I just did a podcast interview with one of my clients, Megan Yelaney, and how she used 4 steps to go from selling someone else's product to having a thriving business in 90 days.
I know starting a business can seem overwhelming. Not only that, but everyone is ALREADY doing what you want to do, right?! Well if that feels like the truth, you need to stick around and see how many of the 4 you are already doing. If you are missing just 1 of them, it will stall your business success. Megan proved it's possible. In fact, she is in one of the most saturated markets of all: Fitness. She worked the Launched in 90 system and denied all odds!
Megan: “I started my business about six years ago in network marketing. I started with Beachbody and really dove in I would say not until 2014 so I kind of was just sitting on it for a while doing what a lot of other marketers do, just really working, not making it an actual business.”
Was that because you didn't believe it could be a real business or you just didn't know? What was the reason that you were sitting on it?
Megan: “I think it's both. I really I think I doubted myself honestly. I saw other people having success so I knew it was possible. So I think I just didn't believe in myself and then I didn't have a big enough reason to. I didn't have something in my life that made me go oh, I have to make this business work until I really did.
Once I moved home to New York I started to just really, really deep dive and met my husband I knew I didn't want to do the jobs I was doing.
That's really when it took off and I actually had a real reason to make it work. Then everything totally changed. I grew that business to six figures decently quickly once I really started hitting the ground running and then I decided last year, I really had this urge like any entrepreneur I'm sure, I knew I wanted to do something else. I loved that company, I still love them, I'm still with them, but I knew I was meant to also do something on my own.
About mid 2017, but really this year is really when I started working with you is when I go deep. So now I have my own coaching programs, I have my own course and while I love the company like I said if that income went away today I'd be totally fine.”
I want to ask you because you had never sold your own product before you had sold somebody else's name. What were some of the struggles or was there self-doubt? Were you positive you had this built up this audience and you could sell or were you not sure if they would buy your product?
Megan: “Oh my gosh, imposter syndrome is such a real thing!! I'm sure a lot of ladies have felt that or feel it now. I even am feeling it a little now as I move more into the business coaching realm and I'm like, who am I to teach this?
It was definitely a comfort blanket for me but that's why I knew I had to do it because I got really nervous and I said you know what, it's not nerves because I know I have the value, I knew, I know I had the knowledge but people knew me in this one area. So when you're changing your identity it's terrifying and that's what I was doing. I was going from being that Beachbody coach which I think they did a very good job of branding myself but still that's what people knew I sold that so people knew that they they could work with me so definitely had doubts.
I also had a lot of people coming to me saying, do you actually do coaching outside of this? I want to work with you, I just want to buy the product.”
I want to talk about your evolution with how you branched out into your own product. The first thing was you created a five day challenge. You basically said I'm just gonna come out with private one-on-one work first and then later, I'll do the group. I want to talk a little bit about what was that first challenge looked like?
Megan: “So my first challenge is actually still the challenge I use I just kept it and it really worked so well. Basically for five days I taught people the ins and outs of intermittent fasting, why it really worked for me and my clients, the benefits and really just deep dive so that by the end of the five days not only did they have everything they needed to really implement this into their lifestyle but they actually lost a little weight.
Not only did it feel really good because I knew what I was giving them was valuable but they could do long term and that was the biggest thing that people kept saying. I could screenshot all of those testimonials for my next challenge which was huge! I was really nervous to launch into a one-on-one but I knew that I was giving so much value during those five days and honestly I've done your five day challenges and I saw like OK, you're giving that much value, they're gonna want to keep working with you.
It really drove me into getting out out of that imposter syndrome, to people want this and I knew it again like we all know we have the tools and the skills. As long as you're leading with integrity and you're actually giving them what they want. It's just about believing in yourself and once you do that and you start to just get a little traction, get a couple customers that you’re like there's something to this. People actually need this.”
Now you have done a challenge prior to our Launched In 90 process and I believe you told me at one point it really didn't do much and it sparked more interest when you did that first challenge. Was it the same challenge or did you tweak it moving into the Launched In 90 process?
Megan: “Yeah, I definitely tweaked it a lot. The first challenge I ever did I didn't launch into anything. I just expected people to like come flock to me and be like I know I must work with you. I didn't give them any invitation. They had no clue what was next. I just left them and I kept making a new group every time. I just realized all these mistakes which is fine, that's how you learn and make it better.”
So now you've done your first challenge, people are buying. I want to ask you this because this happens to when it’s open cart and we expect all those people to buy immediately. Did anybody buy the second you opened cart? What did that look like for you?
Megan: “When I launched my one-on-one I actually did close one person before I even launched, which was really cool.. The way I set it up for one-on-one was they had to set up an interview with me so I didn't just put my sales page and they sign up. It was a slower process in that sense. The reason is, the first calls really just to make sure, are they serious? Are they actually going to want to invest? I actually made sure I put a question in my application like are you willing and ready to invest. This is going to be an investment. So I would say most of them closed by the next week.”
You can never assume anything about anyone online. There are sometimes when I look at someone and I think, oh wow, she's super successful, she has a lot of followers already, this is going to be a really easy close. She's got the money to invest, she's already investing in herself. Sometimes those are the people that they're over investing in themselves and they know they might be stretched a little too much where somebody who might be fresh out of the gate and sees you and finds you thinks this sounds like an amazing opportunity.
How soon did you relaunch that exact same challenge?
Megan: “So I relaunched it a month later because I knew I wanted to launch into the course that I made. I think we tweaked a couple things, I realized going live at night was better for my group so I decided to do that. I think the biggest reason my challengers were successful is they were super niche down so anyone doing them might get specific like don't do something general health and fitness challenge. So that was super helpful too.
So for the challenge I launched into my course, that's was the first time I've ever actually really invested in something outside of my own business coaching and things like that. I paid for a sales page to get done. I really followed your system in Launched In 90 so I had the best market research done, I knew this was going to sell, I knew I was very confident about that but I was so overwhelmed. I also have too much information like I don't know what to do or where to start. So I paid almost $2,000 for the copy and the tech aspect of it. I now have that forever and I can just make a copy of it and use it for anything else.
I also invested in Clickfunnels. I decided to go from Lead Pages to Clickfunnels because it's super user friendly. It didn't have the features that Clickfunnels has. Then I also invested in Kajabi to host my site.”
How many times do you see yourself relaunching this challenge, reusing all of these tools and things that you've done?
Megan: “So since the second I did another challenge and after that I decided to move over to workshops. I've done two lives so far, have my next this week and then I'm going to probably do one or two more until I make it fully evergreen. So I mean the live workshop is very similar. The challenge is the same information just in a one hour workshop so those two went very well. I made less because I had just less people on but I still converted very high for how many people I had on which I was super excited about.”
You know I always say launching is so crucial when you're first starting your business, but it shouldn't be something that you're thinking you're going to always want to do. At some point you will want to turn this automated and scale it. I think launching is a part of the process that you have to go through.
Megan: “Even from the first workshop to the second workshop I learned a ton. I had to change the time because I did it during the day and not as many people came on. I had almost the same amount of people come on and I had half the number of registrants for the second one. I was like okay, that's that means the time was much better so I did it right. The cool thing. just like the challenge prep, once you have a decent live I converted really well, so I knew I didn't want to change the it, everything was great.”
What was one strategy that you did that you feel really made a difference in your launch?
Megan: “I think for the group coaching specifically this wouldn't count for my workshops because they're sort of paced and they're truly passive which is great but for the group coaching it was significantly more as a doubled investment. I got on the phone with a lot of people and I know that's terrifying for some people but if someone was serious I wanted to make sure they were actually serious and were a very good contender. They really just needed to talk through it.
More often than not they did sign and that was so worth 20 minutes on the phone with someone so I think your first few you might have to get on the phone to bootstrap it a bit and message them and check in. If you believe what you're doing you're doing a disservice if you don't reach out to them and you don't say, hey, this is going to change your life. You told me this is what you need and why you need it. So that was probably one of the biggest things and then just a follow up e-mail series was huge too and that I totally learned through watching Launched In 90 that was like something and never ever did.”
I hope you got a lot of takeaways from Megan and there are four things that I have seen people do that Megan has done as well:
1) They have a very specific niche
2) They have credibility and expertise in it
3) They take action
4) They don’t stop when there is a bump in the road
Are you doing these 4 things? I would love to hear from you, tag me @stacytuschl and let me know!
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