Lessons

Lesson Info

Hot Seat with Alaia Williams

Tell us who you are, where we can find you online, and the core offer that you've been working on. My name's Alaia Williams, I'm a business systems strategist, and you can find me online at alaiawilliams.com. Alaia is spelled A-L-A-I-A. Beautiful, like a seasoned CreativeLive Student, love it (laughing). All right. And the core offer? That is what I'm trying to figure out. So I have my course, Systems School, but then I also work one-on-one with people. Usually they buy a package, some clients buy retainers, but most buy a package. And we zero in on a few areas where they need my help getting systems in place or getting organized. I'm trying to decide which one is the core, so that that can help me define like what the follow up and potential first steps are. Yeah, so let's talk about goals. Because when we have these kind of big open-ended questions, strategic questions about how we're gonna build our business model, and in essence, build our product plan, goals are super, sup...

er important. Do you want to be working with people one-on-one, do you want to build a consultancy, an agency, even if one person, you? Or do you want to work in a one-to-many model, where you're taking business owners, working them through a methodology, in a group? Ultimately where do you want to end up? I really enjoy working with people one-on-one, I love the class because it has that one-to-many, and one-to-many for me doesn't mean thousands, but I get to help people in a group situation. I'm just having a hard time thinking of how I do my business and how I like working, and seeing the course as the core offer. So I think that the core offer would be the one-on-one work. Okay, you didn't actually answer my question. Yeah. Where do you want to be 10 years from now with this business? Do you want to be running a consultancy, or do you want to sell this program? Have a training business that sells this program? That's how I should ask that. That's so tough. (laughing) Just because you answer it here on live internet video doesn't mean you need to stick with it. I know, it could change. Let's roll with the course. Let's say that I want to train. All right, so Alaia's building a training company. I love it, yay. I would also love it if it was a consultancy, let's just be clear, I'm very happy. Core, what's it called again? Systems School. Systems School. All right, and tell us about Systems School, what's the value statement behind it? Still working on that. (laughing) But the essence of the course is that you understand the five essential systems that every small business needs. Okay. So that's what I take them through in Systems School. Okay, five essential systems. And only because you were here for the marketing class, too, I'm gonna say that part of the value statement there is not dropping the ball. Not dropping the ball again. In your business. And you know, some of the stuff we talked about with me and others here, it cuts out the time Googling and experimenting, because I've done all of that. Yeah, and so you can work on refining that. Where does this fall in your customer journey? So your customer journey and my customer journey are basically overlapping. There might be some differences in exactly who it is and what the specifics might be. Is this towards the beginning when someone's just getting the idea of what their business is? Is it somewhere in the middle when they've done some of the work, they've got things started and now they're kind of stressing out? Is it towards the end when they're figuring out how am I gonna take this to the next level? How am I gonna get closer to that ultimate goal? Yeah, I want it to be the beginning, but what it actually is, it's middle to later. People are usually thinking about their systems when they're ready to scale, whatever scale means to them. Okay, so hiring people, bringing in more customers, so they're selling, they've got some experience, and sort of the questions that are coming up is how to hire. They know they could be doing business in a better way, like they're spending a lot of time on admin, so they want to automate and work smarter. Spend less time, yeah, exactly. Okay, great. How are you positioning this in the market? What's your USP? Why is someone gonna buy this instead of all the other things they could buy? It's tested. There is some customization within the course, so they'll get personalized feedback, and some one-on-one attention. So it's more efficient than Googling, it's more efficient than signing up for a dozen trials of things, and trying to figure it out. So we can really zero in on what's gonna work for them. Okay, great. What's the price? Right now, it's 200 bucks. Here's where we're gonna run into some issues. (laughing) So what's your revenue goal? For this round, where I was changing things up, I just wanted... No, no, no. What's your revenue goal for like 2020. Gosh. Yeah. 350,000 a year. Okay, 350,000. I don't know what 80% of 350,000 is. Neither do I. We're gonna say it's about 300,000. Okay. I have no idea how many times 200 goes into 300,000. A lot. Johnny Lee is not here with his calculator this time. But it's a lot. All right, think y'all. 150,000? 150. Something. 1,500. 1,500 that sounds more better. That's better. (laughing) Collectively, we can all get the math. Where's your daughter when we need her? I know, right? Dang. She loves long division. Okay, so 1,500. Do you have the capacity to serve 1,500 students in Systems School right now? Yeah. You do? Yeah. Okay, great. All right, awesome. I love your confidence. I can do that. I can do that, she says. Excellent. All right. After Systems School, what new question, frustration, obstacle do they have? They are often--after Systems School is the part where they really have to take action and make that decision of I'm gonna do this, or I'm gonna bring someone on to help me implement this. So I was thinking that the follow up would potentially be either buying a package with me or a retainer. Now obviously if I'm scaling into a training company, there'd be other people that they'd be working with. But as it stands right now, that follow up is potentially either buying a package of a certain number of hours, or getting into some kind of retainer relationship. All right, so customer journey wise, it's like the question is how to implement this. And in terms of value that you're providing, you're providing that implementation, right? Making sure everything's integrated, that your systems are talking to each other properly, so I would be there to help make sure that it all gets set up and runs. So like hassle free, reduces anxiety... That's what we talked about yesterday. all of the things, loving it. Why would someone buy this from you, as opposed to something else on the market? Instead of hiring a BA? Right. Experience. Okay. Because of that experience I can do things efficiently. I would also say, actually, that it's methodology. Right? Because if you're building a training company, a training company is generally built on methodology, right, and Systems School is your methodology. So, yes, experience, but experience that has translated into a particular methodology. Now this could get complicated here. But I would say there's probably also an aspect to your training company that's teaching people how to implement that methodology for others. There could be a certification program, maybe this is just an internal thing, where you're hiring people, teaching them the methodology. But it's still, it's all methodology, methodology, methodology, and that's your unique selling proposition. Make sense? Ah, price? That would probably start at 1,000 bucks. A month? One time, unless they wanted ongoing help. Oh, I see. So it's like a service package. Yeah, it would either be a package or a retainer, that's where people usually decide. All right, well good news, if you're selling 1,500 people through Systems School, I know you can get 50 of them to buy a $1,000 package. You could totally increase the price on that, too, but the way, and make a lot more money. Oh yeah, yeah. All right? First step, I think you probably, if you keep the price at $200... It won't be, but let's pretend it is for now. Good, don't do that. But if you keep the price even on the lower side, I'm gonna say anything south of $2,000 or more, I don't really... You don't need a paid first step. This is a first step. Your core offer is a very easy like, yes, I need that. That's why I asked that question about is my other thing a first step? So your other thing is essentially your first step. And so you want to be thinking every time you do one of those, how am I preparing people for this offer? What's one step I can take them on that's gonna show them that this is the logical next step? Got it. And that's what this is all about, too. The customer journey piece, each offer should be the logical next step to the next one. It might not be exactly consecutive. There might be some internal marketing that happens between one offer and another offer, but you're helping people always take the next step, and the next step after that, and the next step after that. As long as we're not filling our junk drawers up. Okay, make sense? Yes, absolutely. Any questions? No, I feel better now. All right. Yay! (laughing) Now you really could take this and redo the whole thing for a consultancy kind of model. And it just looks different. But this goes back to what we talked about yesterday, which is when you decide on your core offer, you're also deciding what kind of company you are building. I think that's why it was kind of getting there, because on the consultancy model, the core offer is the package, it's like, okay, what's next? Just a retainer, or what would it become? And you know, on that note, too, so I'm thinking now in terms of infrastructure and capabilities, if you're building a training company, I would say this offer is less actual implementation, yes, that is going to be the value, here, that you're offering. But probably what happens is that you've got trainers who are coming into people's businesses and working with a staff member, working with the owner to get that done. Especially if I'm making 350,000 through the course alone. And so yeah, so this is going to be training as well, but it's going to be training in terms of like, here, we're doing this together and then your team member is gonna know how to do it in the future. Right, okay. Okay? Yep.