Live Your Passion, Money Mindset

How I Quit 1:1 PT to Create A 50k+ Monthly Income. Part 3: My 70k Launch!

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Have you ever had one of those ideas that you just know is going to change your life?

That’s exactly how I felt back in 2011 when – after nearly 4 years battling it out online and for the most part not really getting anywhere – I hit upon the idea of Woman Incredible. At the time I was just so darn excited to have something to be excited about again! It felt great to wake up naturally early each morning, already pumped to get to work building my new blog and community, and to go to bed each night with my mind full of ideas for the next day.

Little did I know that my ‘cool idea’ would soon turn into over $30,000 of quickly created income and then into a quarter of a million dollar business!

In today’s blog – Part 3 of my Business Story series – I want to share the story of Woman Incredible with you and how I was able to go from making a ‘modest’ online income to making a truly abundant and lifestyle changing living that allowed me to finally quit my 1:1 business in just over a year.

Missed the first few posts in this series?

In Part 1 of this series I took you through the first year or two of my online journey – in which I basically blogged my butt off and achieved very little in return except for a massive audience of 109 subscribers.

I’d reached a point where I was truly starting to wonder if I had what it took, but just when perhaps I may have given up I was fortunate enough to win a competition to have a free consult with one of the Internet’s most respected writers and editors (amongst other notes of acclaim!), Mr Jon Morrow.

In Part 2 I took you through exactly what happened in this half hour call – what Jon’s exact advice was – and how it literally changed the direction of my online business and even my life as I went on to finally start making pretty cool money online and getting some serious traction in my business.

The True Lesson Jon Morrow Taught Me

In the last post I shared the exact advice that online writer and editor extraordinaire Jon Morrow gave me in the half hour consult I won with him. It was great advice and I could literally credit an over 700% increase in my blog traffic over the 6 months following that consult. I also made what I considered my first real money online in that year – over $10,000 between a telecoaching program and my ebook ‘Secrets of Lasting Weight Loss Revealed’.

I was pumped! Of course πŸ™‚ But it wasn’t until years later – perhaps not even until I sat down to write this series – that I realised what the true gift Jon gave me was.

He gave me back the ability to believe in myself.

I’d become so used to doing the hard yards online, to blogging and blogging and dutifully trying to implement the Never-Ending List of Things That Must Be Done to Make It Online (I know you’ve seen that list!) that I guess I was just used to the battle. But as much as I didn’t mind working hard and I certainly did love writing and engaging with my community, I was getting tired.

Our daughter had come along to add a ton of joy to our lives but also (as kids often do) a big wake up call. I didn’t want to be doing Personal Training for the rest of my life, trading time for money – not even for a great hourly wage. And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t even want to be doing it for another month, week or even day!

I wanted an out. Not because I didn’t enjoy life as it was then but because I believed it could be so much more of what I really craved. Which was freedom. Choice. The ability to live life 100% on my terms. And to ‘make it’ as a writer, to achieve success and recognition by empowering others to recognise what THEY really wanted out of life and then to give them the drive to go out and achieve it.

But how could I even contemplate teaching something like that when I wasn’t making MY dream business and life a reality?!

I had become used to feeling stuck, overloaded, as though sheer hard slog and VERY slow growth was the only way to get ahead.

After my conversation with Jon – especially as he complimented me repeatedly on the quality of my writing – I felt like I could take on the world! Do anything! Isn’t it amazing how much an attitude and self-belief change can impact on the actual results you create?

I guess it’s not so amazing really, not with what I now know about dream life creation and getting what you expect. But at the time it was just such a relief to be told ‘you can do this’.

‘You’ve got what it takes’.

I really needed to hear it. And I want to tell you right now, particularly if you’re reading this feeling inspired and hopeful but also a little scared that maybe you don’t have what it takes –

You can do this.

You have what it takes.

And it is absolutely WORTH this battle that you’re going through now.

But let’s talk about how to fast-track success.

Despite being able to create over 10k income from my site Body Incredible (which was all about nutrition, exercise and motivation) I was missing one key thing.

When I work with my business mentoring clients now, one of the very first things we do is get absolutely clear on niche and ideal client. Let me be upfront – most people have done this exercise. Yet despite this, most people are absolutely NOT clear on niche and ideal client, are holding stuff back and also not really letting THEIR true identity shine through in their online business.

One of the easiest ways to fail fast online is to try to be like everyone else, or even anyone else and that’s what I was learning. I wasn’t particularly modeling myself on anybody online (at the time I didn’t really know of any other trainers with blogs!) but I was basically churning out fairly standard content based on what I would learn in various courses, with the occasional ‘real Kat’ mindset or Personal Development piece thrown in.

My light wasn’t really shining very brightly at all, and to make things worse I was trying to appeal to anyone who wanted to lose weight. Yep … kind of a big market πŸ™‚

For several years I’d been resisting this little voice inside of me telling me that I needed to specialise in working with women. I didn’t want to be that girl! I actually preferred my male personal training clients to my female – less chit-chat πŸ™‚

But at the same time I was starting to realise I had an important message to share with women. And that it ran so much deeper than simply ‘fat loss and nutrition stuff’. Despite becoming attuned to this fact I stubbornly resisted the idea for a good 6 months, maybe more. And looking back, I’m not even sure what changed. I just know that at some point I knew I had to move on from Body Incredible and create a community for women.

For months – seriously, nearly 6 months – I brainstormed to try and come up with a name for my female-only venture. I was very close to buying moneysexchocolate.com … I got it into my head that those were all the things women wanted more of and so that it was therefore an infallible business idea!

Fortunately (I guess?!) I moved on from that idea and kept beating my head against the wall for a few months before it hit me. So simple. So obvious. So perfect. My site Body Incredible had taken me on a great ride, and I still loved the name. I was a little sad to be leaving it behind. And so came the birth of Woman Incredible –

WI

This time around there was no WAY I was going in unprepared. I knew so much more about making it online then what I had back in ’07 when my first little newsletter-turned-blog went online and this time I was in it for more than just an outlet for my writing and a way to give a broader service to my clients.

Those long-awaited dreams of being a truly FREE entrepreneur were about to come to fruition. I could just FEEL it. Oh sure, I’d been working for myself the whole time anyhow but anyone who has done 1:1 as a business model knows it’s really just a well paid job. As soon as you stop, so does the money. And ‘freedom’ or ‘choice’ are not exactly a words we associate with a busy 1:1 practice. At least I didn’t!

I saw Woman Incredible as my way out of the successful-but-way-too-full-on-and-unsustainable life I’d created for myself. My daughter was a year old, I’d come back from our 6-week US and Canada elopement trip feeling refreshed only to right away realise I didn’t WANNA be doing PT anymore, and I was filled with motivation and perhaps an over-inflated idea of what I could achieve online after the 25k or so success I’d had in 2010.

It was time. It was MY time. Not only to finally create the freedom and choice I longed for but to truly start writing the stuff I wanted to write and make a difference. And somehow I just knew that this was going to be big.

I spent close to 6 months preparing to launch Woman Incredible. Everything had to be just right.

I had a logo designed which I still LOVE – despite us speaking 2 different languages, the guy I hired got the exact effect I was going for (after about 30 edits, no wonder he didn’t want to work with me again afterwards haha … as someone who never stops changing her mind I’m a graphic designers nightmare; he wouldn’t be the only one to say it lol)

LogoI pre-wrote 16 blog posts (the plan being to publish 2 a week), based around the idea that I wanted to take my readers through an internal shift over the first 6 months of the blog, so I’d written out themes on what I would cover each month.

I carefully put together a series of pages covering my philosophies on all of the different areas Woman Incredible would be about – nutrition, stress, motivation and mindset, exercise, and of course the big one – ‘you’.

And this time around I even wrote a tentative plan for how I was going to turn this thing into a business.

Screen Shot 2013-10-24 at 10.13.47 AMAfter how long it took me to get traffic traction on Body Incredible I decided to be really strategic about launching Woman Incredible, and so I invited basically every fabulous nutrition/mindset/fitness based woman I knew or knew of online to join the launch, and also put together a giveaway package worth over $900 for each of my first 100 subscribers.

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On top of that I’d been talking about the launch and what I was up to on Body Incredible for ages. Even though I’d never really heard of or studied launch processes and certainly didn’t know what a ‘pre-launch’ was, that’s basically what I was doing.

And it worked! On March 1, 2011 at 11am Melbourne time Woman Incredible and the accompanying Facebook page went live. Well – it nearly did πŸ™‚ If you’ve ever planned a launch done to the minute you’ll know something ALWAYS goes wrong! At the designated time I was having coffee with a client who was visiting from Perth (and had brought me amazing flowers to celebrate Woman Incredible) and … nothing happened on Woman Incredible but my ‘it’s here!’ email still went out to Body Incredible fans. Not the last time I’ve fumbled a launch!

Anyway, that was soon fixed and by the end of that day I believe I had close to 1000 email subscribers and several hundred Facebook fans – 283 I believe was the number!

Fast forward to now – 2.5 years later – and that’s turned into over 13k email subscribers, over 22k Facebook fans, over 50k p/month of consistent online income, and a community of incredible women all working together to change their bodies and change their LIVES.

Yes. I’m a little bit proud πŸ™‚

But the thing I was MOST proud and excited about was that finally I felt I’d found my flow.

Recently I read that the definition of happiness is waking up feeling optimistic and expectant about the day you get to live and that’s exactly how I felt throughout my entire build up to launching Woman Incredible, as well as in the early days after it came to life. I just couldn’t get enough of writing. Day after day I’d be lost in what I was doing, magnetically glued to my laptop screen as I sat in funky inner Melbourne cafes or occasionally at home and just wrote and wrote and wrote.

When I was in that world, honestly the building next to me could have fallen down and I wouldn’t have noticed. Hours could pass and suddenly I’d realise my coffee was long cold, I’d been busting to go to the bathroom for over an hour, and the cafe staff were starting to give me ‘that’ look.

I’d found my bliss and if I didn’t know it before I certainly knew then that I was BORN to be a writer.

It’s funny how when you find something you’re so passionate about – so meant to do – that you become incredibly motivated outside of just that thing. Even before the ‘birth day’ of Woman Incredible I felt incredibly empowered and inspired with what was possible for this business – and filled with ideas! One of those ideas – something I was SURE would make me my fortune online and at the same really help me to share my message and make a difference was to create a membership program for women who really wanted to take charge of their fitness and health and work with me more closely.

Screen Shot 2013-10-24 at 10.18.49 AMI spent 6 months working on the creation of my Woman Incredible VIP Platinum Mentoring program and finally launched it at 6pm on my birthday, October 2 – 6 days and 1 month after the launch of the site.

It was pretty stressful launching it at a specific time! My business manager Mal (who had started part time with me in July that year) and I literally pressed publish on the final piece of the puzzle at 5.59pm – the ‘it’s here’ email was going live right on 6pm and I had to be at my birthday dinner at 6.30! You’d think I would have learned about launching things at specific times by now but I still keep doing it to this day … and it NEVER gets any less stressful πŸ™‚ the only difference now is that I’ve learned (and Mal has had too also!) that this is just how I get things done – always down to the wire.

My 75k Program Launch!

I guess I’d done something right with my pre-launch ‘building anticipation’ as in the 3 days that I kept the doors of VIP open I had over 100 people register! The ‘deal’ was $1 only for the first month and then $97 p/month after that, for a total of 12 months. Yep – my very first real program was a 12 month program in which members received the following every single day –

Motivational email
Nutrition/transformation tip for the day
Motivation action task/journaling for the day
Daily workout video for home or gym (yep every single day!)
Weekly recipes
Weekly meal plans

Plus my VIP ladies had access to a TON of additional resources and bonuses, with new ones coming out monthly. I don’t do things by halves! The program is one I still run once a year and it comprises 18 2-5 week learning modules over the year – the idea is not just that you receive daily workout and food ‘how-to’ and ‘what to’ but also that you go through a process of learning and understanding what YOU need to know on everything from finding your unique food needs, to hormones, to stress, digestion and a ton of other aspects of health. Basically I tried to compress everything I know about health and being in shape into this program.

After the $1 trial month I had just over 40 ladies stay on – a result I was pretty happy about, although by month 4-5 a few more had dropped off.

At the time I thought this was terrible and I couldn’t understand why – the program was SO comprehensive. In retrospect I now know that it was way TOO comprehensive for most people. Can you imagine receiving a daily (long!) email of tasks and learning for your business? Every day?! It sounds good in theory but as if you’d actually read and implement every day; I know I wouldn’t! In the end I cut the emails down to 5 p/week but it is definitely still a program more for those who want results and to also LEARN and create a lifestyle approach to their health and nutrition, not just for those who want quick-fix results.

I’ve also learned that it’s basically the norm for people to start dropping off in month 4 when it comes to programs 6 months or longer. So I feel better about that!

I went live with the program again 6 months after it’s first launch, using the same $1 deal, and the income result from these combined open periods was over $70,000! You can imagine how stoked I was, especially after how much WORK it’s creation was.

It literally took an entire year to finish putting together, as I basically created the content day by day as we went, and filmed videos in batches every 3 weeks. I came to absolutely DREAD those filming days – it took all day and I found it tedious. It was a real lesson that my preferred way to work is to be completely unbound by appointments and ‘have to do today’s!’. Plus – I really just want to write and not do anything else!

As for the daily emails with all their content and the recipes, meal plans, module overviews and reports etc – I did that entirely on the fly. I mean it – when the program went live I’d written ‘Daily Digest #1’ and that was IT. After that I tried to get a few days or sometimes a week ahead but often I was writing the days digest on the same day it had to go out. This went on for the entire 12 months – we might have at one stage been 2 weeks ahead when I was going away, but that was it!

I was really hard on myself about being so ‘disorganised’ and doing everything at the last minute.

I’d initially planned to write the whole year in advance (GOD!) but it just seemed that old high-school version of me who did all her big assignments the night before was stronger than the ‘wants to be organised and pre-prepared’ side of me!

The funny thing is – now that I hang out with so many incredibly successful female entreprneurs in online masterminds and the like I know it’s really really common for people to create their programs on the fly. You might think the idea sounds horrific (and scary!) but there’s a certain type of creative who just loves that under pressure approach to work.

It’s been just over 2 years now since I launched VIP and in that time I’ve gone live with 3 other major ecourse programs and with each and every one I’ve created as I go. I’ve come to terms with that being my creation style – and so has Mal. She hasn’t had any other choice haha πŸ™‚

Already looking for the next challenge …

As awesome as VIP was and as great as the testimonials and feedback from it were in those early months it was quickly apparent that it wasn’t going to be the ‘thing that everybody would do’ that I’d hoped for. It was obvious that most people wanted something far less complex and more specific to their current need. I was starting to get more and more requests on both Facebook and email to write up a ‘list of allowed foods’, so in January of 2012 I started doing just that.

Being the details kind of gal that I am, my list of foods quickly became a full-blown report which then turned into an eating plan with every possible accompaniment you can imagine, from shopping lists, to detailed meal plans and recipes, to food prep tips, to rules on ‘treat meals’, to calculating how much protein you need and even to understanding your motivation and any sabotage issues when it comes to eating right and so The Look Great Naked Eating Plan was born.

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Around the same time that I was writing my eating plan I made an incredible spontaneous and what felt like crazy decision to walk out of doing personal training. I was having a massage after a massive day of clients, and my mind was running crazy as I tried to ‘jigsaw’ all the components of my busy life into a plan that seemed workable.

I was tired of the relentless 1:1 days and had been for some time. Not only did I want more freedom I wanted to be able to spread a bigger message and now that I was starting to do that with Woman Incredible I resented being restrained by having so much of my limited ‘work’ time (my daughter was only a little over 1 so I couldn’t work 24/7 like I used to!) taken up by stuff that held no deeper purpose.

At the same time I had this constant sense that if only I could bring myself to that the plunge and make a leap of faith that I’d be able to create something truly remarkable and entirely on my terms. I spent nearly the entire massage hour trying to work out how to fit in everything I wanted to do, and even make space for new projects, and suddenly it hit me –

It wasn’t going to happen.

And it was up to me to do something NOW to create the life I claimed I wanted. I walked out of that massage room certain that I had to quit PT, and on the Monday 3 days afterwards I did just that. 2 weeks later and I was done – over 13 years of personal training finished, just like that. It was an incredibly bittersweet time, and also an incredibly exhilarating feeling to know that I was literally putting my life in my own hands.

I’d decided to jump with no idea what was ahead and by God was I going to make sure it worked out.

Little did I know that big success was already just around the corner for me. Little did I know that those offhand requests for a ‘list of allowed foods’ which led to me creating my Eating Plan would be the start of my building an online empire via The Look Great Naked Training Plan, The Look Great Naked Bootcamp and a myriad of other related products and offerings.

In fact, by the time 2012 drew to an end that leap of faith would have paid off in a way I’d never dreamed possible and I’d be making upwards of $30,000 per MONTH.

In Part 4 of this series (the final piece of the story!) I’ll outline:

  • The planning, sales and marketing strategy I used to create well over $100,000 of additional income via my Look Great Naked products in 2012
  • How this gave me the confidence and knowledge to go on to create over 30k per month of income by the end of that year
  • The key components that allowed me to go to that level of 30k per month and maintain it
  • And how I took another huge leap of faith and leveraged my success to upwards of 50k per month in my current business

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2 responses to “How I Quit 1:1 PT to Create A 50k+ Monthly Income. Part 3: My 70k Launch!”

  1. Vanessa says:

    I feel you on the name thing! I took me about 2-3 months to find the name I wanted for my new business! Loving your site πŸ™‚