Growing a Hands-On, High-Touch Business with Perfect Planning Events founder Tara Melvin

Interviews, Show Notes

Growing a Hands-On, High-Touch Business with Perfect Planning Events founder Tara Melvin

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • How duplicable systems keep things running smoothly
  • Why strong vendor relationships help Perfect Planning Events deliver
  • How to control the client mix so that you’re getting the business you want
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I learned a lot about what it takes to run a hands-on, high-touch business this week when I talked to Tara Melvin, founder of Perfect Planning Events, on the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast. As a wedding and events planner for more than a decade, Tara has developed deep relationships with vendors and created systems that help her deliver the high level of service her clients expect.

Systems and strong relationships

Build your vendor partners and treat them how you want to be treated.

– Tara Melvin

On average, Perfect Planning Events handles 15 to 18 events per year depending on the mix of full-service clients and the less time-consuming coordination-service clients. Tara is highly involved with the customer for 9 to 12 months. All vendor communication from the venue to the DJ funnels through Tara, so the bride, groom and their families only need to worry about the phone calls and emails coming from one source—Tara.

I’ve been in business for 13 years now and I have good, solid vendor relationships that when I call on them to get the support I need, I know they’re going to bring their A game whenever it’s time to produce events for my clients.

– Tara Melvin

To be a successful planner, you need to be highly organized, and so Tara has developed a systems-based approach that’s mostly electronic to keep herself, her team and her clients updated and on the right track. Tara uses Evernote to keep the flow of notes and ideas going even when she’s on the go, Outlook to schedule all her appointments and follow-ups, and gives each of her couples a client workbook with checklists, budget sheets and information that she developed over the years to make wedding planning simple and less stressful for them.

With her full-service clients, Tara has nine face-to-face meetings (this doesn’t include site visits) that last two hours each. They discuss any changes to the “hopes and dreams” for the event, payments that are due and progress with the planning.

Pricing strategy and client mix

Tara recently verified her pricing strategy: She wanted to be sure she was providing a fair price for her clients, but also wanted to ensure that she was being fair to herself. So, she tracked every email, phone call and hour she used from start to finish for a full-service client. It was a real eye-opener for how much time she spent with each client. From there, she calculated what she wanted to make annually and came up with a per-hour price for her services.

Tara always aims to get that full-service client. She won’t sign a client for just coordination services until its 6 months out from their wedding date. This allows her to preserve her time for her most desired service offering, but then she can fill in any of her open time and make additional income by offering just coordination services.  

Listen to the full episode to learn the secret to dealing with client drama with poise and professionalism, how Tara introduces her team to each project so that they can step in for her if necessary, how networking helped her make connections that built her business and what’s next for Perfect Planning Events.

Never miss an episode by subscribing to the Profit. Power. Pursuit podcast on iTunes where every week I talk to today’s entrepreneurs about how they are building their business and teams to create the lives of their dreams.

Why Physical Goods are the New Services with inkWELL Press founder Tonya Dalton

Interviews, Show Notes

Why Physical Goods are the New Services with inkWELL Press founder Tonya Dalton

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • How a physical product helps service providers create a more sustainable model
  • How Tonya tackles product development from idea to launch
  • How using your mission to guide decision-making keeps your focus
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This week, on the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast I chat with Tonya Dalton, founder of inkWELL Press who has made it her mission to “help women find peace through productivity.” As a former teacher, Tonya knew right from the beginning that education was going to be a big part of what she was going to offer in her business. She said the biggest compliment inkWELL Press can receive is when people tell them that they’re actually a service-based company that just happens to sell a fabulous product—journals and planners of all kinds.

Products Extend your Reach

Products are physical manifestations of services.

—Tonya Dalton

As Tonya shared organization and productivity strategies with those she coached, she wanted those people to have the right tools available so they could implement the strategies she taught. A physical planner had helped her stay organized and productive, so she set out to design her very own for her clients. The products themselves have become brand ambassadors of sorts, since a lot of their business is from referrals. Not only are people talking about inkWELL Press’s planners, they also talk to their colleagues and families about the systems and how they are being more productive.

“Having a product helps you reach people without you being in front of them. I’m still able to generate revenue, put forth my mission without me having to do every single bit of it,” said Tonya.

Products help service-oriented and digital businesses reach corners of the marketing world that they may have not been able to reach otherwise.

Product Development Process: Idea to Launch

When you’re creating your timeline, you need to account for things that you don’t really know.

—Tonya Dalton

The first product Tonya brought to market was the weekly planner; what she considers to be their cornerstone product. She starts off with a brainstorm and thinks about all the elements that should be included. Then, she goes into a thorough questioning process, asking friends, family and even strangers to see if the new concept resonates with them. This is an important part of the process, and one that’s sometimes skipped by those who are too excited by their own amazing idea, they fail to check to make sure others also believe it is amazing. From there, it goes into design, finding the right materials and vendors to help make her vision a reality. And lots of back and forth with samples and tweaking before going into full production mode. Equally important is to simultaneously build the buzz around your product. It’s not enough to just have a beautiful product. If you don’t have a marketing strategy in place, your beautiful product won’t get in the hands of your ideal customers.

We put a lot of time and energy not into just creating the product itself but actually creating the buzz and excitement around it.

—Tonya Dalton

Use Your Mission to Guide Your Decision Making

Although the way she achieves her mission may have altered slightly—she focuses first on productivity and then organization naturally follows—at its heart, her business has really stayed true to the mission she set forth initially. Her mission is the ultimate litmus test to determine her focus, what products she develops next and how her business strategies shift.  

Get all the detail of our conversation including how Tonya and her husband skimped and saved to launch their business, asked lots of questions and invested in training for the things they didn’t know how to do, how her podcast, The Productivity Podcast is a natural extension of her teaching and what’s on the horizon for the business by checking out the full episode.

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From Wholesale to Brick & Mortar with Girls Can Tell creator Sara Villari

Interviews, Show Notes

From Wholesale to Brick & Mortar with Girls Can Tell creator Sara Villari

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • Why wholesaler Sara Villari decided to buck the trend and open a brick and mortar shop
  • How to determine what will really sell (Hint: It’s not about a pretty shop)
  • Why trust in the right people is crucial for a business to grow
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As we learned in this week’s Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast, sometimes your business can be the exception to the rule. In 2006, Sara Villari began selling screen-printed products that featured her doodles through her online shop Girls Can Tell gift co. Her wholesale business grew thanks to the support of small businesses and boutiques that purchased her products. In 2013, Sara decided to buck the online retail trend and opened up her own brick and mortar shop in South Philly, Occasionette, to feature her entire line of products as well as products from hundreds of vendors. At first, it didn’t seem like a big leap, but it has since surpassed her first business in revenue and scope.

Patterns for Success

What became my retail shop Occasionette has eclipsed my first business by leaps and bounds.

– Sara Villari

Inspired by the patterns she recognized from shops who reordered from Girls Can Tell gift co. often and were really good clients, plus finding a fantastic location on East Passyunk Avenue with lots of foot traffic, Sara decided it was time to open a brick and mortar location. She saw that successful shop owners would pick really strong SKUs and they would order very deeply into those SKUs because they had confidence in what would sell. She recognized that the secret to success for Occasionette was understanding what would sell—a combination of knowing what’s a really good product at its core, what fills a need in the marketplace, what people are looking for and what’s on trend right now. If your goal is to make a lot of money, don’t create products that are a vanity project.

Evolution of a Team

Sara has surrounded herself with fantastic people who really have the best interest of her companies at heart—a partner and employees who complement Sara’s strengths and are passionate about things that she isn’t necessarily good at or cares about. Her team also has the autonomy to handle their parts of the business. Building this trustworthy team is the linchpin that allows Sara to juggle two businesses and to expand Occasionette to a second location.

In the full episode, learn more about Sara’s current team and the plans for her businesses, how she manages to nurture her creative side while balancing the demands of being an owner of two businesses, and how she divides her time between the two.

Every week, I get the nitty-gritty details about how small business owners develop products, build their teams and manage their time. Don’t miss a single episode of the podcast named by Entrepreneur magazine as one of the top 24 Exceptional Women-Hosted Podcasts for Entrepreneurs in 2017 and subscribe to Profit. Power. Pursuit. on iTunes.

Growing a Million Dollar Online Course Institution with School of Motion founder Joey Korenman

Interviews, Show Notes

Growing a Million Dollar Online Course Institution with School of Motion founder Joey Korenman

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • How it’s possible even when you’re successful to change direction and create something that works better for your life
  • What signals of success let Joey know he was on to something
  • How building a team allows you to focus on what matters most to allow for company’s growth
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A few years ago, School of Motion founder Joey Korenman, my guest on this week’s Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast, had achieved what he thought would mean true business success and happiness. Instead he realized he was so busy climbing the mountain of success he thought he should be on, he forgot to summit the mountain of success he wanted to be on. We talk about the path Joey took to build a $1 million online course institution for motion designers in less than 3 years and some of the lessons he learned along the way.

If at first you don’t find happiness; try, try again

It was a little bit of strategy and a little bit of naivety.

– Joey Korenman

Joey seemed to be living the dream. He had opened his own studio with two business partners. His office was in the heart of downtown Boston with a client list that included ad agencies for some of America’s biggest brands. About two years in, a daily 3-hour commute, all-nighters and client pressure to perform regardless of what it did to his work/life balance, Joey looked up and realized he was depressed and needed to “figure out an escape hatch.”

When he started to consider the possibilities, he didn’t know his new business would be selling training. Joey started a blog (even though he knew nothing about digital marketing) to teach people motion design after seeing Greyscalegorilla, a business in his space, was blogging. At the time he built his website, he had no idea how he was going to make money. After a trial period developing and selling plug-ins for animation tools, Joey realized what he really wanted to do was teach.

The moment he knew he was on to something

If you can bring someone from their head space into yours they will follow you anywhere.

– Joey Korenman

While blogging, Joey was honing his entrepreneurial skills and learning through resources from Pat Flynn, Tim Ferriss and Jaime Masters. He knew there was a need in his niche for an intent 6-week long course for intermediate motion designers where humans would review the work. The only problem? It would take 3 months to create the course he imagined; in the meantime, he had to keep paying the bills.

So, he took a bit of advice from Jaime and he decided to pre-sell a course (yes, a course he hadn’t even created). He sent an email (the email content is included as a case study in Pat Flynn’s book, Will It Fly?) out to a list of approximately 4,000 he built and very authentically told them he was going to build the animation course he wished he would have had coming up and he was going to explain more in a webinar. The webinar sold out in 5 minutes. At the end of the webinar the beta version of the course sold out in 5 minutes, and he made $5 grand in 5 minutes. These were clear signs Joey was onto something.

Building a team

Joey took it slow when building his team by first hiring a part-time contractor in part due to his fear of “having another mouth to feed.” However, every time he’s unable to focus on the work that he should do to build the company—content production and products—he realizes it’s time to hire another resource. Once the right person has joined the team in the right role, their collective productivity soars. And as Joey becomes better at learning to let go, he is finding ways to manage quality control in a different way rather than being involved in every aspect of the business. 

There’s a lot more in the full episode including a conversation about confidence and authenticity, customer acquisition and how Joey’s team is focused on creating systems that will catapult them to a $3 or $4 million-revenue company.

Become a subscriber of the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast on iTunes to get insights from today’s creative entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses, made money and found work/life balance.

Lessons from Pre-$1 Million Businesses with MNIB Consulting Founder Breanne Dyck

Interviews, Show Notes

Lessons from Pre-$1 Million Businesses with MNIB Consulting Founder Breanne Dyck
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The Nitty Gritty:

  • Why you should figure out a different way to do what’s already working rather than start over with something new
  • Why the hub-and-spoke organization model isn’t sustainable for growth
  • How when you focus on things that feel easy to you, your results will improve
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My guest this week on the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast is Breanne Dyck who published an interesting article earlier this year called “15 Lessons for Pre-$1M Online Businesses” that got a lot of play in our community. Breanne learned these lessons as she built her own business as the founder of MNIB Consulting Inc. and as she continues to help others build theirs. In this episode, we explore some of the lessons she wrote about with a focus on how they impacted Breanne’s business, MNIB Consulting.

Don’t Stop as Soon as Something Starts Working

Every time we pivot we get closer and closer to the thing that is ultimately going to work.

– Breanne Dyck

Breanne describes the big business model overhaul MNIB Consulting just went through where they reviewed all the products they have ever offered and evaluated what was working, what was not working and what’s the least complicated way to combine the things working and be the most transformative and impactful for their clients. As a result of this evaluation, they simplified their client support and made it very easy for their clients to come to them when they had questions.

Your Approach to Team Is Part of the Problem

What matters is, are you hiring someone that you can give ownership to of their entire area of responsibility?

– Breanne Dyck

The hub-and-spoke model of team development, where everything still goes through the CEO, doesn’t effectively free up the CEO to work within their zone of genius. Breanne describes how she specifically built her team from the org chart framework described in Gino Wickman’s book Rocket Fuel so that was not the case. When she hires new team members she gives them ownership of their entire area of responsibility.

Do What Feels Easy

Too often entrepreneurs get caught up in the “I have to do this” mentality even if it doesn’t feel easy. Breanne felt that way about blogging. She knew she needed to produce regular content, but blog writing never felt easy to her. So, she found ways to regularly produce content in different ways such as a daily email, posting in Facebook groups and podcasts.

This format for content is more conversational and off the cuff and allowed Breanne to process ideas as she was having them. And, you know what? Her daily email, a task that feels easy to her, is working remarkably well and the response rate is 10X that of when she was writing regular articles.

There’s so much more in this episode including how a line in Profit First by Mike Michalowicz led to a breakthrough for Breanne about how she would grow her business, what percentage of revenue online businesses should dedicate to salaries (including yours) and why Breanne stopped list building. Access the full episode to learn all of this and more.

Do you subscribe to the podcast? Jump on over to iTunes to listen to all episodes where today’s creative entrepreneurs share strategic and tactical components about how to make money, take control of their businesses and pursue what’s most important to them.

Self-Publishing, Distribution, and Writing for Wealth with Author Joanna Penn

Interviews, Show Notes

Self-Publishing, Distribution, and Writing for Wealth with Author Joanna Penn

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • How the Amazon Kindle and ebook pricing made it possible for independent authors and entrepreneurs to self-publish and write for wealth
  • Why marketing, packaging, and pricing correctly can expand your sales
  • How mobile, audio, and the growth of the international market are the next opportunities for authors
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Ever the entrepreneur, Joanna Penn, my guest on this week’s Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast and author of 26 books and counting, realized the potential to write for wealth in October 2009. That was when the Amazon Kindle launched internationally and lower ebook pricing allowed independent authors access to a much larger marketplace.

Ebook pricing was a revelation. When the Kindle came out, independent authors could price their books lower and still make good margins.

– Joanna Penn

Joanna’s entrepreneurial mindset quickly realized the potential to sell books digitally to people all over the world.

Online marketing, packaging and pricing

If you are going to publish online, you need to market online.

– Joanna Penn

In 2009, Joanna was miserable at her 9-5 job, so she decided to write her first non-fiction book. After self-publishing and self-marketing the book through traditional channels (PR, TV, and newspapers), Joanna had sold about “three copies.” At the time, she really wanted to tap into the American marketplace that was much larger than Australia’s, so her focus shifted to online marketing to reach those American readers. She ditched traditional media for anything with a clickable link; started a blog in 2008, a podcast and Twitter account in 2009.

Since “you can’t have a career with just one book,” don’t trap yourself into launching a website or social media channel for just one title. Chances are you will write another book, so make sure your branding can encompass this growth.

99 cents made the first Kindle millionaires.

– Joanna Penn

By 2011, Joanna had a number of books and realized that she could leave her miserable job because her income would grow based on the size of her audience and the number of books she had.

In the podcast, Joanna shares her insights about figuring out the right price point to get the highest number of people to purchase your book and why offering something for free to your audience is still very important to build your email list and give them a chance to sample your work to see if they like it.

Under her pen name for action/adventure thrillers, J.F. Penn, Joanna’s first book in a nine-book series, Stone of Fire is permanently free on Kindle. That freebie is like the cheese samples in the supermarket. You go in and try it. If you like it, you’ll buy the whole packet—or in this case, the reader will purchase the entire series or more books if they liked what they sampled for free.

Think of Amazon as a completely different ecosystem. Amazon’s algorithms will recommend your other books that are at a higher price point to shoppers when they show interest in your free book. This is why Joanna uses J.F. Penn for her action/adventure thrillers and Joanna Penn for her non-fiction writing—to fully leverage Amazon’s role as a search engine to get in front of the right audience without confusing the algorithms.

In addition, Joanna is adept at re-packaging her work to be more easily found on Amazon whether by adjusting titles, creating box sets or altering the categories she shows up in. If your book has gone stagnant on Amazon, look at changing the cover, the category, and keywords and putting some ads on it and you may restart the whole thing.

Growth of mobile and international marketplaces

Kindle apps on mobile. Audio through Alexa. Best-seller lists on Amazon. The digital transformation of publishing continues. Joanna predicts the next opportunity for independent authors will be international marketplaces, and a little foreshadowing, it might not be on Amazon.

You don’t want to miss a thing from my conversation with Joanna about self-publishing. Tune in to the full episode to learn more about how she repackages her work and what’s on the horizon for self-publishing.

Join us each week by subscribing to the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast on iTunes.