Today’s episode of the podcast is an interview with Sigrun, an award winning business coach, who helps women launch million dollar businesses. We talk all about what it’s like to have been in the online space for a while, have seen success and what that looks like now.As always, I’d love to know what resonates with you and what you think, so please feel free to connect with me on my social media!
KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST
- How can we do things differently if things aren't working as they used to
- How to navigate the online world if you want to be an online business
- The importance of building relationships
- Why you can’t automate everything
- How to build an audience and get in front of the right people
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE
Do not underestimate the importance of going back to basics and scaling intimacy.
HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS
- New ways that we can do business online and reach out to our customers
- How we would sell if we didn’t have the internet
- Sigrun’s experiences of visiting Necker Island and meeting Richard Branson
LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to this week's of the podcast. How are you doing? This week I have an interview for you and it's with the lovely Sigrun. Now, you know we talk a lot about the online space or what if someone's been in the online space for a while and they've had success and they've seen success and they've created a big business.
How does that look now? How does that look for people who have been in the industry, and what does the online world look like now? And how can we navigate the online world if you want to be an online business? So those are the conversations I have with Sigrun. Those are the kind of things that we discuss on today's interview.
We also talk about new ways in which we can do business online, new ways of reaching out. And is it all about the numbers? Because for me, it's not. And I was gonna say anymore, I'm not sure I ever really was, but I think I thought it was because that's what I was taught. So for me it's about, you know, that connection and how can we can get that connection and how can we do things differently if things aren't working as they used to, how can they be done differently? So this is what we talk about. So without further ado, I'm just gonna hand over to the lovely Sigrun.
So I am very excited today to welcome to the podcast Sigrun. How are you doing?
Sigrun: I'm doing great and thank you for having me Teresa.
Teresa: My absolute pleasure. So Sigrun I always start the podcast exactly the same way, which I joke must bore my audience, but I think they're okay with it. Could you take a moment to introduce yourself and tell us how you got to do what you're doing today?
Sigrun: Oh, we could do the long version or the short version. I'll try to keep it short. Otherwise, we're here for an hour. Well, I am from Iceland originally, and then I had moved to Switzerland to be with my husband, and basically I lost my job twice in two years, and I had also been sick for seven months.
So I wasn't this weird space of thinking, do I really wanna work for another person? And not be able to take care of my health. And my back story was that I was been a CEO for 10 years for various small businesses, mainly in IP software. And so there also comes a point where you say, I'm always running other people's businesses.
Why shouldn't I be running my own? But I was waiting for that perfect idea, perfect business idea to come along and it just didn't come. And you know, it's supposed to happen in the shower when you go for a walk or something like that. But now I think for most people it doesn't happen that way.
It only happens when you actually get going, when you actually do something and then you realize, oh, I like this or I don't like this. And it's hard to kind of tell someone else who is at the starting point that they just need to get going. But that's really the only way, and I got so frustrated with myself. I had been switching the theme of my WordPress website multiple times, and then I gave myself a deadline of two days, and of course I could take a decision once there was a deadline.
And it's hard to be your own boss. It's hard to, there's no one telling you what to do. You can do whatever you want. One day, you can do nothing, the next day you are busy on social media. And doesn't actually lead to sales, but you felt you were busy on social media. So I went through all these cycles.
I spent a lot of time on Facebook back in the day, 2013, 2014, and finally I wrote my first blog post, and the name of the blog post was very kind of revealing for the theme of my life back then was like, why start before you're ready is the only way. I was basically talking to myself, writing a few blog posts, setting up by email list software.
It doesn't really mean that you have a business, but one day it hit me. I had to decide what I want to do and I was running around a little bit like, in the book Alchemist. If you haven't read the book Alchemist, really, everybody needs to read it. It's from Paulo Coelho and it's more like almost, it's like an adventure.
It's written like a children's book, but actually it's very much meant for grown up. So this boy is looking for a treasure and he goes traveling all over the world looking for treasure. And he comes back, hasn't found the treasure, and where is it? In his backyard. And that's exactly how I figured out what I was meant to do.
I had been a video for 10 years. I've been done business consulting, I've done startup mergers, turnaround, you name it. And then I find myself not coming up with a business idea, and it was right there in front of me. Being a business coach was just what I was meant to do, and when I finally accepted it, First the word coach was like, uh, do I really want to be one of those coachings?
But I was like, yes, that's me. And you know, at least I can say I have real business experience. I've done it before and now I'm gonna help others do it. So that's kind of, what brought me to the place of actually doing what I do today.
Teresa: I love it. So with being a business coach, how did you start? Did you start doing one to one? Was it, did you go straight online with an online business? How did you start building that business up?
Sigrun: That was another frustrating phase where my mind, you only have an online business if you have an online course and, and I started with a four week online course. Pretty much based on my own experience, how to find your true passion and the right business idea.
That was my first four week online course. And then after doing that for a while, it was already fall of my first year, and I calculated that I had been making $17,000 for, in nine months I had made $17,000. My email list was 1500. I was doing weekly webinars. I was creating a lot of free valuable content.
And again, I got very frustrated. That's where I make the biggest turnaround in my business, and I decided to get outside help. I thought I could really do this on my own, and I wasn't willing to hire a coach or join a program was like, I have business experience. I know what I'm doing. I've done an online course.
Why do I need help? And I had to admit, you can't coach yourself. And if you're stuck, somebody else needs to open up and see your blind spot, then make you aware what you can do differently. And literally, when I invested those $5,000 into my first business coaching program, literally the same day or the next day, I got an email someone asking me if I did one-on-one coaching.
And I was like, wow, I didn't really be believe in that stuff where you say like, you know, energy and I'm like, this is true it works. So I invested myself, and then literally the money came back and not just that I earned 55,000 in three months. And so there was like a shift in my head. I had been preparing everything.
I had people that I liked what it was doing, but I was making the right offer. And so I started with one on one. I tried to an online course and my business coach said, no Sigrun I think you should do one on one. I said, no, I wanna sell an online course. I was really one of those, hard to coach people.
And I did a webinar, I had a sales page. Of course, I hadn't created the course yet, but I had a sales page. One person bought and that this is like two or three days into the launch and one person has bought and had 600 people on the webinar, so it was obvious that something was off and it was not working.
I responded, the person. But you know, I'm a turnaround expert myself. I was like, we must be able to turn it around. There are people still reading my emails. They must want something from me. And then we came up with one of my best emails where I just listed all the things I've been doing the last nine months.
And if they wanted an online business tricks so call with me. And 90 calls got booked and for the next three weeks I was crazy busy talking to all these people. Yeah. And I was fully booked for the next six months.
Teresa: That's crazy. That's so good. And that was then going into one to one. So you, cuz you now have a mixture of, online products, and this is, this is the interesting thing, isn't it?
I have obviously membership and courses and things and I do one to one as well. And, and I class it all as online cuz I'm doing it online. Although weirdly, not weirdly, it's amazing. Someone's flying over from the states to spend a day with me, which I'm like, Wow. Like not only are you paying to be with me for the day, but you're actually flying here, which is crazy.
I'm so excited that, so, so yeah. So now you have, tell us about how the business looks today.
Sigrun: Yeah, so, uh, I was doing one on one a little bit against my will, you could say, because I thought it was scalable and because I had been running businesses before, and one of the businesses that I run in the past was a website business.
And the only way to make more money, you know, assuming that you have enough clients out there, was to hire more programmers. And I decided, one day, if I ever have my own business, I will not have a business that's so based on ours. We were selling ours, and literally now I found myself having great success.
I was making more than six figures with one on one only, but I was still selling my time and I've quickly wanted to get out of it. So in my second year of business, I started the coaching program, and so over the span of 12 to 18 months, I created three level of what I called masterminds, but to be honest, they were probably more like group coaching programs.
And I started to, you know, replace the one on one in terms of revenue. I still had one on one. It was a 2017 in my fourth year of business that I really created a scalable signature online program, and then I started to face out the one on one completely. So I haven't been doing one-on-one really since 2017, but there is a lot of access.
You know, some of my programs there maybe just eight or 10 people in the program, so they do get a lot of access to me. Yeah. So then in fourth year of business, I create this 12 month program. And I also, like, I had this great vision for the program. People come to me and in 12 months they learn everything they need to know in online business.
As experts, we think differently than our students. So we sometimes not always know what's best for them. So I had to make much mistakes. So lots of people bought the program. I thought it was great success. One and a half years into the program, I start to see what's wrong with it. 12 modules in 12 months.
People don't do the work, like people don't have the stamina for long programs. Not in the beginning. When you have beginners, you need to have shorter program. The more beginner the short of the program, when people are more advanced, longer programs, then people want six or 12 month program. So I find myself with big beginners, and I call them sometimes advanced beginners, people who have kind of started to do something in online business, but they haven't had great success yet.
They were in this program. And they're just watching my videos and not doing the work. And I, I got so frustrated. I got frustrated with the students, but also with myself. Like, who am I to sell this program if they're not doing the work? So I must change, it's my fault. I have to take responsibility. And, you know, I didn't have any regrets.
I hadn't done anything like wrong. Not knowingly. Not knowingly, but I figured out there must be a better way. So I said I'll do some sort of a challenge, like have them do some work in the summer, and specifically the summers were frustrating to me because in Europe, Women just take off. Yeah. You know?
Yeah. They take off for 6, 8,10, 12 weeks. Yeah. And they don't work on their business, so no wonder their businesses stay small or there is not much business when they come back to the fall. And I was like, Ooh, I'm going to make sure they don't take a break in the summer. And they actually do something and that's when I came up with a brand new program.
First I just ran it for my students in the program. And I called it some summer school. The program was called Sumba on i b. And it was everything that I hoped for and more, I decided they would create an online course because I thought it would be best. It was like an asset to something tangible.
After the summer, they have a core. Now they're more excited about continuing to build their business. And so I just seated this program, I really hadn't created it. I just knew they want that and then I would have them create a core. And 124 courses got created that first summer courses that would otherwise not have been created.
And people who had been in my program for six months were finally taking action. And I was exhausted after the summer, to be honest. You know, I was very proud but exhausted. And I said, where do I take my business from here? Now I've been four years in business. This is like, no, this is my fifth year, sorry.
This was my fifth year in business. And I was like, what do I do now? Like my best program is a precal inside a paid program. I wasn't ready take a decision yet. I was really just exhausted also myself from running this alone. I had no, no team really. And then the following year comes along, 2019 I started getting messages and emails if I would do it again.
And I just got exhausted thinking about it. So I sent a heart fills email out to my student who had been in the program and said, I need some volunteers to help me run it. And 40 people, 40 people filled that form. And I thought I said 40 people is a little bit too much. So I accepted 20 and we did it again from the summer school.
This time, 264 courses got created. And again, it was a challenge within a paid program. So I still hadn't solved, like, how do I do this? But right after the program, it was clear to me like, this is it. This is my signature program. It's a 10 week program, it's not a 12 month program.
Finally, it got people to take action. It was not too long the program, you know, they can work. You can work a little bit harder for a short amount of time, but not for 12 months. And we had a lot of accountability, we would check on people, make sure they did the work. So in fall of 2019, I shifted and made this my main thing.
I still kept the 12 month program like a backend membership. Yeah, so I do have a membership, but it's not public. And so Kickstart, now it's called Kickstart. This thing that I created and now I love the story because it what created organically out of frustration. It was opposite of what I saw was wrong, like you see in the industry.
I, I thought I was creating a great program. I was basically emulating what I thought others create and I had to find my own way and that's great, but you cannot do it in the first year of business. You have to dive in, you have to do what you think works. And then you'll figure out with feedback from students and your own observation that there's another way.
There's your way of teaching. And I felt so good that I had found my way out. I was like, yeah, I like to, I like to push people, I like to motivate them. I like to kick them in the box, so then kicks that, what's perfect. And so that's the first program, then I recommend everyone go, go through on the journey that I offer them.
And then I have, and then I have a 12 month group coaching program. But we've gone through Interesting there. And this is fairly new this is the first time I talk about. Actually, it's not on my website yet, so nobody knows it. But the thing is, before we started to record this episode, you were like, oh yeah, are there any painted I notice.
Even though that people are a little bit further in business, 12 month program, is a huge, both investment financially and time wise and the trend I am seeing what was easy to sell before as a 12 month program, now you have to offer people to maybe join for three months or six months.
It could still be the same program, but you offer people to join for shorter month time and they basically then can opt for you know just continuing. And when I was thinking like how do you do this best, is actually having the three months fairly high compared to the 12. So you are having them invest more.
Otherwise it's unfair to those who are willing to invest for 12 months. But after three months you can tell them, Hey, You can now pay the difference, or at least you get, you know, a fair offer, for the next nine months. So this is a change that I've been seeing last one or two years, and now specifically with the economic situation.
You know, people are not stopping spending money, but they're more careful. So if someone has the option of three months versus 12 months and I'm spending maybe one third, even if it's like one fourth of the time, but I'm spending one third, that sounds a better deal right now to test this coach, to test this program, and that's...
And the cool thing about that is that we are seeing upfront payments on those investments versus on the 12 month people up for the payment plan. So if you're thinking as a course creator, this is a smart thing to do because cash flow is key. And then I have a final program on the top for those who wanna make the million Red Circle Mastermind.
Teresa: Yeah. I went through, I had to look at it actually, and it looks really good. And then I looked at your, you did a retreat or something with them as well, and that looked amazing. But I think you're right. I think especially now, people are nervous to invest. I know. And you are right. You know someone just agreed to fly everywhere with me for a day.
So it's not that there isn't the money, it's...
