Tina Tower [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to her Empire Builder show. Today I am talking to you about going from idea to Income. Now, this episode is aimed at the people in my audience who are at the very, very, very, very beginning. Most of the time I am talking to established course creators. Her Empire Builder is all about like taking people that have that course, that have that knowledge and then want to put the business engine behind it. So building with scalability and finances and mindset and systems and all of the things. But lately I have had a lot of people asking me, I'm not there yet. I am a coach or an author or I am a speaker or a service provider and I have all this knowledge and I want to put it into a course, but I don't quite know where to start.

Main Episode

Tina Tower [00:00:51]:
And so that is why I decided to one, do this episode. And two, I am running a three day Idea to Income challenge at the end of June. So, so if you would like to join that one, if you're at the very, very beginning, it'll be a really great way to kick off and see really if it's something that you want to do. So a really great tester kind of thing for you to do that you can just go into the lesson notes herempirebuilder.com income or jump onto any of my social media and DM me the word income and that will send you the link straight on through there. So one of the things that I want to impart with you today is what is involved in going nothing but an idea like that. Real I'm starting at scratch to having it ready to go in the world. Now. I think it's one of the hardest things because every time we do something that we've never done before, it's going to be a little bit tricky, but it is a worthwhile pursuit.

Tina Tower [00:01:50]:
My favorite thing, I mean, I know idea to launch, which is our starter course that I'm running a live round of after we do the Idea to Income Challenge at the end of the month. So if you're wanting to look at that, you'll see that at the challenge. But one of the things that I know, I love about digital courses is once you go through the recording of it, once you go through the filming, the creation of it, you've got something there that you can sell again and again and again and again. So the actual creating of it is a lot of work, but then you've got this asset that you can use to sell for years afterwards. So it's a very, very worthwhile pursuit to kind of get all of that knowledge that you have and put it into a saleable product. So when you are looking at where do you even start? Like, what is the idea that I start with here? Usually I find people have too many ideas, not enough ideas. And this is where you can get stuck because you can get stuck in this stage for. I mean, I've spoken to people that have been stuck in this stage for years in going, I want to start a course, but I've got this idea and this idea and this idea and this idea and can't decide on which one to start with.

Tina Tower [00:03:02]:
So my advice to you if you are in that situation is just pick one and start. Because I can get guarantee that in a year your business will look different to what it looks like at the beginning. So you may as well just get started instead of still in a year's time being on the sideline going, I will start one day. One of my favorite sayings is, is it one day or day one? And so you can decide to start and that way you're going to be light years ahead of the people that are still sitting on the sidelines. So when you're looking at your different ideas, I think that the winning idea is at the cross section of three, three main things. One of them being doing what you love and what you're passionate about. Now, this is super important because you have to talk about it a lot. If you are selling a course, you are talking about it again and again and again.

Tina Tower [00:03:50]:
So I do think it has to be something that you're really good at, that you love talking about, or you're going to start resenting it. So that is the main thing that you love it, you're passionate about. It's where your expertise sits. The other thing is that it's something that people want. So you've got to pay attention to. What are people asking you for help for now? What are people going, oh my gosh, I need help with this. You're my person. Can you tell me how you've done that? Tell me what's involved? That is a really good indication that it's what people are wanting from you, that it is something that the market is asking for.

Tina Tower [00:04:23]:
And then the third thing is what are people willing to pay for? Now, when you're looking at those two, what people want and what people are willing to pay for can sound very similar, but they can be two very different things. Because what people say they want and what they're actually willing to pay for and how much they're willing to pay for that can be quite different. And so you're looking at something that's very commercially viable. The number one goal of all business is to make a profit, because without profitability you can't be sustainable. And so you need to have something that people are wanting to buy. If you've got the crop section of those three things, what you're brilliant at and what you love, what people are wanting and what people are willing to pay for, then that, my friend, is the winning idea. Ask yourself, where have you gotten results in your life and business? What are people asking you for? What do you find easy to navigate that others find complex or hard? And that is a really sure fire way that you can guide people through that. Number two thing when you're looking at starting is to validate before you start building.

Tina Tower [00:05:29]:
Now I am a massive fan of starting with a short course. So starting with that six to eight week course inside idea to launch, I teach an eight week course framework because it's kind of a long enough period of time that you can get someone a really solid transformation. But it is a short enough period of time that the commitment phobes don't have to feel like, oh my gosh, I can't possibly commit to this. You don't want to start with something like a 12 month course because a lot of people will see that and go, gosh, I don't have a year, I don't have a year. Eight weeks. Yeah, I could do eight weeks. If you're starting with that, it's a really good way to be able to validate on that first round. Now what I would encourage you to do is teach live the first time you do it.

Tina Tower [00:06:14]:
Instead of spending all this time creating all your content, recording all your videos, making everything perfect and then putting it all out on a course platform. I would run your first one live on Zoom, get a little beta group together, run it live, because that'll do a couple of different things. One that will test your idea again to see whether when you put it out there, people are willing to buy it. So that will test your idea. It will also allow you to get real time feedback. So when you are presenting to people, especially on Zoom, you'll be able to see their faces. So you'll be able to see when people are super engaged, like when they pick up their pens and they're like, yes, yes, that's what I need to know. And then you'll also see when people glaze over and they're super bored.

Tina Tower [00:06:55]:
You need to know both of those things before you go to the effort of recording, you'll also get a lot of feedback with all of their questions so that by the time you rinse and repeat and launch, like my advice is always to teach live at least two or three times every 12 weeks. When you start that way, you've got that proof, you've got those testimonials, you've got those customer success stories coming in. And that way, when you go to record it, you can do it really well because you can anticipate the questions that people are going to ask you, you can anticipate what people need, and you can guide people to remembering. People are buying your course for one reason and one reason only, and that's to get the transformation result. All they're looking for is for you to take them across that success bridge. So if you imagine a bridge and you've got point A and people want to go across to point B, now, knowledge is very easy to come by. Now you can look on Google, you can ask AI knowledge is very easy to find. What people don't know is they don't know the right questions to ask.

Tina Tower [00:07:54]:
They don't know what they don't know and they don't know how to implement and have that guide. And that is what you are there for. You are there to say, I know you want this result. Here's how you can apply all of this knowledge to be able to get that result. So you're the guide taking them across. And that's going to be done really, really well, especially as you're learning how to teach. If you don't have experience with that in a live setting. Okay, so validate your idea is a big one.

Tina Tower [00:08:21]:
When I'm talking about validating your idea, I just want to add in there as well. Sometimes people will just ask friends. So they'll ask friends, they'll survey the audience. I don't think it's actually real until you go all in. So if you ask someone, hey, what do you think of this idea? Often you're very beautiful, supportive friends and family will go, that sounds great, love it, love it. But will they be willing to pay for it? And so you don't actually know until you put it to market with a price tag on it. And that can be scary. And this is where a lot of people stop is because it's vulnerable.

Tina Tower [00:08:57]:
Putting yourself out there and going, here's my offer. Like, will anyone buy it? Especially for people that have never sold themselves before. So for a lot of people, I know that up Until I was in course creation, I was selling products and services. So my business started out as an educational toy store and tutoring center, and birthday party place was my first business when I was 20. And so while I got good at selling things, I never was really selling myself. I was selling the service and I was selling products. And so I didn't take it all that personally. Even when I went into franchising, I was selling my system and expertise, but not so much myself.

Tina Tower [00:09:36]:
Whereas for a lot of people, when you are going into course creation for the first time, it's the first time where you are selling you, you're productizing yourself. And so putting that out there is an extremely brave and vulnerable thing to do. And I'll hear people all the time say, people are thinking of themselves, not you, and no one's judging you. Which, you know, I wish that were true, but we judge people all the time. We're human beings. So I think that it gets easier when you stop trying to bullshit yourself and you accept that, yes, people are going to judge you. If you're lucky, thousands of people are going to be watching you, which means you'll be able to build an audience, which means you'll be able to build your business, you'll be able to sell, you'll be able to create this great life filled with freedom and flexibility and all the things that you dream of. But to do that, you need to put yourself into the arena.

Tina Tower [00:10:26]:
And this is where a lot of people get stuck. And I think that that's something that you need to with eyes wide open in going, are you willing to bear yourself like that? And if you are, the rewards are spectacular. But if you're not, it could be like a whole new form of personal torture. So that's just something I want to caveat in there as well. So with your first course, start with something simple. I talk a lot in her Empire Builder about having like a winning Ascension model and a really great Ascension model has a low cost offer that can be running Evergreen, has a live launch signature course and then has a back membership or mastermind that's more like high level, exclusive. Most of my clients in her Empire Builder have an Ascension model very similar to that. And while that is good to start with the end in mind, I don't want for people at the very beginning to get kind of stumbled on thinking of this big picture because you won't know what the audience is asking for.

Tina Tower [00:11:25]:
When I first started in online courses, my very first online course, I couldn't decide what I wanted to do. So back earlier when I was talking about your idea, I was like a lot of people that have too many ideas and because I'd come out of running tutoring centers for 13 years, I didn't know what I wanted. Like I didn't know what I was passionate about anymore and I didn't know which direction I wanted to go in. So, you know, I am someone that kind of goes all in with things and can get carried away very easily. So I actually started three different businesses. I started Scale up, which was all about systems for service based businesses. I started the Happy Life, which was all about personal development and helping women live their best life, and the Tutoring Institute which was for tutors that wanted to start their own tutoring centres and become private tutors. So I started all three of those things so that I could see which market I enjoyed talking to, which one was the most commercially viable and which one I wanted to do long term.

Tina Tower [00:12:25]:
I will say the one I enjoyed the most was the Happy Life, but it wasn't the most commercially viable because it's a little bit more untangible and the results that people get are less defined than with business. So I stuck with Scale up because one, I love systems and love service based business and I just built and sold service based business. But also because people could get that monetary result, it was a really simple equation to go, this is how much it costs and then you could justify that return on investment with that. So I started with saving Scale up there and then how that morphed. When I first started I launched and then I had four people in that membership. When people are first starting can often go, what if I only get a few people? And you will only get a few people unless you've already got a massive profile. So if you're already a speaker or an author or someone that's already got quite a decent profile, you can go in and escalate really quickly. But for a lot of people it's going to be a slow burn at the start.

Tina Tower [00:13:30]:
You're going to go in, you're going to knock people's socks off and then they'll learn and you'll grow from there. And so I started with Scale Up. I ran that for about 18 months before I launched my first online course, which was idea to launch. Now why I say don't worry about your ascension model is because if I had been wedded to that at the beginning, I would have stuck that out because I was like, this is the thing that I want to do. Whereas What I have always done in my business life, which I think works really well, is listen to the market. I try and pay attention so that when I can start to see indications that something's no longer working, I can pivot and adapt and change. And when I see another opportunity, I can pivot into that. While I started with Scale Up, I had all service based business owners in there, but they were all asking me, hey, I'm loving how you're putting this online.

Tina Tower [00:14:21]:
Can you show me how you built that online course? That is why I did the first version of Idea to Launch. The first version of Idea to Launch was my first live launch. We created that course in a week while I was traveling a year around the world with my family and I was in Thailand. And then we sold it and we sold 11 on that first week. Now, for some people that's amazing. For some people that is small. For me, I was floored. I was like, it was $1,000.

Tina Tower [00:14:50]:
997 was the course cost and we made $11,000 in the week. And I had never up until that day stage made money in such a scalable way. So up until then I had been in product business where you buy something for $2, you sell it for $4 and you try and go for volume. I had been tutoring where I paid the teachers $40 and tutoring cost $80. So then you had your $40, you had to pay rent out of that, all of the costs and expenses. I had never been in something that was such a scalable business model. I could not believe that from creating this course one time, I was then able to sell again and create that amount of revenue. And people were stoked.

Tina Tower [00:15:32]:
People were like, this is the most life changing thing I've ever done. This is incredible. And so to have such a win win situation was awesome. But then I did like I advise people to do, I taught that live. And we rinsed and repeated and launched that again and again for about another nearly two years. And then I had so many people saying, what's next? My course is out in the world. I see what you're doing. Can you show me how to build the business behind the online courses? That's why her Empire Builder was born.

Tina Tower [00:16:02]:
That started in June 2020, purely because that's what people were asking me for. This is why I say, when you've got an idea, just start with that one thing. Start with that one thing and then the market will tell you where you want to go next. Then you can be really adaptive and look at Business as just this constant curious experiment. You will never be done, it will never be set in stone. We have to constant be adapting. Especially now, I find the market is moving a lot faster than what it used to. So you want to be nimble and just do the thing that you love to do.

Tina Tower [00:16:36]:
Okay. The next is to be able to launch and sell confidently. Now I do think that the first time that you are launching, a lot of people want to go wide. So the general misconception that I hear is build it and they will come this. I hate to burst your bubble, but I am a realist. I am a pragmatist and I like people to get results. I don't want you to be high on Hopium. I want you to be realistic and I want you to get actual real results and build a business that's sustainable.

Tina Tower [00:17:06]:
And so I'm not going to blow smoke up your butt. I'm going to say when you are first starting, when you go to launch and sell, you will do much better in going small than going wide. Now what I mean by that is say you've got no profile happening. You're right at the very, very beginning. You've got an audience of zero and you have to build it from there. There are a lot of things that I teach Inside Idea to launch about building your email list and how to establish your social media profile and your personal brand and all of that sort of thing. But where you will get your first sales is from people that you know. You will talk to your friends, you'll talk to your family, you'll talk to your colleagues.

Tina Tower [00:17:47]:
Like make a list. When you've got your make a list of 10 to 20 people that you know in your network of your orbit. Now that would be perfect for that course. What I would say is if you cannot name 10 to 20 people that you've worked with or that you know or that people you know know, if you can't put 10 to 20 names on that list, it's probably not the right thing for you to start with because you want to start with the easiest, like minimal viable product, the easiest thing that you can start with. And if you know no one right now that would buy what you want to put out, then I'd find something that you do know people with that because you want to start as easy as you can. And then from that it will grow. From that you'll be able to grow your email list, you'll be able to grow your social media profile, you'll be able to start some low Cost ads running to be able to get your lead magnet going and get your nurture sequences going and all of those things that we need to be able to grow your business, that will come with time. But my advice is make a list of those people that you know already and make sure you already know people that are willing to buy it.

Tina Tower [00:18:58]:
The final thing is a bit of a mindset. One I see people all the time dreaming of starting a business and then they get stuck on the sidelines. My question to you is why do you want to? And is the why strong enough? Because having just re recorded my course, So I did 56 videos over eight days. That shit's not easy. It takes a lot of energy and I know that when a lot of people go to do things like that, they'll find every reason not to. Believe me. I was trying to procrastinate with all sorts of different things and it requires so much positive self talk to get yourself to do the thing that you want to do. And so you need to be focused on the end result.

Tina Tower [00:19:40]:
And that end result is the impact that you're going to make in the so many people's lives with your course. And really focusing on that now, it's a lot easier for me because I've been doing it for so long that I know that I have the certain clients that have great results. People have done my thousand dollar course and made hundreds of thousands of dollars out of it. Some people millions of dollars. And so I can look at that and go, gosh, it's worth it, let's do this. Because even if I just get a bunch of people that are going to get those sort of results, it's worth my time and energy to put this also on the flip side. Yes, I want the impact for other people, but I also want it for me and my family as well. So I love living the freedom filled life that I have.

Tina Tower [00:20:24]:
I love having the flexibility. I love that we get to experience the things that we get to experience because of the work that I do. And so if you stay focused on the why, it will propel you to go through the hard things that you need to do in order to get there. So that is my advice on being able to start to that. Okay, so to wrap that up, you want to start with a clear idea that people will actually buy that you love, that people want. You want to validate it. You want to keep your first course nice and simple and transformation focused. You want to be able to launch it to a small group of people to get those first beta testers in those first testimonials, those first customer success stories and get your confidence levels up and you just want to do it.

Tina Tower [00:21:12]:
So if you want to go through a bit of a three day tester, like I said at the beginning, go to herempirebuilder.com income and you will be able to join me for Our live free 3 day idea to income challenge which will help you validate your first ideas and give you a roadmap to be able to start. I look forward to seeing you there. Happy launching.