Becky and Jesse Morquecho, business coaches and owners of Idealust, discuss effective and ineffective trends in the creative industry, how to figure out the next step for your business, and how to know what’s actually moving the needle forward.
More about Jesse and Becky:
Jesse + Becky (yes, just like Full House!), owners of Idealust, help creative entrepreneurs build + scale businesses that produce profits, joy and time for more adventures. They are big believers in facing fears and creating your own opportunities. They met and fell in love in South Africa in 2008 and are in the process of adopting their daughter from China spring of 2018. When Jesse + Becky are not coaching others to make their business dreams come true, you’ll find them backpacking, beach cruising, or eating tacos in the San Diego sunshine.
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The transcript…
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Jesse: 00:00:06 Just because the rest of the industry is telling us that this is what we need to be doing. If it’s not working for us, then it doesn’t work for us and we need to move on and try something else or tweak things that need to be huge changes all the time, but we were willing to go ahead and say like at any point with anything they were doing, even if we had put hours and hours and hours into something, we were willing to say, hey, we need to scrap this and go back to the drawing board because it isn’t it. working.
Davey Jones: 00:00:35 Welcome to the Brands that Book show where we help creative businesses, build their brands and find more clients. I’m your host, Davey Jones, and today we’re chatting with Becky and Jessie have Idealust. They’re business coaches out of San Diego and they help creative entrepreneurs build businesses and scale those businesses so that they produce more profit, more joy and more time for adventures. And today they’re sharing how does to actually move the needle in businesses.
Davey Jones: 00:01:05 We just kind of get started around here, so that’s great. Yeah, that’s how we’re going to, that’s how we’re going to do it. So can you guys give us a little background about how you got started? I know that coaching wasn’t your first business that you guys ran?
Davey Jones: 00:01:18 It was not, might not be the last either, we don’t know. Jesse and I met in South Africa back in 2008 and uh, we were working on projects together for this, a nonprofit and somewhere in there he fell in love with me. I don’t know what happened exactly…
Davey Jones: 00:01:36 at first sight, right Jesse ?
Davey Jones: 00:01:36 Uuuuuhhh
Davey Jones: 00:01:42 I set you up for that one Jesse! All you had to do was say yes. I’m sorry, go ahead becky.
Davey Jones: 00:01:46 No, you’re fine. So, uh, we came home from Africa after working there for a year and working together and falling in love and were like, we were starting over. We’re starting from scratch. We had both quit our jobs to move there for a year. So it was like now what? And we had been shooting together in the townships and doing some photo journalism and stuff like that. And we’re like, let’s start a photography business.
Davey Jones: 00:02:08 Totally logical. Yeah.
Davey Jones: 00:02:11 How did that go in the meantime? I’ve got to imagine. So you quit your job and you had to start over anyways, but like wasn’t there this sense of like, I need to pay bills, do I need to have money for rent or mortgage or whatever? Um, so did you just, you just dove in?
Davey Jones: 00:02:25 We did. Um, I had a little bit of money saved. I tease Jessie that I was a sugar mama for just a little while.
Davey Jones: 00:02:25 I got nothing wrong with that
Davey Jones: 00:02:34 I personally have a really hard time having a job that I’m not really stoked about. Um, so I was actually, what happened was I told Jesse I’m going to start a photography business and he’s like, Hey, what about me? And I was like, OK, all right, we can do this together.
Davey Jones: 00:02:47 I had a part time job that I was working at. Um, I used to, I was a pre-med Major. Um, which again, I don’t know where that connection came from. So I was working in the hospitals, in the ER or in trauma tech. So I was going from like, you know, shooting a wedding, you know, shooting a bride, walking down the aisle to like being covered head to toe in blood in the emergency room for like 12 hours. So, um, it was a little bit of a interesting and kind of transition in that period. But you know, that’s just how we got started. Just looking at, hey, this looks like something that’s going to be like fun for us. And we just went out and we did it. Like that’s what it came down to was us just looking at, hey, this looks like it would be an awesome job. We love the idea of what we love working together. Um, you know, me and Becky have never not worked together. Um, just because that’s how we met. And so it just made sense for us. And so we just went out and we did it and here we are now.
Davey Jones: 00:03:43 I think after moving to Africa, I think after you do something like that, like the idea of starting a business, it didn’t seem… We had no idea that it was something we shouldn’t do because we had already kind of done something that people were like, why would you do that? So we just kept going with that route.
Davey Jones: 00:04:03 Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I think there’s some wisdom in there about getting started is that you don’t have to have it all figured out. Um, right off the bat. You don’t have to have it all planned out from start to finish. Um, there’s value in just to just jumping in and getting that experience. But how’d you guys find your first clients? Like where’d you even, where’d you even start? And that’s where we’ll end with the photography questions because I do want to get into some of your coaching stuff, which I think is super fascinating.
Becky: 00:04:27 Yeah, I think like a lot of people, we started shooting a lot of friends. There is a horrible story of me going out to a park with flyers for like $25 family sessions because you think like, OK, like moms and families hanging out at parks made these flyers. I’m not a designer. I suck it designing these things. Looked horrible and I think it was literally a $25 just handing these things to moms at parks.
Jesse: 00:04:55 She was like pumped on it and I mean I was excited to see how it went to but I wasn’t the one going out there and handing out fliers out to moms at parks. I think that would be a little bit weird.
Becky: 00:05:03 You may have gotten arrested, but to answer your question Davey that is not how we got clients because that didn’t work so we tried a bunch things but the way we started getting actual clients who started shooting for friends, friends of friends, you know, booked a couple of weddings for a super low price point where we actually lost money but you know, had to build portfolio, stuff like that.
Davey Jones: 00:05:24 Yeah, no, that’s great. The only way that story would have been better is if Jessie was the one going into the park, handing out flyers for $25 a family sessions. Do you still have that flyer?
Becky: 00:05:32 I do it somewhere in a bin in the garage. We’ve looked for before. I’m going to try and get it.
Davey Jones: 00:05:38 Yeah, I definitely want to put that in the show notes, but that’s amazing. So, to cut to the end of the story, you built a successful photography business. You weren’t always losing money. You weren’t always trying to get sessions by going to the park and handing out flyers. So after you had built this successful photography business, what made you think about moving into business coaching?
Jesse: 00:06:01 Yeah, that is a great question. So, um, it’s funny, it’s almost like our clients that we worked with for a photography business, they kind of like led us to where we are now in that we’d have these conversations. We are very much uh, like, um, I didn’t necessarily like become a photographer because I just love photography so much. I do love it, but it was more the relationship aspect. I am an extreme extrovert. I love meeting new people. I love being able to hang out with people and be like, Hey, you’re paying me to hang out with you all day on like a really sweet day of your life, man.
Becky: 00:06:36 He got paid to have friends, which was really fun
Davey Jones: 00:06:39 I can, I can validate that. We just got to spend a week with you guys. And the joke is always, you know, who’s willing to stay up with me tonight? And Jesse’s always the guy that’s like, yeah, I will have, what are we doing?
Jesse: 00:06:50 Yeah. So, um, people pay me to do that, which was awesome. You know, we’d have these conversations with them, whether it was at the first consultation or when we’re talking about their wedding or whatever that looks like and we’d have these conversations and as like what do you do? They would always come back with, not always, but a lot of times they’d be like “I’m a nurse or I do this”. And I’m like, “how’s it going?” “Like, well that’s OK,” and we’d be like “is there something else you’d rather be doing?” And without fail they’d get excited. The big, Oh man, I would love to open a restaurant. I would love to like go to culinary school or I would love to do, you know, whatever it was, it that we get them excited and they’d light up.
Becky: 00:07:36 I mean Jesse and I we feed off of that. We’re like, oh, that’s so cool. Like tell us more, you know, Blah Blah and why aren’t you doing that now? And they’re like, ah, I could never do that.
Jesse: 00:07:46 They like transform from being super excited to being like, oh, like no, like I couldn’t do that. Like totally like eeyore from Winnie the Pooh they wilt and it’s like so sad to see.
Becky: 00:07:57 And we get in the car and you’re driving home and I’d be pissed and asking “why do they think they can’t do that?” And anyway, after having conversations like that over and over again, we realized we were really fired up about it and we had a stance where not everybody’s going to be an entrepreneur, of course, like idealust doesn’t exist to go convert people into being entrepreneurs, but we learned quickly that we believe that you have it in you. Like, it’s not going to go away and like if you have this dream or desire idea. So after having conversations like that and after having Limelight being successful, we took the extra time on our hands and started another business.
Davey Jones: 00:08:31 So how did you find your first clients? Was it through those conversations basically with people that you’re working with or people that you knew that were like, hey, listen, you guys have built this great photography business, you obviously know how to start a business and what goes into that? Uh, can you teach me how to do that?
Jesse: 00:08:47 Yeah. So a kind of transitioning from the photography side to the coaching side there’s little bit of like an awkward period. It definitely wasn’t pretty. Um, so we, we thought OK we can just kind of put out content, start helping people by writing articles and creating videos and, and you know, walking them through like what we believe we were experts in and when it takes to run a creative business. And we thought, OK, if we do this enough, like we’ll be able to make money doing it and we didn’t have any like, monetization strategy. You know, when you get into photography business, you know how you’re going to make money, you know, it’s by shooting weddings or portraits or whatever that is and people pay you to do it. Um, when we went into this, we didn’t really know exactly how we were going to monetize this. We didn’t know we were going to be coaching one on one. We didn’t know if we were going to be like creating a, you know, a community that then we have events and we have conferences. Um, to be honest, I don’t think we ever really thought it through to begin with. Um, me and Becky are big on just like, hey, let’s just do it and let’s see what happens.
Becky: 00:10:00 We have that track record of just jumping off a cliff. We usually end up making it work for us. I don’t advise it for everybody, but it works well for us because then we just figure it out.
Jesse: 00:10:07 Yeah. And so you know, as we transition in that like we had no idea what we were doing and so we reached out to some people, we got some, we got some coaching ourselves in looking at OK, how do you build a like consulting or coaching business in a way that is organic and isn’t like… Because when you think of a lot of business coaches or at least like three or four years ago even like, you think of an old guy or a business suit and gelled back hair. And we didn’t want to be that. And so I don’t think that it would have gone very well for us in the creative industry anyways. Um, and so, you know, we just wanted to look at and explore options to how we can do that in a way that is going to be appealing and how we can help as many people as possible in this. And so as we’re doing that, we took on some clients at a reduced rate. Here in San Diego we had a good community of San Diego photographers
Becky: 00:11:05 And to answer your question some of those people were our friends or people that we had gotten to know that, um, we were sort of coaching anyway. I mean we would meet them for coffee and we’d meet up for lunch and it turned into like, oh cool, I’ll help you guys. And we went and we loved having this conversation. So a couple of those people became clients.
Davey Jones: 00:11:20 Yeah. That’s awesome. So do you, um, like during your transition, did you find that it was actually maybe a little bit harder to go from one successful business to another? So when you start your first business, right, you kind of know that it’s going to be a grind or the fact that you just don’t know anything at that point. Um, you’re kinda willing to work through it, right? But then what I find at least, is that during transitions from one business to the next, um, it’s a little bit harder because you’re coming from something that’s established and successful. You’re used to maybe getting consistent inquiries and then you go into something else and you almost forget what that beginning stage looks like. And the hustle and the grind. Um, and that sort of almost torture figuring out things over again. Right? I mean, did you guys find that at all transitioning into your coaching business?
Becky: 00:12:11 We found that a lot Davey haha! Like Jesse was saying we thought it was going to go originally– well we thought like all of our income is in Limelight photography. We’re down here and over the next five years we’re going to slowly swap that out.
Jesse: 00:12:29 And then we had our first big wedding season while we’re trying to grow our business. And I’m like–I’m the kind of person that I have a little bit of a workaholic in me. So I will stay up late. I’ll wake up early, do what we need to do to get it done. Becky, she needs her sleep.
Becky: 00:12:46 I need my downtime. I can work hard for a chunk of hours. But anyway, we had that first busy wedding season and I was a mess. Let’s just call it what it is. Like I was crying all the freaking time. I do that anyway, but it was really bad and Jessie’s like I’m putting on the website that we’re not taking any more weddings. So instead of five years transitioning, it was like 90 days. And in those 90 days I don’t think we cooked. We were, you know, not as healthy. And we knew this is not a sustainable way to grow a business.
Jesse: 00:13:14 We looked at both of these things or do we need to make this transition faster? When we decided, hey no, this needs to happen sooner rather than later and said, well let’s just do it. And so we were able to completely transition out of weddings and we still had a couple on the books, but we were able to completely replace our revenue for our business, which definitely took a lot of the pressure off of that feeling of like, oh, like I’m used to these inquiries coming in and we’re able to kind of make that full transition within 90 days.
Becky: 00:13:51 And yes Davey that transition was way different, way harder, way more of a mess, honestly than we thought it might be. We were originally gonna, you know, over five years times swap out our income from limelight photography to idealust. And we ended up doing it in 90 days. Actually the other day as I was cleaning out some stuff in our office, I found this piece of paper where we had this chart of like, percentages of like 2012, 2013 like what this would look like. And then we pretty much taught that in the garbage. Um, but it was, it was messy and it was hard in that 90 days where we ended up switching. And, you know, the reason we did it, it was just too hard for me personally, honestly, I think Jesse could have done it, but having two babies and the things we were pursuing with like all of our heart and we have clients who do this, they’re like, we have plenty of entrepreneur friends who pursue multiple things, but at that stage of our life, it just wasn’t sustainable for us to pursue both things. And we knew long-term where we wanted to go. We knew Idealust was more of our longer term plan. Um, so when we decided let’s just make this happen as quickly as possible because becky’s crying too much. We did and it worked out. It worked out in our favor.
Davey Jones: 00:14:59 Yeah. I think I probably am. I like you guys in that where if I have too many things to pursue at once then I don’t pursue any of them well. And you know, if you, if you knew you were going in the direction of business coaching and that’s really what’s getting you excited then I would assume that it would be difficult to get as excited about maintaining or growing your photography business at the time and I think I see that trend where there is that hustle, that grind in the beginning and late nights and second jobs and all of those things are OK, I think, uh, for a while, you know, and then, and then at some point balance balance comes back. Uh, so we’ll have to talk a little bit about that. But first, just in those 90 days, what moved the needle the most in your guys business to get you to where you want it to be.
Becky: 00:15:48 Davey, honestly, in my opinion, I don’t think I remember those 90 days cause we sort of try to put those 90 days out of our memory.
Jesse: 00:15:53 Yeah, it was crazy. And I think that in the industry, there’s this conversation talking about like hustle– hustle, hustle, hustle– versus oh no, you need to find balance. Balance is so important. You don’t need to like kill yourself to build a successful business. Now I’m a little bit more on the stance of like, Hey, I know there is a time and a place for hustle. If you’re not willing to put in the work, if you’re not willing to put in the extra hours, especially if you have another job or you’re trying to go full time in your, in your own business, there is a 100 percent need for hustle and your business. And that’s where we just went out there and we did the work. Now we weren’t just doing work that was like, “Oh yeah, let’s just like cold call random people.” No, we were very strategic about what we were doing and we had checks and balances in those things. So we would ask, is this actually working? We try to have like a real measuring, uh, metrics to look at, hey, if this isn’t working, we need to spend our time doing something else. And so I think that there’s one thing that helped us do that as quickly as we did, it was simply just being real with ourselves and looking at, well, just because the rest of the industry is telling us that this is what we need to be doing, if it’s not working for us then it doesn’t work for us and we need to move on and try something else or tweak things. They don’t need to be huge changes all the time. But we were willing to go ahead and say like at any point with anything that we’re doing, even if we had put hours and hours and hours into something, we were willing to say hey, we need to scrap this and go back to the drawing board because it isn’t working. And if I had to credit anything to us being able to do what we did as fast as we did it, I think it would be that.
Jesse: 00:17:39 And just to add to that Davey, we were a new business, people knew us as Limelight photography but they didn’t know us as Idealust. People that are outside of San Diego had no idea who we were. And I think the biggest thing also that we did was just building our brand presence as quickly as possible. And we did that by leading with value and still to this day we still do that, you know, four years later and we still encourage our clients to do the same. And we went out there saying, hey, we’re becky and Jesse we’re Idealust, how can we help you? Here is some value. This is what we’re all about. We took that stance of, you know, freedom of entrepreneurship and we went out there and showed the world who we were even though they didn’t know who we were, but did that as quickly as possible by leading with value.
Davey Jones: 00:18:15 I want to unpack that a little bit because I think there’s such wisdom in that and leading with value and I think that the companies gets get the farthest are the ones that do that. But especially when you’re first getting started– how did you measure what worked? Did you have like a single metric that you looked to and decided OK, this is working and this is not. Was it always in terms of income, like, hey, we’re making money on this or we’re going to do this anymore because I sort of feel like when you lead with value and when you’re building your brand there is this value to awareness in the beginning to people just knowing who you are. And in the beginning that might not be the easiest thing to measure. So how did you guys navigate that and decide, hey, we’re spending a ton of time on X. is this working or not?
Jesse: 00:19:06 Yeah, I think that’s a tough question and it’s a tough thing to kind of answer when for example, a lot of businesses, a lot of what we were doing early on was a lot of organic things which can be really difficult to track. I’m very much a numbers person. I want to know how many people, what percentage of people saw our instagram post, clicked on it, and then ended up our on our website or you know, whatever that looks like. And some of that was kind of using as much as we could to get concrete answers and that’s where we have to start when it comes to really measuring what’s working and what’s not. We have to try to find, to the best of our ability, what kind of numbers that we can use because we can’t just go on our gut as, you know. We can’t necessarily say that I got this many likes on this instagram post, or it got more likes than this one because there are so many variables that go into that. But at the same time, we can’t totally discredit instagram followers. We can’t totally discredit how many likes you’re getting on photos in the engagement you have there. So I think at the beginning it was one of those things where we were just trying a lot of different things and we used some of those metrics that aren’t necessarily the most healthy metrics to use in the long term. But just looking at, OK, like when we share this, how many website visitors did we get from this?
Becky: 00:20:25 Or how is the market responding to what we’re putting out there? And without Sherpa for example, which we may or may not get into, but without something like that it was just asking, how are people responding? Are people replying to our emails? Are they saying this is helpful? Um, and like Jesse saying, yes, instagram followers– we to this day will tell everybody unless it’s transitioning or leading into people on your list or clients are making you money then OK, let’s not spend hours and hours there. But at the beginning when people didn’t know who we were, we just had to see what people were responding to most.
Davey Jones: 00:20:57 So individually per maybe each goal that you guys had, you had some sort of metric in place to figure out whether that was working or not. Even if it was something that was relatively intangible, like, hey, we sent out this email and 15 people emailed us back. So obviously this is something that, that hits people the right way.
Jesse: 00:21:20 Totally. So when we would go do something, whether it was like speaking at a little mini workshop or putting on a Webinar or whatever it is, we looked at the engagement we’d have with people if people would be asking us questions. If people would email us afterwards and say, hey, like that was so helpful but I have this question. So often we, we like base things off of like, “Oh man, I think that was good, but it felt really good.”
Becky: 00:21:43 Or you know, like, “oh, I wrote a blog post. I feel really good about it.” That means absolutely nothing unless other people feel good too.
Jesse: 00:21:50 Some of that has to do with, you know, like we post blogs and I think that this is something that’s going to be a little bit more applicable to just the service based creative industry as a whole because this is one of those categories where so many of us blog once a month or whenever we have a portfolio post that we can put up. And that’s all we do and we don’t really look at like, hey, is this really doing anything? And that’s where we want to look at like, OK, like, well when we post that on facebook, are we getting any new traffic from that? And we can’t necessarily discount and say like, oh I have this post and it’s only gotten 30 or 40 views. And you’re like OK, well is that new people coming to your site? Is that people that are friends of people that were just at that wedding that you shot or friends of family that you just shot or whatever that looks like. And so just because the metrics are smaller and the numbers aren’t big, we usually still want to take advantage of those things and look at those. And so using those metrics, even though they seem like they may be unimportant because they’re so small, like using those things can still be so valuable because you’ll be able to look at, hey, this posted a lot better, or I try posting this in a different way on instagram, on facebook and I did a instagram story about it and man that drove a lot more traffic to it. So you can use those metrics like that even though they may be small to tell you what’s working and what’s not.
Davey Jones: 00:23:11 Yeah, I think analytics are such an afterthought for people. And in fairness, it’s something that seems, I think kind of overwhelming and anybody who’s been in Google analytics there’s a lot of things if you’ve never been in there before, you’re like, I don’t know what maybe 90 percent of this stuff means
Jesse: 00:23:26 I think it’s confusing sometimes. Right?
Davey Jones: 00:23:29 But there’s a couple of things going on I think. One google analytics has started rolling out with updates that I think make the dashboard look a lot more friendly than it did even two years ago. Yeah. So that’s nice. And then, um, the other thing is too, I don’t think, again, going back to just that concept of getting started, you don’t have to know what every metric means to make use of something like Google analytics. So you can go in there and you can almost guess. OK, user and new user, you know what these things mean. Unfortunately, again, just with the updates that google analytics has made there’s a little icon that you can hover over and they’ll give you a little idea of, of what that number means, but just having those things on your site, especially, you know, when you’re launching so that you can go back and look at these numbers and make educated decisions like you guys are talking about. So as you transitioned into your coaching business, you had mentioned that you guys had your own coach. How valuable was that in helping you guys figure out or navigate that transition?
Becky: 00:24:33 I don’t think we’d be where we are now if we hadn’t made that move.
Jesse: 00:24:37 Yeah. Which is I think one of the reasons why we still do what we do. Because we saw the value in that we had no idea what we were doing before that and searched out someone who was doing what we wanted to do. That was like maybe two or three years ahead of us. Um, and you know, maybe a little bit more than that even. And just looked at, OK, is this person going to be able to help us do what we want to do? Um, and the answer was yes. And so, you know, we hired this guy and um, ended up being probably one of the best business decisions we ever made even though it was super uncomfortable even though like it wasn’t something where like we thought “yeah this will be fine even if nothing comes from this it’ll be fine”. Like, no. It was a very uncomfortable decision as a big investment for us. And that was just something where we realized– that we had to ask ourselves, is this going to be something that is going to help us do what we want to do faster, is going to help us take a short cut to where we want to go to be able to really make that transition in our businesses as fast as possible. And the answer was yes for us. And so we realized, hey, that’s totally worth it.
Becky: 00:25:45 So we closed our eyes and handed the money over here we are.
Davey Jones: 00:25:49 Yeah. And I want to talk a little bit about, what went into that decision. I think that there’s probably, um, some misperceptions out there about who needs a coach, right? Uh, I think some people think, oh, well, only if you’re just getting started, but you guys had already built a successful business, so on some level you knew what goes into building another successful business. And then there’s others that think, OK, well once I make it to kind of the level I want to go to and I have all this money laying around, then I’ll, then I’ll go in and pay a coach. But yeah, to a certain extent the coach is the one that’s going to come alongside you and maybe help you get to that level. So what went into hiring a coach and who is a coach for?
Becky: 00:26:34 Yeah. I’m a lot went into that decision. Jesse and I literally laughed when we heard the numbers of the investment, I was like, oh my God, you’ll never guess, this is such a funny game. Like literally laughing.
Jesse: 00:26:48 I was like, like what kind of person? Like what kind of idiot is going to pay this guy this much money?
Becky: 00:27:00 Hands up! Yeah, that was me. haha but no we are not idiots. So the decision, I mean to get there though– when we know we want something we’re risky. People look at us like oh, that’s a lot of money or that’s a risky decision. But we knew we wanted to get there and we wanted to get there fast and we knew we needed help. And I mean we have tons of clients, I mean we have a range of clients ourselves from either just starting out or they’ve been in business a long time and they’re doing incredible things. They just want to take it to the next level. As far as who needs a coach? Whoever wants to take their business to that next level and is tired of doing it on their own. And even if, I mean, we’ve also have clients who are, um, they’re, I mean, they’re doing great things. They’re not even super stressed out. They just want that, like that partnership or collaboration.
Jesse: 00:27:44 They want to make sure that like, all that time, you know, we, we have clients that don’t have, you know, eighty hours a week to work on their business because they want to have that balance and it is really important for them to make sure that every minute they spend on their business, is a minute that is moving the needle. That is helping them grow their business. Because every minute they spend on their business is a minute they’re not spending with their family and a minute that they’re not spending doing what it is most important to them outside of their business, which is the reason why they have the business in the first place. And so that’s something that for a lot of people, and it is for us, why we hired a coach because we didn’t want to spend a another six years building a business. No, we wanted this to happen a lot faster and we knew that we could because we’re willing to do the work and we were excited about the work we’re doing and we knew we could help people. We knew we had a good product or a good service for people. And so we just need to know how to get it out there. We knew that if we had that right direction, that we’d be able to do it way faster. And they say like another level, another deviul. So any time you’re ready to hit a new level, there’s always going to be new challenges. There’s always going to be things that pop up whether or not you’re moving, if you, even if you don’t make any more money, if you’re not bringing on more clients. Marketing changes so much so quickly. How you can communicate with people, whether it’s via platforms, where there’s algorithm changes, whether it’s a, you know..
Becky: 00:29:08 …what other industries are doing and how that affects your industry. I mean, there’s so many variables to all that stuff.
Speaker 2: 00:29:14 And at the time we didn’t want to have to figure that out all by ourselves. And so it just made sense for us and it made it so worth that investment even though it was so painful. And I think that the fact that it was painful made us really like, say, hey, we’ve got to make this work.
Becky: 00:29:30 And we still had to do the work. I mean, we handed the money over but at the same time Jesse and I worked our butts off probably more so in that period of our life than we ever have. I always relate back to hiring a personal trainer or you know, somebody who’s going to help you get somewhere, like if I’m hiring a personal trainer, like I’m going to go work out because I hired them to help me do that, you know?
Davey Jones: 00:29:51 yes, and it’s more expensive than just like a gym membership that you got maybe for $20 a month or something like that.
Becky: 00:29:56 And then you never go!
Davey Jones: 00:29:58 Yes, and when you show up to that person you’re going to try to get your money’s worth. So I think that’s an important point just for the investment that you make for coaches and why coaches are worth it. But I think if you look at any high performer across any industry, there’s somebody in their life that’s outside of what they’re doing, uh, that speaking into their life. And I think that makes a huge difference having an outside perspective. You know, it might be a business coach, it might be somebody’s who’s not even a business coach but more of just a life coach. But I think there’s value in having somebody outside of what you’re doing speaking into what you’re doing because they can ask that question–like, why are you doing that? And you know what it’s not a stupid question. Right? When I came on a even helping Krista, I was coming from just coming from education, so I was able to come into that business and I was able to ask a question, just, you know, why are we doing that way? And all of a sudden Krista would be like, I don’t really know because we’ve always done it that way or because everybody else does it that way. And so it was a good opportunity to stop and evaluate OK, is there a better way to do that? And I think a coach is just, you know, somebody who can come along and ask those questions for you and make you think about those things. So in the creative industry now, just because– well– How many clients do you work with at a time?
Becky: 00:31:18 Max? Usually around 12 ish.
Davey Jones: 00:31:23 Yeah. So, throughout, throughout the course of a year, right, you’re gonna see up to a few dozen probably of clients. So what’s working in the creative industry now? What’s not?
Jesse: 00:31:34 Yeah, I think that in this digital world where people live vicariously through other people’s instagram accounts and all of that. I think that, what’s working the best or what is having the most impact, even though it is a lot of work, is taking people offline, looking at how you can be as high touch as possible in your business. That’s something that even for us that we are hitting it really hard this year.
Becky: 00:32:02 And we probably sound like a broken record because we’ve been saying the same thing on Instagram, on our blog, in our newsletter, every where we go, like people are probably sick of Becky and Jesse saying the same darn things, but these things, they’re not going away. They’re only getting more and more important, especially with technology and like beautiful websites. And we appreciate beautiful websites. Trust me, we do, but people hide behind them all too often. We want, especially us personally, like we want to know real people. Like that’s why we have a call with somebody, not we’re having a video chat and people are like, Oh, I’ve never done this. You know, it feels sort of weird. We’re like, I know, I know, but isn’t it better? Like we can see each other’s faces. So…
Jesse: 00:32:40 …that’s something that we’re really shifting towards in and seeing that it is working so well. We are seeing that adding little high touch points throughout whether it’s uh, you know, making sure that people can see your face, whether that’s doing instagram stories, um, and actually showing your face and not just like taking pictures and kind of curating the world through that way. But actually being in front of the camera or doing video calls instead of a phone call.
Becky: 00:33:02 We had a client just this week tell us she has booked to have her highest, you know, price packages, which is a big number for weddings. And um, she said, I’ve been doing these video responses and she’s like, it’s golden nuggets. That’s her quote, you know, it’s been golden. Like instead of just emailing somebody back, like taking that high touch approach and like sending them a quick video, hey, so and so is so great to get your email x, y and z. More info in the email. I just wanted to say hi. And I’m so excited. Like that’s so small. It’s such a small thing, but it’s booking her more weddings.
Davey Jones: 00:33:34 Yeah. That’s incredible. So I’m so high touch and, and I guess one, one question I want to just throw out there is a difference because with digital marketing there’s all sorts of online courses out there that you can, that you can take and on a certain level that’s awesome, right? Because you don’t have to go to the local community college, the local college and take a class in those things anymore. Right. You can go online, you can learn pretty much anything you want to learn. So what’s the value in doing something like coaching? Um, we’re doing something just, you know, high touch like coaching where there’s a more personal one on one than doing something like a course,
Becky: 00:34:18 You have accountability first of all and you have somebody walking you through and it’s custom for all of our clients. Their journey looks totally different from each others because their strengths are different, their ideas are different their businesses are different. So it’s personalized custom attention versus, and we have courses, courses aren’t bad but we like the mix of both. But when you have somebody who’s just a course junkie and going to every Webinar… I mean we have some of these clients come to us and we’re like, you guys, like we literally tell our clients, stop, don’t buy anything else. Like everything you bought. We, we agree. It’s great. Those people who are putting that course on, we love them too. They’re great. We’re not doing anything. You need to, you need to do something with everything that you have at your fingertips right now before you go out there and try to get more.
Davey Jones: 00:35:01 Sure. And I think there’s people out there that, uh, they, they buy a bunch of courses and they don’t get through any of them and I think statistically for anybody, you know, so we run a course as well. I think statistically to there, there’s a contingent of people who buy the course and they never complete it and no matter how much encouraging you give them through things like email they just don’t, they just don’t complete the course. Um, you know, but with, with coaching and again, I think comparing it to something like hiring a trainer at the gym, you’re not going to show up to the gym and just be like, Hey, I’m just going to hang out here. I’m just going to sit on one of the benches. And if you guys could you just give me an hour. You know, you’re gonna you’re going to do what the trainer asks you to do. So high touch marketing. What are, what are some things specifically that people can do to incorporate, um, you know, high touch in their creative business.
Jesse: 00:35:47 So this is something that we’ve been preaching that for a long time and we are not going to stop. So not just using video, one of the easiest ways to create high touch points that will give people as many opportunities to connect with you as a person is just put your face in front of them in video. Video is so much easier to show personality a lot of times than just using a photo with like a blog post with all these different words because when you get in front of people on a regular basis, and I’m sure that, you know, for people that like, listen to your podcast Davey or the people that listen to videos from a specific person for a long time, what happens is you start be able to hear them talk when you’re reading what they say. And you’re like, oh my gosh like I’m hearing their voice inflections. I’m hearing, oh they would get excited when they’re saying this. Um, and it allows you to get to know the people. You’re giving people the opportunity to get to know you on a personal level which is so powerful. And so whether that’s insta stories, or facebook lives, whether that is just, you know, we’re recording a quick video to put on Youtube and put it on your blog. That’s one of the easiest ways to create those high touch points with your potential clients or with your audience. And um, there’s so many great side effects with using video. You know, there’s a big conversation about how people are very upset because their reach is being taken away from different algorithm changes and stuff like that. But it’s like we want to beat the algorithm. You can use video because video is going to get so much more reach. It’s not going to be like the glory days of facebook necessarily where you share a post when you have a thousand followers. Um, you know, it’s not quite going to be that. But if you want to take advantage of, you know, these holes in the Algorithm where you can get in front of a lot of people, video is going to do that for you.
Becky: 00:37:37 And you’re going to hear us say that over and over again. But then also just like back to those relationships, whether it’s your clients, whether it’s people you want to get to know whether it’s people you want to work with or for someday like Jesse and I are big believers in sending not like one big gift that cost hundreds of dollars. Like that’s great. And if you have the budget for it, cool. But you know, it’s better sending like six different things to your clients or even a quick email after you’re finished working with them. Hey, how are you guys doing that? You know, honeymoon in Muai looked incredible. I just wanted to reach out and say, Hey, I was thinking of you the other day because x, Y and Z, like stay on people’s minds. And the best way to do that is just to stay in communication with them. Be as high touch as possible. Be in their inbox, and then, you know, you’re done with them all right. Onto the next. No, like keep staying their life and encouraging them and cheering them on like that’s a super easy way to be high touch.
Davey Jones: 00:38:30 Yeah. I think we confuse high touch with being expensive all the time because high touch doesn’t necessarily scale in the same way that some other things do but I like what you said about not having to send the super expensive gifts or anything that’s even just really elaborate to past clients or current clients that you’re working with. Kat Schmoyer who we had another interview with and that you guys have worked with as well. She was talking about how when she got started she sent 30 packets that probably costs $50 total, so 30 packets, $50 total when she was just getting started and she probably booked 10 weddings off of the relationships that those started. So there’s a crazy return on investment off of something that’s not super expensive. I do want to go back to the video stuff and I asked this, uh, this is sort of a personal question because I, you know, I want to love video, I want to do more video. Some of the reason that we’re doing the podcast, the way that we’re doing, where you can listen and watch it on youtube or you can listen to it as a podcast on itunes is just because I want to do more with video for all the reasons that you’re talking about. But I like writing and part of the reason I like writing is because I can go back and edit. You should see me edit, I go back a ton and make sure everything’s kind of buttoned up and great. Whereas with video to do that, it requires all this editing and just this additional work. And then I’m sitting there, I’m like, do I look stupid? I look stupid. I’m not gonna publish that. So what tips do you have for people like me? All right, who would love to get into video but are just sort of scared of it.
Jesse: 00:40:18 Well Davey I’m a lot like you. Well I shouldn’t say I’m a lot like you in this way, but I see a lot of things that I probably should enter I think before, I don’t think before I speak sometimes. And I think some of that it’s just like I got to get over the fact that like, Hey, I’m going to look like an idiot sometimes and I’m doing these things and I’m going to like say things that maybe it was a little bit too blunt or whatever that is. Um, and I had to be OK with that. And um,
Becky: 00:40:40 I think people want that. I think people want that. I know people want that actually. I don’t know, you can have this beautiful brand and you can have this persona. I think that’s all great and we want to be known for these things of like being very specific and putting out in the world and like we don’t want to stray from that in a video and all of a sudden not be a good representation of our brand, but at the same time we want to be real people. I appreciate it when I see somebody out there who, you know, at times is out there tripping over words. Whatever that is. Everybody does that though, so my advice to you Davey and anybody else out there like Jesse is saying like just bite the bullet, get over it and just do it.
Jesse: 00:41:18 Sometimes we put so much pressure on ourselves to make these super polished videos. Like you see all these like video bloggers or all these youtubers that have these super polished videos, with cool intros and their shots are so clean or the music goes so well with what they’re talking about and they’re so eloquent. And I think that we put all this pressure on ourselves to create videos like that. But we have so many tools where we can kind of get our feet wet with instagram stories or facebook lives. Or you know, that we love live stuff like that because you can’t edit it because once you say it, it’s out there and it gives you practice in just doing. You can’t go back and say oh I’m going to start over. Um, and so you, you get practice thinking about, OK, what is it that you’d want to say? You get a little bit better at prepping for those things and being able to kind of think on the fly a little bit more. And those are the things that people really want to see. They want to see the real becky and Jesse, they, they don’t really care about the becky and Jesse that like we wish that we could portray to every single person. No, they want to know that like, like, um, like Becky cries.
Davey Jones: 00:42:23 Ha ha ha. Hopefully not too much on instagram live though.
Jesse: 00:42:25 I know that I might say things that I shouldn’t sometimes..
Becky: 00:42:32 and there are tangible ways to do that Davey. We even still to this day, we’ve done tons of videos, tons of facebook lives and we still like outline stuff out to this day and we might go on a tangent, but then we always have something to come back to you. So as far as like tangible tips, like write it out, if you’re going to do a facebook live, what are the three points and what, what are you going to end on? So it actually feels like there’s an ending because people start to freak out. Like, here’s the that, here’s what I’m going to say. OK. Bye. Ha ha so just having something to wrap it up, an intro, and going over that stuff. Practicing. I mean, no matter how good you get or how long have you been doing it, practicing is still super important in my opinion. Smiling, smiling brings the energy.
Davey Jones: 00:43:15 I’m going to keep those, those things in mind because like I said, my goal this year and we even did a round up post right with you guys. And I think one of my things was to focus on was video. Echoing everything that you guys are saying about video, so hopefully by the end of the year I’m going to come back to you guys and I’m going to have you guys grade me on how well I did incorporate your advice into my videos.
Jesse: 00:43:15 Haha we’ll be asking Davey, where are these videos at?
Davey Jones: 00:43:38 Yeah. Yeah. So I’m really gonna try to get better at that. Um, especially instagram stories and things like that. I struggle partly because I get a little bit of energy from being able to see the people I talk with, even on something like a webinar where you’re able to see if the questions that people are asking. Right. Whereas instagram stories, it’s like you’re basically talking to yourself, you know? So I’m going to try to get better at that. Are there any other ways that people can incorporate like high touch marketing into their business? Whether you’re a photographer or planner or florist?
Jesse: 00:44:16 Yeah. I think that another great way to be able to be high touch in your business is just in your relationships. So often we don’t, uh, like we were trying to automate everything. It’s something that we preach all the time is to automate everything in your workflows. If there’s anything that you do for every single client, like you need to automate that if you can. Um, and that doesn’t always mean making that email template that goes out automatically. It could be things like, uh, you know, automating workflows in place or systems in place to where it’s going to remind you, hey, check in with these, uh, wedding vendors are these industry friends and just like, go show them your fan on their instagram comment on a couple of things of there’s like go out there and say like, Hey, I’m a, I’m, I’m going to get together at this coffee shop. You know, I’d love to have you guys come over and just hang out. And it’s, again, not so much about these big grand gestures or like going to these networking events and like trying to get as many cards and meeting as many people as you can. It’s about showing people that you genuinely care which usually adds up to showing people that you do care on a regular basis by commenting and seeing if there’s anything that you can do for them, always coming back to leading with value. It’s so easy for people to, to see through you being like, Oh hey, let’s grab coffee so that I can maybe work with you in the future instead, you know, like go into that with zero expectations with looking at instead, how can I help you?
Becky: 00:45:49 And being a good listener, I think, in conversation in person. But also just to your market to what you’re putting out there to what your clients are saying to what your friends and family of clients are saying is they post stuff like just listening in general. Instead of going out there and feeling like you need to talk, talk, talk and bring it all the time. Like take a step back and see what’s going on and then respond.
Davey Jones: 00:46:10 Yeah, for sure. And I think that, uh, for relationships especially, that’s one of the questions that I’ve asked pretty much every interviewer that I’ve, every, during every interview that I’ve done so far, um, and, and it keeps on coming up. You know, there’s this idea of relationships and you really can’t replace that and you really can’t not do it. right?
Becky: 00:46:31 Ha ha, you can but you’re not going to get very far.
Davey Jones: 00:46:37 Sure. What are some things that you’re seeing in the industry right now that are just not working? I’m sure that you guys have maybe some common things that come to you– a client says this and you’re just like, hey, just every client says I’m doing this, and you’re like, ah, just stop doing that right now. Don’t, don’t focus on that at all.
Becky: 00:46:57 I think the first thing, and probably the easiest thing, depending on where you’re at, is looking at what’s currently in front of you. Part of the thing that’s being ineffective, people are not looking at what’s currently in front of them. They are all like, I need more, I want more. How do I get more? And I get it. We’ve all been there, but I guarantee anybody who’s saying that hasn’t stopped. It’s directly in front of them, whether it’s relationships, emails, something in their business already. There are holes that they can go in and fix and fill those gaps with some of the other stuff we’ve already been talking about before just trying to get more. So like filling the gaps and just looking at what’s right in front of you is something that we start with all of our clients like, all right, what’s going on? What’s working well? What’s not working? Let’s like take some inventory here before you go out there and panic and freak out about meeting more.
Jesse: 00:47:42 It’s different for a lot of people. You know, we, if you say, hey, this strategy doesn’t work. There’s going to be for every person that says that there’s going to be five people that say, oh no, that’s working in my business. And so I think to kind of, uh, elaborate a little bit on what Becky just said, just looking at like in your own business and being real with yourself. I think that you have to be able to look at this and say, hey, like this really isn’t working even though you want this to work so bad,
Becky: 00:48:07 …even though you put money and time. I mean even I remember when we took down a, just as an example, when we took down like our photography site, we still have our blog up, but I remember that day like Jesse, that was our first baby. We can put thousands of dollars, like the Promo video, which we still have out there, but the site, all of this stuff, I’m like, this was thousands of dollars an hour. We’re going to take it down. But we did that because it was no longer serving a purpose for us. So applying that to smaller areas of your business. If you’re working so hard on something but it’s not working for you, like giving the freedom to like surrender that and move on. I think it’s super important.
Speaker 2: 00:48:45 Um, but to answer your question about specifically what are some things that we see that like aren’t necessarily working as well as maybe they used to or things that people get excited about doing that don’t really do anything for their business. I think one of the biggest things is just blogging for the sake of blogging and that’s something that we see all the time that people just put up a portfolio post. Then they get in this cycle of like, I’m going to post on Instagram, hey, come look at my pretty work and then you’re going to get some traffic, get to the blog and they don’t give people anywhere to go. And so I think that it’s usually an easy fix. It’s either changing up the way you blog so that you’re, you know, maybe a little bit more story based or pulling out something that from that wedding or from that portrait session or from, you know, uh, working with that client that is going to be able to draw people in that people are gonna get excited about. Um, because when we get in that cycle where it’s just like, oh, I’m going to blog when I post, no one, no one cares.
Becky: 00:49:47 Most don’t know why they’re even doing it. Yes. Like, oh, I blogged this. I need to put out in the world. Maybe it’ll give me more clients, but like lack of purpose behind every move that they make just because that’s what everybody does.
Davey Jones: 00:49:57 Yeah. We find that a lot, especially since, uh, one of the things that we teach on SEO. There’s this half truth out there that blogging is good for SEO, which is, uh, you know, it’s true, but only if you’re doing it purposefully, you know, if all you’re doing is blogging personal stuff because you saw a popular blogger out there and all she does is blog personal stuff. So you think, Oh, if I do that, I’m going to get a ton of clients and traffic too. You probably, um, you’re not going to be happy with the results probably, right? It’s probably not going to lead to more clients. You have to have a purpose behind why you’re blogging. I feel like people struggle, especially with blogging and I don’t know if you guys have found, uh, found the same thing. But I think thinking through that purpose is important. It’s not super difficult once you sit down and say, OK, why do I want to know what kind of people should be landing on my website? Why am I putting this piece of content out into the world? And I think people will find that they save a ton of time if they think through those things that you guys are talking about. Because otherwise they’re going to be publishing these posts that get really no traffic and they don’t really move the needle and they spend hours on them, you know, and, and like, like you had mentioned earlier in the interview when you’re spending hours on that you’re not spending hours on something else. Is there anything else that you find people are coming to you and they’re like, hey, I’m really trying to grow my facebook page. Is there anything else that people are doing that just really isn’t moving the needle?
Becky: 00:51:33 This might lead to something specific, but I think people, a lot of people aren’t diversified. They’re putting all their eggs in one basket, like they’ve been in business five years. It’s all referral based, which is so awesome. That means they felt incredible relationships. They have a great client experience. All of these things that are going well for them, but they haven’t done anything else outside of that as far as marketing goes and so now five years in, you think like I’m home free and all of a sudden people are panicking because inquiries stop coming in. I think the mistake or the ineffective thing is like just solely focusing on that one thing and not being able to like shift and move how the market moves and how technology is going and how our industries going and bringing it back to what Jesse was saying earlier. Like oh, people are panicking or they freak out because facebook–the algorithm– or not getting the reach and like totally, that sucks. We get it, we all hate it, but if this is what’s going on and we can pay 10 or 15 bucks to get in front of a couple thousand people, even though you didn’t use to have to do that and you know, you’re kind of bitter of the fact that you do now have to do that. Um, you have to be flexible as to what’s going on in the world and not like stomping your feet that you can’t get what you used to with facebook.
Davey Jones: 00:52:49 Is there any one channel that you guys would, you know, if you only had to choose one or maybe one or two channels to focus on, what would you tell them most creative services businesses to focus on?
Jesse: 00:53:01 I think that the key word there for me at least this channel, because it doesn’t for me, I don’t care where our clients get traffic from or get visibility from. But the key thing is that you have a channel for people to come through. Even if, for example, like a lot of our clients focus on instagram because that’s where their clients are hanging out with, are not necessarily hanging out on facebook as much anymore, you know? So if that is instagram where that channel starts it’s important to know, hey, where does that client, where does that customer journey take them? Um, so often we post on instagram and we’re here, but like, no one’s coming to our site and it’s like, well, are you asking them to come through? You’re giving them a reason to come to your site. Are you telling them to come to your site? Because here comes a blunt, Jesse quote. But like people are dumb. You have to tell them exactly what to do.
Becky: 00:53:54 He means that in the nicest way everybody.
Davey Jones: 00:53:55 No, I, I completely agree.
Jesse: 00:53:57 It’s not that people aren’t intelligent. It’s the fact that we’re, we’re a little bit lazy and they were being bombarded with so much stuff that we need to make sure that we’re leading people where we want them to go. And so I think that more important than just looking at like, OK, where the traffic or where the, the channel starts, I think is much more important to look at, OK, where am I taking them from there? Because once you have that, then it doesn’t matter if you’re taking them from instagram to your website to an inquiry page or if it’s from an in-person networking event to something like that, you have an idea of where you can take people. And I promise if you can do that effectively and you can lead people down a journey where you’re intentionally designing it and when they come to a blog post, I’m going to give them a call to action that says like, Hey, do you like what you see here? Like I would love to chat with you about shooting your wedding and we know we keep coming back to the wedding because that’s what we were was where we started I think. But like, that’s such a great example of how so often, you know, for example, when people are blogging, um, it’s just a blog and there’s no calls to action. And people tell us, “People come to my blog, but then they just leave” and it’s like, well, are you giving them any reason to go anywhere else? And I think that that’s more, that’s such an important conversation to have with yourself and such an important exercise and looking at where it is that you want them to go and then looking at if you’re actually leading them there. So, um, you know, once you have that figured out, I think that totally depends on you’re looking at where your audience is hanging out,
Becky: 00:55:27 and what your strengths are as well because as much as we preach video for example, um, like we know video is great for business, but it might not be everybody’s strength. Like we do think everybody should try it, but at the same time, like they might be so much better at connecting with people in a different way. So it comes back to their strengths as well.
Davey Jones: 00:55:44 Yeah, I think that’s a great answer. And I love what you said about leading people. I think one thing that we see on websites a lot, and we do a lot of different website reviews for clients, um, that, you know, they have these pages and they have links to a thousand different things. And so in that case, that’s almost a little bit different than what you’re talking about, which is just as important having a single strong call to action at the end of a blog post that tells people that you want to work with them. But on the other end of that if you lead people everywhere, there are going to go nowhere, you know. And so you really, I just love what you guys said about having to lead people and having an understanding of what customer journey is I think is also super important. So going back to coaching, especially with you guys, what advice would you give people who are maybe they’re sitting there and they’re like, I have a thousand different ideas. I need someone to help me find a little bit of clarity. Um, what advice would you give to people in seeking out a coach? Like a knowing what you guys know, uh, being the experts. Um, if someone’s looking for a coach, how do you think they should go about finding one?
Jesse: 00:55:44 Go to Idealust Hahaha
Davey Jones: 00:57:02 hey we’ve done coaching with the guys and, and we found it extremely beneficial so we can attest to, I mean not only just the value of coaching but uh, how, you know, how fun it was to work with you guys and you guys helped us specifically around a launch that we’re doing. And again, just going back to what you were saying about coaching and I feel like I am a fairly technically savvy in the sense that I can figure it out. It might not come super naturally, like I feel like you are one of those guys that you, Tyler Harrington and you know, a couple friends of mine that are, uh, that you love the tech world and you’re always in it. But I do feel like I can figure out things for the most part, but when we’re doing this launch with you guys, like I knew I could probably figure it out and the launch probably wouldn’t go as well and you know, I’d probably make 8,000 mistakes along the way, which is great. And I can learn from that for the next time. Or we could hire you guys. We could do it pretty much right the first time around and still learn a ton in the process and probably spend half of the time that we had spent trying to figure it out on our own.but just finding a coach in general like are there certain things that people should be looking for?
Becky: 00:58:13 I think something that’s super important outside of like the business realm because those are there, I want to get some of those too. But like it’s do you click with them like personality wise, that’s why every strategy call we have with people like we do a zoom call or skype or whatever it is, cause we wanna see their face and we want them to see who we are and vice versa because you’re going to be working with this person and not just so that you get along, but so that you are coachable. I’m like, if you don’t respect somebody or you’re like, oh, it’s just something’s a little off. Like you’re not going to listen to what they have to say. For us that’s very important.
Jesse: 00:58:45 I mean we talked to our clients, uh, you know, our, our longer term clients every single week and we talked to them a lot more than they talked a lot of their friends or even family. And so it is important that, that they do like us and we have like at least a healthy working relationship in that they have to be able to at least be able to believe some of the things that we believe in, the things that, the philosophies that we have. Um,
Becky: 00:59:08 another thing as far as business wise, like can they help me, what do, what am I looking for? And have they helped other people get their, um, or have they done it themselves? Or are there other people out there, you know, have been in my shoes and now they’re here because they hired so and so.
Davey Jones: 00:59:25 I know that you guys occasionally turn people away. Just say, hey, this isn’t going to be a good fit. And I think that there’s real value in that. I mean just realized that as coaches or in any profession, you know, regardless of whether you’re a photographer or plan or whatever, that not every client is going to be exactly the right fit. And I think that says a lot about the, the coaches as well. So what do you guys, uh, so let’s say somebody really wants to hire a coach, but they’re just simply not in a position to do so because like you said, it is an investment. I think in, in a lot of cases, as you guys seemed to think that a lot of cases it’s, it’s well worth the investment. Um, but if, if somebody is not in a position to hire a coach, uh, is there anything that they can do? Um, in the meantime?
Jesse: 01:00:12 Yeah, I think that, um, there’s a few things. One is, you know, and that’s why core courses are so popular I think is because it does give you a chance to, you know, work with us on a smaller level, but still be able to get some of that information and get some of that direction. Um, unfortunately, courses work for a certain type of personality for people that are going to go through it and actually make those changes and do a, do the work on their own without any outside accountability. Um, you know, there’s also other things out there like, you know, we’re having a marketing retreat that’s somewhere where we’re giving a lot of people the opportunity that, that haven’t had the chance to work with us in the past, whether it’s because their schedule is full or because they, you know, they’re just not in a place financially to, to make that happen. We’re going to bunker down in an Airbnb with eight to probably 10 or 12 people max and look at, Hey, what are can we do in our businesses that’s gonna help us grow. What are the things that are working, what’s not and how can we apply those strategies to your business specifically? Um, so, you know, again, for people that are like, oh, like I’ve done the course thing, I, I need a little bit more hands on. Something like that I think would be super beneficial for people. Um, because so often it’s so hard to get caught up. They have all these people telling us, hey, you should do this in your business. No, no, actually you need to do this and your business now. Instagram is dead. Oh No. Instagram is the best thing ever. And you hear all these conflicting things and it’s so hard to sit through that when you’re just like, I just want to know what to focus on. Uh, I just want to know what I’m willing to do the work. I just need to know what the, what I need to do. I need some help and direction and I think that, you know, that’s one of the reasons why we’re doing that is because we know that we can help people very quickly. I’m just simply by helping them lay out a game plan, help them apply those strategies to their businesses specifically,
Becky: 01:02:02 And we like in-person stuff and we like Tacos, so all of that stuff. But if they can’t go into that, something that they can do on their own is just something we mentioned earlier, like take an honest, honest look at your business and even if it’s things that you don’t want to see your numbers, you don’t want to see–Look at what is working and what is not working. And then also what are those gaps? something that’s been like that little devil on your shoulder like, no, you need to get those systems in place. Whatever it is, the things you like know, this is nagging at you that you haven’t done yet. Like do those things. And I get that it’s not fun or easy all the time, but you have to start by filling in the holes before you can go out there and be like, give me more because it’s just going to snowball in the wrong direction if you don’t have that other stuff figured out.
Davey Jones: 01:02:45 Yeah, I think retreats or conferences, things like that are a great alternative in the meantime especially. And I want to talk a little bit more about what you guys are doing out in San Diego, right? Because that sounds incredible because you’re still going to get a little bit more attention than you would taking an online course. You’re around people, both attendees who are in it with you and the speakers and the educators who are trying to impart whatever it is that they’re trying to impart. So I do think that, and you meet so many people that way, you know, you’ll make like real in person relationship when attending a retreat or conference at generally, what is a lower price point then what coaching would be. I think that’s a great way to go. Something that I do for books and online courses and this actually it was a rule that I started with books because I would order books and then I would not read them or I’d read a quarter of them and I’d be done, you know, and so we’d have all these books laying around that I’ve never read and I would just keep on ordering books. Krista was a large part of how this rule came into existence. And by large part, I mean she, she pretty much created this rule: if you don’t finish the book, you don’t get to get another book, even if it was a book that I didn’t enjoy, you know, and sometimes we pick up books and were just like, this is, this is useless. But, um, you know, it forced me to finish the book before I went and got a new one. And I think the same thing, we’re a fan of online courses But if you don’t finish the online course, there’s no reason you should be buying another online course, finish it, do the work, and then reward yourself by getting whatever that next thing is that you think, um, you know, is going to, is going to help you and your business. You know, it’s crazy. Read the compound effect. It’s crazy how much money you end up saving, I think, uh, down the road. But there’s all sorts of things that I would love to talk to you about online courses. You know, how valuable they are and then some of the pitfalls of them too. So that’s going to have to be another podcast episode. Jesse, I would love to have you come back on and talk about, you know, the numbers and just metrics and a Sherpa, which is this great software that, uh, that you’ve built or helped build. Um, so I want to bring you back on and talk about all those things, Facebook ads and stuff. Before we end up here, you guys are doing something in San Diego. Do you guys have dates and details about all of that?
Becky: 01:05:15 We do have dates in August twelfth through the 15th. It’s going to be here in San Diego. We’re going to get one or two beachy AIR BNB’s it is going to be like the real world. We all sit together in the same house and like great marketing comes out of it and we’re going to have some beach cruiser bike ride, some yoga, lots of Tacos. I’m, it’s all marketing marketing retreat. It’s all marketing. And then also we’re going to have some one on one time for everybody there, so we get a little one on one coaching as well.
Jesse: 01:05:47 The whole goal in this and why we’re doing this because we want people to learn these things. We want them to walk away with a game plan moving forward. Um, so people that are going to come to this thing, they’re going to walk away with, not only with the strategies but those strategies that are applied to their businesses so they can walk away knowing exactly what they need to do over the next six months to a year, um, to be able to get on the right track and start achieving some of the goals they have in their business.
Jesse: 01:06:10 And we’re going to practice things that people have been avoiding. We’re going to practice some video, we’re going to practice some consultation, some sale stuff. We’re gonna, we’re gonna like literally on the spot, do these things. So that might make people feel uncomfortable. If it does, that means this is for you because you’re finally going to tackle these things. But we’re excited just to come alongside people. We love our one on one clients, we love working with people so personally, and this is going to be very personal,
Davey Jones: 01:06:35 I’m a little bit jealous of the fact that in San Diego you have 70 degrees and sunny all the time. You’re going to be out of the beach, you know, arguably some of the best tacos that you could probably find in the United States. I mean, just for those things, I would sign up with us for those things. So I mean, the fact that you guys are going to be, you know, teaching and educating and coming alongside people I think is a, just puts that over the top so those details you can find in the show notes. So head over to the show notes if you want more details about that in a link to get to more information about that. Thank you so much for joining me today. If people want to learn more about you, where should they go?
Becky: 01:07:20 Yeah, a website is Idealustlife.com. And instagram is probably where we hang out the most. Um, especially on instagram stories these days, so yeah, those are the two main places.
Davey Jones: 01:07:30 All right, awesome. And you can find all that information in the show notes. Thanks guys.
Becky and Jesse: 01:07:30 Awesome. Thanks Davey.
Davey Jones: 01:07:43 Thanks for listening to the brands that book podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to the podcast on itunes and leaving a review so that others are more likely to find it. For show notes and other resources. Visit daveyandKrista.com.
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