Part 2: Becoming the Entrepreneur, Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Jason Coleman explore the various responsibilities that successful education entrepreneurs must juggle in this discussion.

Finding client problems, for instance, might serve as inspiration for blog entries, emails. Or social media postings, which facilitates audience connection and trust-building. Jason continues, “It’s important to address pain points directly. And clearly because people are more likely to act when they feel that their particular issues are understood.”

Chris and Jason together highlight how crucial it is to be genuine and unambiguous. Education entrepreneurs may create enduring firms by comprehending the demands of their customers and coming up with answers.

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Episode Transcrip

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the education entrepreneur series. This is a five part series where we go over the five critical hats. That you need to wear as an education entrepreneur. Or within the skill set of your team based on what we’ve seen with success. With education, entrepreneurship, teaching online, coaching, building education based businesses.

Those five hats are being the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder. Today, my business partner, Jason Coleman and I are going to be talking about becoming the entrepreneur. Enjoy this session.

All right, let’s talk about becoming the entrepreneur. This is a topic we could go for weeks or years on. But we’ve, you know, kind of thought about some of the most important things. Let’s start with sales and marketing. You know, there’s a saying in business that nothing ever happens until a sale is made. Just kind of going into sales and marketing.

The big idea here to make this process easier. is to map the pain. Which we’ve talked about in our expert series, and then how to think about actually making the sale. And there’s a concept I have called conversion tools. That helps make selling both easier from a process standpoint and as something you can scale.

So for me, My strength in marketing is content and then my strength in sales is creating conversion tools. So to get into what that means at a tactical level. Content marketing is really built around this idea of pain. If you look at your target audience or your customer avatar. What are their like chief top five pain point areas?

And when you identify those, you can then find sub pain points underneath that kind of pillar. Category cluster of pain and those become like individual pieces of content. So if you’ve forced yourself to come up with what are the five primary pain points. Then maybe 10 to 12 like sub more specific nuances or variations of that pain point. That is 50 pieces of content.

It’s like a year’s worth of content ideas. And you can create blog posts, you can create YouTube videos, you can create podcasts. You can create a social media strategy, you can do email marketing and ideally your product, your course, your membership. Whatever it is really helps with all of that. That’s kind of the content marketing, you know, sort of top of the funnel that flows into your business offer.

And I’ll give you an example of that in a little bit. But then once you have these like content ideas that basically stem from the five primary pain points. You can come up with a content framework. We’re actually using a content framework in this conversation we’re having right now. So that, okay, well there’s this, I’m an expert.

I, I have all these ideas. How do I like, kind of consistently deliver value in a way that’s not overwhelming in. In the form of content. So like a content framework like we’re using here is we have like a topic area like sales and marketing. We have like a big idea. A strategy, like I’m talking about content and conversion tools.

Right now I’m giving you three or so tactics. Then I’m going to tell a story about, you know, what’s going on there. So that’s a content framework and that’s a way of teaching like strategy tactics, story. Also known as like a case study in a way. And then we’re also having a conversation, which is also a form of education.

So the content framework is awesome. I just wrote a book. I’m in the editing process with that. Every chapter similar to this has like. A set series of things like tactics and strategies and stories to create a content framework. That actually made writing a book as a subject matter expert in this topic easier for me. Because then it was like, okay, well, what’s a, what’s, what’s a story related to this and so on.

So it makes content creation easier. Now conversion tools there’s a lot of different ways to think about that. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding around sales and marketing and how they’re different. But sales is actually, let’s say somebody enjoyed your content and then they find out about your offer.

The process of actually creating the sale or the quote conversion event. How do you do that? In the offline world, people do that with a conversation. Like if I walk onto a car lot and I meet the salesperson. You know, I get in a conversation and I get the sales pitch, they handle my objections and then. I take it for a test drive and then I buy the car or I don’t buy the car.

I try a different car. That’s kind of the sales choreography or sales motion as it’s called. But when you look at information products and online products, digital products. Courses, coaching, membership communities, there’s sort of four main ways to create a conversion tool. One is a trial that can be a free trial.

Like, Hey, first month’s free. It could be a paid trial. Like it’s a dollar for a month or a week. The other way to do it is to do a demo. So you could have like, Hey, here’s a sample. You know, training or come to this one for free and let me like demo you. Or let me take you on a tour of like what’s inside the program. I’m going to kind of demo how people use it and so on.

And then there’s a webinar, which is like a sales presentation at scale. Where you kind of make the pitch to like a group. You can even automate that and create like an automated webinar that just runs. And then you can also do old school traditional sales, which is one on one conversations, book a call.

Here’s a Calendly link schedule a meeting. You can call it a strategy call and not a sales call to take. You know, take some of the resistance down. But once you figure out, you know, sort of your, your marketing mix. And there’s other types besides content. There’s also outbound marketing. There’s you know, paid ads.

There’s a lot of different ways to do marketing, but for me, content is the primary. And just to show you an example of mapping the five pain points. Which really ties into our avatar training we did earlier, which is what we’re doing here after over a decade in this industry. I noticed in. The users of LifterLMS and broadly in this category of treating, of serving course creators, coaches, experts, community builders. And so on, that the ones that were successful had within themselves. They had to wear these five, having an, being an entrepreneur is hard.

They, we all talk about wearing multiple hats.ut in online education, there’s these five hats that I can see in every single program that is successful, that. The founder is either like a unicorn and can do all five of these hats successfully at a satisfactory level, or they build a team to fill in the gaps.

So, and if somebody’s failing, that’s the first thing I do is I diagnose like across these five hats. And this is part of this whole training. We’re doing the series, you know, the five hats are being the expert, being the entrepreneur, being the teacher, instructional designer. Being a technologist and then the fifth hat is being a community builder.

So we’re literally using that, you know, these are the five pain points and. There’s a lot of challenges within those that. You know, becomes a foundation for this content and why if you’re somebody who’s watching this. They’re thinking if this is. All of this is really resonating, you know, they’re in the target market, they’re an education entrepreneur and we’re just here trying to help people.

So that’s how I kind of think about if I could give you one idea. About improving or starting your sales and marketing program, map the pain. Create that, that map to make content out of, and then choreograph your sales process and try to package that in a conversion tool. And the best place to start is just book a call and do one on one sales.

And then once you see something that’s repeatable. Then you can start doing some of these other scalable, even automated models.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. I think something that’s amazing about. Like the current day and online sales and marketing is that that pain point is so immediate. So and I think it’s helpful to think of it in a very literal way when you’re writing sales copy or developing these conversion tools that like literally this person is feeling this pain right now because a lot of times it is so immediate you’re like God damn.

And I wish there was a way to, and you’re like literally Googling exactly the pain point. And you’re hoping like, you know. If you’re doing marketing through, you know, search engines, you’re trying to like have up a, have a result there. So that’s what’s amazing. And even if it’s not immediate. Like some of the skill and copywriting then is like, you know you know, press on the pain point a little like, Hey, remember that?

Don’t you, you hate this. But. moment. Yeah. It’s like that. That’s so immediate for folks. I also like, yeah, that we talked about frameworks making things easier. That’s so good. Cause I think in sales and marketing, a lot of, Times early on before you, you, you catch like a groove and, and how to do things.

You feel like you’re just trying to get things to stick thrown out the wall. And I’ve had this with sales and marketing people that we like train up. Like for example, we write like a weekly email to our, you know, our customers, people on the mailing list, the customers. And I think for some folks when you give them that task, it feels like.

like term paper. It’s like, I’m writing a book every week and it has to be like different and awesome and clever and everyone has to be amazing and over the top and perfect. And it’s, you know, that, you know, it’s what I developed as a framework. It’s like, no, like, Hey, just answer these questions in this order and that’s the first draft and then make it good and ship.

And it’s like, it doesn’t have to be creative. And there is room for like that super over the top iterated, perfect email that you send everyone in your funnel. But that’s not what that exercise of like writing a weekly newsletter was in the moment. So yeah, recognizing where like the frameworks can be used.

Like when you feel A little lost about what am I supposed to be doing here? I kind of don’t know what I’m doing. Try to find a framework. And there’s so many for so many sales and merchants things, and they share a lot. And it’s almost like, just pick one, right. And maybe pick a different one if you feel like you’re getting tired of one.

And over time you’ll kind of like start to understand, understand the underlying psychology of how they work. So I think along that vein, like, Okay. there’s lots of different frameworks and methods of doing sales and marketing. Something that I find really useful is to keep it simple. And just so I think of marketing in this way is like, I’m just finding the people who need my thing and I’m telling them about my thing.

And it’s, so it’s like, if you’re looking at, you know, a sales funnel or the forget the funnel, it’s a milestone map. It’s a journey. It’s a customer journey. You can get overwhelmed a little bit. And if you’re overwhelmed by the marketing strategies, like just think in that framework of like simpler terms that Like you make something that people need.

You need to find the people who need that thing. So finding where they are as part of marketing, and then you need to tell them about your thing and there’s different, you know, is it a story, is there a framework for the stories? It’s like, just make sure you’re telling them about your thing and you’re not tricking them into buying.

You know, I, ideally, if you chose to write customer avatar, like we talked about last time you know, it should be an easy sell. It should write it if you really, and that’s what I said before I was talking about customer avatars. If you know exactly who you’re talking to, it’s just a conversation. Like it’s not too clever.

And this has happened before you know, in our marketing team, where They’re trying to figure out how to write sales copy and stuff and and I often try to simplify it I’m like, hey, like we have a thing they they want our thing. We’re not fooling them We have a really good thing and they want it.

We just have to tell them about it and it simplifies things It makes it less high You know It’s like it’s not So contentious and it’s not the it’s not the most critical thing that does email be absolutely perfect. It’s like now you just tell them

Chris Badgett: In terms of keeping it simple I love this quote. I heard that you get tired of your marketing before your market ever does.

So as you become more of an advanced marketer and salesperson, it’s like, okay, now I got to do a B testing and I’m going to do paid ads. I’m going to do them over here too. And. And there’s sort of like one main channel, like when people drive onto the car lot or then you put up a billboard, like you kind of figure out the main channel and it’s easy to think you always got to do something new, but actually just keep it simple.

Just stay focused on the avatar, what they need, how they usually come in, how they like to be sold to and how to over deliver on the value. It’s not complicated.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, yeah, and I think that’s useful to even if you’re like outsourcing marketing or if you’re hiring someone to bring them on You There might be a mismatch of like their career path and their goals to like try something new or force like a channel or strategy and, and your need to like just find the people and tell them about the thing.

So early on there is like, you do want to experiment and iterate and try a bunch of things to figure out like which of these channels is working. But once one works, like just dig into it and then it gets boring and you might find like the marketer that you hired. Is very bored or like the marketing company you hired is very bored.

And that’s something to like, look out for. And are they pushing you into another channel a little too early before you really optimize the first one? So

Chris Badgett: I think it is good to move to also once you master a channel to move on. But. And like, all right, let’s see if we can get ads working or whatever, but don’t just forget and stop doing that other thing and come back to it and keep, keep doing that thing that was working and improve on that.

I like this idea when you’re thinking about improving your sales and marketing to, if you’re going to do something new, like in a quarter, say, do two more things that you’re already doing better, like take them to the next level. So it’s, it doesn’t become this new to new to new to new thing and your, your focus just gets totally scattered.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, I’m sure there’s a clever name for it, where there’s like a bias towards like different and new when like sometimes the thing you have to do is refresh your old content, refresh your old funnels and conversion tools and update them. And that’s more high value for you than, you know, trying something different.

Chris Badgett: I think that is a cognitive bias. It’s, I think it’s called novelty bias. Okay, novelty bias, good name. Being an entrepreneur is actually creating a company and forming a business. And a lot of people get stuck here. I’ve been stuck here. And you overthink it. So like the classic thing at the beginning, at least in the United States, that people get stuck on is, well, should I form an LLC or an S corp?

And then they’re like, do I need to pay thousands of dollars to a lawyer? And so on. I think it’s, it’s really all about just getting started and, and like, just do a if you’re having trouble, like, I don’t know what I’m gonna name my company. I don’t want to name my product. Just pick something and start and see if you can make a sale.

And it’s not fun to rebrand later, but like when I first started my web design agency, I’m like, I don’t know what to call it. I’m just going to call it Badget Media. That’s my last name. And if I do products later. it’ll just be sold through badger media. And I didn’t have to like, think about it a lot. And the way to think about just actually putting the infrastructure you need in place is like, you need the ability to accept money over the internet, sell a product and not go to jail and do your taxes.

Right. So what, what’s, what’s involved in that is it’s just, I think about it like, okay, pick a name. Once you have a name You can buy a domain name. Once you have a domain name, you can have a website. You can create an email address. Once you have a separate email address and a business name, you know, register, go to your town office and register the, the business name.

Once you have that, then you can open a bank account. Once you have a bank account, you can open a PayPal account or Stripe account to accept money through the internet. Now you have a website. Now you can put an offer up. Now you’re good to go. And at tax time, you know, you’re, you’ve kind of got all those fundamentals in place.

And if you’re just doing a personal brand, I do recommend like keeping the funds separate and like your business kind of becomes its own identity, different email, different bank accounts. And there’s just, it’s just the basics, but some people get all caught up in the details of that, of like, what do I name it?

And how do I figure out e commerce? But it’s really not that complicated.

Jason Coleman: I feel like. We should probably try to write up a framework of all these things and share it as a handout for this of like. These are the steps, like it’s a, they’re pretty simple, but like each one feels super critical and irreversible.

And while it is like a pain in the butt to change your logo or your brand or some of these things later on it’s not too hard. It’s like, it’s not, yeah. Like if it’s, if it’s necessary, it’s, it’s kind of better to get in the habit and, Get it running and actually make something and sell it and make some money and put it in a business bank account.

It’s kind of like, Oh, cool. Now you like completed the loop. Now pick a part to make better. And maybe you realize early on, like branding will be important and you narrow in, but. It’s just like

Chris Badgett: with paid memberships pro, like it’s actually stranger studios, which is an agency. Yeah. There was Lifter LMS was Badget Media and then code box.

And now there’s this brand. It’s fine.

Jason Coleman: That name stranger studios. Like I thought I would make video games and that sounds like a really good video game. And then when I started doing I built websites for school, I had a job. And then when I started getting con, you know contracts on the side, I already had this website, stranger studios, and this name.

So I started using it. I didn’t even have the business at the time. Like you can go pretty far just on like filing personal returns. But then it stuck. And then I come up with the reason it was like, Oh, we’re strangers. Like everyone’s strangers on the internet, but like, let’s not be strangers. I forget like what our pitch was back when we did consulting.

Yeah. It was good to just get into it. And our thing comes up a lot of times, it’s like forming a business is partnerships. Like either you know, you, you have a partner. Like I build my business with my wife. I’m very lucky that like you could just be lucky like me and have a life partner that you marry into.

They have all the skills you don’t have and help you in every way to run a business. And being married, like we run it 50, 50 and it works out. And I think because We’re married. We’re forced to get through it. Like, like we but in general, that 50, 50 percentage doesn’t often work. I’ve seen it cases where it doesn’t work.

And, and even in my, my own history where it didn’t work, I can get to. So it’s like But before you figure out the details of how to split up the partnership, like that’s confusing too. It’s like, I think it is good to try to find a partner and you can’t go really far alone. There’s, there’s, you know, lots of tools and AI will help you.

And. I think it’s good to get started and probably in the space of content marketing you know, like learning educational content, there’s probably a higher percentage of solo preneurs than partners. But if you, so get started, but when you start building something like, it’s so good to have a partner they help out in so many ways.

And it’s, it’s kind of like, and there are risks, but it’s kind of like love in that, you know there’s There’s a lot of potential pain if it doesn’t work out for unraveling a business relationship, but it’s, it’s worth it for like the rewards of like going through this together because when there’s hard times and when you run into issues and when you’re learning things, there’s, it’s great to have someone to like be excited with and help you out and talk through and second guess everything you’re doing.

So there’s different forms, but so if you’re literally going to have like a partner. Like share a business and you’re incorporating. I think what I, what I found that work out is if you can find one of the partners to have more than 50%, like 60, 40 split instead of 50, 50, cause that deadlock, if you have two partners or like in our case with investor geeks, we had a business and it wasn’t even incorporated, but we like on paper agreed like, Hey, this is all third.

We were making ad revenue and we would split it. What happened was like it was only one we only got one third of the output from the business And so we had other things going on. We weren’t motivated to work on that We this other thing we had a hundred percent of we got and then also there wasn’t any one person who had more than the others That was motivated to make it work.

You know, like, Hey, like if it’s more than 50%, if you own more than 50%, like there’s one person who’s ultimately going to be responsible for the business. And sometimes the business needs that. Cause if you run into you bump heads, you’re like, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Dissolve.

Whereas like if it’s 60, 40, one of you is like, it’s your job to know what to do. You’re like ultimately responsible for his business. And so. If you can get into that relation, that kind of situation, I’ve, I’ve seen it work out better and to have a tiebreaker for those kinds of things works out. And even if you don’t like Kim and I are 50, 50, we it was like a tactic to, if you have like a business with your, your spouse or even just a, like one other partner.

We would in the consulting days, we always had a tiebreaker. So in the consulting days, whoever found the project was like the head. So when they decision on the project or like what to do about it, or if we’re firing that client or, or who’s in charge, who makes the decisions as it goes, whoever found the client, you know, was the one who like broke the ties on that.

And so that helps where we were 50, 50, but for every project someone was in charge. And so we weren’t getting stuck. And later on when we went to products, we had an agreement where like, I was like, Hey, we’re 50, 50, but I’m the CEO. So like the tiebreakers I’ll, I’ll make the tiebreakers and it

Chris Badgett: helps. I think partnerships are great because entrepreneurship’s lonely.

It’s like, it can be super lonely, especially online. If you’re not interacting with people in person is as much as a quote, normal person. So having partners is, is great just from a loneliness perspective, but also coming back to like this idea of having to wear multiple hats. I mentioned like you kind of need a base level of efficiency across being an expert, being an entrepreneur, being a teacher, being a technologist.

And being a community builder, it’s really nice to share those hats with a partner. And some of the most successful Lifter LMS sites I see as an example, there’s like this partnership between a techie and a talent. So like the face of the business and everything, and then there’s somebody else who like does the website, does marketing and other things.

So it’s, it’s, it’s much easier to do it together than. A solo act though, you can definitely do it. Yeah.

Jason Coleman: And sometimes there’s like support groups or masterminds or communities that you can take part in that help fill that gap. If you, if you’re kind of feel all alone,

Chris Badgett: let’s talk about product. Like we said earlier, a sales, nothing ever happens till something is sold, but you have to have something to sell.

So I’m a big fan of product. And a product really should be like. the solution to a problem as efficiently as possible. And I learned this framework from a guy named Dane Maxwell. He said, the Holy grail of business is just three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. And a lot of us get really focused on the mechanism, like how we solve it, what’s in the course, the VIT, making the videos.

And even when we’re selling, we keep talking about the mechanism. But like really good sales is like, Oh, I will help you achieve X result in Y number of days through Z mechanism. And what, what’s primary there is the result. It’s the improvement offer or the transformation. And so really design your product around solving a problem, not your body of knowledge.

This goes back to like the library of Alexandria thing we talked about in terms of what people actually want to buy. And you know, once you have that result, that solution to a problem to create a mechanism or a transformation there’s this concept in instructional design called chunking. So like, if I’m going to, you know, help somebody find the love of their life, if I was a dating coach, you know, the end result is finding your love of the love of your life.

Right. So that’s like a huge result. But like you can do it. It’s probably easiest to like reverse engineer instead of being like starting at zero and be like, all right, I have somebody who’s frustrated. They haven’t found a partner. What do they do first? You can often work back from the end and be like, what happens right before they found the love of life?

Well, there’s this kind of this milestone where these people decide that they’re going to go from short term to long term relationship. So how could I coach somebody or create training around that concept? And if you go back from this there’s sort of like a dating process and then you go back from that.

There’s a first date. And then, before that, there’s like learning how to approach and be comfortable, comfortable around the type of person you’re going after. And before that, there’s kind of this phase where you really need to kind of become the best version of yourself or do some of your inner work and like kind of get ready to like go out into the world and do this thing.

I’m not even a dating coach, but like, I’m kind of like finding these milestones or these chunks that need to happen to get this result. And by doing that, you’re actually creating. your unique mechanism of how you help people. So that’s, that’s kind of the customer result mechanism. And then the other thing is as if we use our dating coach example your program should work for your avatar in challenging circumstances.

So if they have setbacks or maybe it’s not like your actual avatar and this there’s a lot of this other type of person in your program, which is also fine. But like, maybe they have this other challenge that not everybody has, like, how can I improve my training or my coaching so that it still works, let’s say, even if the per, they’re trying to date and they’re, they speak a different language, as an example, I’m just thinking of something like, how would this program still work if there was a language barrier or a culture barrier or a geographic barrier?

Like they met online and they really think that like, there’s all these like challenging circumstances. So. Don’t just think like in a perfect world, this is how it would work. It still should work under pressure in the same way, like a good vehicle can like drive in the snow or in the rain, it’ll still get you from a to B.

One of the biggest parts about product is pricing. And this is something you know, we’re both fans of a guy named Patrick Campbell and his, one of his hooks, he’s all about pricing, particularly in subscription businesses. He ended up selling his company for a couple of hundred million dollars, but hit one of his hooks about pricing is face it.

You just guessed. And when he says that, like his avatar, like people like us with subscription software business are like, yeah, you’re right. You know, like they all, so he like understands the avatar or whatever. But pricing is key. We could do a whole thing on pricing, but just to throw some quick ideas out there there’s different there’s like value based pricing or like if you were going to do this like one on one with somebody, how much would that cost?

How valuable is the result that you’re promising? So if you can, if you truly are a matchmaker and help people find the love of their life, what’s that worth to a person? It’s priceless. And so if you really want to go for something that’s really lucrative, find priceless things I’m sure there’s all kinds of like, if you’re a health coach and you specialize in some challenge that you can help people overcome this, it’s kind of priceless where somebody goes from a permanent chronic condition to like exactly where they want.

Whereas like if you’re like, like if I was doing business coaching, I might, I could be like, I’ll help you grow by 10 percent every year, whatever. Like that’s an incremental improvement. That’s still valuable, but that’s not as valuable as like, I’m going to help you scale from like small business to mid market.

And I think about it in terms of return on investment. I could talk about pricing forever, but I’ll leave it with this one thing, which is Whatever you do, price it, try to price it at 10 to a hundred X ROI for your end customer return on investment. So. If I think helping somebody find the love of their life and in their mind, they think like I would pay 20, 000 to find the love of my life, maybe charge two grand for that.

Or if you want to go broader,

Jason Coleman: it should feel like 10 times as much value for what they paid.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s like, yeah. Cause they should not feel like price gouge. If you’re going to help a business grow. And they invest like 10 grand in you, your training should deliver at least a hundred grand worth of value for them.

And then they’ll keep coming back. They’ll tell their friends that’s good pricing.

Jason Coleman: That makes the math easy. You’re kind of like, if I do this thing that sometimes people coach businesses to make more money. So it’s like literally money. So it’s like, at the end of this, you will make an extra a hundred thousand dollars a year, would you be willing to pay?

20, 000 for that. It’s like a no brainer. Right. And if it feels like it feels like a good investment when it has that kind of ROI,

Chris Badgett: I think business is actually the easiest because you can use money. So when you have your, your chief problem or these five pain points, there’s often metrics like business metrics.

It’s easy. I think it’s a little harder. Like what’s the value of finding the love of your life? It’s a little different. And just a quick story about Lifter LMS. We decided we started out as paid. We wanted to make sure people would buy it. It was 150. We sold 42 copies in the first week of the launch.

We said we were going to shut down the business if we didn’t sell more than a hundred. We were bullheaded and decided to keep going anyways. But then later We made the decision to make the core product free and have add ons and bundles and stuff Which is how we made made the money, but so like you can test your pricing So even if you think just test it, like pre sell it or work with an early group of people and just get going.

Jason Coleman: The market is more flexible and like you can change your prices and people don’t really notice. And, and often, especially in the beginning, it’s like, don’t feel. Attached to the 50 people who just bought at a certain price. It is like, if they notice you make it free or raise your price, they may get upset in some direction, but you’re like, think about the 50, 000 people you’re eventually going to serve.

So it’s like, that sometimes helps. It’s like, it’s, it’s difficult to make those changes, but you can, yeah. Change your pricing. If it didn’t work out, you can launch something again. If the launch didn’t go well, like apparently no one noticed, they won’t notice the second time either, but you’re trying to do it better.

Yeah. There’s so much to like to dig into here. The, as another resource for folks, when you were talking about results and chunking, that sounded a lot like there’s this book called badass by making users awesome by Kathy Sierra. And I I think it’s a book about product and touches marketing, but but it’s like a, the, the analogy they use in that book over and over is you’re not telling someone how to use a camera.

You’re telling them how to become a photographer. That’s like the result, you know? And so it’s like the documentation, you know, isn’t just how to do it. It’s kind of like how to get to the result. And the, and you’re going to be more successful if you build your products that way. And I think Yeah, we, on pricing really quick, it’s like, yeah, the guest is good.

I think like trust your guests too. People downplay the guests and their systems. I have a couple of things like about pricing that. Or maybe newish to like everything that’s out there you could find. One is like do all the methods that everyone, all the methods are really good. So do all of them and then kind of like take the average or what your gut is telling you after you do the exercise.

Like you kind of learn the exercise of like time and materials plus a margin, like make sure you’re making money. That’s really important in doing that exercise. Is like, can I price this product in a way that I’ll still make money? That’s really important to like go through the exercise and the number you get out is, is an indicator of what might be the price.

And then if you trust your gut, what’s everyone else charging? That’s another method. But I forget the, like the, you, you, you threw out a couple other methods for figuring out pricing. And so it’s like, do all that. And then kind of like, you know, the process of going through that a number of different ways, then you’d be like, Oh, actually it feels like the price should be about this.

And the other thing on pricing I think about is like the timing of the pricing. So we think about that too. I think we talked earlier about we, like you had a paid, you went paid and then free or like you could charge monthly or annually. And it, the, When you ask for money should match like when you’re delivering the value.

So an example to drill at home is there was a course I saw where it was, you know, quit drinking in a month and It was amazing. I think it was priced at like a hundred bucks and this person was making money selling that course, it was transforming people’s lives. And he was building like a little free community.

And he’s like, how can I make recurring revenue off the community? Like how can I deliver more value to them and keep making money? And it’s like, this problem is tough. Cause if. Your product does what it really says. Everyone loses 20 pounds. They save a bunch of money than I spending on alcohol. They repair the relationship with their mother and their spouse and their kids, like their whole life changes in month one.

And you already anchored that price of a hundred dollars. So like I’ll change your life for a hundred bucks. And then it’s like, I’m going to sell you a gym membership for 200. Like it doesn’t work. Like so in reality, what I think that person had to do in that case is like, if you have a product that delivers a ton of value upfront, like charge upfront And then, you know, you deliver ongoing value, charge a smaller amount ongoing.

But I think that exercise, it’s not talked about too much of thinking about the timing of the product, of the pricing. We can also get into like, we were talking about product. Now we were talking about marketing earlier, kind of an old school marketing idea that I think sometimes gets lost when your head’s deep.

And what you’re doing is that product is marketing. And so what you want to do is use customer insights to guide your product development. And your positioning of your product. And so it’s, you’re not, not just like how to sell to them. Like, so as you’re talking with customers and you should always be talking with customers, it’s like either do consulting.

So you’re doing your type with them or take calls or find a way to like, always be talking with your customers. Cause you’re going to learn from them. And as you learn from them, you might think I’m learning how to like market to them better. We talked about that. That is true. But. The real market is like, maybe the product should kind of sell itself.

And if you improve the product using what you’ve learned from the marketing, you know, all that stuff will flow more easily. There’s like a positioning is this term to figure out early, like, which is really important and we could dive into, but it’s basically. There’s other products that solve the thing my course or my product also solves How is mine positioned verse those and I think you talked to some points Of like is it?

You know, what’s the mechanism is it or I think we’re talking about like speed insight Yeah. And certainty. So it’s kind of like, which, which of those am I like levering, leveraging most first, like the other solutions out there you know, like a gym is like, you come here three times a week and then you get healthy, or if it’s kind of like a diet has a different pace but it’s kind of solving the same.

Problem. So figuring out, you know, your, your course, how do you position it? And I think positioning like pay memberships pro also made the decision to be a freemium product. And part of that was positioning of like, let’s be the best free membership plugin. So there’s like a paid one and let’s be the free one that has the widest distribution.

Let’s be the biggest free one was, you know, and that, that’s how we would differentiate between with the others. And there’s another term here is like called product market fit, which is you know, when you are developing a product early on, you’re building a course, you’re, you know, you coach someone through something and then you tried to build a course around your coaching, but it didn’t hit for the masses like it did for that one person.

And you’re like, why, what’s wrong? And you go back and reiterate. And it’s crucial that you, One of the reasons to be a hundred percent focused is it takes a certain amount of grit when you try something like that and it doesn’t work to not give up and be like, ah, the product doesn’t make any sense.

No one will ever get it. And like actually dig in and be like, I have to make this work. What could I do to make it work? And that iterative process is like product market fit. So I so an example of this and What we’ve done, we have a membership platform. We built this tool to run Black Friday sales called Sitewide Sales, and we used it ourself, we dog fooded, and then we used it for a subset of our customers.

And I think we had like a few hundred, maybe like a thousand people using this on a membership platform to run Black Friday sales. And then we’re like, everyone should use this to run every Black Friday sale. So we tried to build like a general purpose version. And it was like how to run a sitewide sale on like any e commerce site was the goal.

And it wasn’t getting traction. People weren’t, it wasn’t obvious to people what the need was. And we built like a really good tool that works. But then when we were talking to folks, There was a couple insights that did stick. Like, so I’m like getting market feedback here. And one of them was like, Oh, like one of the killer features to be going to have is that they could schedule a sale.

So a pain point was like, Hey, do you ever run a sale? And you have to like wake up at midnight to like. Put the banner on your website and update the coupon code and set it live. You’re like, that’s so annoying. I hate that. And you’re like, yeah. So like, what if you could set it up in advance? And like, okay, that’s a feature.

And that was a feature we had, but it was like buried in the settings. It needed to be like the feature. And. And I was talking to you earlier, you’re like, it also had to like change the name. It’s not site wide sales. It’s like timed sales, scheduled sales. It’s like, that’s like the core thing that people get excited about.

That needs to be like the name of the product, the focus of the product. And, and technically if you do that in this case, like there’s like a, Obscure technical reason why that’s hard, like to run multiple sales at the same time and have them all scheduled at an advance and overlap and automate.

There’s like a hard, it’s a hard technical challenge based on how we already built the product to do that after the fact. So what happened actually is like, we got that key insight and we’re like, shit, we should have from the beginning built it like this with, this is the focus with this technical architecture.

And then it would. So serve the killer app that like, it seems to be clicking with people when we’re trying to sell it. And that’s like, it, it needed another iteration. We didn’t give it cause it was a side project. And maybe that’s another story, like, you know, how to handle side projects. But yeah, I remember like product is like, yeah, product market fit, iterate through it, figuring out your positioning, always talking to customers.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Product is marketing. I love it. And sometimes if you’re thinking. Well, I don’t know what to do in my marketing. Just move the free line and give away a little bit of your product or use it. And two examples, like at Lifter LMS, our top performing lead generation the way we get email addresses and, and it kind of also works as a conversion tool is we use our software to make a free course about how to use our software that we give away for free.

And so like the product is literally marketing itself. And I think as of now, we’ve probably had somewhere around 35, 000 people come into that and it just works. But just to give a different example, like with the dating coach example, we kind of talked about the end result, you know, they’re getting married or whatever.

But that first step was about working on yourself and getting ready to like go out into the market and approach people or whatever. So maybe make step one free, just move it over the free line and give that away for free. That’s your, your main marketing tool. And at the end of it, there’s just a call to action to be, by the way, this is step one in a six step process about how to find the love of your life.

And now you have this like really strong marketing, which is actually a piece of your product. In terms of the mechanism of delivery, here’s step one. You can have that for free. So, so you, you don’t have to like overcomplicate it. And in terms of, um, marketing and just a pro tip out there, if you’re ever thinking about just, you’re already got this working, let’s say as a dating coach, like, well, just go out past your end result of you know, finding the love of your life, maybe the next thing is something about.

A parenting thing or something like what’s going to happen next. So always think about people. If you put people at the center of your business, not your product, decisions get much easier. You’re like, Hey, I’m trying to expand my company. Well, like what do they need after they find a love of your life?

And just stay with that same avatar and, and go with them.

Jason Coleman: That’s awesome. Sometimes like successful pivots are. I had the right audience, but they weren’t willing to pay for this thing, but they are willing to pay for this other thing and this other format or this other version and keeping your eye open, eyes open for that kind of thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Being flexible is so key. Let’s talk about operations and you know, part of, even if you’re a solopreneur, there’s all this, these functions that are going on inside the business. And if you’re doing everything, you still kind of have to do everything if you’re doing it by yourself. So it comes from corporate culture, but having an organizational chart, even if it’s just you, I recommend making the organization organizational chart, like you’re the CEO of the business name

Jason Coleman: over and over and every column

Chris Badgett: who’s doing operations, who’s doing sales, who’s doing marketing, who’s doing product, who’s doing support, who’s doing design.

You can slice and dice the org, however you want. But like map it out and that’ll also, you’re, you’re, you’re going to be stronger somewhere. Like a lot of people really love product and like the coaching or the courses and the, all that, but they hate marketing. Well, somebody has got to do marketing and somebody needs to sell people.

So map it out and. One of the ways I like to think about that is you put your name everywhere and when you’re like, oh, maybe this is working, what’s the first thing I would do? If I could hire somebody, where do I want to delegate? Typically the first answer particularly if you don’t have a partner and you’re not already like dividing and conquering is perhaps getting a virtual assistant to help you in some of these processes or even take over something like customer success and Or even marketing if you really don’t like marketing, but your assistant is really good at writing and could take your ideas for from a content Spreadsheet or calendar that you make and help execute that that’s fantastic Partnering Is good like for your business, but you can also partner with outsource agencies to help Fill in the org chart.

So for example, if you want, if you don’t want to learn to run paid ads yourself, you can partner with an ad agency to do it. You could potentially even negotiate instead of, you know, just paying whatever the rate is, like giving them a percentage of sales that are tracked through their generation. So like being creative about partnerships is helpful because it is overwhelming to wear all these hats.

And particularly if you’re early on. And can’t if you can’t afford to like go big, you could get creative in the partnerships. Like one of my first courses where I brought in other expert instructors in the platform, I didn’t pay them anything until their stuff started selling. So they got a percentage of sales.

I was able to partner to help create product within the org that wasn’t all on me and that business was with my wife as well. So yeah, typically a virtual assistant is a good first hire just to try to unload and delegate some of the things you’re either not good at or just can’t find time for that you can build a process around.

And then also there’s this idea when you do start to get a team to have like a singly responsible individual on each part of the business. And that’s all, that’s you everywhere when you’re a solopreneur, but. It’s really nice. What, what happens is sometimes entrepreneurs can be a little bit of control freaks and not, not like fully delegate.

It doesn’t mean you’re not involved. You’re not, you’re still need to manage and coach and stuff like that. But having different singly responsible individuals and like empowering them, like from a management philosophy, the way I look at that is particularly at a high level position in the org chart is.

If you’re the CEO, like you’re still like setting the goal and the vision and stuff, but give them freedom on how to get there. Cause they’re a different person. Hopefully they’re better at you at the thing. And just, but think about the org chart. Like when I see an entrepreneur who’s just stressed out, like there’s so much going on, you kind of got to slow down and like, what is, how is this ecosystem working?

And, and you know, it’s something that’s never perfect. Like you kind of have to refine it over time. So yeah.

Jason Coleman: It’s a good activity. It’s like business plans. It’s like, you know, you make the business plan and that’s not worth so much cause things change so rapidly that it, but the planning process of writing the business plan helps you figure things out.

I feel that way about org charts. Like very quickly after we settle an org chart in a business, it goes out of date and you’re like, Oh, we just hired some. So they’re not an org chart. And you’re like, yeah, okay, we’ll get to it. And I could totally relate to that. The first time I put that together yeah.

I think I got, you know, maybe it was like, that also has talked about an e myth revisited of doing an org chart, even if you’re a small team and you put your name on every spot and maybe like a tactic if you’re in that phase where you’re doing everything. Is to pick days of the week and like Friday is the day when I’m CEO and I do CEO stuff and like Wednesday is the day I do marketing and I do marketing stuff and to kind of make sure that you don’t, you don’t forget to work on critical areas of the business when you’re at, you know, until you figure out a way to either automate some of those aspects, outsource some of them or hire people to work on them.

But it’s good to be, if you’re thinking about what you’re doing as a business, you’re going to write down all these roles. And then yes, I think I said like the E Myth Revisited, that, that was like a transformational book for me thinking about business. And you know, it made me think of business as building systems and there’s other folks who talk about stuff like that, but in like maybe like the main.

you know take away from that book is like, right. Standard operating procedures for everything. And like that, that is building the business. And it’s an interesting book if I reread it and the, it’s like half story, like a fictional story. He’s talking to a woman about her business and half kind of prescriptive, like here’s what you got to do.

And I remember like I devoured that book the first time I read it and that the story really helped hammer at home. But then as, I had already been in business for a while rereading it. I was skipping over the fiction and like, just tell me what to do, man. I’m trying to remember like exactly how to do this thing.

But yeah, so. you have org chart, these are the roles. And then the different roles, like they, they do things. I call them standard operating procedures. There’s different names for these things, but it’s basically like write down instructions for everything you do or record yourself as you’re doing something.

That’s all, you know, you can hand off a recording of yourself doing it, but also write down what you’re doing and why and how you’re thinking about it. And. Especially when you’re hiring folks, but you can do it for yourself when you’re not. Cause it’s just, I still run the SOPs in my own business. Cause it reminds you what to do.

I’m doing all kinds of stuff. And I’m like, how do you do this again? And make sure you don’t miss steps and the goal for a good SOP. And don’t tell this to the people that you hire, but you want the most mediocre workers to be able to run, execute the SOPs. And I forget, I think that’s, It’s kind of the phrasing that Michael Gerber uses in the e myth book.

So it’s like right up to SOP for the lowest. You shouldn’t have to like, like early on in a business, you’re, you’re, you’re an exceptional person and you’re the one who makes everything work and you’re like a great, you know, sales person or a great developer or a great content writer, and eventually then you hire out those roles.

And like, maybe you’re lucky and you hire someone who’s even better than you are, but probably they’re expensive and you’re not actually hiring at that. So you don’t want your business to only work because awesome people are running it. You know, there’s definitely parts of your business where it’s like, write the SOP for the lowest common denominator, mediocre person who could execute that task.

And if you, you keep that in mind, you make them as simple as possible. And then another kind of tip related tip to that, when you, you start thinking in terms of systems in your business is that you can fudge it early on and automate things later. So you know, in the short term, you can use human power and time to do things and kind of make a mental note.

I’m either going to ditch this cause I can’t scale it or when I scale it, we’re going to have to automate this. So like a real good example is if you’re, you’re selling a course. And it leads to, there’s a kind of like coaching or consultation aspect. It’s like do it yourself and you’re, you do it really well.

But your time as the CEO of this business is really valuable, but like be willing to do it early on yourself. And it just takes time. And then in the future, you can automate aspects of that or subcontract it to someone else. Or even sometimes it’s like, even as simple as like, we need to send an email this many days after they do, and I don’t know how to like actually program the thing to send the email.

It’s like, just take notes. Like you’re, especially in the early days, you’re watching every single cell anyway, like send the email yourself, do it manually. So don’t be scared to do things manually or things that take time. And if it works out, you can automate it later.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. For standard operating procedures or SOPs, I think one just a pro tip out there is at the top of it you kind of got to sell the idea to the team member a little bit.

Like, why is this important? Instead of them opening, I’d be like, like, let’s say we’re a coach or a course creator and we have somebody helping us with new onboarding, new clients. If we want them to. The new client to receive like a personalized email and maybe some branded swag in the mail or something like that.

Before step one, like open your email, step two, use this templated message. Like before getting into all that, you know, saying something like we want all our customers to feel special, valued and welcome to this community. It’s part of our brand because of X, Y, and Z. You’re kind of like providing context and like company culture and

Jason Coleman: the values.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So there’s something to do. Let’s talk about team and leadership. One idea I want to dig into here is sometimes leadership and management kind of get lumped into the same thing. Just like sales and marketing where they’re, they’re actually different, but there is overlap and the same thing like leadership and management are not the same, but there is overlap.

So I wanted to talk about more of the leadership side. Like the management side is sort of like in the operations of like, okay, we have these standard operating procedures. This is the process. This is how we do things, you know, quality control and, you know, performance and things like that. Leadership is more higher level And, and I find that people tend to gravitate towards like, there’s like layers of leadership, like the top being like a transformational, super inspiring leader at the bottom of the leadership hierarchy is like, I have to listen to this person cause they send me a paycheck or whatever.

And we all want to like move up and become higher levels of leaders. And the crazy thing within leadership is that when you have a team, Not everybody will see you as the same. Like some may see you as like transfer, transformational, inspirational, and others may see you as like, I’m just working here cause I need the money.

I need the paycheck. And it’s not bad or good. But like it’s good to kind of move up and tactically one of the ways to kind of get clearer on your leadership is to actually get clear on your, your vision, your mission, your values, your strategies, your tactics, and actual projects. So whenever somebody’s like feeling like crazy busy, they’re often like in the weeds of projects, which you should be, or tactically executing some kind of campaign.

But particularly at the top of that figuring out your vision and mission to use our dating coach example, like, why do I care about helping people find the love of their life? Maybe it has something to do with a lot of like loneliness or depression in society. Maybe you have a personal story from a friend or family member that, you know, inspired you to start this thing.

Like what’s the story, what’s your vision? What wrong do you want to write in the world? Mission’s a little more goal oriented. Like I want to help a hundred people find the love of their life in 2026. So they’re like, And then you put this stuff on your website, like on your about page of what you’re, what you’re doing.

It’s easy just to be get really busy in the projects. Like I’m creating content, I’m, I’m doing marketing, I’m building this site. I’m figuring all this stuff out, but whenever you get stuck or you’re not sure what to do or not sure what to prioritize by going back to that leadership, you did leadership work you did earlier on what’s your vision and mission.

It can often settle things down, help you prioritize. I’m also a big fan of leading by example. If you have a team so, you know, demonstrate the work ethic. You want to see others do in our example of like helping new customers on board and you like have as a part of your company culture that you actually do really care about your customers.

You’re not just trying to separate. money from their wallet. You got to show that like it’s good for your team to see you like over deliver to somebody or if a customer was getting challenged, like even breaking process and being like, this has happened to me in a coaching program where like it didn’t include private coaching, but the coach, like I just emailed him, I’m like, I’m this challenge.

He’s like, let’s jump on a call. I’ll be glad to talk through that with you for like 30 minutes. And that like demonstrate his team sees that. Yeah. And that like demonstrates that Hey, this is how we treat our customers here. It sets company culture. Then the other thing about leadership that’s really important, I think, is to take good care of the people, not just below you, but above and beside you as well.

I, there’s a framework for this. I’d give credit if I could remember the person’s name, but it’s called plus minus equal. So when you really want to grow and you really want to develop your leadership. You want to lead your team, you know, they’re kind of below you. Or your customers the equals you want to like connect with other leaders in your industry and just try to help each other.

Some people call that masterminding. You and I both do that as well. Then look up above you, like reach out for mentoring, get help, treat those people well try to add value and give back to them and stuff like that. And it just kind of develops this leadership momentum. And just as a personal story, I always think about this.

I had a boss once tell me a long time ago that. He promoted me up to being a manager of the company and this was in Alaska and there’s a lot of like dying crazy stuff that happened, whether in situations and all kinds of stuff. He’s like, man, you’re so calm under pressure and level. And when I remember him saying that, I’m like, I’m not, I just must not show it.

 I am like common or pressure. So whenever something kicks off you know, I try to just be calm and be like stable because it helps your team is sort of, you’re kind of like a lightning rod and your team will feed off that energy. And I think being on time is an important one too. Like, If you’re a leader and you’re like cracking down on people for being late or not keeping commitments, but you’re also like never on time, it’s a little contradictory.

So if you want to have a culture of like timeliness and respecting other people’s calendars and schedules and stuff like that, it’s really important to like practice what you preach and have congruency there. And I’ve always appreciated that. And of course things come up and like, Hey, I’m late. Sorry, I’m late.

This thing happened or whatever. But that’s how I, Those are some tips on leadership.

Jason Coleman: All that resonates with me around like leading from the inside and by example, and try to do that as much as possible of getting side by side with them. I feel like sometimes when I’m training managers early on, they think When you’re managing someone, they do stuff for the manager.

Like all the work trickles up and it’s like, I don’t know exactly what the percentage breakdowns you were kind of referring to some of the things related, but it’s about like third. So like a third of your time as a manager is like, you’re doing your own stuff. A third of the time your employees are like helping you do that thing.

And then a third of the time you’re helping them do their thing too. Like, don’t forget that last one. Like you should be like And I think that helps. Yeah. Like the glue that holds everything together and like keeps the respect of everyone. But then there are those times when, you know, you’re in the trench with folks. But then as the leader of the business, you, you know, you are doing these high level CEO things and you are. You’re there’s a, like solving the big business decisions.

That’s why they’re an employee. They just want a job, you know, and like, you. Handling the risk and some of the pressures and I think of it like an umbrella. I’m like Preserving these folks from thinking about these things that are just gonna that don’t concern them. I’m like a micromanager way of like trying to hide the information. It’s really just kind of if this thing is just worrisome for people you know, let’s Let’s insulate them from that.

I, we I, I start to like really micromanage the, like you’re in a Slack with me. I think when we started working together, a lot of my first kind of feedback of like. How I do business for how you do business was around like the communication. And Slack and kind of like the management channel. Like the channel is marketing, but some of the discussion goes in the management channel.

Cause you don’t want the marketers to see you fighting, you know, it’s like fight over here amongst, and then. You know, show yourself as a solid front. Like, you know, we’re all doing this together. And then it like, Oh, they’re really smart. They know exactly what we’re doing. Like they gave us like the one directive.

They didn’t see the indecision. We’re like, I don’t know if we should be doing this. They’re like, I’m thinking of one of three things. I don’t know. Let’s do the first thing. Cool. And I, I think that’s not like, I don’t think of it from, I hope, like from like a micromanaged, like control everyone’s, and I make fun of it all the time.

I’m like, the idea of police, like Jason is like trying to police everyone’s ideas. I’m not coming from that standpoint. I’m coming from kind of like a caring standpoint of like nurturing and trying to give people the space to do their job outside of the distractions and, and really just kind of managing the flow down.

And, and I think. If you do that, like there’s a lot of respect that like it makes folks jobs more enjoyable. I think a lot of the stuff that people hate about jobs is like the bureaucracy and the politics and the confusion and, and that, and you kind of insulate that. So we’re talking about team and leadership and you were just talking about having a vision, building a mission and setting your core values.

You know, as a business and using those to guide you. And in particular, I think. That’s useful in all kinds of contexts, but in particular in hiring, it’s been super useful for us. And so the suggestion here is to like define your core values early and use them to hire folks. And I think where I’ve seen this idea written most clearly is in a book called traction by Gina Wickman.

And that’s like the entrepreneurial operating system EOS. There’s like a whole, like, you know, group and a lot of kind of midsize businesses use this framework for everything, but it has a really good chapter about defining core values. And what I loved about it was it wasn’t like an abstract exercise.

And you could do it at any time. Like it really was. So if you, at this point I already had some employees and it’s kind of like, think about your ideal employees, the ones you like, what do you like about them? You know, and like takes you through the steps. You write down all these things. All right, which of your employees are problematic?

What don’t you like about them? Kind of figure out and, and, you know, you can go through process and we have core values, both our businesses and they overlap, you know, kind of well. And so once you have these, you’re like, Oh, like everyone who works here and is great is like a hundred a plus on all these core values and people who have problems are failing at one or more of the values.

And so you can start reviewing people internally about that. But then when you’re hiring, was the kind of the big ah ha for me, was I used to hire, say I was hiring someone in marketing, I would ask them questions about how they’ve marketed before and try to judge if they have the skill set to do the job they’re gonna do.

And instead now when I’m hiring people, every question I’m trying to drill into, do they have the values of everyone else who works here. Cause that’s, Turns out more important than the skill set because if we work together for six months and you have all the skills But you don’t have the values. I found it’s almost impossible to kind of for some of these values or so And maybe to make it more clear like There’s one value in particular we have at stranger studios, which is you know, taking responsibility for your own work.

And we’ve found that that’s probably the most important of all the values we have, because it’s the one that you use to fix things when they’re broken. So if I sit down with someone and we have another value, which is like you know heifers or you know, have a commitment to open source and transparency.

And maybe something’s out of line there if they don’t take responsibility for, you know, why they’re not meeting that value. Like there’s not even like a tool to lever to make it better. And I mean, I could go on advice like that, taking responsibility, like an example of that is when, when there’s problems and why it’s so important, like when, you know, Something’s not getting done.

Like an employee you have messed up. They sent out like a blog post and it was poorly worded. It was undrafted. It looks like they might’ve plagiarized like the worst thing you could imagine. And then you’re like, Hey, that’s a problem. You definitely need to talk to that employee. They’re probably breaking some core values while they did the sloppy work.

So having those core values to talk it through. But As a manager, having responsibility for this work means that I have to take responsibility. Like, how did this happen on my watch? What did I do wrong? Why didn’t I explain to this person that this, why did they think this work would fly? What, you know, why did they think they could get away with this?

Why didn’t they know how to do this? And so we’re always doing that. So it’s like at every level, it’s kind of like, you know, taking responsibility for what you did for the work that you do. So I’m diving into like one specific value. We have, you know, five of them, but it’s once we know these things and it’s like, man, these things really, we developed them based on the people that we worked with and we wanted to work with and what we liked about them.

And these were the traits. Then we you know, definitely tested the people who, you know, thought about these with the people who are working at the business and whenever we hire, we test on those first. And then definitely the skills are important too. I’ve, I’ve realized. You know, basically we have to trial everyone like it’s when we hire someone to do a job It’s nearly impossible to know if they can actually do that job well until you actually work together Even if you see stuff in their portfolio There’s sometimes there’s cases like oh, they were working with someone else and the person who really can do it is that other person you didn’t hire or but It’s it’s hard to to judge people.

Some people really get it interviewing and not just get it doing the job and but you can train people on skills and and Things but it’s hard to train them on values. So looking out for that early is key.

Chris Badgett: I Think one thing when creating your values is they don’t have to be cheesy You So like you might think like trust, integrity, work hard, but you can actually have fun with it and they can be kind of creative.

And like the first things you think of of like, of course you want to work at a company that has integrity. Like that should be every company. It’s not really that unique. So like spend some time on it, like at least a week, like thinking about it, talking to team about it, just introspection. I just also just want to iterate that like terminating or firing people is one of the hardest things you do as an entrepreneur.

And when it’s about the values, it becomes easier because it’s not about, Oh, I feel this way or you made me feel this way. It’s more about, this is the culture. These are like kind of the rules here of how we operate. And oftentimes, you know, this person has been given, like clearly communicated that like, Like, for example, at LFTR LMS, one of our company values is clear communication.

So if I were ever to let somebody go for communication, I would have tried to coach them, help them level up, get on the same page, understand expectations with communications more, and then, you know, give them a path to improve and look out for it and revisit. So then when it does come time to a termination conversation, if that’s going to happen, It’s not about how I feel.

It’s just protecting the values of the company and we’re not seeing change and it becomes easier to do.

Jason Coleman: And that’s key. You said like protecting the values of the company. Cause it’s, it’s like, if you let folks in who don’t have those same values, it kind of poisons the well and you know, people, if work ethic is important and that’s built into the values, people come in without it, then other people are like, Oh, he’s not working hard.

Why do I have to work hard? Or you know, they’re not communicating well. Why do I have to communicate well? So yeah,

Chris Badgett: and one more thing just to add on that is To make your life easier if your personal values and your business values overlap pretty good or even are the same It’s so easy just to show up because this is like, this is who I am at work.

This is who I am at home. And it’s just like the same, you’re not like a different person at work. And when we talked about the customer avatar before, if the person you’re targeting is also in this values group, there’s just so much congruency. That it’s not hard or forced or like that’s where I’m talking about one day Like you don’t want to necessarily serve everybody because this other group that doesn’t have these values at all Probably aren’t going to be that fun to work with or support or whatever So it’s it sounds quick like oh write down the six most important values But like really think about it and think about it and who you hire and who you want to work with as customers and so on Let’s talk about thinking in spreadsheets and building models.

The thing I love about spreadsheets is I’m kind of on the, I’m like, if there’s like the right brain, who’s like artists left brain hardcore analytical spreadsheets, more on the analytical side. I’m probably Right of center in terms of my creative, like way of abstract thinking. But I love working in spreadsheets because it removes abstraction.

Like I do a lot of mind maps. I mean, looking at one of my notes right here, like here’s a mind map of things I want to talk about values. But if I was actually going to like codify my values and like get more specific and make sure they fit, I’d move off the mind map and move into a spreadsheet.

Because this cell needs to have a data point in it. And then once I have that data, or that word, or those numbers, I can build formulas and do stuff. So I just love the idea of removing abstraction and forcing yourself to work in spreadsheets. Like, even as like a course creator, if you’re gonna create like a resource to go with a training, like a worksheet, this is how I create worksheets.

I would be like, well, how do I support this person? I start mind mapping on my paper, but then ultimately I’m going to build that spreadsheet and put boxes on there and give this box a name and that’s going to become PDF worksheet. So I moved from abstract, you know, brainstorming into concrete, valuable resource.

You can do that for course outlining too. So like, okay, I’m a, to use our dating coach example, I was just brainstorming when I came up with those like milestones of like what needs to happen on the way to finding the love of your life. So that’s kind of a brainstorm, but eventually we want to put that in a spreadsheet and start thinking about you know, the order of things, what’s missing.

Is there anything that goes between this and so on? Marketing content is the same. Where if we find our five pain points and then we got our mind map going and then we can create like a spreadsheet that gives us like categories and filters and columns for like, Oh, for this pain point, here’s the 12 topics.

And then, you know, it could just keep expanding because there’s only so much we can carry in our working memory. So moving off of like journals and scribbles to like spreadsheets and tabs is really powerful. And then on the more business side, like business planning, using our dating coach example again, like if I was going to get into adding a line of business for like, okay, they found their soul mate.

Now we’re going to do like how to do the family thing or whatever. Be like, well, how many customers do I have? Like what percentage of people like want to have kids? And I could start forecasting numbers and stuff, which is something you’re really good at. Your forecasts are awesome of like kind of validating ideas.

And what if that grows at 10 percent every year? And now we have these two products, the love of your life and then awesome family product. And what’s it, what does that look like in 10 years? There’s only so much of that you can calculate in your brain. So that’s, that’s really helpful. And just a personal story, like you’ve done that.

Like when you look at things like growth, like at Lifter LMS, like, okay, if we set these goals and this is where we want to be in five years, you said something to me the other day, like, Oh, if you grow, if you want to double the business, if you grow 15 percent every year, in three years, you’ve doubled the business.

I don’t know if it’s 25%, but yeah, but that’s like, Instead of being like. I want to grow, like, let’s double the business. That’s like the abstract thought and let’s do it next year. It’s like, well, but if we do it this way and this compounds and let’s model that out in math, it really starts making sense.

And you get it a more concrete plan.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. I call that like another aspect of that, doing that spreadsheet, I call it like positive visualization through spreadsheets. It’s like you, you kind of model your business and how it works and you’re like, what if I grow 25 percent per year? Click and drag, you know, it doesn’t like 25 percent is pretty big.

Like we don’t like the power of compounding. You drag out 10, 20 years. You’re like, Oh my God, this is huge. And there’s something about like putting that number in there 25 percent and like committing to it to like, you find a way to do it. And if you have a good spreadsheet model, it’s like, you’ll have cells like a really simple model.

I’m selling courses to people at a certain price. And it’s like how many How many people times what price is how much I make and if you want to make more money You either have more courses more people or higher price. There’s like no other way to make more money Like so which of those dials needs to turn so if you’re like, I’m gonna go 25% Am I trying to get 25 percent more users?

Am I raising my prices 25 percent and hoping that people will buy it? Am I, you know, going to expand. You know, horizontally through new courses and sell them to the same people where other products and things. Yeah. So, I mean, I love it. It’s funny. I’m like on the left side of the right brain, left brain thing.

And so I do love these spreadsheets, especially like early on to model the business. It feels almost irresponsible to like start. spending money on a business before you realize like how that spending that money turns into the money you’re going to make back, like to have a rough idea. This is how we make money.

And I, so it’s good to get out of your, so for folks who are maybe right brained, I see folks like we’re, we’re gushing over spreadsheets and I see some folks are just like, I don’t like numbers. I don’t, I don’t get it. I don’t know how they work. And so they avoid that completely. And I, I think it’s like good to try to get out of your comfort zone and, and, and dig into that.

Then more specifically, like when you’re doing these kind of like modeling forecast type sheets. You know, that could be as simple as I said, how many customers times what price it’s like the numbers are going to be imprecise and to be okay with having the spreadsheet isn’t, and I think that’s another hangup some folks have is they’re like, Why do that?

I’m like, just drag 25%. Doesn’t mean you grow 25%. You’re like, yes, but the product, like, okay, now dig into it. You have to figure out how to grow 25 percent or like, it has to make sense. There’s a, you know, don’t be scared of the spread, spreadsheets or the fact that you, you can’t really know. That’s it.

Yeah. So yeah, in investing sometimes. And you see if it makes sense. Like you know, you have to tell a story then to justify those numbers. This happens in like stock investing too, where you’re like, they’re growing at 30 percent per year. And then you’re kind of like, it’s a, they’re a company that sells cars for example.

And you’re like, you drag that out five, 10 years and you’re like, that’s more cars than there are in the whole entire world. So you’re like, they have to do something other than sell cars if they’re going to keep growing at 30 percent and like that. So that’s like the numbers in the spreadsheet lead to the story that you have to tell to figure out like the next move you got to make in your business.

Yeah. And so, yeah, like, don’t be scared of spreadsheets. Use rough estimates to get an idea and you can always update your sheet as you, you learn more. So if you realize you know, the, the assumptions you made about pricing, about how many people would stick around if you raise prices, assumptions about, you know, like you blow up and you’re on Oprah and now like that users goes off the chain.

It’s like, okay, now you need to, that’s a good thing. You got to adjust your spreadsheet to account for that. Yeah. And I think. I’ve seen, I see this a lot on, I do I’m treasurer on a, like a private school board. And I, part of that, I build a forecast just like we do for lifter. And like, it’s kind of, we don’t set a budget per se, but we do a forecast that is like a rep, like stay within these numbers.

But not like every domain has a budget, but that’s how we figure out, you know, is, is the school making money or losing money? And I, other people on the board just have, I see like that just maybe they’re You know, they have, they struggle with either like the spreadsheets scare them or they’re like, it’s not exact.

And it’s like, it’s just a forecast and you do your best and you adjust. If I’m wrong, then we adjust. And actually, you know, oh my God, we overshot. The school lost money. That is bad to lose money. But hopefully mid year you can check in and be like, shoot, we’re going to end up, you know, and kind of adjust if you can.

Or if you have like a cushion of money, like, okay, last year we lost money cause we didn’t have a good forecast. Why? Okay. It changed these adjustments. Next year’s forecast is going to be better.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. One of my favorite business spreadsheets, and this was a trick I learned from Dan Martell. It’s called a precision scorecard.

And this is something I recommend everybody do who has a business, which is Create a spreadsheet that has like the main functions. So like for a course creator business as an example, you’ve got sales, you have marketing, you have like customer satisfaction or just customer results metrics, and maybe you have some operation stuff just for the actual running of the business.

And then pick three metrics. so that you can be more scientific about it and you can see things and you report it every week. So three metrics per department. So to give an example, like marketing as an example, if you have an online business, you’re going to want, you might want to look at traffic, like how many in your Google analytics, how many, how many people visited the website this week, you know, and sales, you might have whatever your conversion tool, if it’s a one on one call, you might have like meetings booked.

Meetings, show up rate, sales conversion rate, so that would be like three there. And then you just, you fill it out every week. I actually like actually going and tracking down the numbers myself. I often think like, oh, that’s something an assistant can do. But the very act of me like digging in, getting the data, putting in the sheet, looking at it, looking at it last week, looking at it the same week a year ago.

I start like seeing patterns and I get ideas and, and, and it’s great to celebrate where you’re winning. Like, Oh my gosh, our traffic doubled this week. It tells you like, Oh, that marketing thing we did worked or, or you’ll find a problem. Like if you do ongoing monthly coaching and you have like a really high churn rate of people not renewing or canceling, there’s something to dig in there.

So it’s sort of like a, when you go to the doctor. And they run labs and they’re looking at all these markers that helps like figure out what to do,

Jason Coleman: diagnose the health of the business.

Chris Badgett: Let’s look at kind of being an entrepreneur and like, it’s sort of this thing I’ve heard. Um, I’m trying to remember the guy’s name.

I heard this from, but like, there’s this one quality of entrepreneurs that they can’t turn it off. It’s like a thing. So they’re like always kind of in business, you know, They’re always looking at through the lens of business or entrepreneurship wherever they go like If you’re picking up your kids at school and like man, this pickup process is really inefficient like at my kids school I had to like You had to like go against traffic make a u turn in the back of the parking lot to get in line It was just it was always like chaos but you can learn from any domain.

And the big idea is really just pattern recognition. So if you can’t turn it off, if you’re always just grinding on like seeing systems and wanting to optimize and fix everything and start new companies, cause you see like something new working, you can, you start identifying patterns. So pattern recognition is.

a big part of being an entrepreneur. And when you study either different types of businesses or even different disciplines entirely, you can see patterns that you could apply over to your company. And then when you see pattern, then you can start, okay, I see a pattern here that’s sort of like, For me, it’s kind of like right brain and then it’s like, let’s push it over to the left brain and start building it.

Like what is the actual mechanism and system here? How does this work? And then you can, can I apply that system in my business? And for marketing specifically, like everything is marketing. As of recording this, we just watched a presidential election process. It played out over years and months and it’s a giant marketing campaign.

So when I’m looking at that, I’m like, okay, this is the this text message I’m getting on my phone. Let’s look at the candidates websites. You know, what is like, what’s happening on social media? Like it’s all marketing is everywhere. Communication’s everywhere. So you might learn something that you see in like a presidential campaign or let’s say a Black Friday retail ad for like clothing, but you sell courses and coaching, but like, was there something in that brand of clothing the way they did it?

They were like, I think I can try that over in mine, but kind of format it differently for what I offer. And we mentioned earlier about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence. The people that read that book are kind of business and marketing nerds like myself and Jason. Yeah. But what he did is he actually studied like cults, which is more of like a social science, social thing.

He was like, how do these cult leaders like develop all this influence? So he took something from sort of a social science world and brought it over to business and marketing. And so there’s all these Chowdhury nerds in business. So that’s just a great example of taking it from over here and applying it to a completely different industry.

Jason Coleman: This reminds me of a tactic I heard from Alex Ormazi, who’s on YouTube about exposing yourself to these other things. He recommends like not turning off ads or paying to get rid of ads on YouTube. Like if you’re ever going to make a YouTube ad, you want to expose yourself to all these ads and kind of see what seems to be working.

Or when something grabs your attention, you’re like, wait, why did that grab my attention? Why did I react to that text message or that email or that phone call or, you know and take mental notes and be like, Oh, we could, we could do it that way. That’s awesome. And I think, you know, I, I definitely have this in my life where I’m, I’m always thinking about business.

We’re here in this space. I think we’ve both been done and we’re like, what’s it cost to lease this? How much did these lights cost? And it’s like, you just can’t turn it off. You can’t do it. Whenever I’m at a restaurant and it’s kind of like, how many tables? Am I like, how did the turnover? You know, Kim and I, Kim, Kim started making dog treats for our dogs.

And we’re immediately like, how could you scale this up and make that? She’s like, no, dude, you just, you have a hobby, keep it as a hobby sometimes. But I’m always thinking about that. And I guess one thing that’s useful about that is that you know, you can pull things from our industries, apply it to your business.

You can also use that same mindset to analyze your own business. So if you can tap into that and find that kind of beginner’s mindset of you know. Trying to experience. What do I offer? What do I give away? What do I sell? If I, you know, how would I think about that? And and you can kind of consider other You know big changes like we get caught in our ways like it’s a free man product.

This is how we sell it We sell this thing. Let’s not, you know, tweak the business model But I have that thing. I mean, that’s always analyzing, come up with business models on the fly. Like turn that on my own business. Don’t be afraid to like entertain big changes. And there’s a really good blog post by Jason Cohen of a smart bear and WP engine where I forget what is this?

It’s some crazy numbers, like 20 or more like thought experiments to like push you outside your comfort zone and consider different business models. Like if you sell something for 500, what if you sold it for 50, 000, what would you have to do in your business? To like justify a 50, 000 price point. And what’s really amazing is if you go through that exercise, maybe you’ll be like, I should be in the business of selling 50, 000 things.

That could be cool. But you might realize like, wait, I have this thing to justify a 50, 000 price point. And it doesn’t actually cost me any money. I can record it once and give it away for free, basically. And deliver more value to my people who are paying 500. So you like, you push yourself. And if you’re, you constantly have that.

So. Don’t be stuck in, in a way about you know, your, your business model and consider things. And even if you’re not gonna, we’ve changed slightly our business model over time, but we’ve done things, you know you know, like is offering lifetime deals or not. And we have like a mutual friend in the same space who I think is more defensive on this.

Like he, he has, I think he’s struggling to grow. He runs a very similar business and he wants to push the same levers he’s been pushing. But it’s kind of not going to work. Like I, I think of this analogy, which is silly. Cause I don’t go to the gym that often, but like when I used to work out when I was younger, you’re like, you do a bench press and you’re like, cool.

I go from like 150 to like 200 pounds bench press and you hit a wall. And at that point, like just doing the bench press over and over again, it’s not going to push you. You need to exercise other muscles that contribute. And, you know, shake it up a little bit and try something different. And so I think this mutual friend, like, I think is hitting a wall and trying to do the same exercises.

And it’s like, consider this thing that you give away for free. You could charge for it. And you’re like, how do you do that? Like you really could like nothing sacred. And that’s part of it too. If you’re like, nothing’s really sacred, we’re just thinking, we’re just exploring opportunities. Go with me here.

Like, you’re like, come along on this journey and see what it feels like. If you made this big change in your business, you don’t have to do it. We’re just talking. But sometimes you get insights that way.

Chris Badgett: I think one of the coolest ways to always be businessing that can be a lot of fun is to flip the script.

Like, In sales and marketing it used to be called like the mark or the prospect, like who’s the target, right? In sales, direct sales. So I actually really enjoy when it’s flipped. Like if I’m going to buy a car, I’m the mark, like I’m semi, but I am fully aware I’m like looking at everything and I actually enjoy it because I know what’s going on.

I know what good sales looks like. I know what not great sales looks like. And it’s fun just to be on the other side. So if you want to create a course, flip it, take somebody’s course. That’s something you’re interested in. If you want to become a coach, like get coached, see what they’re doing in their business.

If you want to run a services agency, hire a services agency. And if you do those things that are in alignment with your business, there’s a lot of synergy. So. You know, for example, I hired a coach for I mentioned the Dan Martell several times and he has a program called SAS Academy for SAS founders.

While it’s extra time, I also wanted to go in there and see what it was like to be on the other side and be the client and how does this coach do his thing? And it’s really informed things like that. And if you’re starting to delegate in your org chart And you’re, you’re, you’re have a service offering or an agency.

Like you can hire an agency to run ads for you and see how it goes. What can you learn from their process? And so I’m not just get the service and the result.

Jason Coleman: When you’re building a product or pricing something, you’re like, you’re, you know, you’re pricing a course. You’re like, what courses have you taken recently?

What did you like about them? What were they priced? What things have you spent money on personally? Why, how? Never stop learning. Yeah, it’s always on.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.