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About the Episode

In this episode, we walk through the journey of creating our first few courses and products, including how we did it, how much money we made, and what we learned (so you can avoid our mistakes!).

We also explain the difference between live vs. evergreen courses, how marketing products &. courses are different, and what makes a good digital product. And we share how much $$ we’ve made through passive income in the past 12 months as a primarily service-based business.

Enjoy!

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Want to sell digital products & courses, but feeling overwhelmed? We’ve rounded up our favorite passive income tools, broken down an easy way to understand funnels, and laid out a step-by-step approach to getting started! And you can download it for free as a thank you for listening!

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Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Seriously Creative. I’m Jess.

And I’m Gwen.

And today we are talking about passive income. Do you want to tell us what passive income is, gwennie?

Sure. So it’s income that is usually generated somewhat, automatically. So you are not as involved in the process. So it’s basically the opposite of our custom client work.

Yes. So you’re basically setting up the whole process for someone to be able to purchase something from you without you needing to be involved at all.

So they’re gonna see an ad, and then they’re gonna go maybe to a webinar or to download something. They’re gonna get an email, maybe a sequence of emails.

They might see retargeting ads, and then hopefully, eventually go through the cart purchase of downloading your item and you get the money, and you kind of don’t have to do anything.

And the idea is, you want to make something that multiple people will buy. So every time you sell it, you’re obviously making a bigger return on that initial investment.

So this episode is definitely not a step by step tutorial on passive income.

Please do not try to treat it like one, because you will be sorely disappointed.

Actually, after we recorded this, we were like, “Were we all over the place too much?” but I went back and listened to it and I do think there’s a ton of helpful tidbits in here, and helpful things that we’ve learned, and how we got started.

And then we also share some numbers. So it does involve a lot of information, but not in a step by step manner.

For sure not that.

So it’s also important to note that this is not the main part of our business.

It’s something that we’re doing on the side of our custom services. So we’re not putting a hundred percent effort into it. We’re maybe doing. 25% when we’re lucky. And sometimes it’s 0%.

It’s work in progress.

Yes. If we have a full client load, this falls to the wayside. This is what we do in, in between times.

Yes. But we’re looking towards the future of it becoming not something that totally falls off our plate and can be more substantial.

The one other thing I wanted to note is that we have had more experience in courses than in products, digital products.

And the reason for that is really, courses, you can just sell at a higher price.

And so each purchase obviously makes a bigger impact. And when we have limited time, we wanted to put our effort into some sort of high ticket offer that we would set up once and then we could keep making money off of it. Versus if you set up a product and you sell it each time for $37, it’s money that’s more like trickling in.

But we are getting more into products now as our audience gets bigger and we definitely want to have things at different price points to be more accessible for people so that the only thing that we offer is not like a thousand dollars.

Yes.

And I think it’s also important to note that the choice we made to do a course first over a product was partially because of our audience size.

So our reach wasn’t really big. So that made the most sense for us to do at the time. It is a good testament that you don’t have to have a huge audience to sell courses and products though.

I mean, we have an email list of about 3,500 people. We have an Instagram of about 3,500 people and we run some ads and it does all right.

Yeah, we’ve had some successful launches, not anything like multimillion success.

Someday, we’re gonna get a multimillion dollar launch, just wait.

All right.

You guys enjoy the episode.

All right. So today we’re gonna be talking about actually one of our favorite topics, which is introducing passive income into your service based business. because I think this is something that a, a lot of service providers are interested in because it’s like, wait a minute. Right? All of my time is connected to money and I can disconnect it and make money while I sleep.

That sounds great. Of course. Yeah. It seems like everybody’s doing it and doing it well, and there’s also a huge, I think perception, problem, like passive income is just this like easy. Flow of money when really it takes a ton of work and a lot of trial and error. So I think just wanting to talk about some of those things, because it’s something that we have done extensively so that people know what they’re getting into.

I think even just talking like really honestly about what it’s like to add passive income, because I know before we started this journey, all I ever saw on like Instagram or Pinterest about passive income was how easy it. And how you could just make money in your sleep, like become a millionaire like overnight.

Well, the reality is it’s not that right. Exactly. Okay. So we want to talk a little bit about our experience, some of the passive income products that we’ve made, and then what we’ve learned from it that you can hopefully take and will be helpful to you. So our very first foray. in two passive income was our first course.

We have the habit of like, not starting small on like, let’s just take this little product or template, make it into a product. We’re like, no, we’re gonna do like a massive course and it’s gonna take us months. So I’m gonna say my first tip is maybe just like, start with something small and get like things up and running in a way that isn’t a huge risk, but shows you all the steps that are.

I think we attempted to start small, but then we end up like snowballing. We’re like, hope we could add this and this. And it’ll be way more valuable and we’ll feel better about it. So like, let’s just do this thing. It’s one of our not so great qualities, but also really great qualities mean we ended up making a great thing.

So our first course is called O Hey, new brand. So still love that name. I know. I’m so glad. Okay. New brand. I’m so glad that that’s what the name we said all time. So the reason. We created this and how we got the idea was because we obviously are service providers. So people come to us for custom branding design, and we were getting some clients who were just getting started in their business.

And so they weren’t quite ready to invest the amount of money that it takes to hire a designer. And we hated just like turning those people away and sort of being like we can’t help you. So our idea was we want to set up a program where we can guide people who are maybe. Mostly not designers through the branding process, make it really accessible.

And one of the things that was happening at that time was Canva was getting really big. So Canva is a program where you don’t have to be a designer you can get in and sort of create stuff really easily. You don’t need Photoshop or any of the Adobe programs. So we leveraged Canva a lot in creating this course to make it accessible for non designers.

So one of the other things that we did as we were launching the course is we ended up enrolling in Amy Porterfield’s digital course academy because we’re like, okay, if we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna launch this big course, we want to make sure that we have like a step by step process so that we knew on the back end, what we needed and what the course needed to really be useful for everyone who enroll.

I think again, we’re service based. So we’re our time is money. And so I know it would take us a lot longer to learn how to do that than it would be to just pay for this course, go through. It is still a ton of work, but it did help get us over a lot of hurdles that would’ve been hard otherwise, for sure.

And then in the early days, it was nice to like learn what parts of what we learned matched for. What we wanted to do versus kind of like, oh, we didn’t really like how that worked. We have a different way that we want to do it. That feels more true to how we run our business and how we like things to feel.

Yeah. So one of the examples of that was in the course, Amy actually has this really helpful outline of how a webinar works. And there was one part where it starts to get into pricing and you’re like building on the price to be like, it’s not this much. It’s not even this much. It’s this much. We did it once.

And we were like, that feels just not right for us. It was a really good lesson for us to be like, okay, this whole success of this course, isn’t gonna rely on us taking a couple of these tactics that don’t feel right. And like either getting rid of them or just making them our own in a way that felt better to us.

Yeah. It just didn’t feel good for how we want to sell. So being able to shift that felt really nice and also like really liberating when we were like, Second, we don’t have to do it this way for it to like work. So at this point it’s been. What a year and a half, since we launched that course mm-hmm

So we’ve had like tons of learning and we’ve made additional courses, additional products since then, but that, yeah, our first foray into passive income was this massive course. So we ended up doing a, a live campaign because there’s kind of two ways that you can. Run courses. One is to have it be live, which means you’re enrolling a certain amount of people by a certain date.

And they’re going to come in, they’re all starting on the same date. And then usually you’re meeting with them through like a Facebook live or something either weekly or biweekly or multiple times a week, but you’re going through and like coaching them through the program. And then there’s an evergreen model, which just means that your ads or your marketing is out there all the time.

People can sign up at any time and then they. Go through it at their own pace and it’s recommended. And I think that this is probably right to do at least one live round first because you learn so much. And we really did. So we did that live round and we were sitting with each of the people who were trying to build their brand.

We were seeing exactly what struggles they were going through. Mm-hmm one of the things we were the most nervous about is like, Are people going to be able to create their own logos. And the truth is yes, they are, but they also need some hand holding and some guidance. So we really got in there. And, and one of the things that we still do because the, now the course is on evergreen.

So it means people can sign up at any time, but we still go in and offer them feedback. And while we’re helping. We’ll say if it’s okay with you share the editable version of your document with us and we’ll go in and actually like tweak some things to make it stronger. And I do think that helps people a lot.

It’s like they got 75% of the way there. And then to have somebody come in and just be like, here’s a couple things that like, of course you’re not gonna know because you aren’t a designer, but it will like. Strengthen this and make it a lot more flexible. I can confirm that it helps people because we’ve gotten the feedback that being able to come to us and get that supportive step is super, super crucial.

So that was our first course. We, I’m just gonna be brutally honest about this, because this is. The part, I think everybody struggles with is you don’t know what results to expect. So we ran that campaign. We spent a certain amount on ads trying to get people to our webinars. We held three webinars at three different dates to give people some flexibility.

We had a bunch of people sign up and we were like, what if we can get like 25 or 50 subscriptions or signups to the actual course. And we. 10 on that first one. So we also had absolutely no idea what to expect. Like on our first one, we like those numbers, we were just like pulling out a thin air. Right.

We had no. how do you even know? Right. You always have to go in like, you want to have a goal, so you know what you’re aiming for, but then also if your goal is too high and then you’re disappointed, but you’re like also our course is a thousand dollars. So that was $10,000 we made in a week. Mm-hmm off of something that’s already created.

So that is a great win. But if you’re coming at it from the wrong angle and you’re hoping for, you know, 50 people to sign up and only 10 sign up, then you’re like bummed about something that was actually really good. Yeah. I think we had some slightly unrealistic expectations. I think part of it for us was seeing the success stories where it’s the wildly successful ones where they’re like, I launched at, like I put this course together.

It was my first launch. And I made like, $200,000. And I’m like, oh my, to a list of 38 people. And you’re like, wait, everyone bought. And your course has 10,000. Like, yeah, that just doesn’t happen to everyone. Right. So then we do still have that course. It is on evergreen now. And the way that that works is we have ads that are out there.

We also have it, like in our Instagram profile, we have it on our links page. We have it on our website. So there are lots of different places that we’re leading people into the webinar, but the main source of getting people. Facebook ads. So we’ll run ads. They’ll say, you know, come to this workshop on how to create a brand.

People love, people will sign up. Then they’ll in the webinar. It’s actually us walking through at a high level, how you can create your own brand and us showing examples of some of our students who have done it themselves. And then from there, people will. Either retargeting ads or an email sequence as a follow up to see if they want to enroll in, oh, Hey, new brand.

So that’s a, a truly passive funnel that we have set up that does have obviously money that has to go in and on the front end for ads. And we’re still trying to tweak that to get it right, because some of the numbers look really good. And then other numbers at different points in the funnel aren’t as good.

So I think that’s. Ongoing thing that we’ll have to figure out and, and you have to kind of figure it out independently for every product because you have to figure out is the targeting, right? Is this the right webinar? Are the emails good? And so you kind of have to look at every step of the process and identify like where people are dropping off if they are.

So that’s you talk about the work that goes into creating anything, passive income it’s like there is the work on creating the thing and then there’s the work on how you sell and market it consistently. So it’s bringing. Income on an ongoing basis. Yeah, I think a lot of the, the story that’s out there is just the, the time you need to spend creating the product, but you’re gonna spend that time.

And then there’s a lot of work that goes into the rest of it. And a lot of tweaking. There’s still a lot of work on the, the passive yes. Income. It’s not so passive. And then the second thing that we did, which is more of like a, a typical passive income product, is that we took some of the things that we use in our own business and we made templates out of them.

And then we put them up on our website is like a shop. So for instance, one of the things that we’ve spent a ton of time, like perfecting is our proposals. So when we send proposals out to clients typically we’ve had already like a meet and greet call with them, found out what their needs are and then.

Our proposal is a combination of pages that stay the same every time that talk about us and our process and our packages, and then pages that are customized for the client. And we’ve done it in a way that the client hopefully feels like it’s very specific to them, but it doesn’t take us a ton of time because early on we would spend a day making a proposal and it’s just bananas.

I think part of that too though, is we have. As many service providers do we have like our set packages, like we only do like three things, so we don’t have to like mix and match and change things around we, our full master thing has like 19 things in it. I shouldn’t say mix and match. I should say we’re not like creating new pages for like a different service.

So that’s one of the things we actually hint. We have another course and it’s for creative service providers or designers. And that’s one of the things we recommend is when you create a proposal for every different project that comes in specific to that project. You really, your prices have to be charging to allow you for that extra time that you are making proposals.

And we don’t do that. We have set packages. So you come in, you’re gonna hire us for one of these things that we’ve already built out. And if you want something different, there’s other designers that will do work, sort of like work for hire. Yeah. I like going into our proposals now and it’s like, all the pages are already there.

I can take out what we don’t need for that client. Or like rearrange the order that it goes in based on what I know their needs were and what was most important to them. So we’re talking about the right thing, but it’s such this like beautiful, like clean process. So the fact that we made a product out of it, and that’s one of the things that people who took our course, which the proposal template is part of it always say like, oh my God, they’ll send us little screenshot.

They send out a proposal to a client and the client will write back like, oh my God, this thoughtful and beautiful proposal. And we’re like, yes. So we knew that there was something there, yeah. That people could really benefit from. And we hear so much from people that they’re like, oh my God proposals take me forever.

Well, yeah. And we knew like, like you said, from our clients when they were like, this is such a professional, beautiful. Proposals so well laid out and we’re like, okay, well, we can help other people with that. And there are, there are proposals out there, like on creative market or what have you that you can buy.

But I think the thing, like we wanted to make sure that the one that we talk about and the people who connect with us, it’s like, here’s the formula that. That we use and we know it works. So, and it’s built off of strategy and it’s built off of making sure that the people can see like their desired future state in your proposal that you like hear them and where they want to go.

Okay. So we told you upfront that this wasn’t a step by step guide, but we actually did make you a step by step guide that you can download on our website. So, if you’re interested in getting started in passive income, you definitely want this guide. We break down what a funnel looks like, what you have to do with each step.

And we give you the full list of tools that we personally use to keep our courses and products bringing in consistent cash. Honestly, this should probably be a paid product because there’s so much in it, but it is free just to thank you for listening. You can get it at, Hey. hello.studio/passive that’s.

Hey, hello.studio/p a S S I V E.

I think that was always the struggle that I had. Like, if I’m just looking at something on, you know, a, a place to buy a template, I’m like, I don’t know what went into this. Is it just something that like, looks nice, right? Or is there like a thought behind how it works? Has anyone ever used it? Is it effective?

Like that kind of thing? I think that’s a great way to look at what in your business. What you’ve already created that might make a good product, is like, is this something that people already struggle with? Is it something that people could buy that will save them time or money? That’s usually what people are looking for.

They want time, money or energy being able to be saved. They want things to be able to be easier. So we are always looking for, or Instagram templates are another thing. That’s like, people always struggle. To open up Instagram or Canva, whatever, what am I gonna create? Mm-hmm so we’ve like baked ideas into our Instagram templates.

We’ve spent a lot of time doing that. It’s like, okay, now we know that that’s something that people struggle with. We know we have something that we’ve created that works really well. And we always, you know, we iterate and iterate until we get to something that we feel is like really good, and then we’ll make a product out of it.

So. the, it’s a lot easier to make a product out of something that you already have than obviously it is to build a course because there’s so much that goes into that. So really at that point, it’s just, you have the product it’s how are you gonna distribute it? So for us, it’s in, it’s in Canva. So we, you know, there’s a PDF that you’re gonna.

Get a download link to, and it’s gonna share the template with you. You open it up, you need to obviously have a cart, like a, a way for people to pay you. We use thrive cart. We’ve also used Shopify in the past, which also works well and then creating like a product page. So what’s in it, making sure that that copy is like, Has words in it that are what the people might be searching for and then creating, you know, graphics that show it off, show what it looks like.

And actually that’s another product that we created, which are mockups. So we found that we, that people needed digital mockups of their products that they wanted to sell. So. and we had to make that for our own. So put that up as well. It’s like, if you needed it and you made it, somebody else probably needs it too.

So if you’re willing to go through the steps to get it set up, then you might as well. Also, if you’re willing to share the thing that you made, some people are probably like, well, I had to take the time to make this. I’m not gonna share it. But also you get money from it. So yeah. Now the same thing is true with products as with courses, is that they’re not going to sell if you don’t market them.

So the, if you build it, they will come. You know, we originally were like, well, we should have stuff that’s on sale on our website. And we’ll see sales trickle in like probably one or two a week of these, you know, 37, 40 $7 products. And actually in thrive cart, they’ll let you add an upsell on, so one of the things.

We do is when you buy one of our products, there’s a little button that says, do you want to add on the Instagram template kit for only $17? And so a lot of times that’ll help get the total cart amount up higher, but ultimately you really do still need to be marketing it in some way or else it’s just like people finding it on your site, which is gonna happen.

Not as frequently hoping that they just stumble upon it. And that does not have to often yes, you have to guide people there. Right? So the way that we sell our products and it’s not a big focus for us, but we do have an email list. And so we’ll send out emails and sometimes link it up there. We link it up in our blog posts and then sometimes we’ll share Instagram posts about.

And you can run ads also to lower price products, but usually the amount you have to spend to get somebody to purchase is around 37 or 47. So the money you’re making is really only paying for the ads. So it should be to get people into your funnel if you have something bigger to sell them. And then the third thing though we’re working on right now is website templates.

So this has been something that we’ve wanted to do for a really long time, years in the making. And we actually started off. Squarespace templates. Mm-hmm just because we were like, well, if people who aren’t designers are gonna buy them, you know, they’re gonna need a really easy platform. And we struggled so much in Squarespace to get websites, to actually look really nice and be easy to use.

And so we eventually found show it. Which is what we used to design all of our websites. Now our website is on show it, our, all of our client websites are on show it. So that’s what we’re building templates for. And it’s, it’s a drag and drop platform. And it makes it super easy to edit things. You can like customize your whole mobile site.

So you can, you know, like we have long FAQs on some of our pages. So you can like take that off on mobile sites if it’s like not a good experience, but templates are another thing, like courses that there’s a lot of upfront. And so a lot of upfront. Yeah, there’s a, there’s a lot of different people who will teach a method of like sell it before you make it.

So you want to like test out interest that people actually want it, but, you know, that’s, that’s also a difficult thing to do. So in this case, we know enough people are buying website templates at this point, and we know that. We it’s just like with Han new brand, we know we get enough clients who come in, who maybe aren’t ready to invest in a totally custom website, but want something that’s nice and well designed.

And so we want to be able to offer them a lower price option. And then because we’re website designers, we are going to offer our own custom, like, we’ll customize it for you. Mm-hmm as an, as an upsell. If that helps people get into the right price point. And I think also we can part of this whole thing about like, we have these higher price point courses and we have lower price point products, but you, we also do custom client work.

Like why are we launching another product? Is the fact that. Website templates is kind of like a missing piece to our marketing funnel. It’s something that we’re like, oh, that would help out with this thing over here and this thing over here and not to mention, it’s something that we’ve been talking about for years.

So it feels really good to be finally like acting on that and hoping to launch it in the next, hopefully by the time this episode drops, Ooh, will be check out our website, see if they’re up. But also, yeah, people come out of, oh, Hey, new brand. And they’re like, okay, now I got my brand dialed in. I’m ready for a website.

And we. You can go to a different place to get them. And we don’t want to have to be sending people away. Yeah. We want to be able to offer them something that aligns with what we’ve already helped teach them, or if they just follow us and they really like our stuff and maybe they already have a brand, but they’re not ready to invest in a full custom website.

Like it’s, it’s a, it’s an entry point to like, get to know us and our work without having, if you’re not ready yet. Right. And. I’ll just will mention that we did end up creating another course. And this is actually the solid before you make it model. I forgot that we did this at the beginning. So we have a course right now.

It’s called six-figure creative lab. And it’s specifically for people who are providing creative services. You might be a copywriter of VA, a designer, you know, web developer, and you. Are working sort of as a freelancer and you’re not bringing in all that much money and the work isn’t steady. So the we’ve taken everything that we’ve figured out about running a service based business and making it so that you have consistent work coming in that you’re scheduling yourself in a smart way that you’re creating packages, that you’re pricing them appropriately.

Like the whole sort of system works together and we created made that into a course. But our first iteration. Was called design boss, because we were only helping designers at that point and we sold it as a mastermind. So we said, we’re, it’s gonna be six months, each month. We’re gonna focus on a different thing.

So we outlined like we’re gonna focus on strategy at first, then branding, then marketing. On and on. And we enrolled, I think, five students into that first one. And it was at I think, $1,800 at that time. So it was hands on. We met once a month for like a lesson kind of thing. And then a second time a month for a Q and a, and we built the curriculum earlier in the month before the call.

And then we taught it on that call and then we built the curriculum for the next month on and on. And. When we were done running that live, then we made it into a course that people could join anytime mm-hmm . So that is a risk that you take when you’re selling something that you haven’t made yet is that you don’t want, obviously only like one people, one person to buy, and then you have to make it for make the whole thing.

But you could also refund that person’s money if only one person for sure. Signed up. If it, if it wasn’t worth it to you to make the product and, you know, give them a bonus or something as a thank. give ’em one of your other products. And I mean, the great thing about doing it that way is you didn’t put a whole bunch of work in before creating something and then it didn’t work, but the downside is then once people are inside of it, then you have to like have the time to do the work while you’re doing it.

And when we did it, it was, we did have quite a bit of custom client work happening at the time. So we were stretched a little. Then during that period or during that phase, but now we have this great course that we can sell. Yeah. So I think the overarching theme of this is there’s so many different ways to do this.

Like, and there are not only. A bajillion different types of things that you could sell, but there’s different ways to sell them. There’s different ways to package them. There’s different ways to create them. And I think we have found that it is easiest for us to have someone who’s done it before, teach us some portion of it.

So you’re not starting like from ground zero. So if that’s a course or a webinar or, you know, a coach or something who can sort of walk you through, and that’s what we did with this podcast. Business coach has helped. Someone else create a podcast before we got on a call with her, walk us through what all the steps are like, just somebody who can give you a little bit of guidance and then you get to make it your own.

And so you can remove things, add things, observe how other people are doing things and change. But I think at the end of the day, it’s a lot of work. There’s no way out of it being a good amount of. It’s a lot of work and we’re still learning, but we’re really passionate about making this a bigger part of our business.

So we’re figuring out the parts that work for us and how to make this continue to grow and to hopefully scale. Because that really is the, the hardest part about being a service based business is that your time is connected to money. So if you want to take a vacation and you don’t have any money coming in that month, and that’s really hard.

So even we’ve said before, like if we just had like a baseline of a few thousand dollars a month coming in, that’s like one less client that we have to take. That’s a little bit more free time. That’s a little bit more flexibility for us in our lives. Of course, you know, having. Kids and school events and summer vacations and all that.

It’s like, you still want to be able to make all those things work. So even though we don’t have a plan to totally stop taking custom clients, because we still do love that work. It really helps even things out for us. For sure. Yeah. Should we say like how much we’ve made in passive income on these things? I know you’ve always talked about like when you get to listen to people, talk about like actual numbers, it’s helpful or sharing things.

All right. So just to summarize, we have two courses. One of them is our branding course, and it’s about a thousand dollars. And one is our course where we teach other creatives how to build a sustainable creative business. And that’s about 2000. And then all of our products are about 27, 30 $7. And we ran one live workshop that was $47.

All right. So in the last. 18 months, we have made $62,600 crazy. And the 18 month thing that’s because that’s about how long our courses have existed. Most of that. Was from courses. I think products here I can actually, products is about 1500 of that. So again, going back to what we were talking about at the beginning, the courses just there is such a bigger ROI because it’s a higher ticket product.

Also obviously takes. A lot longer to create. And with that, I think it’s really important for us to talk about how much we spent in ads because while 63,000 sounds really impressive, we spent $13,000 in ad campaigns to get people in to get to that number. So a lot of. The sales obviously came from our organic audience.

So that’s email and social. And then the primary way that we use ads is to get people into either a webinar or to download a lead magnet. And then we follow up with an email sequence. So the ads are definitely at the top of the funnel where we’re just trying to get new people like into our orbit and then providing some sort of free value.

We always want to like add value, even if someone. Doesn’t purchase from us. So we always make sure that whatever we put out there for free is super valuable. And then if they want to go deeper, then we give them an opportunity to, yeah. And then we have sold to 133 individual people. So that’s super exciting that we’ve had that many people come through our.

Digital doors and trust us to teach them something. Yeah, it’s amazing. The other thing that we have included in our courses at different times is some one-on-one support, which makes it not truly, always passive because there’s some, either group coaching or one-on-one coaching element in there. But that is a little bit harder for us to manage because we do have custom clients and sometimes everything can all hit at once in the past several months.

We’ve actually been running our branding course with feedback submissions that you can send us and will reply to you in like a few days, which has worked really well. because then it’s not like we have to be on the call. We’re able to. Do it on our time. Yeah. When previous versions of the course, we did lives with our students and we were giving feedback like in the moment or to everyone within that 24 hour period of time.

And it was very stressful. Yeah. Sometimes you just need to sit with something and you come back later and you’re like, oh, okay. I totally have better advice to give than I would, if it was on the spot. Also, it helps to have submissions coming in staggered mm-hmm versus a group of people all, all at once.

And then we probably haven’t taken advantage. We definitely haven’t taken advantage of our email list as much as we could have. So again, sometimes when we get really busy with custom client work, our email list falls to the wayside. So I do think if we were better at nurturing and better at consistently showing up for our audience, that we could have that number could have been even higher, but again, being a primarily service based business.

We just don’t have as much time to devote to this. So also a service based business where it’s like, we don’t have people that we’re outsourcing much to aside from like, you mean just the two of us. just the two of us. Let’s see if we can get that into every episode where, where it’s just the two of us.

But it is worth noting that not that everyone does, but a lot of people have some help and. Aside from like accounting at this point we don’t. Yeah. I mean, is there anything else that we get help on we’re hiring movers to move us next week? but aside from that in our business, currently, we have, we only out.

Accounting. I always say like when we have courses and services and passive income, we’re, we’re sort of trying to like raise the waterline every month. So like, even if somebody comes into a course on a payment plan, it’s like, okay, that’s like a little bump every month. And like a certain number of products or courses that we can rely on.

Like that’s a little bump, it’s all raising the waterline. And I think we realized this year that the best type of business for us is where just the waterline in general that we need. Up with is low. Yes. I kind of used waterline in that metaphor in two different ways. It was confusing, but basically like the amount that we, the size of the glass that we had to fill that being smaller.

And really just being really flexible has let us have more of a lifestyle business and spend more time at home and just not stressing out, which has made our creativity like a thousand times better.

For sure.

And I think we’ve mentioned, in other podcasts episodes, about how we used to have a team and now how it’s just us, and that works right now.

And I think if this part of our business grows very large in the future, we probably will need to have a team to help us manage it. But for right now, this is what makes the most sense.

Yeah.

Okay. I think that’s it.

If you have questions about passive income definitely go to our Instagram for this episode and leave us a comment.

I’d love to know what people are thinking or even just what your experience was or has been, or maybe if you’re just putting it off, because it seems overwhelming.

Just love to know what other people are thinking about when it comes to this topic.

Yeah.

And if there’s another topic that you guys want us to talk about, Anything that you’re curious about, can you let us know?

That’d be cool.

Yeah. Just like shoot us a DM.

All right. Love you guys. Thank you for being here. Bye.

Bye.