In today's episode, we help Chris find the confidence to build his side hustle business.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's podcast we help Chris find the confidence to build his side hustle business.
Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.
Shane Sams: What's going on everybody, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. Super excited to welcome another member of the Flip Your Life community onto the show so that we can help them take their business to the next level.
Shane Sams: But before we do that, want to remind you that the Flipped Lifestyle podcast is brought to you by the Flip Your Life Community. We do not sell ads, sponsorships on our show. We are completely supported by you the listener and our members inside of the Flip Your Life community. We would love to help you take your online dreams to the next level, just like we're about to help our guest today.
Shane Sams: If you'd like to learn more about the Flip Your Life Community, go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can check out all of our amazing membership options we have. We have an entire community of hundreds of entrepreneurs from around the world, courses that can help you at any stage of your online business and if you need a little bit more help from me and Jocelyn, we do live member Q and A's every single month. We'd love to have you in there. Check it out over at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife.
Jocelyn Sams: Now it is time to introduce today's guest Chris Holdheide. Welcome to the show.
Chris Holdheide: Hi Jocelyn, hi Shane. Thanks for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it, thanks.
Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, we are excited to talk to you today and we cannot wait to meet you in person in Lexington in September. We're very excited that you are coming and that someone in your family too, right?
Chris Holdheide: Yes. Actually, it's me and my twin brother. We both signed up at the same time and decided -
Shane Sams: That's awesome.
Chris Holdheide: Yeah, we kind of debated it at first and then I kinda told him ahead of time that I was gonna buy my ticket and I kinda got him to, push him a little bit to buy his ticket and then, lo and behold here we are, we're going. We're gonna be there.
Jocelyn Sams: Well are you guys identical twins, first of all?
Chris Holdheide: Yes, we are.
Shane Sams: Do you have identical businesses?
Chris Holdheide: No.
Jocelyn Sams: And, are you not going to switch name tags at the event? I'm just curious.
Chris Holdheide: We might, just never know.
Shane Sams: See that would just totally mess me up. You look down, you're sitting at different tables. I'm on stage. I'm getting confused. I wouldn't know what was going on, man. You can't do that to us, man.
Shane Sams: So before we get started and get deep into your story and help you take your business, what you're working on right now to the next level. Like, what made you decide to come to Flip Your Life LIVE in Lexington, Kentucky this September? What was the big, you know you said you kinda looked at it, you thought about it, and you wrestled with it. What pushed you over the edge and then allowed you to push your brother over the edge too? To drag him down I-75 kicking and screaming to Lexington?
Chris Holdheide: I'd been to several conferences over the years, but a lot of them were ... They're very generic and they just had a lot of you know content where it was just like, I felt like it didn't really help me or improve or help me move forward with my business. I wanted something that was a lot more hands on and that's what you guys were talking about, more hands on, and like you're teaching something then we're gonna go do something. I just thought, "that's gonna be what I need. That's what I need." Someone show me something and then I can do it and I can get my hands dirty and kind of learn some things.
Shane Sams: Awesome. Our philosophy when we started Flip Your Life LIVE was to create an event where you did more work in two days and made more progress than you had done like in the year before you actually got to the event. So we actually designed it that way on purpose, like it's deep teaching, it's a no pitch event. We're not going to be selling anything at the end of every session, like they do at some events. We're going to go into a topic, dive as deep as we can into it, stop, let everybody work on it for a minute. We'll be sitting around at tables doing masterminds, helping each other to make progress on whatever we're doing. We're going to focus a lot on traffic and sales. Closing the deal and getting more people to your actual deals.
Shane Sams: But then we come back out and Jocelyn and I actually stop and answer questions every session for thirty minutes to make sure there's no problems. You're completely clear on what you need to do. You can wrestle with it for a minute and then we even come back after the event at night and we have these big working sessions. So we do like four sessions a day. You work on everything at the event, you get to ask questions and then, we all come back and mastermind after the questions session so we get to go out and get things done. I'm glad you're coming. Have you been coming to any of the weekly live trainings that I'm doing for Flip Your Life LIVE, have you been coming to those?
Chris Holdheide: Yes. I've been coming to almost every single one.
Shane Sams: Love it.
Chris Holdheide: Just not the ones, some were during the day, during work, but most of them, any of them in the evening, I've pretty much been there for every single -
Shane Sams: You've got the replays there too, if you want to watch those.
Chris Holdheide: Yes.
Shane Sams: How are those helping you? Are those good, getting you kind of making some progress before you even get to the event?
Chris Holdheide: Those are incredible. So far I've been able to create my first course, get it up, get it launched and just actually make my first sale.
Shane Sams: Awesome, wow, that's amazing.
Jocelyn Sams: Wow, yeah.
Shane Sams: If that's not a sign that you should be coming to Flip Your Life LIVE, so you can take some massive action. You need to be there. You can go to flippedlifestyle.com/live to check out how many tickets are left. We were under thirty the last time I checked and we want to announce this, I think we've said this on the podcast already, but this is the last time we're doing the big Flip Your Life LIVE conference. We've got some other ideas that we're gonna pursue next year. This will be your last chance to come to Flip Your Life LIVE so join us in Lexington, Kentucky, September nineteenth through to twenty-first at Flip Your Life LIVE. We would love to see you there and you get to meet Chris and help us figure out if it's him or his brother for the entire event.
Jocelyn Sams: All right Chris, so let's start talking a little bit about what you are doing online and tell us also a little bit about you and your background and how you started doing this?
Chris Holdheide: Okay. I started way back in 2004 actually, with my very first business. I started doing a lot of different things from multi-level marketing for about four and a half years and then I jumped into affiliate marketing and building my first website in 2008. It really just snowballed from there until today where I have, basically my bigger website now, that I work with mostly now.
Shane Sams: What's that website called?
Chris Holdheide: My main website is sidehustleacademy.com.
Shane Sams: Awesome. And it looks like you have done a lot of side hustles. Being the MLMer and the affiliate marketer and doing all the side hustles.
Jocelyn Sams: Yeah and I need to know about this, okay so, in your form that you filled out to be and the podcast it says that you run your own brick and mortar business gating for swine and dairy. I need to know about this.
Shane Sams: What? Like pigs and cows?
Chris Holdheide: Yes.
Shane Sams: It's going to be another farm episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast.
Jocelyn Sams: How does one get into building gates for swine and dairy? Just curious.
Chris Holdheide: So that business was actually started by my father and he retired from it back in 2009, which I took it over. Me and another guy, we partnered up and we took it over and we've been running it ever since. It's basically a gating and manufacturing business. We build gating for swine barns, cattle barns, stuff like that. We've been doing that for just over ten years now. You know that's been going very well. We actually just built a brand new shop, fifteen thousand square foot shop.
Shane Sams: Wow. That's amazing. I would say though, that that's a lot of hard work to run something labor intensive with, you've got to have people that you manage. I mean building, fencing and gating can't be easy.
Chris Holdheide: No, it's a very high overhead business. It's also, it can be stressful at times and I wear a lot of multiple hats in that business. Because I do a wide variety of different things. Pricing, quoting, stuff like that.
Shane Sams: Awesome. So is that kind of what your motivation is to get into that online world, is hey, we've got a high risk, high overhead, if something goes wrong, you know, I'm sure there's some liability involved and all that. Someone loses their pig herd, right, whatever.
Chris Holdheide: Yeah, yeah.
Shane Sams: You know what I'm saying. I mean if you do something wrong, the gate breaks, pigs you know, run away, right?
Chris Holdheide: Yeah. So it does very well. People are going to come back over time 'cause you know stuff wears out and stuff like that. So the gating business is pretty stable for the most part. I mean, this year's a little slower than the last few but you know, that's why I kinda turned to online business is because I want something that kinda supplements my income a little more and gives me more ... It's less overhead, it's more time with my family, stuff like that. That's what I'm really looking for.
Shane Sams: Love it. Tell me about this MLM route a little bit because you know we hear a lot of people get into the MLM place and some people even try to mask an MLM as being like an online business. And if you're an MLMer out there, please don't get mad at me, but Jocelyn and I just don't like MLMs at all. But tell us a little bit about the MLM route, like what were you doing and like why did you get away from that multi-level marketing aspect of a side hustle?
Chris Holdheide: So yeah when I started that, I had a few friends in it and I thought it was kinda a neat thing but what I learned, 'cause basically I was selling insurance, investments, stuff like that. But in order to even get paid in that business you had to have a license. So you had to go get an insurance license and investment license, stuff like that. Then on top of that, what they don't really tell you is that, MLM is a very high energy type business. You have to be beating people's doors down, calling people. You have to be doing it every day or you're just not going to get anywhere with it. And I did it for four and a half years. It was okay but in the end, I just realized that it wasn't for me.
Shane Sams: Yeah, MLM is 24/7. And like, it's not just beating down doors. It's beating down everybody's door. Like you gotta beat down your friend's doors, you gotta be Facebook messaging people. You gotta be like, you have to literally like make every single network relationship in your life, family, friend or anywise into a business relationship. And it can get uncomfortable and like Jocelyn gets them all the time from people and she's like "Oh my gosh, I don't want to buy your MLM product."
Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I've had to take people, block people from my phone because they won't stop texting me stuff.
Shane Sams: It's like when you hear from someone, you haven't talked to them in ten years. They haven't even liked a picture on your Facebook page and they just show up and be like "Hey girl, I got something good for you."
Jocelyn Sams: My rule is if I haven't talked to you in like the last five years without something that's not MLM related, I probably don't want to talk to you about something that is.
Shane Sams: Yeah. And it will just wear you out. It's like it doesn't give you any, there's no chance for passive income. I mean they say there is, but the top, what is it, one to three per cent actually get any kind of income or passive income out of those big networks. You know what I'm saying. So. We're not going to be building any downlines today y'all, if you're here for that you're in the wrong place, okay?
Jocelyn Sams: All right, so you decided MLM wasn't for you and you then decided to start a website then?
Chris Holdheide: Yeah, I started a personal finance website first in 2008. And then I wrote a bunch of content for the first year I had it up. I didn't make a whole lot. I started running AdSense on there and I think I made maybe a hundred bucks in my first year doing it. In the second year I kind of figured out this thing called SEO and how all that stuff worked and then I started dabbling with that and then within a year I was making about a thousand bucks a month doing that.
Shane Sams: Nice, that's awesome man. Yep. That was mostly of affiliates or ads? Or just a combination of like everything?
Chris Holdheide: That was just pure advertising at that point.
Shane Sams: So all Google ad clicks, people click it you get, you're basically using SEOs, search engine optimization to bring more people to blog posts that you wrote and then hopefully those people would click an ad that you posted from an ad network, that's correct?
Chris Holdheide: Right, right.
Shane Sams: Cool.
Chris Holdheide: And then, I was doing really good 2010. By the end of 2010 I was making a thousand bucks a month and then 2011 came and Google had a little update and all of a sudden, everything I had worked for, I think I was making about thirteen hundred bucks a month and it was gone. Google just decimated that entire business for me.
Shane Sams: And that's why it's like, you can't build your house on rented land. You know what I'm saying? That's the danger of a true SEO strategy, of only relying on Facebook ads, of doing anything else, or you're putting all your eggs in someone else's basket, and it's why we're so adamant about building your own thing with your own products, with your own community of followers and fans because that's where the security really is, right?
Chris Holdheide: Right, yes.
Jocelyn Sams: Okay, so you decided okay this whole Google thing, you know it got kind of screwed up, but the online business, you still see hope there obviously. So then you decide that you're going to start this new thing right?
Chris Holdheide: Yeah, so in 2015 I started my new site which is called sidehustleacademy.com where I just, I help people, basically I write a lot of content about helping people do various types of side hustles that I've learned over the years. Learned a lot with affiliate marketing, I was teaching people about that so and it's just, right now it's really just a content website and stuff like that right now. But I started a little YouTube channel and stuff like that. That's doing okay and stuff and it's starting to draw some people in.
Shane Sams: Good.
Chris Holdheide: I'm looking to take it to the next level though.
Shane Sams: For sure. Basically right now, you're making money with affiliate marketing, so it's kind of similar to the ad thing, but you're creating the content, getting some traffic and then you're basically recommending products for people you're an affiliate for. So like, you gotta say, "here's a side hustle about this, this guy teaches a really good course, I recommend it." That's what you're doing, right now?
Chris Holdheide: That's correct, yeah.
Shane Sams: Okay. And how's that going?
Chris Holdheide: That's going okay. I mean, it's not making a ton of, maybe around five hundred bucks a month on average.
Shane Sams: Getting back up there though. Right?
Chris Holdheide: We're getting back up there.
Shane Sams: What's the problems with that that you've encountered? Like besides, is it percentages, is it just getting people to click on something when they really came to you? Like what are the biggest problems you're having with that style of business?
Chris Holdheide: So that business, the bigger problem is just trying, because you don't really have a huge name built up to it, and to get people to click and then buy, it's a little harder.
Shane Sams: To get that, know, like and trust enough to, you gotta have a lot of know, like and trust to recommend somebody, right?
Chris Holdheide: Right. Yeah and that takes a lot just to get that, you know and then to write great content and you know make sure you're promoting good products and stuff like that you know. You want to really make sure that you're promoting a good product. You don't want to just promote anything. You want to promote the right things.
Shane Sams: So basically you're putting a lot of time into research, looks like you're taking a lot of time into content.
Chris Holdheide: Yeah, pretty much any course I recommend, I've bought. I bought it, I reviewed it, I went through it, so I know what I'm selling is good.
Shane Sams: 'Cause that's a reflection on you, at that point. You've got to trust the affiliate, you know what I'm saying. 'Cause if they screw the customer, they're never coming back to your site, right?
Chris Holdheide: That's right. That's right.
Shane Sams: I follow a guy named Ben Settle and he said something on his podcast once. He's a copywriter and he's kind of a brash, hard core guy. One time he said, a mentor told him you should never enter an affiliate relationship with someone who you wouldn't give the keys to your house and let them stay there alone for week. You gotta have that much trust before you're an affiliate or they'll just burn your house down.
Shane Sams: Right, so where are we now? Now, we've gotten up to this point now, where you've done the affiliate thing but you're trying to transition again to more teaching and course models and your own thing, right?
Chris Holdheide: Yes, that's correct. Right now, I've got my first course created. I just threw it together. There is five videos, put it together and I threw it up on Teachable real quick and started promoting it to my email list and made my first sale.
Shane Sams: Love it.
Chris Holdheide: Right now I'm actually working on setting up my membership area so, trying to get that all put together and then get my community going there.
Shane Sams: Awesome. You know I say, if you can find one, you can find a hundred and one. If you can find a hundred and one people to give you fifty dollars a month, you're making sixty grand a year, right?
Shane Sams: If there's one person that'll buy it, there's more people that'll buy it. We just have to figure out a path to finding all those people. Also I want to comment here too, this is very interesting. I was talking to somebody yesterday, I was coaching somebody and basically we created this email sequence for them. They're probably listening to this right now. I'm not going to tell you who it is but they're listening.
Shane Sams: But I was coaching yesterday and they wrote an email sequence and they sent it out and panicked 'cause like only two or three people bought something or something in one day, right? And they were freaking out 'cause their list is kinda big. "Do I need to change direction? Do I need to write longer emails? Do I need to write shorter emails? Do I need to not do emails? Maybe I should have ran ads to this. Maybe I should have tested it. Maybe we should pull the plug and not do the rest of the sequence."
Shane Sams: They were just freaking out and I'm like, "Calm down." Like, whoa Nelly. You know. Pull the brakes a little bit. You gotta ride stuff out to learn if it works or not. I told them the goal is to ride this out for three months and just see what happens. And do it over and over again and test it. But she was totally willing to pull the plug immediately.
Shane Sams: But what I love about your story, dude. 2008, was that when you said you started your first website?
Chris Holdheide: Yeah. August of 2008.
Shane Sams: That's amazing. And like, that was eleven years, when we're recording this. And you went up and you got to that magic thousand dollars a month, but you got slammed and destroyed. All the way back to nothing. But you pivoted and tried something else for a while and got it back up to five hundred a month and then you're like, "Man, I'm hitting a ceiling here. I need to do something else." And now you're testing the next thing which should be the best thing, right? And it's taken you eleven years of relentless never giving up to do it, right. And I just love that, man. I think that speaks volumes about you and your character and is a great example for everybody listening, like this is not a, "I tried it and I hit a home run." Or, I tried online business for three months, like success comes by grinding and grinding and grinding until you hit the home run.
Shane Sams: Like, how many swings do batters make in a baseball season? Hundreds to get forty home runs, right? And you're doing that and all this stuff has built to the point now where you're like, "whoa, I made a course and sold it, maybe this could be a membership. I found one." Six months from now you might have a hundred and one people, right.
Chris Holdheide: Right.
Shane Sams: Dude, great, great job just sticking with it. Making money. And look at all the knowledge, you can't run the Side Hustle Academy unless you've been running side hustles for ten years.
Chris Holdheide: Yeah.
Shane Sams: Just an amazing story, man. I absolutely love your tenacity and keep sticking with it. Great example for you all our there that are like, "I started a blog in 2007 and I quit because I didn't get a million followers on Instagram." Or whatever.
Jocelyn Sams: All right. So let's talk just a little bit. Obviously you have a spirit of not giving up which we love, but something is still holding you back. So let's talk a little bit about some fears, mindset issues or whatever else might be holding you back right now.
Chris Holdheide: So when I was creating my first course, my initial thought was I was going to create this course and I'm gonna price it ninety-seven dollars. And then I started creating the course and I started having this feeling like, I just don't know if this is worth ninety-seven dollars and then all of sudden I back it down to like forty-seven dollars and then all of a sudden, I'm at nineteen dollars and I'm also thinking the same thing with like my membership. How much is this worth in the beginning? Is what I'm selling worth it? Or worth the amount of money I'm thinking it should be worth.
Shane Sams: So basically this is a confidence problem. It's not really is the course worth it, it's more like, is anyone gonna pay me to teach them x, to teach them y, to teach them z.
Jocelyn Sams: And actually what I hear in this conversation, Chris, is that you don't feel that you can convince someone that the value is there. That's what I'm reading between the lines.
Chris Holdheide: Right.
Shane Sams: Let me ask you a question here. So you're basically, let's talk about value and how to actually, the problem that most people do with their course is they assign the value to themselves and not the result that they're trying to get for their customer, right?
Shane Sams: When we start valuing ourselves, well we're our worst critics. We look in the mirror and we don't like the way we look. We put our clothes on, we don't have the newest clothes. We get in our car and we're like, "Man, do I have the best car? Is anybody looking at me funny?" We're all self conscious, right?
Chris Holdheide: Right.
Shane Sams: If you try to put the value of what you're selling on you, you're always going to talk yourself into giving it away for free, right? Because it's hard to assign value to ourselves. But that's, the trick is, we've got to assign the value to what we're giving people, right? To the actual result that they're going to get.
Shane Sams: For example, in our teaching businesses, our result was not, our value wasn't based on we're the best teachers, we make the best lesson plans, we're the smartest elementary librarians and social studies teachers in the world. Because if that was true, we would have probably not even made our courses. Jocelyn had been teaching for three years. I was a social studies teacher but I was half football coach so like I didn't even really teach a lot. You know what I'm saying?
Shane Sams: It was like we couldn't possibly value. So what we did was we flipped it and said, You know the result that we could give people, if we could literally plan their day for them, every school day of the year, the result would be going home at three o'clock, seeing their kids, being able to sit down and have dinner and not worry that you're not going to have anything planned tomorrow. And that was priceless. So that was easy to go five hundred dollars. You've got to pay this. Or forty-nine dollars a month. It's worth forty-nine dollars a month to see your kids at night and not be stressed out about your job.
Jocelyn Sams: And like what I'm wondering is, okay so your course, what is it for? Is it to help people learn how to start a side business?
Chris Holdheide: So my course is all about helping people develop the idea that they want to go forward with and then figure out how to profit or make their first sale basically. Not to like build their entire business but just to get them started and make their first sale and realize like okay, there's something here. I can make money with this. And they see a way out, you know.
Shane Sams: Sure, let me ask you this. If you could, you've told us, your side hustles have generated a thousand bucks a month, five hundred bucks a month, something like that off and on for different side hustles, right?
Chris Holdheide: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Shane Sams: If you could tell somebody, "Hey man, what stresses you out?" If you could ask them that question and they said to you, "Man, you know what really stresses me out, man. My car payment. It's three-ninety-nine a month and I've got a hundred dollars in insurance a month and it just really stresses me out, man, 'cause that car payment makes me run thin every month and sometimes we run out of money for groceries." And you said to them, "Hey man, what if I could teach you something? I've been making five hundred dollars a months plus for ten years. That could pay your car payment. It could totally take that stress off of you. How much more space would you have for your spouse? How much more time would have for your kids, when you wouldn't be worrying about it? How good would it feel to walk into the grocery store and know you had a little margin and you didn't have to put the real Fruit Loops back to get the generic Fruit Loops, you know what I'm saying?"
Shane Sams: Like, how would that make you feel? If you could literally say that ti someone and you could do that for someone. There is no way you can put a value on that, right? It would be worth it. I'll give you a hundred bucks to show me how to make five-hundred a month. Any day of the week. Right?
Chris Holdheide: Right.
Shane Sams: But what we've done there is we've transferred the value to the result, not you. It ain't about you, man. Like you've made a thousand, five hundred dollars a month for ten years. Like, yeah man. If you can teach that to someone, there's no way to put a value on that at all.
Jocelyn Sams: And I can assure you that people do not really care about the quality of the course in those cases. All they care about is the result. Can you teach them to do whatever it is that you told them that you're going to do?
Shane Sams: And that's how we price our products. That's how we have the confidence to say, it's worth it. Like our courses are not the fanciest, most polished courses in the world. I had a buddy in a mastermind group I'm in, they just spent like ten grand, hired a video crew, redid all of their courses. You know what I'm saying? And I'm not gonna do that. I just don't do that. It's fine if he wants to do it, right. And maybe his audience puts value in the presentation, but for us it's more like, let's just get this information in people's hands 'cause it could change their life, right? And that's where we assign the value of our community. That's how we price our community. And then you can look at other things like the demographic of your audience, like there's nothing wrong with having lower tier prices. We do that sometimes too, right? Because we want to help as many people as possible take our courses.
Shane Sams: But like you've got to assign the value based on the result, not based based on your own confidence issues in yourself. 'Cause if you do that, you're always gonna just charge nothing. So...
Chris Holdheide: That's great, that's great.
Shane Sams: Yeah, so. Is your result worth a hundred dollars, tell me that right now?
Chris Holdheide: I feel like it's worth fifty dollars a month.
Shane Sams: Chris, you're not listening.
Chris Holdheide: Okay.
Shane Sams: Why do you feel like, if you said, "I can teach you how to make five hundred dollars a month." Why is that only worth fifty dollars?
Chris Holdheide: I don't know. I'm just thinking what I was gonna price it at, that's all.
Shane Sams: Fifty dollars a month is fine. You can do that. But try to focus on the result.
Chris Holdheide: Okay.
Shane Sams: And not focus on yourself. Because I think you're judging it on, "Does it look as good in the lighting? Did I make a good enough PowerPoint? Did I say it in an epic Nelson Mandela speech?" You know what I'm saying?
Jocelyn Sams: Is it five hours long?
Shane Sams: Is it, yeah, is it, does it give them the result? That's all you've got to worry about it. Okay? And I've seen your stuff. I like your website. Talking to you, it's fine. Your stuff is well worth fifty dollars a month 'cause the result's worth more. Okay?
Chris Holdheide: Awesome.
Jocelyn Sams: Alright, so let's kinda jump into your next question. As far as building this thing, what can we help you with?
Chris Holdheide: My biggest, my big thing there is trying to lead them down a path and how to build that up as I go in my business. I'm trying to figure out, okay, I've figured out in my first course, just basically how to get them to start their side business, but I'm trying to figure out how, where I need to lead them after that point and stuff like that.
Shane Sams: Well I mean, I think you just look at your own experience here because you've spent the last ten years literally selling everyone else's stuff, right? And like you've spent the last ten years writing content designed to get them to click other things on your site, right? So that copy writing and that skillset that you've developed over the last ten years is the same thing you're doing here. Like getting people to go click on your product is the same as getting them to click on someone else's product, right? And just like in affiliate marketing, if you're an affiliate marketer, you might sell one product in January for affiliate Bob. Here's Bob the affiliate, right? But then in February, you might have different promotion for Sally, your other affiliate, you know what I'm saying? And you just teach people, you write different email campaigns to sell different products.
Shane Sams: So what you have to do is, you have to look at the steps to guide them and say, well what's step one? Well that's, I'm gonna convince them to buy step one. Well then you look and you say, what's step two. If step one is starting their side hustle, then step two is going to be growing their side hustle to x sales per month or whatever. So you just sell that. That's what you guide them to, you just write the emails that get them to that. Maybe you've got another tier of membership or you just answer their questions like along the way. All you have to do is figure out how you've always sold everyone else's products and how you always sold the next affiliate's thing, and then you just have to map out your path that you want people to follow. What's the success path that your people need to follow to get from zero to a thousand dollars a month, right? Because you can teach that, you've done it for years.
Shane Sams: You need to write that path out. Know the six steps they have to do to get there and then take them through that path with all of your email and copy.
Chris Holdheide: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I've been trying to figure out that path, I guess but when you say that, that makes a lot of sense.
Jocelyn Sams: And do you have people that you have worked with that this process has worked for? So in other words I'm asking do you have testimony?
Chris Holdheide: The only one I have is my brother. I've been coaching him on a few things here and there and you know I helped him get a few coaching calls lined up and stuff like that.
Shane Sams: You can make a million dollars on one testimonial.
Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, that's totally fine. The only unfortunate thing in your case is that the picture's gonna look just like you.
Shane Sams: That's not his brother. That's him. He just changed shirts.
Jocelyn Sams: This scam artist is trying to tell me...
Shane Sams: Y'all need to be on camera together, but in this day and age with deep fakes and I don't know, he's got some trick camera stuff going here. That's what's happening.
Shane Sams: You just have to have some kind of success. There's only two ways to actually sell courses. You can sell a lot of course to a lot of different people, right? You can say, "I only teach the first step." Well once they're past the first step, they leave you and go somewhere else. That's cool. You just need to find more people that need to take the first step. Or the real money is in selling your existing customers your next thing, right?
Shane Sams: So you can sell them their next product, like beginning side hustle and then intermediate side hustle, turning it into a car payment, right? You know, get started, get it to five hundred a month. That might be your first two parts of the path. Okay? And you don't have to complete the whole path. You just need that path, right? It's the same way we get people to pay for our membership. We just treat our membership, each month is like a different product. You come in to the Flip Your Life community and maybe you don't have an idea. So your first month you're going to be researching your idea, talking about your idea in the community, getting feedback from me and Jocelyn on our member calls and then finally, month one, "I've got my idea. I've set some goals. Now what?"
Shane Sams: Okay, it's time for month two. Now we're gonna figure out what your customer looks like and we're gonna start building your product. Month three, what do we do next? Well we're gonna build out this product, and then we're gonna get your website started. Month four, we're gonna try to launch this thing and build an audience. Right?
Shane Sams: We just have a path, we know how long it takes. We know what people need to do next. And like that's how we sell membership. We treat it like a different product. Does that make sense?
Chris Holdheide: Yeah.
Shane Sams: As you're building yours out, you need to do the same thing. In the beginning, you know, when so and so creates their side hustle, what does the first month look like? That's the easiest way to think about this. That's how you get them in the first course. But then what does the second month look like. "Okay I've got this website, I've got some affiliate links. How do I promote this thing?" Okay maybe the second month is, well you start a social media page with some ads behind it, whatever.
Shane Sams: So you just have to create a success path for your business. Figure out, we assume that it will take people about as long as it took us to get to the promised land which is thirteen to eighteen months, right? So our success path is actually written out over thirteen to eighteen months. That's how I thought about the Flip Your Life blueprint and I was like what did we do in month one? What did we do in month two? It's the same thing for our education businesses, right? What does a teacher do in August that teaches US history? I have to know that right? What do they do in September? Okay well here's September's lesson plans. What do they do in November?
Shane Sams: And we just go through that path and that's how you build retention. That's how you get people to take the next step, is 'cause you know where they're gonna go, 'cause you've already been there and you drew the map and you're just taking them down the map. Like Dora the Explorer. Right?
Shane Sams: That's probably your next step is actually creating that success path and that'll build out that monthly retention for you and your business and help you sell the next thing, help you sell the next month and keep people paying about forty-nine dollars a month every single month.
Chris Holdheide: Awesome.
Jocelyn Sams: All right, so that is kinda a lot of information. How do you feel about all of those ideas?
Chris Holdheide: I feel like I'm ready to get some stuff done. I'm excited.
Shane Sams: Chris, you sound a little overwhelmed, dude.
Chris Holdheide: Yeah.
Shane Sams: You sound a little like that. So let's boil this down and eat the elephant one bite at a time here. Like, what do you think your very next step should be?
Chris Holdheide: As far as my next step should be, I feel like I need to finish up my membership and I need to start working on, start promoting and stuff like that.
Shane Sams: Figure out what your next step is for your customer, right? I want you to try to create, on paper, an outline, handwritten. I want you to number one to twelve, okay?
Chris Holdheide: Okay.
Shane Sams: Now I want you to imagine that you've got someone that is just starting their side hustle journey, okay? And I want you to say, "Month one, I've already got. That's my course that exists right now." That's gonna start the side hustle. And then I want you to write a path for that person to walk. Each month, what do they need to do to get to a thousand dollars a month? Okay? What did you do to get to that point? To get to thousand dollars a month? And then just an outline. You get one line per step. Does that make sense?
Chris Holdheide: Right.
Shane Sams: Now you'll know that so you can start building that. The next thing you'll do is build the second step. That's all you gotta do. When that's done you build the third step. And then as you roll this out and more people join it and get into the membership and we start promoting that thing, they're gonna have somewhere to go so they stay and you don't have to worry about it anymore, okay?
Chris Holdheide: Awesome.
Shane Sams: All right guys, that wraps up another great interview with one of our Flip Your Life community members. Super excited to see what Chris does building out that success path for his customers which will lead to a lot of success in his business.
Shane Sams: If you need help building that success path in your business, we would love to personally help you do that inside of the Flip Your Life community. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can check out all of our great membership options. We've got options that start as low as nineteen dollars a month to get access to all the courses, all the training you need and join a community of hundreds of family focused entrepreneurs from all over the world who are building out their online business and building better futures for their families.
Shane Sams: So go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife today. We would love to have you in the Flip Your Life community. Who knows? You may find yourself right here on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast some day.
Shane Sams: Before we go, we'd love to close the show with a bible verse. Jocelyn and I get a lot of our inspiration, motivation and business tips, believe it or not, from the bible. Today's bible verse comes from Second Corinthians chapter nine, verse eleven and it says "Yes, you will be enriched in every way so that you can always be generous. And when we take your gifts to those who need them, they will thank God."
Shane Sams: Guys, people need you. You need to build your business. You need to build your business just like us, just like Chris, just like all the people in the Flipped Life community so you can go out there and get those results to people. Take what you know and teach it to others so that their life can be better too and they will thank you for it with their hard earned money every single month in those membership sites that you've built. So, take that to heart, get out there, get started and until next time, do whatever it takes, flip your life. See you.
Jocelyn Sams: Bye.
Links and resources mentioned on today’s show: Chris's Website Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information Flip Your Life communityEnjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month!
