you know how to do, you have done. If you want to go further, you have to learn to do something you've never done before. You have to learn new information and have to take that and implement that. And that's going to mean making a lot of mistakes. It's going to mean trialing, failing.

Tina Tower [00:24:04]:
Like trial and error is all constant, curious experiment is part of the game. You're going to have to figure out, okay, I've made the mistake, I've fallen flat on my face. I'm not going to take it personally. Like, I don't take failure personally ever. There is never a moment where I think I made a mistake and then I sit down and I think I am a failure. Like, that doesn't happen to me. I do think I failed and this failed, but I don't take it on as I am a failure. I actually know because I've learned this over the time, because I failed, pushed through, moved on, tried something else, and then it works.

Tina Tower [00:24:41]:
I just know that I'm on my way. I can learn. I truly believe that I have the ability to learn, adapt, and implement anything I want to if I want it badly enough. I'm unstoppable. There is nothing that I cannot do because I have proven to myself that I can take nothing but an idea in my head, a little concept, and I can flesh it out, and I can figure out my way to get to the other side. And I've only done that because I failed so many times and then had to recover from that and then prove to myself again and again that I can do hard things. And I think that is what people are petrified of. I think people are really afraid of making mistakes without realizing.

Tina Tower [00:25:25]:
Everybody that's ever gotten to anywhere makes so many mistakes. You just don't see it all the time. And, I mean, I think on a weekly basis, I make mistakes, I do the wrong thing. I've got to figure it out and try again. And then you get there and it's like, yes, it's the best moment ever. When you think, gosh, my back's against a wall. Can I do this? Can I not do this? And you've got to, like, figure it out. You've got to use your creativity.

Tina Tower [00:25:51]:
You've got to go, try this, try that. This worked. That didn't work. That. Two steps forward, one step back. And a lot of people find that really excruciating. I find it nothing but exciting. This is the game.

Tina Tower [00:26:04]:
And so I think if you want to be in business, you have to embrace that game. You have to embrace two steps forward, one step back, knowing that it's still going to lead people in the dust that have never tried. You're still going to get there. If I had to pinpoint the biggest struggle, that's it is how do you get yourself to do the thing that you want to do that is really working on yourself and figuring out what is it that's holding you back? Because for some people, it is the fear of failure. For some people, it's the fear of judgment. For some people, it's the fear of success. It's all different things. You've really got to work with yourself.

Tina Tower [00:26:41]:
Read a lot of personal development books, go and see a psychologist, listen to different podcasts and figure out, like, just ask yourself those introspective questions, why have I not done this? And figure out why. And figure out how to incentivize yourself to do the thing that you don't want to do so that you can get the thing that you do want, that you have to do in order to get there. Once you unlock that, you're absolutely unstoppable. All right. Alright. That is the end of Ask me anything. I hope that was helpful and I'll do another episode like this for you. I think every six months.

Tina Tower [00:27:13]:
That was fun.