How I Took The Summer Off From Marketing
Even when you love your side hustle, there are seasons of life where it makes sense to take a step back.
You might be…
Taking an extended vacation
Getting married
Growing your family
…or wanting a break just because!
Learn how you can take a less involved approach in your business as it fits your lifestyle (without sacrificing your profitable and thriving business) on the latest podcast episode.
CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!
Show Notes:
Hey, Risers. Welcome to episode 169 of Empathy Rising. I am so excited to be back with a solo show for you guys.
Having guests is great and it makes recording super easy, which I am going to expand on in this episode, but I also really love when it's just me, and my mic, and you guys, and I get to just share what is going on or what I feel like is most important to pass on to you guys in the moment.
Solo shows are my favourite. This is our first episode coming off of the Summer Coaching Series. I've gotten so much feedback from you guys that you loved this series, that it was really helpful to hear other people who maybe have the same licenses as you, who may be in the same state as you, and who are definitely around the same stage in starting their side hustles as you, so you could hear their questions and hear their concerns and be able to personalize that.
I'm glad this series was a success. If you have questions or comments, don't hesitate to jump into our Empathy Rising Facebook group, where we can chat all about what came up on the episodes for you, and what you were reminded of.
Just to let you know, if you want to have monthly coaching for yourself, just like what was offered on these summer coaching episodes, Space Holder is always available for you. You can grab that program, it helps you learn how to create your first offer and then we meet monthly in perpetuity. You get to hang out with me and get your own questions answered. That is over at marissalawton.com/space-holder.
I am happy to be back with a solo show. The reason I'm back with a solo show is that the girls went back to school this week. All of my students in Space Holder, in Side Hustle, in the Mastermind, all got very close with my girls this summer.
In every single call they were asking mommy for something or other, or just needing to cuddle, or whatever. It's lovely to have a little bit of my space back and be able to work freely and be able to meet with my students without interruptions.
The title of this episode, "How I Took the Summer Off of Marketing" is because I knew I was going to be home with my girls and I wanted to give them memorable moments and make special connections this summer, do things that we're not able to normally do. I still definitely was facilitating my programs, but I did not have to market them.
I'm going to share not only how I did that, but the decision process I went through to be able to decide to do that and how you guys can start thinking about this too. Today, I'm going to peel the back of the curtain of my business a little bit, and share the behind-the-scenes operations and how I run things around here, and how Hailey runs things around here.
You guys have heard me talk about her millions of times, but I'll talk about her more in this episode too because she was instrumental in me being able to do this. I'll also get you guys in a mind frame and get your wheels turning around, "How can I do this too?" or "is this right for the type of side hustle that I want to run?" Let's dive into all of that I just spoke about.
I think one of the main reasons that therapists work with me to build their side hustles is this lifestyle-freedom, getting their time back, and getting their energy back. To stop trading that for one-on-one sessions, and having their money be linked with their time and linked with their energy.
I think that is one of the main motivators. Of course, students of mine are also money-motivated, wanting to make more money on the side, (for sure - who isn't?) and also creativity motivated; wanting to do something new, wanting to step into their next evolution, wanting to be able to experiment, and play and have some more autonomy.
Those are definitely other factors, but the one we're going to drill down on and focus on today is this lifestyle management, this energy management, and this time management piece because all of us are looking at ways to make a living with less of a time commitment.
If I were to rank these in the level of importance to me, being rich and being wealthier, (to me, two different things) but rich/wealth. That's certainly a priority of mine; building wealth for myself and building wealth for my kids is a top priority.
Let's say wealth is number two, probably for me above that is being able to build the wealth in a way I enjoy, that I get to have days off, that I get to wake up, take my kids to school and then come right back home and get in bed and read a book for four hours but I'm still building wealth. To me, that sounds like heaven.
Fill in that "read a book" with whatever sounds like heaven for you. It could be going to the beach. It could be going for a hike. It could be meeting with friends, any of those. Whatever is your thing, or your passion, or your fulfilment, but having that thing be front and centre while building wealth.
I don't think that there's anything better than that. I think that what we're looking at here is a way to do that without it eating so much of our daily lives and perhaps even without it eating up so much of our souls.
If our goal is to be building wealth while still having lifestyle freedom, the first thing we have to look at is this differentiator, this key difference between working ‘in’ your business versus working ‘on’ your business.
Working in your business means the facilitation of your business. To put this in therapy terms that we'd all understand; working in your business would be things like seeing the clients and doing the documentation, then anything else that comes with that.
Working on releases, or if you have to go to court, or if you have to prepare documentation or anything like that, but beyond your notes, that would be all in your business. That would be the facilitation or the carrying out of what you do, what you get paid for, that is working ‘in’ your business.
‘On’ your business is then the external things that can be looked at as growth strategies or the external things that allow you to get paid so you can do the facilitation, like networking events. A lot of marketing would be considered working ‘on’ your business.
What is going to get you the attraction of these people who are then going to pay you money to sit in your office and do therapy with you? Working on your business could also be things like rewriting your website. I'm thinking about coffee chats or meeting for lunch with other therapists in your town.
What else would be working ‘on’ your business? If you decided you wanted to introduce a therapy group and you had to come up with that curriculum - that would be working ‘on’ your business. Facilitating and conducting that therapy group would be working ‘in’ your business. We want to distinguish those two things. Again, thinking about it in therapy terms, this same dichotomy here makes sense for our online businesses.
If you are creating a membership site or a group program, the actual calls for that group program or the actual calls for that membership site or making a PDF or the workbook, that would be working ‘in’ your business, whereas going on someone's podcast or the growth strategies and coming up with the curriculum for your group program, that would be working ‘on’ your business.
Once we understand, "am I doing ‘in’ my business work or ‘on’ my business work?" we can start to tease these apart and we can start to then look at different business models that have more or less of these because some online businesses have very little working ‘in’ your business. These are the no-touch or the low-touch offers.
Thinking back to the Summer Coaching Series, there were several episodes where people wanted to be creating low-touch offers or zero-touch offers. I remember one of the guests wanted to make PDFs and create an Etsy-type marketplace or a shop. There's very little ‘in’ the business there because there's no facilitation.
The actual making of the worksheet would be working in the business, but once the worksheet was created and listed for sale on the website, everything else would be working on the business, getting all of the traffic to the site so people could buy it. Other offers have more facilitation.
This comes in line with the touch of your program. If you've heard me talk before about low-touch versus high-touch, this is where that facilitation piece comes in. This is where the working ‘in’ your business comes in. Programs, as I mentioned, and membership sites, that's a mid-touch. Group programs or one-on-one coaching or retreats are very high-touch.
People then might ask the question, "Then why in the world would you ever want high-touch? Why would you want the facilitation to be high?" That's the part that you can't hire out and that's the part that takes your actual time, your face-to-face time.
The trade-off is the money; price vs. volume. I have a lot of episodes on that, but the lower touch means the lower price. The trade-off for that is then all of the working-on-your-business that you have to do to get the volume required to get the low price assets, and make you a decent amount of money.
If you're interested in or willing to have facilitation, have 'touch' in your programs, then you get to charge more and you need lower volume, i.e. fewer amount of sales. It becomes "Am I the type of person who likes to work 'in' my business, facilitate the offers, deliver the programs?
Or am I the type of person who likes to work more 'on' my business, where the programs have very little to do with me, but then I am growing the business - I'm networking and marketing and working on the business?" It doesn't have to be in either/or. There are many middle-of-the-road options. If you're curious about those, that's what Space Holder is for.
I want to paint this picture of "is it 'in' or is it 'on'?" The thing that doesn't change is the existence of marketing, which is an on-the-business type piece of this. You are still going to have to market, whether you have high-touch or low-touch, the amount of marketing and the type of marketing will differ but you have to market regardless.
What I was able to do this summer is take off from marketing, take off from working 'on' my business. All I had to work was work 'in' my business that's half the stuff. If you have a low-touch or no-touch offer, you have very little 'in' your business, but you have a lot more 'on' your business, which means a lot more volume, which means a lot more marketing. You don't get to take that off.
If you take that off, then what you end up with is less marketing. Less marketing means less money. If you have facilitation and higher touch and higher price, there are certain circumstances, when you get to it, when you get to a point of having extra revenue or making more than you need or more than you want, then you can potentially hire out your marketing, hire out a lot of the working on your business.
You can step away from it. Not only seasonally, but permanently. This is the dance that I'm doing. I have outsourced a ton to Hailey and her team (highly recommend them). I couldn't do that in the beginning because Hailey is good at her job and requires to be compensated for that.
My revenue had to get to a certain level where it made sense for me to be able to have that expense for my business. Even with bringing Hailey on to do a lot, (Hailey and her team do a lot of the stuff) I'm still responsible for certain things.
If you guys heard somebody else's voice on this podcast and it was like, "oh, Marissa wrote this, this is Marissa's outline, but hi, I'm George. I'm going to deliver Marissa's outline today" it would not be the same. You guys don't trust George, you guys don't know George, even if it was my material, it still wouldn't be me.
There are certain things that even though I've outsourced a lot, there are certain things that I still have to do. Mainly, I still hold the big vision. I haven't brought in a visionary. Hailey and I certainly talk vision when we meet, I say, "here's what I think I want", and she says, "have you thought about this..." and stuff like that.
She's definitely instrumental in this, but I'm still the captain in terms of the vision part, her team does much of the nitty-gritty and then the podcast and this marketing stuff are still things that I have to do because no one else can do them for me.
Even in the 'on' your business category, there are things that you can take time off of seasonally. There are things that you can outsource permanently. My hunch is there are still things (depends on what type of marketing you choose to do, but most likely) there are still going to be things that you have to do. If that's one out of three things, and you're able to outsource the rest, it's not too shabby.
I was able to allow Hailey's team to continue doing what they do, what I pay them to do. I still met monthly with Hailey and we still envisioned things and we still strategized things, but this piece, this recording the podcast, this writing the emails, these things that I'm responsible for, I was able to completely take off from that for a season, for 10 weeks.
I'll tell you exactly how I did that. Even though I took 10 weeks off of the stuff that I'm personally responsible for and freed up half of my time in my business, I was still able to generate around $25,000. I still had around 10 people get on the wait list for Side Hustle.
Hailey tracks these numbers for me. She might be like, "oh, that's not quite what it was" or "it was more than that" or whatever, but these are just the general, what I know off the top of my head. I was still able to have forward movement in my business, even though I took time off.
I think that is what's really important. That's what I want to dissect for you guys because yes, I am years into running my business. That makes these things a little bit more feasible. They always talk about, "oh, getting a business off the ground takes a lot of work" - for sure.
There are still things that I can pass on to you, even in these beginning stages where you can make the load lighter. I want you to have a keen ear for that. I think this is something you can do, no matter how long you've built in your side hustle. What it boils down to is being familiar with your business model.
That's what I've talked about here. Are you in a position where you can work 'in' your business and not work 'on' it? Or have you built something that doesn't even require you to be in it and you're doing all 'on' tasks and then are you in a place where you can remove yourself from those seasonally or permanently?
Without having this familiarity with your business model, without knowing how these pieces work together, it can be not good. That's what it boils down to because if you don't understand this relationship between marketing, lead generation, sales, revenue, and fulfilment or delivery in your business, and you just start changing things or you just stop doing things you can tank your business.
You could cut your business off at the knees. For some of you, your side hustle isn't fully on its legs yet. It's a side hustle or it's new, so if you start just chopping it up and you're like, "I'm just not going to do that for six weeks or 10 weeks", you don't want to make these radical changes, even though you want to save time, or even though you want to give yourself some breathing room because it could have ramifications that you don't want, it could stall your progress.
Understanding and being clear about your business model, being clear about these integral pieces and how the puzzle fits together, that's the key. For instance, your lead acquisition to your lead nurture ratio, when you know these things or when you know your financial goal to your revenue stream, then you can say, "kids are home for the summer. I know what my financial goal is. I know what revenue's projected for these weeks. I can take these 10 weeks off".
If you know "my next launch is in the fall and I have this many new leads coming in. I can take a couple of weeks off from bringing new leads in because I know I'll have time once the kids go back to get more leads". If you don't understand these things, you end up just killing your business.
You can make cutbacks. You can take time off; you can spend more time with the family. I'm using summer because that's where we're at and how I took the summer off but think about the winter holidays. Thanksgiving through Christmas or whatever you celebrate in those winter holidays, you can take that amount of time off.
I take the last three weeks of November, December, and January off of fulfilment 'in' my business, and those are the months when I'm working 'on' my business. I'm taking the feedback from the previous round of Side Hustle students, and I'm making tweaks to my curriculum. I'm working 'on' my business, but I'm not doing any fulfilment.
I know that I can take these seasons off and I know I can make permanent changes because I understand how all of the pieces of my business fit together. This understanding is key. I'd say especially at these beginning stages and when you know how it all fits, then you don't have to be years into business to make it more it more lifestyle friendly. You just have to have a clear picture and then you can make it more lifestyle friendly from the very beginning.
Here's where we're going to dive into my business a little bit. I have three main offers that are available all of the time. One is what we would call an 'Evergreen' offer. It's for sale all the time. The other two that I provide are time bound offers where they have start dates and stop dates.
If you're familiar with my business, you probably already know what those are. The evergreen offer is Space Holder and that is available all of the time. You can grab it whenever you want, and it helps you come up with a clear idea for your program, for what you're going to offer. It helps you set it up to be marketable and it helps you set it up to be sellable.
Also, hint, hint walks you through these decisions that we're making, walks you through these questions, and helps you set up this business model that I've been talking about the whole episode, and people can buy that all the time.
I have Side Hustle Support Group, which runs from the last week in January to the first week of November live and it opens up once a year. That is very high-touch. We're meeting twice a week. We have voice coaching availability constantly, there are tools, there are templates, and there's a graphic designer, there's a copywriter. Anything you could ever want to build an online business is inside of that program.
Very high touch, which means premium priced. This also means I don't need very many students in it to make a great deal of money. If you're curious about my numbers behind this, earlier in the year around January or February and the beginning of the year, I did an episode that dissected all of my revenue and I share all of my numbers.
If you haven't listened to that one yet, I would recommend going back to that. It talks about how much I make per side hustle student, what my annual revenue is, and all of that stuff. It sets me up so that I am facilitating a lot in that program, but the cost I'm charging for it meets that demand. It makes sense for me to have such facilitation.
My third offer is the Mastermind that is available for Side Hustle students and alumni of Side Hustle. It could be from the previous round or from rounds past of people whom just want to be able to work with me again or have my eyes on their things after they've launched. That's what the Mastermind is.
We meet every other week in that program and it's a year-long commitment. We run from January to December. In that program, it's more of a medium-touch and more of a medium price because I'm not as high-touch as Side Hustle. I don't charge as much as Side Hustle, but I have facilitation.
Overall two of my offers are low volume, and high-touch, and one of my offers is low-touch and high volume. This gives you a picture of how my entire business is mapped out. For the most part, I am focusing on lead acquisition. I need more people for Space Holder than I do for Side Hustle and Mastermind.
This means I need to work 'on' my business for Space Holder more so than I do for Side Hustle or Mastermind. Those two programs are high-touch which means I need fewer people for them, which means I'm working less 'on' my business and more 'in' my business. I am facilitating those programs for those people who've purchased.
Hopefully, now you're getting a well-rounded view. Now, what this is known as is an Ascension model. I teach this in Side Hustle. It looks like a ladder. Space Holder is my lower rung on the ladder. It feeds into Side Hustle, and then Side Hustle feeds into the Mastermind. This is something you will grow into.
The first offer that you come up with will be one of these pieces of the puzzle. You're not creating a whole Ascension model, a whole product suite from the beginning. That just wouldn't be smart. This is what you can work up to.
Ultimately what I was able to do this summer, where I'm driving everybody into Space Holder with the hopes that they then come up to Side Hustle and then eventually come up to the Mastermind.
I was able to remove myself from that for 10 weeks. All summer long, I had things coming out that you guys were listening to in real-time, but I was not delivering them in real-time. I was not doing anything from the end of May to the beginning of August while my kids were home with me.
Let me break down exactly how I did that. The first piece is not going to be any surprise, because I've been talking about the whole episode, but I was familiar with my business model. I know when I'm working ‘in’ my business; I know when I'm working ‘on’ my business. I know when I need new leads. I know when I don't need new leads.
I knew that I could... I don't want to say 'stop' because it was still happening for you guys in real-time. But for me, I wasn't facilitating it in real-time, but I could take this time off from lead acquisition so I could be with my kiddos. If I didn't know exactly what fed into what, where the marketing went, where the facilitation went, when I was 'in' my business, when I was 'on' my business, I wouldn't be able to do this.
I would not have the clarity and I wouldn't have the confidence to be able to do this. Knowing your business model is key. I'm familiar with this so I was able to reverse engineer my goals.
I still know that the more people who join Space Holder throughout the year before my big enrolment for Side Hustle, I know those people tend to come up into Side Hustle and make another purchase with me (at a certain rate). I'm able to reverse engineer, "if I want this many students in Side Hustle for 2023, then I would like to have this many people come into Space Holder".
I'm able to reverse engineer that. I knew what my goal over the summer was. I understood my business model and I knew what my summer goal was. There might be a time when you can say, "I don't even need any revenue over the summer", or "I don't even need any leads over the summer". That could be you.
For me, I was like, "I know what I need and I know what I want over the summer. How can I take myself out of that, but have it continue to happen?". The answer for me for that was batching my content ahead of time.
What I did was I wrote all of my emails that you guys were getting in the weeks of June and in the weeks of July, those were all written in March and in April. Also, in these coaching episodes, if you go and you reach out to Maggie and you go and reach out to - I'm trying to think of a few other people who were on the episodes just off the top of my head, if you went and tagged them in the Facebook and group and said, "Hey, when did you record with Marissa?" We recorded in March and in April.
What did this mean? This meant that March and April were heavy months. I was not only doing the content that you were hearing in March, March content was the content that you were hearing in April, and I was also doing June's content. It was double duty for me for two months.
I had a little bit less time freedom, and a little bit more of a constricted lifestyle in March and in April, which gave me a completely free lifestyle in June and July. That was a conscious decision. I could have said, "Guys, we're ending the podcast here in May, and I'll be back with new episodes in August".
I could have done it like that and just taken all of June, all of July, and not had anything come out, but because I knew my revenue goals, and because I knew my business model, I still wanted the content to come out for you guys. I hope you're seeing how all of this fits together.
For me, it's worth it. It was worth it to have March and April be a little busy, knowing that I would be able to give a lot more time and attention to the girls in June and July. It's an educated choice. That's what I think is most important for you guys, as you're building your side hustles is these educated choices. The more information you have, the more clarity you have, the more confidence you can have.
I batched the content ahead of time. In March and April, I was recording episodes to go out in June and July, and I was writing emails to go out in June and July. I also did one more thing to make this easier for me. You guys probably as the listeners are like, "oh, this summer coaching series is so awesome".
As I said, I've gotten a lot of feedback that this was really cool. I thought it was really cool. I thought it would be beneficial for you, but it was also strategic. When I interview someone on the podcast, I'm just sitting down. I told everybody who was in the Summer Coaching Series, they're like, "do I need to prepare anything?" and I was like, "nope, we're just going to chit chat".
It's just me being able to have a conversation with somebody, which is so fun for me and so easy for me right now. I'm looking at an outline and I'm looking at my outline and I'm talking with you guys now over time, these outlines have gotten faster for me to create. The process is streamlined.
If you guys go back to the very first year of the podcast, episodes 20, 30, and 40, I'm reading a script. It would take me over an hour just to outline the podcast, another 45 minutes, an hour to record the podcast. It was twice the amount of time.
Now I'm just freestyling, spitballing, if you will, behind the mic, and just glancing at my outline once in a while. That has come with time, but it still was a good 30 minutes for me to get this all on my screen before I sat down, because I wanted to have my thoughts organized before I recorded.
I planned out these interviews for the Summer Coaching Series on purpose, so that not only did I batch the content ahead of time, but I made the content I was creating even easier. While March and April were double-duty months, I was only doing one outlined podcast, and for the one outlined podcast, I had one interview podcast.
This is how I was able to have my business appear streamlined for you guys but also to be able to take my kids to the beach, take my kids to six flags, take my kids to the water park, and then not only do those types of things, but Sawyer likes to sun tan. We laid out a towel and put on sunscreen and sun tan in the driveway.
We weren't only doing big things. We were doing small things and fun things around the house. Logan is super into baby dolls. We built these makeshift cribs out of our laundry baskets and stuff like that. To be able to be present with them while they were home from school for summer vacation is everything to me.
It's this lifestyle-based business, and yet everything went off without a hitch. I added people to the interest list for Side Hustle and I sold about $25,000 in June, even though I was playing dolls and sun tanning and going to six flags.
This is what I think it's all about; building wealth with less time investment from you with less energy investment, with less stress investment, and bringing in more autonomy and bringing in more creativity. This is what my work in the world is. This is my purpose; to help you guys do this.
To not only help you do it but to model it for you as well. I hope this was helpful, talking about how I was able to take the summer off of marketing, how I was able to stop working 'on' my business, show up for my students only, and have all of this 'on' the business stuff either hired out or done ahead of time so I could hang out with my kids for their summer vacation.
The biggest thing to take away from this episode is lifestyle first. Also, you can have your lifestyle be your first priority, and simultaneously build wealth at the same time, it can happen. It's a both/and situation.
If you want to understand this, if you want to plan out your business model and start answering these questions, this is what my master class is for. It walks you through the essential questions to ask; the question of touch versus volume, the question of ‘lead acquisition’ versus ‘lead nurture.’
These things that I've talked about in today's episode, this masterclass walks you through them and helps you decide. It is completely on demand and it is completely free. It'll help you start to design the online income stream for you. That is going to be lifestyle first and still help you build wealth.
The link is super easy. It is just marissalawton.com/masterclass. Go ahead and register for that. I will be back next week with another solo show and until then, keep on rising.
