THE PODCAST FOR ONLINE COURSE CREATORS GOING BIG!

Join business strategist Tina Tower as she explores how to build your empire by packaging your expertise into online courses, speaking, content, podcasting and credibility.

Tina has over 17 years of experience in starting, building and selling companies, she's a speaker, teacher, mama and world traveller.

She's unapologetic about living an intentionally big life and if you want too, this show is designed to show you many different options to help you gain clarity over YOUR version of awesome.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

I am so excited for the year ahead and this podcast's exciting name change. Today I’m sharing what sparked the change from Her Empire Builder Podcast to The Female Course Creator Show and why it will help me achieve global domination!

Also, I will talk to you about my plans for 2023 and all of the incredible things I have in store for you. As well as what I’m planning to do less of this year, what I’m adding into the mix and the changes I’m making inside my business to help achieve my theme for the year: VITALITY.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why we’ve changed the name of the podcast
• What I’m doing more and less this year
• What we have planned for 2023
• The goals we have for the year
• My theme for the year - what is yours?

Want more?

We have some incredible things happening at Her Empire Builder this year! If you are a course creator, you have to be a part of this incredible community. Jump on to herempirebuilder.com and check it out!

If you loved the episode, I would be so grateful if you shared it on insta or left a review! 

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Her Empire Builder is a combination of live sessions and pre-recorded content to help you get what you need, when you need it.

I know that you're the expert and you've got all of your subject knowledge nailed - now it's time to build the business behind your online course and stop being the worlds best kept secret. 

Show transcription 

Intro

Hi friend and welcome back to the first episode of 2023. Happy New Year. Can we still say that late January? I think we can. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and holiday break.

It's such a blessed time. I know that when I was in the early days of my business, so I've just kicked over 18 years. I'm not old when was in the early years of my business, I would always take the time when you are undisturbed and work my little butt off. And now I've come to know as the years have gone on that it's like this sacred time where you should endeavor to do nothing as little as possible. Because no matter when you take time off through the year, when you've got a business and people are relying on you and you're looking after the team and you're looking after clients and all that sort of thing, you're off.

But unless you've got a veteran team that you can trust really well, it's rare that you can switch off completely. And that period between Christmas and New Year is just this total switch off time. So the first thing I want to say is if you didn't take it as total switch off time, please put it in your diary for 2023 because our brains need it and we feel so much better for it. So welcome back to the podcast. We've had a rebrand.

I love a good shake up when people are naming podcasts. I have a lot of clients in her Her Empire Builder that worry so much about their podcast, name, their course names, different things and I know that that's natural. And look, I put a lot of thought, time, energy, effort into naming my things as well. But I want this to be a lesson to you that we have the freedom and flexibility to change direction anytime we choose. Often we are so afraid of being agile and people will call it pivoting, whatever you want to call it.

I like to talk about agility and going we can go this direction and then when we want to, we can change to this direction and we can be bouncy and we can do whatever we want. It's our life. And so for my podcast, I love podcasting. It is my very very favorite medium. In a couple of episodes time I'm going to start filming the podcast so that we can put it on YouTube as well and have the female course creator show as a YouTube channel as well as the podcast.

But I love podcasting because right now, like I'm in my Jimmy jams in my office, it's nice and dark and cozy and that is not conducive to highly produced video content. But I've come around to it in terms of repurposing content and letting the time and effort that we put in reach as far and wide as possible. So when I started podcasting, I just sold my last company and it was like 2017. And I started the Female Advantage and I had no business, I had nothing to channel it to other than that I wanted a podcast and I just wanted to talk to really cool humans. Because one of the things about podcasting, right, is I could email message.

However, you get in contact with some of the raddest people on the planet that I can think of and they're never going to reply. However, you have a podcast and it's going well and you're getting traction and you're sharing that platform so that you can elevate them with the world and all of a sudden the doors open and you can ask questions to the most interesting people that you can find. I just love it so much. And so I started with the Female Advantage with no point other than just talking to females. That really, really inspired me.

And then I stopped to the podcast. When we traveled around the world, my family and I went in 2018 to 2019 for a year, and we traveled. And about a month before I got back from that trip, I reignited the podcast and renamed it An Intentional Life, because that was my period where I had started online courses, but I was like small fry, you know, I was doing $10,000 launches and I just really I had been anyone that's done extended travel. You know, it changes you a little bit. And I was in this mode where I was, you know, it was my EPA Love journey and I was like, I'm going to be Zen and I'm going to be intentional about everything and I'm just gonna, you know yeah, that didn't last that long.

So I got back from the trip and into real life. And then in 2020 I started her Her Empire Builder, which is my favorite thing I have ever done in my life. It is really? Oh, it's like the dream business, really. It just makes me so happy and seeing all the women that we can help and the impact that we can have and just, I feel like I'm a primary school teacher.

For those that don't know my whole story, I did a business degree first, then trained as a child care person, then I was a primary school teacher, but I started my business during uni, so I never actually went into a classroom to teach. And I was wondering, it's such a waste of time just to get this piece of paper, but I was that committed that I needed to finish it and I thought it was such a waste. But then I ended up creating tutoring centers and writing curriculum and then I started a franchise and learnt systems and frameworks and all of that sort of thing through running a franchise and selling skills like out of town sales skills and then running events and all of this sort of thing. That running online business is like the culmination of every natural skill that I have in this one thing. So never think that what you're doing is not going to make sense going forward, because everything helps when you're in there.

And so I started her Her Empire Builder in 2020. It took off so quickly and is really what pushed me over that million dollar mark really, really fast. And then I renamed the podcast Her Her Empire Builder because I was like, you know what? All my roads are leading to her Her Empire Builder. This is my life's work, this is my purpose.

This is what I want to do. And that is still 100% true. My mission for Her Her Empire Builder this year is to become known as the best online education for female course creators in the world. And so I'll go into in the episode the different things that we're doing this year in order to make that happen. But in the intro here, I just wanted to tell you the kind of theory around the name change, because I know it's something that you as a course creator will be thinking about.

And so I did her Her Empire Builder to match that. But the idea of a podcast is to not only give Massive Value and love up on your customers, but also to kind of it's a marketing thing. We cast the net wide so that people can get to know us through the podcast, get to learn what we're about, what we're like, what we believe in, all of that sort of thing. And then choose to first step is join your list and then the next one is become a client. And so with that, I was like, well, there's no point in putting Her Her Empire Builder out there on the podcast because people don't know what Her Her Empire Builder is yet.

If they do, they're a member already. But who her Her Empire Builder is for is female. Course. Creators. So I have rebranded to the Female Course Creator Show so that when people are searching for that sort of content, hi, it's me.

And then you can get to know me and then decide, am I your flavor? Am I not your flavor. Have I got the goods? I think I do. And then when I put out lead magnets, because this is the thing, right?

Podcasting is like the last anonymous land. Like, I always look at stats in podcasts and go, who is listening right now? I don't know. I don't know who's listening right now. Like, I don't know what you're doing, who you are, unless you choose to tell me.

And so it's this constant thing and going, all right, we add Massive Value and then when people are ready, they can jump through and go to the other side in there as well. So welcome to the female course, creator show. In this episode, I'm going to tell you all about this year, what's going on, what's happening, what I'm planning, and I hope you like my new intro and new cover and all of that. Thousands of people listen to this show every week, and I usually only get reached out when there's a mistake. So if there's been a glitch somewhere or if something's wrong, I get like a ton of emails and a ton of DMs.

But I would love to know what you think of the new name, the new cover. We're going to be having a whole lot more interviews as well. I'll still be doing solo episodes, but I usually up until this point, I've done about two or three solo episodes for every one interview, and we're flipping that and doing more interviews, less solo. So I'll do one solo episode for every like three, four, maybe five episodes going through that. So I hope you love it. Welcome to the new female course creators show.

Main Episode

Okay, so what I want to talk to you about today is what I'm going to do less of, what I'm going to do more of in 2023. Because like you heard in the new intro, my goal for the female course creator show is to help kind of ignite those ideas like fireworks.

That's really what I want to do. I want to ignite the ideas and also encourage you to take massive inspired action on those. Because ideas are one thing and what I see time and time again is people aren't short of an idea, but a lot of it is what's going to work for you and then having the courage to actually take the action and go after that. And this year can be completely transformative for you if you choose to take those steps. If you go, you know what?

I'm sick of sitting on the sidelines or I'm sick of just learning and not doing and actually take those things, find an accountability buddy or a group coaching program like her Her Empire Builder and get in there and hold yourself accountable, hold others accountable and actually get the result that you want to be able to get. You can be in such a different place at the end of this year than you are right now. What can happen in a year is absolutely astounding. Okay, so a couple of things is we had a massive year in 2022. If you listen to the wrap up email, like, you know, how many events I did and how many retreats and launches and all of those things.

So one of the things that I did was I survey my clients a lot. I survey people that don't buy when I do a launch, and I get a whole lot of feedback all the time so that I'm not creating the things that I mean, I create the things I want to create, let's be honest. But more than that, I will put them on the back burner and I will always create what people are asking me for, always. That's always the priority. And so we've taken all of that feedback and really redrafted what is happening in 2023 so that we're putting our focus and energy where it's going to make the biggest difference for our clients and where we can help grow their businesses.

I mean, my mission has always been since I started her Her Empire Builder, to have 100 women make a million dollars by 2025. And so we're going for that massively. And this year we're going for 300 members. So it's a big number and it's something that's going to need a lot of team support, because one of my things is we are known for quality. We're known for actually it's not a marketing byline, but actually having the best, most comprehensive business education for online course creators.

And so we need to make sure that as we scale that we can keep delivering those outcomes and that love and care that we have. So there was a couple of different things that I've done. I've done reduced numbers for Her Empire Builder. So Her Empire Builder is my mastermind program. Her Her Empire Builder is our group coaching.

And I've reduced Her Empire Builder to 44 people. And we're not opening it through the year, so we're going to do it in annual cycles and send invites out each October to her Her Empire Builder members that are performing really, really well, that want to push to that million and then they'll get the invite into Her Empire Builder to do that. So a few things that I'm going to do less of. I will do less face to face and more scale. I do love the face to face, but 2022, I just got overexcited and seven events with too many events.

So this year we're doing three, which is still a lot of logistics allows me we're doing our members retreat in Palm Springs, we're doing our members retreat in Port Douglas in Australia, and we'll do our end of year. And that is enough that we'll be able to see all of our clients if they want to see us in person. But I'm actually not doing any public events, so nothing open to nonmembers. Everything is just going into loving up our current members. So doing that, I would do less pushing when I'm tired, so I'll get to what this theme of the year is here, but I want less push energy, more going.

When I'm tired, you can stop, let's walk away. Less events, less using time instead of money. And this, up until this point, has been a really big shift in going. I have traditionally used time instead of money. I will look at something, I mean, I love canva one of the downsides, and you may be the same, I'm sure you can resonate with this, is you love your business, you're really good at what you do.

And so when you go to do things, like a good example is Canberra. I freaking love Canberra. And I will create things on there that I can make our week social media and all of the different graphics and everything that we do, and I can put that all together and I just love the creativity of it. I use my brain and do all of that and it might take me a few hours. And all of the different components of the business and all of the things that I have done up until this point, it's like, it's a few hours here, it's a few hours there.

Like, every task is allocated in the time. But I have this job matrix that I share inside her Her Empire Builder. That is every single task that happens inside an online course business. And then for every task, you make a procedure for that and then you allocate it to how long that's going to take and is it going to be you or is it going to be someone else? And when I do my job matrix and I look at how much time the different things take, I added it all up and I'm like, well, of course I'm running out of time because there's something that I'll go, I don't want to pay someone $500 to do that.

I can just do it myself in a few hours. But all of those few hours add up and I'm left with running out of time and energy and not using my time in the biggest revenue generating activities that I can be doing. So a big thing of 2023 is using money instead of time, which is a strange thing for me to say. And I think for a lot of people that have come from nothing, you would resonate with this. For a lot of people that have really done the battle through business, really had to fight for it and went a long time without really making much money and without having a big profit.

It's really hard to psychologically switch, but there is a point of which we have to graduate ourselves and go, all right, what got us here won't get us there. Unless you want to suffer from immense burnout. We need to start now using money instead of time. So that's the less now what I'm doing more of is more short courses. So I have her Her Empire Builder.

I've got a couple of short courses at the moment. I need to launch unlimited launch formula, and that's basically it. But what we found is in the last launch that we did for her Her Empire Builder, we sent a Why didn't you buy? Email out afterwards. And I asked five questions in that there were simple questions.

Most of them were open ended, so it gave tons of information. And we had 150 people return it, which is a huge amount of people to actually give really thoughtful, really useful feedback and for a lot of the people. So I always think my audience is like wanting to be six figures, seven figure course creators. That's where I'm aiming everything at. Inside her Her Empire Builder is, let's get you to 100K as quick as possible, because that is the hardest part.

Zero to 100 is the hardest part. Once you've got to 100 to 200, it's kind of dialing different things in getting a little bit of that scalability going, getting a little bit more of that instead of one on one too many and kind of ironing all of that out. That's the hardest part done. Then it's just really scale. Like, getting from that to a million is still hard.

Like, none of it's easy despite the advertising that some people do. But it's not the hardest part. It's really doable. But what I was surprised at was 72% of people either had an idea but hadn't taken any action yet, or didn't even have an idea, didn't know what they wanted to do. Just knew they wanted to get into online courses, but didn't know what they wanted to do.

So I know that that makes her Her Empire Builder really prohibitive. And people are like, well, am I ready to commit to something that's like, leveling up? You've got to be ready to go. My program is not a program for people that are like, well, I'll put one footy in, 1ft out. We'll dabble.

We'll see how it goes. It's for people that are like, I want to really elevate my course business. Let's go. So I'm going to do more short courses for people that are right at the beginning stages and don't know where to start with those particular areas. So we'll have things like Personal brand from Scratch, how to set up everything in your personal brand, how to start setting up processes for yourself.

So Monday, for course, creators, we'll have building your Kajabi site from scratch. We will have how to start your podcast. We'll have all of those little siloed bits and pieces so that people that aren't up and running yet and don't want to commit to an ongoing elevation program can really get one thing at a time and pace themselves in that. So we've got more short courses, we've got more devoted team. This has also been a really big thing for me.

I feel like I've spoken about it on the podcast at Nauseum. I'm not going to talk about it too much again, but I've hired some beautiful superstars and we now have a wonderful admin agency doing all of the admin. I was getting an EA that was going to be side by side, but I've decided I love the freedom of not having someone side by side with me. And so I'm using an admin agency. I have my marketing Rainmaker, who's in the US, our client success coordinator, who's in New York.

This is the thing, we've got staff now, like, all across the US, the UK and Australia. It's very eclectic. So we have our client success manager, we have our marketing manager, we have podcast manager, social media manager, content creator and admin agency. So we've got a full team now, all set up, ready to go, so that we've kind of built it. And as we grow, like, our next launch for her Her Empire Builder is in late March, and I have big plans for that, but never do I ever want to.

Sometimes I'll put the break on because I go, well, if we actually exceed those goals, I don't have the infrastructure in place for that. And my thing is always 100% of the time, people get the most incredible experience and we blow their mind going above and beyond expectations. And so you have to have the team and the infrastructure in place before you take a big level up, which is hard because it's costly. So, cost wise, I always do my revenue in my business and 20% of revenue goes to team. That's kind of how I budget in going, all right, I've got this much money that I can spend on team.

At some points of last year, we were down to about eight to 11%, which tells me I was drastically understaffed. And so now where we sit, we're up at about 36% to 40%. So huge. But that is because we're in January and in March it will then go back to its normal 20% after we do our launch. So I have built it so that it's ready for the next rise.

So my focus will be on short courses, on getting the devoted team, on developing my team. So I know that humans are complex, and I am so excited and energized by our mission and what we do. And having people all across the world, it's hard for them to be connected to that as well. So I'm doing a lot of things to develop the team. When we do our retreats, everybody's flying in and coming, which again, is a big expense, but it's worth it from a culture point of view.

And then everyone can kind of see what we're doing and feel that in their soul and know why we're doing the thing that we're doing, which I think is so incredibly important. And we're going to launch together, too. So in March, I've rented a house in Palm Springs because it's my favorite city in the world. And I've rented a house so that I can fly in all of the team there and we can have the week together with our laptops there and just kind of jam together, sit by the pool and get to know one another and get that team cohesion in there. So I'll be putting a lot of time, money, effort into developing the team.

I'll be doing more, asking for help and accepting it. If you listen to my 22 Lessons from 2022 episode, you'll know, this is a big one for me, so I will be accepting that help. I'll be saying, yes, I do not want to win the Marta Medal anymore, so that is done. I'll be doing more expansion. So I have, you know, been in a holding pattern through 2021, 2022 in not being sure if I wanted to go big again, because my last business got so big that I fell out of love with it because it became a different sort of business.

It was all just about the legalities and all of the just really boring. And I love the game of business. I love building, I love marketing, I love testing, measuring, experimenting, creating things, making it easy for people's, systems like all of that, geek out on it, love it. And I didn't want to lose that. So I've kind of architected the way, and this is the thing, and you don't have to do it the done way.

There's different things that I'm doing in my business this year that are not necessarily I'm doing my fingers with inverted commerce, like the done thing. But one of the most beautiful things about a course creator's business is there are so many different ways that you can do this. There is not one done way. And people will say, like, this is the only way to be successful. You have to have this.

But you don't. You can have short courses. You can have monthly recurring revenue. You can have memberships. You can have long courses.

You can have small containers, big containers. You can have low cost memberships, high cost memberships. You can have private coaching. There's so many different things that you can do. And for me, it's been working out, like, how do we do this team thing that will grow the business in the way that I want to grow, support my clients in the way that I want and need them to be supported and allow me to still fly.

So not be into people management each and every day, and that becomes my job, but my job is still being able to create and perform and help people. So that's what we're going for. More expansion, but done our way. I'll be spending more time in my garden and home with my family, more conferences and learning. So this year I'm going to St.

Lucia and Sedona and Greece and Mexico, Texas, and a couple of other places that are all for conferences that I am attending instead of running. And in 2022, most of what I did was I ran them. I was the facilitator, I was the leader, and I want to be the person that just sits down in the corner and kind of disappears and can go into my own little world with my notepad and my pen and just geek out and learn and be inspired and get new ideas. And so I'm really excited to be back into that learning mode and going, all right, I am all ears. Give me new ideas.

Show me how it's done. Challenge me. Can we go this way? Can we go that way? I feel alive with it, and I am pumped.

And of course, more fun with friends. There's a lot of things I'm doing in 2023 that just bring that fun back in. So the theme of my year, my word of the year, is vitality. So at the time of recording this, this is coming out in a couple of weeks. It is my birthday in two days.

It is my last year of my 30s. I'll be turning 39 when this comes out. I will have just turned 39. And a girlfriend of mine the other day said, are you thinking about it? Is it a thing for you, 39, 40?

And I was like, no, not at all. I don't mind getting older. I think getting older is an absolute privilege, and I'm pretty psyched about it. But when I thought about it a bit more, I was like, oh, yeah, obviously it does have something, because there's been so many signs of me to focus more on my health. And I've always had this mentality of, I'm the young woman in business.

Like, I started when I was 20, so my whole persona was around. Like, all of the marketing we did, all of the media that we got, everything was young woman in business. I was the youngest woman to be a franchise or in Australia, I won the young businesswoman of the year in Australia. There were so many things that were just like, young businesswoman. And so in my mind, I've always had.

This attitude of, I'm so young, I've got so much time, and I kind of went, oh, hang on, we're going from young to, like, middle aged. We better take a look at this. And so I've decided that I want to age backwards this year. So when I turn 40, I do want to age backwards. And I was at the hair salon the other day, and I was telling them about this, and they're like, honey, just come through and we'll give you some Botox.

But I don't want to. So I'm doing it a different way. And so I've stopped drinking alcohol. So I've gone alcohol free in 2023. I am two weeks into that now, and I'm a little ashamed to say how much I miss it.

Like, I miss it so much. I'm a little sad that it's no longer available to me, but already I feel so much more energy. And that was the whole point, is going often I have all of these ideas and all these things that I want to do in business and in life, and I will run out of time and energy before I run out of the ideas and before I run out of the things that I want to do. And I'm not sure if that will ever change. I think I'll always have more ideas, but I hated getting to the end of the day and feeling so pooped, and I know that it's a cycle.

So when I was drinking, I then the next day didn't feel like exercising so much. And so then it's this spiral that kept going, and the catalyst of that for me was the alcohol. And so I've stopped doing that. I started personal training right before Christmas, so I'm doing that twice a week, which has been amazing. Like, I haven't ran or lifted weights for a couple of years.

So it's been really good to just show me that my body can do really cool things still besides sit at a computer all day. And the changes already are so significant. So I'm trying to move my body more. I'm trying to eat more Whole Foods and just really increase the vibrancy and that feeling of being alive. So for this year, I wouldn't say I have no profit goals.

I always have profit goals. I know I want to get us to 300 members in her empire. Builder we sit around 30% profit. I'm happy for that to actually go down a little bit. So we want to double the revenue of the business.

It's unlikely that we will double the profit. So usually what you'll hear me say is, there's no point in doubling the revenue if you're not going to double your profit. And that also depends because we're going to double the revenue, but the profit won't necessarily double immediately because I'm building for 2024 as well. So as we progress through 2023, there'll be a lot of those profits that I will reinvest back into the business, to develop better programs to get more professional things done and more team on board that have more experience and higher level and all of that sort of thing. So I do have profit goals and we have kind of strategized that out.

I mean, of course I have, but it will be experimenting with a bit of a new way of doing business that I haven't actually done before. So it's not like up until this point, it's kind of I've known the exact levers to pull like a business from naught to a million dollars. I can tell you everything. Like, you do this, you'll get this, you do this, you get this, this, you'll get this, or this. Pick your pathway kind of thing, pick your problems.

Once it gets past this, though, I haven't been here before, and the friends that I have that run businesses, so we finished 2022 on 1.8. And the friends that I have that run businesses that kind of have 3 million, 4 million, 10 million, they all do it very, very differently. And this is what I mean by one size doesn't fit all. And so it's been this big thing of going, what's important to me? What do I want?

And how can I architect our business, to deliver me not only a business that's highly scalable, highly impactful, highly profitable, but also gives me a life that I'm really proud to live. And that is great for not only myself, but for my family and for my community in doing that. So, yeah, that's the goal for this year, the world's best online education for female Course Creators. We're on our way. Welcome to the female Course Creators show.

So new name. We're hoping to appeal to a new, wider audience and of course, proceed with global domination. So thank you so much for being along for the ride for that. I hope that you have big dreams for your year as well. I would love to hear them.

Let me know. Tag me on Instagram, send me a message, let me know what they are. I'm always cheering you on. There's amazing things that we can do. And when you've got the support and the encouragement and the knowledge, you just get to unlock that part of yourself that shows you that it's all possible and you can have it all and you can create whatever you want.

It's just a matter of time. And I wish that for you. Thank you so much for tuning in, always. I hope you loved it. Welcome to the new female course.

Creator show. This episode was brought to you by my Signature Group coaching program, Her Empire Builder the best online education for Female Course Creators in the world. Check it out at Tina Tower, along with so many free resources to help you get building your empire and seeing those results that you deserve. If you loved this episode, please don't keep it a secret, share it with a friend on social media and tag me at tina underscore Tower and give it a review. It really does help us to be able to bring you bigger and better content as we grow. Have the most beautiful day. I'm Tina Tower and I'm cheering you on all the way.