Hello, I'm Tina Tower, and you're listening to her Empire Builder. For my first decade of business I thought grinding and hustling and working harder than everyone else was my path to success. It was pretty successful by a lot of measures, but it led to burnout and adrenal fatigue. Then, when I travelled around the world on my family gap year, I discovered the simplicity and the reach of online business, and I completely fell in love. You have so much knowledge and expertise that's within, and I want to help you to package that, so you can also help to lift others up. So, how do you build a thriving million-dollar business based on everything that's in your mind? This is her Empire Builder, the podcast.

Hello, and welcome to Cocktails and Coaching on this beautiful Friday afternoon. I literally just like skidded into my chair about 10 seconds ago. So, there's some days that I'm like, you know, "Friday afternoon is a great time to relax, pour yourself a cocktail, reflect on the week, do all those things", and then there's other times where life happens, and you go, "Why did I say I was going to do this on a Friday, there's so much going on."

So, I've got my two kids running around, and then I've got a girlfriend's kids because she had an appointment. So, they're one and three, and they're running around, and the one year old is a little bit scared of our dog because Holly is a Groodle, she's a golden retriever x poodle, and she is huge, and so she's taller than, than the little girl and so, we've got to kind of put her away, and so, she's been barking because she's not used to being put away. Anyway, it's been a bit of a madhouse this afternoon, but beautiful chaos is what it is, hey?

Okay, so, welcome to Cocktails and Coaching. Today I've got myself, I'm trying to eat a whole lot less sugar at the moment, so I've got sugar free tonic, I've got a nice gin, and then I filled it with all sorts of berries, oranges, all sorts of things, and it is delicious. So, I hope on this Friday that you are also in a similar position where, you know, it's been, there's been a lot going on and you may have had a big week, it may still be going, and you can have a moment to really take a breath and reflect on the week that has been.

So, for me, it's been a massive week, which has been really good. Happy Friday, Belinda, great to see you on here. What are you drinking today Belinda? Let me know. So, it's been a massive week this week. A really exciting week. I've had some speaking going on. I've had lots of new clients coming in for coaching. Lots of cool stuff happening and it kind of prompted me for, for this week's topic, was yesterday, I spoke for Key Person of Influence. So, Key Person of Influence is an amazing sort of program that's run by Glenn Carlson, where he puts people through this whole program in trying to, to elevate your business and one of those aspects is profile. So, yesterday I got the 60 people that are in the program all in a room for the full day and was able to teach them all about profile, and it's going kind of through the process of social media, using awards, live events, and also third party media. Hi Jenna, Happy Friday, and so that's kind of the process that goes through and that's, that's what I lead people through yesterday, but one kind of part of that, that I wanted to extrapolate, because it's, it's a question that people ask me quite often and it's a question that I got asked quite a bit yesterday, was how much of our "personal" should we be using to build our brand, and do we even need to use our personal profile if we, if we have a business and it's all about the business, and it's all about the business name, "Is personal brand even something that we should consider?", and I think you know the answer that I'm going to give for that.

Hi Bridie. Oh, Belinda's just said that she's in an indoor play centre with kids, “No alcohol, weekly routine to wrap up the week.” Beautiful weekly routine. So yes, so you're, you're surrounded by as much chaos as what is outside my door right now as well, which is fun.

Okay, so the part that I wanted to talk about was, "Do you need your personal brand, if you're building a business, or if you're just building a standard business, is personal brand anything that you need to think about at all?

Hi, Bridie, how you going? So the lesson that I kind of wanted to talk about today was, I was able to build my last company, Begin Bright, solely by using personal brand, and so our marketing budget was very, very low, because for the first few years of running that, all of the money that we made, got pumped right back into the business, to create better infrastructure, a better website, better systems, more staff, all of that sort of thing, and so we didn't have an abundance of funds for marketing, which is the case for a lot of businesses, and so the easiest way to get marketing for, for your company is by using your own personal brand, and, and that's because stories sell. It's really as simple as that. So if, for example, you win an award, and you send a press release out to the newspaper to say, "Hey, we won this award. The company is this many years old. This is the company name, we won this award.", da, da, da, da, dah, and it's all very company based, the newspaper is never going to print that because it's boring snoring. It's not news, it's not a story. Whereas, if you were to write the story and go, "Okay, local business woman, she's entered here, she's had beautiful local support. She's been going this long, she's young, she got kids.", all of the different things that are going on, that's something, that's a bit of a story. It's relatable. It's something a little bit different, and then you can actually go for that, and so that's what allows you to get the medium.

So, you want to really focus on how can you use your personal brand, to actually elevate the status of your business, and there's so, so, so many different ways to do that. One of the most obvious ways is social media. When it comes to social media, the most common pushback I get is, "Well, I don't just want to be on social media all the time just talking about myself.", and I totally agree. So, I'm on social media quite a bit, as I am right now, and I do always weave a bit of my story in there, because that's what makes it real for people, but it's more about you. So right now, the point of doing Cocktails and Coaching and the point of actually doing this segment today is to be able to go, "Okay, I've got people here, how can I actually help you? How can I serve you, and how can I make that easier for you?", and in your businesses, if you actually have a look at who you're serving, and then how can you share parts of your story to make it relatable and to help people achieve the things that you want them to be able to achieve with the services that you provide. So, being able to craft that story is amazing. So, then we kind of go on to, I'll stop a second and just say hi to Sharon, hi to Simone, hi to Lynne. Lynne's got a three-hour time difference so now she's watching live, yeah, I love it.

Okay, where was I, see, always with Cocktails and Coaching, I get, get so lost because I read all the comments at the same time, and then I lose my train of thought. What was I talking about, I was talking about personal brand, oh privacy. So, when you're talking about social media, um, there's, there's a lot that can go on where you go, "How much of myself should I actually share?" So, I'm never a fan of, you know, "This is what I'm eating now.", and, "This is what I'm about to do.", like a blow by blow of the day.  Sometimes "a day in the life of" is super, duper interesting, but most of the time you're taking up white space and just, just making noise, if there's nothing valuable there for the people that, that you're trying to serve. So I always look at it in the in the way of going, "I know stories help illustrate points, a whole lot more than anything else.", and so, if you can link your story in so that it's relevant, that's what's going to help elevate. So, using social media is a great way to get your personal brand established, then it's going in awards and using that sort of thing so that you can create awards, win awards, and then when you win those awards, it then allows you to get more media, it allows you to elevate your personal brand, it allows you to share things on social media; it's got a whole multi-pronged effect, and it gives you massive credibility.

So again, I'll illustrate with my own story here. So, when we started going in lots of different awards, we didn't win straight away, and that's the thing people go, you know, "Should I start entering awards now because am I even ready to actually do that? Maybe I have to wait until the business is more of an award-winning type of business before I can do that?", and I'd say start now. There's, in nearly every awards category, there is new business, which even if you're under a year old, you can still go in them. So, the best place to look is, for those that are listening in Australia, is thebusinessawards.com.au does all the local business awards, and then the Small Business Champions, which I think is smallbusinesschampions.com.au, but if you just Google Small Business Champions, you'll find that and that's something that every single person listening right now, go in there, open a new browser, I don't mind you getting distracted from what I'm saying. Enter yourself in there now, because it's very, very worth taking part in those sorts of things, and then you get to elevate. So, for us, unfortunately, we never actually won the local business awards. It really was a thorn in my side and I just could never win it. I tried. I was a finalist 17 times, never won, but we won the My Business Magazine awards, we won the Australian Business Champions Franchise Council awards, and then the big one was the Telstra Business Women's Awards, and then when we got that one, that's what really catapulted us into kind of the next level of doing that, but it was all stage by stage, and so that really solidified that part of the personal brand.

Then, you've got speaking. So you've got to know how to, how to present, and this isn't just for speakers, and so this is what I mean, what I said right at the beginning is, if you're just focussing on building a business that actually has nothing to do with personal brand, do you need to consciously establish a personal brand? My answer is always, yes, because by speaking, so even when I had tutoring centres, and you know, keynote speaking was nothing that I wanted to do, it was all about building tutoring centres, getting more students and helping them succeed, but, speaking is an amazing skill for every single business owner because it means that you can speak at local events, you can speak at industry events,  you can do Facebook Lives like I'm doing right now, you can do webinars, you can do everything really naturally and really easily, that helps to reach more people and elevate them up.

So, I have people say all the time to me, "It's easy for you, you know, you just hit go, and you can talk." So right now, I'll show you how, how I do this. So, this is my Cocktails and Coaching. So, they're my points that I'm talking about today. So, I literally take about 60 seconds before, before I start. Jot down some notes so that if I do get lost, I've got something to refer to, so I can make sure I hit all the points that I want to hit, but most of the time I don't look at it, because if you trust yourself, you know what you're talking about. I always look at it as, you know, when some people if you're not used to it, you stick a camera in your face and it's kind of like, "Ahhh", all of a sudden your lost for words, but if someone was to ask you a question, if there was a customer to ask you a question, you're going to get an answer 100% of the time, you're never just going to stand there, like frozen, going, "I don't know." So, that's something there.

Hang on, let me answer some of these questions. "Can you list them here please? Belinda's asked. So, that was with the awards. So, what I'll do is after this session finishes, I will put the links to the award programs that you should be going into now. I'm now putting Cocktails and Coaching onto the podcast as well. So, for podcast people that will be in the show notes on there.

Svetlana, hi Svetlana. So, Sharon said, "What category would my business be?" Okay, so when you're talking about categories for your business, it can often be hard to choose which industry you're in. So, there's usually about like 20 different industries, and a lot of businesses, especially nowadays, don't actually fit into any of those business categories. So, if you don't fit in one of those, in nearly every sort of awards program, there is specialised business and that's what you go into. When we had our tutoring centres, we always went into specialised business as well, and then we’d enter a business person too, there's, there's often multiple categories you can do. For you, Sharon, because you're new, you'd go into newly established business. So, it's usually businesses under 18 months old have a whole other category that they can go in as well, and Bridie has said, "Speak from your passion." Absolutely 100%. Bridie actually owns a Begin Bright franchise, so she knows all about all the stuff that I'm saying right now because I've been saying it for about the last 15 years. So, it's nothing new there.

Okay, so, awards. So, then we've got speaking, so I've covered that, and then we have media. So, getting media so that you can elevate your business by, by going into other people's podcasts. So, if there's other people that run podcasts that you want to be on, hit them up. So, kind of create the list of what ones you want to be on and then just approach those people. Email them, ask them, have things prepared. So, with things like, if you just email someone and go, "Hey, I want to be on your podcast.", they're likely just to say no if they don't know who you are. So, make sure you've got some points with what value you can bring to the audience, because as someone who runs a podcast, what you're looking for is how you can deliver the most value to the people that you serve. So, if someone approaches you and you're like, "Hang on a minute. The audience that I have, they would love to hear from that.", then that's great, but you need to really sell yourself and pitch it when you're doing that in there as well.

So then, what it, what it kind of comes down to is when you start sharing all the parts of yourself, it's really choosing consciously which parts of yourself you want to share, because I do think, so there was a stage in my business where I shared everything, very openly, and I had a social media stalker for a while, so it's kind of like everyone's worst nightmare, but that happened and it was horrible, and I'll plug at the moment, if you want to know the full story, my book is coming out next month, which will tell you all about that, so I won't go into that now, but it really made me question social media and how much of my life I share and how much my details are out there. So now, while I'm really prevalent on social media, because it's the best avenue for business and for communicating with the people that I want to do business with, I'm very particular about the parts of my life that I share. So, there's a tiny little bit of personal in there, but it's a sliver of myself. You know, it's not, nobody knows I went out and had lunch with a girlfriend today. Nobody knows I went and got laser hair removal this morning and went shopping and bought a couple of extra tops. You know, no one needs to know that stuff. I mean, now you do, but on a daily basis, like that's not the shit you need to be sharing. So, really decide. Are you going to share about your dog? Are you going to share about your kids and if you are, what, what parts of that are you comfortable with, and what parts of that are you comfortable with the world knowing about there?

So, hi Stephanie. Stephanie said, "What comes first, getting the business off the ground and really getting that ball rolling and then the branding? Or do you focus on branding first, when not many people know you exist? Good question. You do both in conjunction really. So, when you're getting the business off the ground, you want to be focussed on branding right from the beginning. In saying that, your branding is going to evolve over time, because the sort of messaging that you're going to have in the first year of business, you're going to get the market feedback. So you're going to get feedback from customers, and it'll kind of morph through that time, where you'll kind of get, get different people's opinions, and you'll get, always the services that you think you're going to offer, and the services that you think are going to be most popular, you'll get people asking for different stuff, and you kind of stick to what you love, but also go with the market takes you as well. So, you may change that a little bit. So, you've got to be flexible enough to be able to do that, but yeah, always the branding and I would always say, so, you know, someone asked me the other day, "Well, it's no point me doing Facebook Lives. I have a very small audience." I have a very tiny audience. So, on my Facebook page, I have 600 followers. So, in the scheme of things, tiny, itty-bitty, itty-bitty tiny, but, I mean, for everyone that's on here now, I've got great engagement. So, there's a lot of people that come on. There's a lot of people that watch it later. There's a lot of people that listen to it on the podcast later, and so, is that worth doing? 100%. If I had five followers on Facebook, I would still do it, because I would rather talk to one person than no people. So yeah, so I would say start right at the beginning, start wherever you're at, and just know that that's going to grow.

Bridie's said she does own a Begin Bright centre, that's why she's here, and “No, you speak truth.” Whoo. Yeah, I do baby. Simone said, "Such epic advice. Thanks Tina." Thanks Simone. Simone's actually hosting my book launch for me in Wagga next month, which is exciting. For everyone that's on, if you have not booked into my book launch yet, I would love for you to come party with me. I'll pop that in the comments there as well, or you can just go to tinatower.com and you can say, "Come to the party with me."

Okay, so that's kind of my little, my little talk there, all about, what else did I have to say? I'll look at my post it note here. What else did I have here? Oh, people invest in the business because of the story. That's what I've written there. Which is very true. So what I mean by that is, if you're, if you're a consumer, and you're looking at doing business with one person or another person, and you're comparing them against one another, you're going to go with the person who has the story that you relate to, and who has a more compelling story. So if you've got, like a generic business that has no human sort of element behind it, and just hide behind the brand name, and then, you have another business that, that feels warm, and feels friendly, and actually has a person that, you know, cares, I know 100% which business people are going to choose to do business with. So, that's the value in really being brave enough to put yourself at the forefront there.

So, yeah, okay. So, has anyone got any questions? So, Cocktails and Coaching. I love to do the coaching side of things as well where you can ask any, so it doesn't have to be related to personal brand, but anything business related, you can ask whatever you like, and while I wait for anyone to ask that, I'll have a sip of my delicious cocktail because I've got to try and finish it because as soon as I finish today, we're running out the door to go to futsal, to go to soccer. Such is the life hey? That's just, my podcast episode that I did this week was Too Much to Do, Too Little Time, because there is just so many fun things to get into. I want to get into all of it.

I haven't got any questions come through yet. Anyone got any questions today? Or are you all bamboozled by what I just said, and you're all off on other internet browsers, signing up for awards and nominating yourself and doing all those great things?

Let me know. Anyone got any questions? If you don't have any questions, let me know because I always love to know this. What has been your highlight of the week? So, what's been the win of this week that you're celebrating? I think my win was yesterday, speaking for Key Person of Influence. I've loved what Glenn does for a really long time, and so being able to do that, and because I'm used to doing keynote speeches. So I do a keynote, I'm very high energy, and I kind of go for 45 minutes is what I'm used to, an hour for a long one, and so I was really, usually I do a speech and then I'm, like, tired after. I need a nap because I kind of give it all, which I know you just can't imagine, right?, but I was really curious to see if I could hold that high energy for like eight and a half hours of presenting yesterday, and I did, so that was probably my, my win for the week.

Jenna has asked, "What is that amazing cocktail?" So, Jenna, I'm trying not to consume sugar at the moment, and so I have a sugar free tonic, some nice clear gin and then it's filled with fruit to make it yummy. So, there's natural sugar, natural sugar. Jenna said, "Love all that amazing info." Excellent Jenna, you can get that personal branding all started. Jenna has an amazing Pilates studio. So that's fantastic. Belinda said, "Are you going to grow your Facebook group or prefer it to be smaller?" Well, I've never been driven by numbers. So, I'm always a lot more into quality over quantity, and I like to connect with people as well. So, in saying that, if I got thousands of people in all of a sudden would I complain? Hell no, but I don't consciously do it. So, I never pay for any likes or engagement. Occasionally I'll do a boosted post for something like book launch tour, or when I'm doing an online course launch, but apart from that, I don't pay for anything so, so yeah, we'll try and grow the group but I like it to be small, because, I like that most people that I can see on here right now, the people that come on every Friday, I get to know your business and get to have that bit of relationship with you and I really like that. I like the connection. Yeah.

Belinda said, "Can we pre-purchase your book?" You can. So, if you go to tinatower.com/tour, that's got all of the tour dates there, and it also has where you can pre-purchase the book, which will be sent out on the 7th of November. So, it's getting so close and I'm so excited.

Anthea. Hi Anthea. So, Anthea's asked, "What do you reckon is a good benchmark percentage for expenses for an online business? My accountant had no idea as he has never worked with a business like mine." Yeah. So, it's completely, completely different from service-based businesses. I actually have a spreadsheet for this exact thing, which I can send to you later. So, send me a message and I can send that to you, but percentage for expenses. So usually, operating expenses are about 10%, marketing's about 5 to 10%. Profit is sitting at about 60% in an online course business, whereas in a service-based business, it's sitting at about 10 to 15%. So, it's why I love online businesses so much, but yeah, it's a very different kettle of fish to a service-based business because your main expenses are really, marketing's higher than what it would be with a physical business. Generally, operations are really low. You've got a bit of tech in there, and then you've got team support there as well, and that's essentially most of it. So yeah, and Anthea said, "Met me at Dent yesterday." Yay. So glad. Belinda said, "Can I get that expenses sheet as well?" Yes. So, a good way to get it also. So, I am running a masterclass next Wednesday for online course providers. So, if you run an online course, you'll want to come to that. The master class on Wednesday is How to Get an Extra $10,000 in Your Business Before the End of the Year. Oh gosh, there's so many links today. I'll drop the link in for that too. I better write that down or I'll totally forget.

Alrighty everyone. Well it was absolutely fantastic being on with you today. We’ll be the same time, same place next week. Four o'clock for coast to, Cocktails and Coaching. I've only had like three sips, goodness, I shouldn't be mincing my words already. Have the most wonderful weekend. Remember to take a moment to, amongst all this chaotic life, to take a big deep breath, reflect on the week that's been, all the amazing things that you've actually done because sometimes we can get to this point of the week and go, "Oh my gosh, the week is over, another week. I had all these things I wanted to do and I haven't done them all.", but look at the things that you actually did do and take that moment to really congratulate everything that you actually got done, and you're in this arena and you're playing hard and how good that is, and then take your moment to plan next week. So instead of getting into Monday and just sprinting full, full pelt, work out what are the top priorities, put them into your calendar and then do one at a time, because we have all the time in the world for the things that are most important for us.

Alright, have an absolutely fantastic weekend. Oh, Svetlana's put her win in, "Managed to get fees paid by a client who, who owed money since June." Well done. There's nothing worse than chasing money. It's horrible.

Ai Wei says, “Have a good weekend.” Have a good weekend darling.

Alright. Excellent. Have a great weekend everybody. See you later.

Thank you for listening to this episode of her Empire Builder. If you loved it, please share it on Instagram and Facebook for your friends, and if you really want to deliver me smiles, you can pop a review on iTunes. I'd love to hear from you, so if you have any questions, email me at [email protected] and if you want to know more about what we do, head over to tinatower.com. Now I truly hope this podcast gives you so much value and you can use it to dream big, plan well and take massive action in building your very own empire that's perfect just for you.