Ep. 13: How Much Money Do You Need to Make? + How to Price/Sell With Tara Newman

Meg Casebolt 0:01
You’re listening to social slowdown a podcast for entrepreneurs and micro-businesses looking for sustainable marketing strategies without being dependent on social media. Social media is a double-edged sword. It’s a wonderful way to stay connected. But it also can feel like an addictive obligation. And it’s even more complex for businesses, your audience might be right there, but you’ve got to fight with algorithms to maybe be seen by them. So whether you want to abandon social media altogether, or you just want to take a month off, it’s possible to have a thriving business without being dependent on social media. This podcast is all about finding creative, sustainable ways to engage with your audience without needing to lip-sync, send cold DMS, run ads or be available 24/7. Let’s get started.

Hello, today on this social slowdown podcast, I’m going to share an interview that I recorded with Tara Newman. Tara is an incredible business coach. And she is also a Profit First Certified Professional. So she is going to get with us into the nitty gritty of how to turn your business into a financial powerhouse. We’re going to talk about how the fact that running a successful business doesn’t always look sexy from the outside, it might not conform to what online marketers are trying to sell you because it doesn’t always have all these fancy systems and automations and giant audiences. In fact, we talked about how the fastest path to being successful isn’t necessarily to grow the biggest audience. But instead to start with people who already know you to start with those warm and hot leads, and try to sell to them first, before you go out and try to get tons and tons of cold traffic and get them to buy from you. We’ll also talk about how to know how much money you need to make in your business. So that way you can pay yourself what you need to live on. We don’t always have those calculations at the ready. And Tara has this incredible tool, it’s called the revenue goal calculator that will help us determine not just how much we need to pay ourselves, but also how much our business needs to make in order to support those financial goals. We’ll also talk about how to keep as much of your revenue as possible so that you don’t have to work quite as hard. And we’ll talk about how to determine which of the steps and offers that you’re using in your business are the most profitable. So this is an action packed interview. And I’m just gonna get right to it. Here is my interview with Tara Newman. Hello, Tara, I am so excited to have you here to talk about different ways that we can market our business and be really profitable in our businesses without necessarily needing to have super bloated expenses. And I feel like you are the person to talk about this with. So really briefly, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself and your business? And who you help?

Tara Newman 2:58
Sure. Well, first of all, I’m really excited to be here with you today as well. You’re one of my favorite people. You are smart as a whip. Oh, and I always get so much out of our time together. So thank you for having me on.

Meg Casebolt 3:12
I know we’re supposed to do quarterly planning sessions. Sometimes it’s like, well, let’s just complain about sometimes you need someone who’s aligned with your values in such a way that it’s like, we just, we just understand each other I think,

Tara Newman 3:25
yeah, for sure. For sure. Well, I’m Terry Newman, and I am the CEO and founder of the bold leadership revolution. And, you know, I think just to be kind of quick about this is my mission is to really do maybe three things, one, take women from being fearful around money to being financial powerhouses. And that is like beyond a mission at this point. This is a mandate. And the reason why I actually use the word financial powerhouse is in a 2018. Survey put out by American Express the state of women, small business owners, they do, they do an annual report. And they talk about how basically few women are making money in businesses. 88% of women, small business owners are making under $100,000 in revenue in red. So gross top line revenue, but not take home pay. We’re talking about what your entire business makes. Yeah, so let’s be let’s be clear for a second. This was a 2018 survey. I don’t think it’s improved much, probably to be quite quite honest. And at the end, they talk about women, only 1% of women have businesses over a million dollars. And what they say is that when you get to that point, you know you’re this real financial powerhouse and I was with them the entire survey and study until they said that, because I think anytime that we can give women an understanding of how money works At any point, they become a financial powerhouse. And it may or may not lead to necessarily a million dollar business. But it leads to a heck of a lot more good in the world than we have today. And so that’s why I specifically use that term financial powerhouses, because it really stuck in my craw a little bit from that from that survey. And then

Meg Casebolt 5:21
I want to really quickly hop in here and say, I have a master’s degree in International Development, I don’t know if you know this about me. And one of the things that I wrote my master’s thesis on is this idea of how when women get money, whether it’s, you know, in the developing world, or here in you know, the United States where you and I are, but when women get money, entire communities are impacted. You know, when men make money, it goes into boats and bank accounts, like that kind of it tends to be more insular. Whereas when women make money, they hire other women, they invest in their communities, they make changes to the way that their households are running, it’s, it’s, I don’t want to use the, the term empowerment because that feels like it’s being pressed into somebody as opposed to coming from within. But it really does make a difference in not just that one person’s life, but also the greater good around them. There’s research around that. So this idea of being a financial powerhouse, it just resonates with me so much.

Tara Newman 6:17
Yeah, um, and there’s a lot of truth to that when men and women think about money differently and use money differently, for sure. And then in order to do this, you know,I’m a, I’m a prophet for a certified consultant. And so, you know, I work very closely with Mike McCallowitz and the team over there at Profit First, to help them with their mission around eradicating entrepreneurial poverty. But when it was, was really interesting that through my journey, I’ve been certified for a little over a year. And through my journey of working with women in this way, in our program, the profit Academy, what I started to realize was his book starts way ahead of where we actually are, yeah. And that when you look at what is happening in the female, small business ownership space, is a very unsexy thing. That’s called a lack of financial literacy and a lack of business knowledge. And if we can just plug some holes there and give women competence in business and money, then their confidence will grow truly actually, and be embodied. And not be fluffed up like what we’re seeing in some of the online space today. And so it’s very important to me to democratize business education, for women, and to do it in a way that reduces anxiety is calm. And is a safe place for worn out and weary women, business owners to land.

Meg Casebolt 7:57
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of shame around these conversations

Tara Newman 8:00
A tremendous amount.

Meg Casebolt 8:02
Yeah, it’s not just, you know, what, what’s your top line revenue? It’s like, well, how did you not know that and then we feel so guilty and shamed for not having these foundations, but so many of us, we don’t have MBAs, we’re not going through these processes of, you know, coming up with these business plans. So many of us are bootstrapped, home based, you know, like, this wasn’t something that was the plan. When we went to college. It was, I mean, some some of us have advanced degrees, you know, therapists and coaches and, and people who have really great trainings, but the trainings that we’re talking about do not include business training. So you can be an interior designer, and pass the ace that exam and have no idea how to price your services and have no idea what your markup should be, and how to get clients and that’s missing. But because we’ve gone through this educational process, where because we have these skills, we don’t want to acknowledge that there’s a knowledge gap there. Correct. Ah, that’s why I really love working with experts. Because, you know, I work with female experts who are amazing at what they do. They are they have gotten done the schooling they have done the years of professional development, they know how to get their clients results, and it’s so frustrating to see them struggle financially to make money and to grow their business and to get clients. And at the same time, I know how sensitive it is because they’ve been rewarded for their being the expert, they’ve been rewarded for being all knowing they’ve been rewarded for being seen in that way. And like they have to have all their shit together. And, you know, they have to have all the answers. And the reality is, is they don’t even know what they don’t know. Mm hmm. And that’s terrifying. And I’m not here to be a guru

Tara Newman 10:00
I am not here to be better than anybody else. As a matter of fact, please don’t work with me if you if you need me, or you’re looking for a savior, I’m here to stand shoulder to shoulder as an expert in what I do partnering with you as the expert in what you do, and like making a really great team. Yeah, yeah. And I think you make a really good point, which is that we are experts in our industry, you know, having that insight or knowledge of what it is that we do best. But the the marketing and the sales, and the delivery is not always something that’s easy to understand. And so when you’re in that space of I am an expert, but I don’t know how to get clients, the narrative that is being sold to you, in all, the places that most of us online business owners are looking is, well, here’s the formula, here’s the solution, you know, you can go create this funnel. And then if you run, you know, Facebook ads to it, or if you have a really thriving social media presence, then people will go into the funnel, and they will just automatically become your clients. And all you need to do is be visible. And there’s that term of visibility that I feel like I hear all the time. And I’m like, visible to whom and for what is always my follow up question, you know, and one of the things that you told me on our first call many, many months ago now is I work with experts, not influencers. Yeah. And so I would love to hear you kind of make that differentiation of how you define an expert, how you define an influencer, how the ways that they make money can be different. Yeah. All right. So listen, this is just one girl’s opinion upon us set that up, right. Right now, I’m not pretending to be an expert on this at all. But here’s just my I’m just an observant person. And there are I think, what’s happening, and maybe, you know, you can lead some insight to this, too. And I just talked about this on a podcast episode that I did yesterday, is that experts are using influencing influencer marketing tactics. And it’s the wrong tactic for the business model. So influencers and like, if you want to go into the Wayback Machine if you’re like, where this all started, and like get her like a really cheeky view of it, go watch the Joneses with David Duchovny, I think it came out in like 2009. And I don’t know if you saw that, but like, they were basically like these influencers where they were driving around in all these fancy cars, and their neighbors wanted to be like them. And like meanwhile, they didn’t have like a pot to pee in. And, you know, they were being subsidized by all these brands. And anyways, it’s a super it’s a it’s a really cute look yet, you know, influencers and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with influencer marketing, I actually think that it’s, it’s a revenue stream, it’s an option for people, that that’s viable, as long as you understand what it is, and you are knowledgeable in it. And you know, to use the appropriate strategies, influencers are selling their lifestyle, their identity, to promote a product or a brand that they use, and you know, like, honestly, a lot of us do it. Like a lot of us just do that. Like if I’m recommending a product, you know, I’m being an influencer, whether I’m paying for it or not. But I think there’s a difference between, you know, being an affiliate for a program that’s deeply aligned with our values or being, you know, somebody who is saying, this is a product that I use, and therefore you should use it and I’m going to get sponsorship for the fact that I’m doing this. And listen, there’s sleazy and slimy crap in every industry and every everything, right? And so if you’re, if you’re an influencer, it’s a lot of inspiration content. It’s a lot of look at my lifestyle, look at how I use this thing. Look at what I’m doing here. And, you know, swipe up, and here’s my link, and, and I need 10,000 Plus gazillion followers, because whatever, you know, like that’s how I get my brand sponsorships and things like that. So it’s a different model. If you are an expert who’s charging a premium price for your expertise and your service, you don’t need 10s of 1000s of Instagram followers who are mostly bots by the way, go watch go watch fake famous on HBO max.

And so you don’t you don’t need that many people so you need to be using your into your social strategy to make sales. How do you make sales using a social strategy and here’s where I think people get, we get we get off where we’re missing. We’re missing a gap. If everyone’s like, what am I blind spots? Here’s your blind spot. You are applying a tool without having a

system or a process? Hmm? So in the bowl profit Academy we teach that sales process, what are the steps in a sales process? And how do they align those steps align with your buyers psychology with the way your buyer is thinking so that you can meet your buyer where they’re at. So we’re selling from a place of empathy, right? This is what we teach, and then apply whatever tool you want. Use Instagram, use a webinar, use an ad, however you want to use it, but at least understand where it fits in your process. You know, for example, I think social media is a great sales tool. So back in the day, if somebody was gonna come in and make a sale, like say, like in a b2b environment, like a business to business environment, they pick up the phone, they say, Hey, can I come in and make a presentation about my product. And like, if they got through on that cold call, they’d say, Sure, come on in. And then they’d open their PowerPoint. And they’d walk you through a consultative selling experience where they are understanding what your needs are. And they’re positioning their solution. And they’re overcoming your objections. And they’re making a sale. All we’re doing now, or what we should be doing is using, like technology and online tools to do that you no longer have to do come on site and do a PowerPoint presentation, you can outline your PowerPoint presentation. In Instagram, you can outline your PowerPoint presentation in a set of blog posts that are found through SEO, you can outline your sales presentation in a webinar, there are tools for a process, and we are missing that. Everybody’s like I need to jump on the latest fad. I need more eyeballs on my things. So I’m going to do reels because reels is adding you know, gazillion followers to people’s accounts in a very short period of time. No, you need to understand how to walk your buyer through a decision making process to make a sale. And the tool that you’re using for that is irrelevant, irrelevant. I mean, it’s irrelevant in the sense that you want to pick a tool that your respite client is using, yes. But it’s not like this is everyone should be using LinkedIn, because that is the best tool, it’s still, you know, if you’re working with corporate clients, you may want to post on LinkedIn, you may want to have a way to reach those people, you know, so figuring out who your buyer is, and where they’re hanging out, and finding a way to connect with them. But it doesn’t have to be millions and millions and millions of connections. Now in order to make a single sale.

No, I mean, that’s overwhelming. Yeah. So I mean, I, you know, I get folks who come into my programs who have been following some of these, like online marketing, more traditional online marketing strategy is, you know, like webinar to funnel kind of,

you know, stuff and running ads, and they have hundreds of Cotonou contacts being added to their Active Campaign, but they’re not converting. And now they’re managing all of these contacts, and trying to figure out how to engage them. And they wind up just getting dumped, essentially, and ignored. Because there’s no strategy or there’s, it feels too overwhelming for them. I have an incredibly small email list. But I use it very well, because it’s my one of my primary sales tools. It’s not the size, it’s how you use it, right.

Meg Casebolt 18:40
But I think it’s true, you know, like, you can have an email list that’s tiny and has a great conversion rate, everybody opened, not everybody, but like a much larger percentage opens, they click they buy, you can have a much more profitable email list that small, or you can have, you know, 10 or 100x, and have people who aren’t opening who aren’t clicking who aren’t buying. And so what’s the value of having that larger, quote unquote, audience wherever it’s hanging out in your email service provider or on your social media, or wherever you’re collecting that information. But then if nobody is engaging with you, if nobody’s buying from you, then you’re just absorbing the cost of having a larger email list because there is an expense to the size. Yes. So that’s really my biggest concern is that I want women for their sanity. Let’s Let’s just Let’s just Let’s just talk some facts for a second. So one of my favorite things to do with social media is to do research and to listen and to ask questions and to have polls. And so some of the data that I’ve got from my Instagram community is really telling 91% of them feel like social media is not accurately portraying small business ownership. Oh, that’s cool. That

Tara Newman 20:00
They’re that they’re glorifying small business ownership. So my Instagram community is brilliant.

Well, they’re following you. So they must be doing something right. 86% of them responded that they feel like the online business culture promotes that your revenue is tied to your value as an as a person. And as being that, that your revenue and financial success is, is now creating an identity. And that is also been discussed on

this coffee Zilla. He’s got a YouTube channel. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him, but he interviewed a professor at Copenhagen Business School about fake entrepreneurship. And the reason why entrepreneurship, is it, we’re actually seeing a decline in like valuable entrepreneurship, which is actually a problem. Yeah. Because it’s become identity. So identity, but it’s about their identity, I just want to call myself an entrepreneur. Hmm. It’s, there’s a status to that. And he talks about it in there as well. And then 100% of my Instagram population said that, in 2022, prioritizing their mental health is mission critical. And we have to really consider how our financial situation and outcomes impact our mental health, our level of stress, and worry, Gallup has done a poll and small women’s small business owners 61 of them, 61% of them have reported experiencing daily worry, which is dramatically higher than their male counterparts, and linking it to money related issues, including things like access to capital and right money, knowledge and things like that. But I think a certain do to a certain extent, the worry would also come from that lack of financial literacy of if you don’t know what your cash flow is going to be that month, you’re going to worry about whether or not you can pay your expenses or pay yourself or if your expenses are so high that you aren’t paying yourself, then you’re going to be freaking out about the fact that your business isn’t making money. But if you don’t even know what your profit numbers are, you know, it’s it’s something that I struggled with, for my first couple years of business to where it was like, I could tell you what my top line revenue was, I could tell you what all the money the business was making. But it wasn’t until I got to tax season, then I was like, Oh, that was not a great year for me. But I wasn’t keeping a finger on the pulse of how much I was taking home. Because I wasn’t paying myself regularly, I just let the money sit in my business banking account, or I would take money when I needed it. But it wasn’t on a regular, you know, rhythm of now I pay myself on the first of the month, and I pay myself through gussto. So I know that I’m going to be paying my taxes. And you’re like, I didn’t have that knowledge that that was something that I should be setting up. Or how much I should be paying myself or, you know, there was so much hesitation about doing things wrong, that I just wasn’t doing them at all. Yeah, and and, you know, we’re at an inflection point. Hmm. We are at an inflection point. And I know a lot of women, small business owners don’t take in as much news and business news and economic news and financial news, beyond kind of what they are getting in their feeds, which is largely based on algorithm is largely based on recycled content is largely based on confirmation bias. Because they feel like that’s overwhelming. And that’s scary. I’m not saying they’re bad people because they don’t take in this information. I’m saying, you know, I understand this as a pain point. But we’re also at an inflection period. And when you look at all the what’s happening around us, so I’ve been in the online space for 10 years. You could spit and make money in 2014 1516 17. You know, it was really easy. You didn’t have to have a lot of business knowledge. You didn’t have to have a lot of business acumen. I mean, heck, I’ve watched people just have one lucky break in a Facebook group where the Facebook group owner of a $10,000 a 10,000 person Facebook was like, Hey, you should go work with sewing. So because she’s amazing, and the next thing you know, her business was like 10 Next thing overnight, that’s not reality.

But these are the things that were happening and that’s slowing down. That’s not happening anymore. Your buyers have been scammed. They have been grifted on and especially women, because women are the largest group of people who

We’re entering small business ownership. And if you don’t think the marketers know that you are a prime target for them,

they are getting real crafty with the way they market based on identity. So if your business has problems, you’re bad and wrong. It’s something wrong with your mindset. Right? It’s not that you our business model isn’t working a certain way, or you sit down and do a math problem. Yeah. Or you know, and it’s becoming self reinforcing. You’re, we’re watching these messages become self reinforcing. I’m an overall lots of people like talking to over thinkers. And as somebody with ADHD, I’d like to give this the big middle finger, like, like, so. Like you’re an over thinker, stop being such an over thinker. That’s a mindset. We need to do this about, you know, we need to fix your overthinking. I don’t know maybe I’m just a deep thinker. Yeah. Maybe I might processing my thoughts is my genius. Yeah, that’s really concerning, too. I haven’t seen that show up in. But I’m also like, trying very hard to not take in this kind of, of input for me right now. But I think that overthinking is a strength of mine. And maybe not overthinking but processing information gathering, right? Gathering information from a wide variety of sources and trying to find patterns in there. And if somebody tries to tell me Stop overthinking, and do this instead, that’s a red flag for me. Because I’m like, Well, what am I not thinking about? What are you not thinking about it? I think that there’s something here, what are you trying to keep me from knowing about how things are actually working by gaslighting me into believing that there’s something wrong with me or that I don’t need to know that piece of things. You know, I, I believe in simplification. But I’m concerned about people over simplifying to tell their own narrative and to shut you off from information that can be valuable. So what’s happening is, is we have a mass amount of women who are looking for the new frontier of business. And they’re flocking to the internet in droves, like the pioneering days when people are flocking out west for the gold rush, right? Like, we’ve got women flocking to the internet. And the internet’s a big place. But they’re finding social media. And they think that is the internet.

And that is the way, right. And so then they get into the into that then now they’re in the matrix. And now they’re taking in all these messages about how bad and wrong they are. And they don’t know what they don’t know. But they know they have some blind spots. And they’re so willing to trust somebody else over trusting themselves, that they wind up buying into all of these marketing tactics, that are very expensive, and don’t really yield a result. And that is where their profit, profitability is flying out the window. Why aren’t business influencers and web celebs talking about profitability? Who benefits when you don’t profit? They do because you’re spending money with them.

Who benefits when people tell you? You’re you’re in scarcity, you have a scarcity mindset Don’t be scrimping and saving, scrimping and saving as bad. I think saving is the best thing ever. Because when I am more discerning with my dollars, I don’t have to fucking work as hard.

Meg Casebolt 28:32
Right, like, I don’t have to work as hard. I’m more of what I make. And then I’m not chasing all the new dollars in the door. Yeah. And there are ways you can use your money to make money passively that aren’t passive income. It’s called investing your money. Right? And so but that’s a totally different conversation.

Tara Newman 28:51
Like, how can we was like my whole, like, how do we unhook people from this? And I think what was really interesting, and again, I said, we’re a real inflection point. So I’m like bringing a lot of things together here. I was watching the Lula rich documentary. And what I found most fascinating about the Lula rich documentary is if, if you’re an MLM fine, I don’t care like I’m literally make money, how you want to make money. I think that lots of people start in MLMs. And realize that’s not the way and there’s a better way, but they like being independent, and they like making their own money. And then they start small businesses. I’m not judging anybody how anybody makes money. But this is my point. They enter into an MLM and they’re told you’re you’re small, you’re running your own business, you’re not your distributor, weren’t your distributor for somebody else, okay. It is not your business. And then they’re hyping them up around the lifestyle, or hyping them up around abundance. And since people don’t really understand what wealth is, especially in this country, we associate it with more things. And so they start to do you go that path and then what was really fascinating in LuLaRoe

that, then they started to encourage them to have their husbands retire. Because then if you are out there buying all your Louis Vuitton, your trucks and your husband’s retired, guess what? You are dependent upon that income stream, you are now enslaved. Yeah. And you don’t have a choice. However, what could solve this problem, a little bit of business knowledge, a little bit of business literacy, and a little bit of financial literacy. I watched a woman on the show, spend $55,000 I’m apartment, my calculator wasn’t planning on doing math, right.

Meg Casebolt 30:35
Live math happening now. Um,

Tara Newman 30:39
because this really fascinated me. And this was like, when I started to feel like, this is a mandate for me and not just a mission. Alright, so this woman woman went and she spent they were some of them, were making six figure like, checks from enrollments. Each month, they were making these women who got in early and we’re making a lot of money. And I’m one of them went and spent $55,000 took a $55,000 check and bought a truck and bought a new truck, and then winds up going bankrupt by the end of her tenure as a lulu distributor. Now, if she took that $55,000 and instead put it in just your like, total stock market index fund, right and figure she was in her 30s. So let’s give her 30 years for retirement. And the compound interest over the last 50 years is on average about 11%. Let’s be conservative, say 7%. She would have turned that into $418,000. In 30 years by investing it. Yeah, right. Instead she’s bankrupt. Yeah, and now needs I’ve been bankrupt and now needs to spend 11 years repairing her financial situation from declaring bankruptcy. And that was just one check. They were getting multiples of these. Oh my gosh. So when you have just some of this information, and listen, this isn’t just happening in MLMs, go watch some of these cult drama documentaries, these MLM documentaries, and you start to draw the parallels between that and the online business industry. Yeah, and our friend, Maggie has been talking about this a lot, Patterson, and Michelle means or what? Podcast duped, right. And if we can just get more of this knowledge and talk more plainly, and be willing to be beginners and not experts. And not go well, I know that already. Or that’s, you know, I don’t I don’t want to that’s new learning something new is scary, or any of those things. But if we just be the slightest bit brave, and take a tiny step, we could be keeping so much more of our money than we are. And using that to generate greater wealth passively. And I also think like maintaining our wealth, holding on to our income, but also making more by charging more. Yes, like these, it’s okay, if your business model is low, you know, low cost, high volume, but you’re gonna have to hustle to get the amount of people into your funnel to do a $50 product $100 product and sell 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of them. Or if you’re an expert, which is who you are talking to the folks who have this high level of expertise, don’t sell $50 products. So $50,000 contracts, you only have to sell one. Right? So let’s unpack this for a hot second. Yes, please. There’s nothing wrong with low dollar products, per se. And this is where we lack a lot of nuance in this conversation, membership sites, low dollar products, those are great. If you’re working a nine to five and want a side hustle, another revenue stream, all for that those products are great. If you already have established consistent revenue coming in, and you want another revenue stream, great, as long as you’re doing it because you want another revenue stream and it’s fun, and you’re not doing it because you’re trying to get the people to pay you who keep telling you you’re too expensive, they are never going to buy from you stop.

Meg Casebolt 34:28
Wait, let me just say that again to make sure that we hear it. If you are currently running something that is a higher price offer, and people are saying you’re too expensive, then making something less expensive does not mean that they will suddenly buy from you. The objection is not necessarily the cost of your service. It’s how they portray the value of what it is that you’re trying to give them. Correct and they’re not valuing you and you never want to work with them ever, ever, ever. Because we don’t work with people who don’t value

Tara Newman 35:00
us ever, period end of story, don’t do it. Um, so there’s a place for these offers, when you might be ready, when you might be considering it.

But they are a lot harder to sell. Now in order to sell than a higher dollar offer, so if you’re going to be spending your time somewhere, I’d like to see you spend your time on selling a premium offer. However, here’s what the marketers know, the marketers know that you don’t want to sell the marketers know that you don’t want to have difficult conversations, the marketers know that you don’t feel comfortable or confident communicating your value and owning your area of expertise. So they are giving you a letter, they’re saying, no problem. You don’t have to do any of those things, sell a $47 product, people are just going to click on a link and buy, you won’t even have to talk to them. And you go awesome. And they go, you know, it’s gonna take some time and some work. And women are love work. Women love to work, women love to work for free. Women have been conditioned to do all the free work, all the annoying little tasks that nobody else wants to do. Women will raise their hand over and over and over again. So they’re like, no problem. I got this hold my beer. Yeah, I can hustle, I can do the work, watch me do it. I can sell 4011 $3,147 products to get to, you know, a revenue that will actually allow me to feed my family, and then have to do it year after year after year after year, month after month after month, right? Hold my beer and then they go away. I can’t afford beer. So don’t worry about the beer. Right? You’re being manipulated. They’re using your internal psychology against you. Yeah. And if you’re not willing to do the work to reverse your own internal psychology, and by the way, this is the work because as a business owner, you have to constantly fight against human behavior. Think about it. Human behavior is comfort seeking, protect yourself. Fear avoidant.

Meg Casebolt 37:24
Risk avoidant, it’s our brains, we don’t want to change our brains want to keep us where we are, they do not want us to change anything about our lives, because that is a fear of the unknown, right? Fear of the unknown fear of uncertainty, all those things, every single thing that a business owner has to face every single day, right? So if if you you cannot let them manipulate your internal psychology, you have to control that. That is the one thing you actually can control. inflection point, we’ve got inflation happening, right? And so people are like, Oh, my gosh, inflation freaking out freaking out about inflation. You can’t control inflation. But you can control how you think about inflation, and how you run your business during inflationary periods. You can control the way you think about it. So why are so many people allowing marketers into that protective safe space in our brains? I don’t I don’t get it. Why are we letting people tell us how to think, I think because it’s scary to, to blaze your own trail. And it’s much easier to follow somebody else’s framework. And if somebody can promise you that their system works, then there’s comfort in knowing that someone has been there before you. And if you don’t know your numbers, which is why I really get along. You know, like, if you don’t know your numbers, then you can believe someone else and saying, Oh, it’ll just work out. And so then you know, you chase every sale Chase every sale, instead of how much money do I need to make? Overall? How much money do I need to live on? And then how much money would I do I need my business to make in order to have the take home pay and you know, it requires the best and

Tara Newman 39:14
it’s well, so this is what’s interesting is that marketers will tell you, people won’t buy information or knowledge. They won’t buy competence. They’ll buy confidence. So we’ve got all these like, feel good, feel good about your business, feel good about your money, feel good, feel confident, feel like this manufactured. It’s all right. It’s all manufactured. But really, you need to be buying competence. Yes. Right. And so that’s why, for me, it’s about democratizing business education. It’s about selling competence skills, tangible things you can take away and use forever and ever and ever. Nobody can take your skills away from you.

Meg Casebolt 40:00
No one can take your knowledge away from you, you know, the tools that you can use can go completely under, you know, when I think about like, the product launch formula that everyone for years and years was doing the three, three videos, each of which has an email, they talk about the, you know, the same pain points because they’re following this formula. And it worked like really well, for a short amount of time. And the halflife on that was about a year. So for about a year, we saw everybody doing these three part video series. And then over time, it started to peter out because it stopped working as well, because everyone was doing it. But the skill of knowing how to talk about what it is that you sell does not go away, it’s just the format of the three part video series that the tactic versus the strategy. And when you were talking about sales processes, it’s like nothing about the sales process has changed. It’s just the way that you’re packaging it up can be different. And so the tools, whether that’s the three part video series, or the webinar with this format, in your slides, or the social media to go into the DMS or whatever that is, those are going to change all the time. But the skills of knowing how to position your offer. So that way your audience is interested in knowing how to price your offers. So that way, you’re actually making money from it, knowing how to track how profitable that offer is, you know, how much time are you actually spending on that service? How much what is your conversion rate for that product? What how many people do you actually need to get into your website and into your email list in order to make a sale? Knowing that information is not something that people can take away from you or wave a hand at and say, Oh, no, no, my way is better, you’re overthinking it, right? And here’s what here’s, here’s what this boils down to. There’s a cost to making money, there’s a cost to selling, and there is a cost to delivering. And what we need to find is the balance the harmony between the cost of selling, and the cost of delivering, and where you’re picking up a lot of cost in selling a lot of costing money, a lot of cost and time. And a lot of cost and energy is when you are putting out reams of content, new content all the time content, content, content content, you I want you to log your hours that you spend on content creation, and include that into all of your working hours, not just the delivery of the service. And I tell you, you’re better off working at Starbucks, I can almost guarantee it. Right? So why are we putting out so much content? Well, that’s what the marketers are telling us to do. Right? Or, okay, we are going to sell this low ticket offer.

Tara Newman 42:43
And we are going to enroll you through a funnel through a through a webinar. And we need to make like five sales a month. Do you know how many people you need to get on the webinar to convert to those sales? How are you going to get those folks on how you driving that traffic to a webinar? Paid advertising? Wait, allow me to bring up some statistics and data on paid advertising, if you will just for giggles I am here for statistics. Okay, so Scott Galloway, I adore him. I don’t know if you know him. He writes the blog, no mercy, no malice, and he did a blog post called carcinogens. It was epic. And he quotes in there. I didn’t know this existed. But he quotes and references the World Federation of Advertisers that they have this report called a compendium of ad fraud knowledge for media investors. But it’s a mouthful.

It is but like why are people who have no idea that this exists? running ads? Yeah. So in this report 88% of clicks on ads are fraudulent. What I was blown away, click farms bots pay for clicks like 88% of clicks on ads are fraudulent. It makes a lot of sense. Because like Facebook has no regulation around this like you they just it’s a slot machine. You put money in and you hope you hit a jackpot but the lights are always on over there for sucks, right? Yeah, he has no control over any of this. So here’s another quote from that article was Scott Galloway. A study by MIT Professor Katherine Tucker found that even targeting something as basic as gender was unsuccessful more than half the time I ate it was worse than random. And Nielsen analysis of a household income adjusted ad campaign found that only 25% of its ads were reaching the right households. As much as 65% of location targeted ad spend is wasted. Plaintiffs in a class action suit against Facebook

Meg Casebolt 45:00
book have alleged its targeting algorithms accuracy was between 9% and 41%. And quoted internal Facebook emails describing the company’s targeting is crap. And abysmal. So you’re spending a lot of money on ads that aren’t getting the people that you want to get. And then you’re spending that money and you’re driving them to whatever your sales processes, which may be a Facebook group, and maybe a webinar, or maybe an automated email series. But if you’re not getting, you know, it’s like, calories in calories out, but like junk in junk out, if you’re not getting good leads, then you’re not going to make good sales, they’re not going to be a good fit for what it is that you’re doing. Right. So let’s talk about solutions. Yes, I’m just gonna say, I feel like we’ve been a little bit pessimistic, and we’re not usually this.

Tara Newman 45:49
Honestly, like, I think this is all great. Yeah, you got to know the lay of the land. Right. Like, I think this is great, because now once we have information, we can make better decisions. Yeah. So what’s the alternative to this? Okay, so So here’s alternatives. I’m speaking to experts running service based businesses, right? Because we need to know what the business model is and apply and appropriate strategy. That’s one, one gentleman, right. I’m not against ads. I think ads can can possibly be helpful. I haven’t personally run any. But if I were to run ads, one, I obviously want to know, this information. Yeah. And know what I’m getting into and know that I’m gambling? And is that the risk that I want to take? Maybe it is personally for me, I have a really high actual lifetime value of my customer. Yeah. So I can afford some ad spend to see what happens, I can afford to play around. But most people don’t have this data. Yeah. If you don’t know how, what your average sales cycle is, or what your customer lifetime value is, or what your cost per acquisition is, then how do you know how much you can spend? Right? All right, we want to focus on the most profitable strategies to get you to the revenue that you need, the revenue that you need.

How do you know how much revenue you need? Now, that’s not the shiny objects, not the million dollar, listen, if you want to do that, you got to pass a whole bunch of like benchmark steps anyway, you’re not going to leap from a $10 business to a million dollar business, you have to get through 100,000 200,000 500,000. Right. And along the way, you’re going to be able to make better decisions about whether or not that’s the responsibility that you want to take on. And for for most people, and most women, it is not what women are looking for, is they are either looking for the the ability to provide for their families, provide the upgrades, pay for college for their kids, take some fun family vacations, and whether they’re thinking about it or not, I want them to be building wealth. And I want them to consider, I want them to consider that they don’t have to be 65 to retire, they could be any age to retire as long as they’ve built the wealth to do so. And I want them to realize that we do not want you at 69 years old, shaking your ass on reels.

Nobody wants to see that. Okay, like and feeling like you’re in this dire need for money. We want to utilize your best earning years now and leverage that for later. And I think people just like to think long about retirement. It’s really unsexy. But I’ve decided I’m done at 55. And I think that’s sexy as hell, yeah. Like, I’m just gonna cut 510 years off of that. But recognizing, if you want to retire at 65, at 60, whatever that is, then you need to be putting aside money now, which needs to come out of your business. So you know, my household, we contribute 50 or $60,000 a year to our retirements now, because we do want to retire early. But that also means that my business needs to make $100,000 to be able to put $50,000 into my retirement accounts. Yes. So people don’t realize the intricacy of their personal finances to their business finances. And so usually I see this as a giant disaster in my entire career, when I’ve been in businesses where the CEO spends more than he earns, or spends as much as he earns. And then what happens is, is he needs that money. Where’s he going to get that money from? Or she gonna get that money from the business? And now we have chaos, because we have to go make more money, make more money, make more money, because I got to pay for the car and the House and the this and that and all the things

that my luxury lifestyle and right. So if we can look at what our needs are. And here’s the other thing we have a lot of people who are not able, their business is not able to support even their basic needs, because they’re so focused on, like, the luxuries that they may have one day. Yeah. And and that’s not that’s not happening, we need to cover things in order before we can have this huge income and impact. It’s like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in terms of what you’re gonna do. Like you need to pay for your food and your shelter and your water before you start worrying about, you know, what are the self actualizations? Are the luxury vacations or the fancy cars, but people don’t want to buy that? No, so So the web celebs and the marketers are marketing self actualization before basic needs.

Right? And that’s why we’re all getting so messed up, is because we can’t actually hit these things. Because we’re too focused on this nebulous, perfect, like, out here, this this thing, right? So let’s just get honest with ourselves, and look at what it is that we need to provide for our families. What are those luxury upgrades that you want? What do you need to thrive in your life? And this isn’t about scrimping and saving? Living good life? Right? But But what do you actually need? And then how can you translate that into salary and into revenue? And if you’re like, how do you do that? Tara help me, I do, and it’s free.

So we have a free a calculator, a revenue goal calculator, and what you do is you put in your expenses, and I have a 15 minute video that walks them through, you put in your expenses, and it tells you how much money you would need to make on a yearly basis. And then what it does is using Profit First numbers, it does Profit First math for you, and tells you what that would equate to in revenue.

So if you need to make $100,000 a year, take home, bring home, your your CEO, putting putting in your bank account, not your business, but your personal bank account, it’s going to tell you that you need to be earning about $200,000 in revenue in your business, if you’re going to operate on a profit first model. And the calculator will also tell you at that point, how much you have for how much you have for expenses, how much you’re going to pay in taxes. So this is a calculator that you’re going to want to download and use over and over and over again, as your personal financial situation changes. As your business financial situation changes. This is really amazing. What what is possible for us when our money has a purpose. What’s possible for us when we have enough? Yes, because that’s when more than enough happens. But everybody’s like chasing more than enough without having enough. Yeah, and I love this calculator, too, because my husband and I sat down and looked at it together. And I went and what you were talking about earlier with the you know, if you get a big check, then you should retire your husband play, you know, we sat down and looked at how much is his salary from his full time job? And how much would my business need to make to not just cover our expenses, but also replace his salary? And that was a big change in my awareness of what my goals should be. It doubled what I want the business to make next year. Not that I want to retire him right away. But that I want to have that number. I wasn’t thinking big enough. Yeah. And in general, I think pretty big. And this doubled the number that I want to make. And then I kind of before I started to panic and go, Oh, holy shit, how am I gonna make that I was like, okay, but no, the same things that are working for if you know what’s working for you, you can do more of it. But before you can say like pulling a revenue number out of the air, I want to make a million dollars or half a million dollars or whatever. What does that mean for your life? Right? Right. And then here’s the thing, then when you’re like, you have that number, then you understand the strategy. How do you get to $200,000 a year I’m just using this as the rough, right? It’s nice to easy, easy math. Yeah, like you know, how would how would you get there? What’s the quickest path what’s the most profitable way? And you know, the most profitable way to to do that is to sell to the leads you already have. You already have leads you just don’t see them. But I promise you they’re there

to really get good at sales and converting warm and hot leads before you go running ads for cold leads. If you cannot convert your warm and hot leads to more revenue, like hell, you’re converting your cold leads.

It just light the dollars on fire.

Like it’s not happening. And so that’s gonna click in by No, they’re not. It’s gonna take you. You have to put them through a sales process. Yeah, click and buy. Um, so you

No, really understanding your target market.

Really understanding the free tools you have to help you convert and referrals. When you focus on the people who are paying you, and you get them excellent results. It doesn’t talk about it. Here’s my favorite story about so I always tell people just think, think back to when the internet didn’t exist. What would you do? Yeah, you talk to people you already know. So my husband was a triathlete and had his triathlon community. And then a bunch of them were business owners and stuff like that. They would refer to each other. Nobody did anything without checking in with this community. Anybody know, a plumber, a massage therapist, a hairstylist, a bike repair shop, a landscaper, a pool person, like nothing happened outside of this community. And so say the community was like 100 people. And then 20 of those people bought from people within the community. And then those 20 people, when they’re asked, Who do you know, who does massage? Who does landscaping now you’re referring outside people to inside the community? Yep. And now they’re referring Look how big the network gets really fast. Yeah. The the team that cleans my house was one of them was telling you about it this morning, where she was like, I don’t need to do advertising, because my clients just tell other people about me, there’s always somebody looking for a good house cleaner. And when you know, you don’t like my entire street now uses my house cleaning. Because it’s like, well, they’re already here. So they, they didn’t even have to knock door to door. I was just telling my neighbors and my neighbors told my other neighbors like, it doesn’t have to be that, you know, they don’t have to go and run Facebook ads, everyone who’s in our, you know, five talent vicinity, they can just tell people to refer and give referral bonuses, and have that consistent high quality service. It doesn’t always have to be super complex. Yeah, it’s just not that hard. It’s not that hard. It’s so much harder than we need to. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. And the reason why it’s not easy is because it’s not an overnight and worth being sold, that these things happen to house have to happen overnight, or they’re not worth it. And it’s a lie. It is. It’s a lie. So I really just want everybody to make the most profitable dollars that they can make. And it starts with knowing what your best revenue goal is, knowing what is already working for you focusing on the people who are already paying you and understanding how to sell. There it is. All right. Well, guys, I am so thrilled that Tara was able to share so much with us today, definitely head over to her website, I’ll have a link in the show notes. And right there, you can grab that revenue goal calculator and start playing with your numbers and taking a look at how much it costs to run a business. And then maybe taking some time to look at your own expenses and the revenue and where you can where you can make more and spend less time. Meg, thanks so much for having me on. Because this is not a conversation that’s being had in a lot of places. So true. And it’s really confronting for people to have these conversations. And it’s like, they almost don’t believe it when they when they hear it because it’s such a different conversation. And I just really want to thank you for starting this and allowing this conversation to happen here. It is my pleasure because I believe in what you do. So thank you so, so much for being here. And I will talk to you soon, Tara. Thank you, Lee.

Meg Casebolt 58:41
Thank you so much for listening to the social slowdown podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or come on over to social slowdown.com and sign up for our email list so you never miss an episode. We’d also love if you could write a review to help other small business owners find the show you can head over to social slowdown.com/review Or grab that link in our show notes for easy access. We’ll be back soon with more tips to help you market your business without being beholden to social media Talk to you then.

Please forgive any typos as this transcript was automatically generated by otter.ai.