4 ways to step into your CEO self as an edupreneur

 Welcome to the Empowered Edupreneur Podcast. My name is Michelle Smit, and I am an ex-teacher turned online business coach for Edupreneurs the owner of Digiteach and a six-figure entrepreneur. I am in love with empowering educators just like you to create freedom filled online businesses and lives they love.

If you are looking to up level your skills, your finances, your mindset, and change the trajectory of your life as an educator in business, then you are in the right place. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of business and mindset development to help unlock the infinite potential within you. To play bigger with your life and go after your dreams. We are going to have so much fun together. So thank you so much for pushing play today. Now let's dive in.

Hello? Hello, hello. Fabulous one. I hope you are doing so well Today I am doing my first podcast from South Africa, sunny South Africa. And I'll be here with Mike for the next three months, which is absolutely fabulous. My family lives here and Mike has been able to come with me for the full three months because he quit his job.

And yeah, it's actually one of the reasons why I started my online business is I literally cannot stand the winter. And when I moved to the Netherlands, I had like one winter there and I was like, Nope, I can't do this. This is not for me. I cannot survive a full winter. And one of my driving points in my business is that I really wanted to work online and earn online so that I could travel to warmer countries, go back to South Africa whenever I wanted.

So yeah, that's pretty much one of my, well, just one of my driving points in my business, but super stoked to be in South Africa, visiting my family. And I hope you are doing really well today, and I'm really excited to chat to you today. Actually, last week I shared a podcast episode about how your teaching identity is keeping you broken business, and it's such a good episode because I'm talking about a really important.

Concept in that episode. It's, it's quite triggering for some, and that's normal. It's probably meant to trigger you in some way. It's all meant with love though. But if you haven't listened to that episode, then go and check it out. I think it's episode five, and today I'm going to be continuing that conversation even further, but with some more practical tips on how to actually step into your CEO self as an educator in business.

Like how to start taking the right kind of actions that a business owner would take. That tends to lead to better results overall. So if you are operating from your teacher mentality in your business, you may struggle with one of these steps that I'm going to mention. But I promise simply doing even some of these things will make a difference to your success in your business and will make a difference to your sort of mindset as well,

and like how much you love your business.

And I say that because building a business is hard in any shape or form, but when you do these things, you're actually supporting yourself and it's going to make the business building journey a lot more enjoyable. A lot. Well, a lot less stressful, a lot more fun and more supported and guided, and therefore you're going to love the process more and therefore you're going to continue more.

I'm going to be sharing with you some key actions that you can take that will really elevate how you are showing up in your business. These things in itself will have a return on investment in some capacity. Even if that return isn't money, the return will be maybe in time or mental white space or feeling supported.

These, these steps that I'm going to share with you or these practical things that you can do are going to make a big difference and help you step into your CEO self. So you operating from that space rather than from. I'm just a teacher and I have the side thing, and you know, I'm not treating it really like a business.

Okay, let's get started. I'm going to share with you four practical ways that you can step into your CEO self as an entrepreneur and start taking action from that energy and that space in your business and how that's going to help. Improve your success of your business, right? Step number one, and I know I mentioned this a lot, but it's an important one, is investing in your business in both building skills, like investing in learning skills.

And some sort of mentorship and coaching, so that typically they go hand in hand through the mentorship and coaching. You'll be learning skills and you'll be guided in the process. And this goes also both for investing time and money. So putting both of those things into your business and I see. I see a lot of people winging their business and, and consuming loads of free content online, and there is definitely a lot you can get from studying free content online.

I'm not denying that. There's a lot of good stuff out there and I understand in the earlier years of your business, you may not have the funds to invest. Otherwise, I get it. Remember, I started, my business broke and I had literally just $400 to invest at that point. So I feel you. You can bootstrap your business to a certain extent, and in the early phases you can do that, but that mentality of I need to do this in the cheapest way possible, can actually damage your potential for success.

So firstly, free content. Is great, but it's bloody confusing. If you are patching together your launch strategy using free blog posts from five different coaches, you're going to confuse yourself like crazy and you're probably going to hate that experience and you're probably never going to want to launch again.

This is going to cost you more of your time and energy, and therefore more money. Because remember, your time is your time is money, right? And in 2023, with more and more online businesses and courses launching. Winging your business for free is not going to compete against others who are actually being guided by coaches with effective strategies that are actually working.

One very powerful way to start stepping into your CEO self now is to invest in your business through either hiring a mentor or a coach, or investing in some sort of course or program that's going to teach you the skill that you want to learn. It, both of those things, building skills is the best way to invest in yourself.

Getting support and guidance in business is an amazing way to support yourself in your business. And when you do this, I, I want you to invest in a way that's not going to break your bank completely and send your nervous system into a state of absolute despair because you put all your money into an investment that was way beyond your comfort zone.

I don't expect that and I don't recommend that. But it's, it's got to be an investment that's going to give you enough skin in the game for you to stay accountable and show up to the process. Because when you pay, you actually pay attention. And as soon as that transaction happens, the transformation is already on its way.

Because once you invest in whatever way it is in your business, you're going to. Into that business with a whole different energy than if you were just doing it the cheapest way possible and patching together everything and just doing it like as budget friendly as possible. So if you struggle so much to invest in your business and you struggle to pay for, you know, courses or coaching or anything like that. And you're always sort of looking to get the, the free thing or the cheapest thing.

I want you to ask yourself, where is that coming from? Where is that sort of fear of spending money coming from? Do you not believe that you can make that money back? Is this fear real or is your mind just completely being irrational? Right? Cause we know our minds. Irrational, right. Most of the time it's just a scarcity money mindset thing that is sort of built in, conditioned into your mind, especially as an educator.

But a lot of the time it's not true. Like you thinking you're never going to make that $2,000 or that. Whatever, $1,000, $5,000 back ever again. That's, that's not true. That's probably a story you're just telling yourself, and it's just showing that you have lack of confidence in yourself, and maybe you just come back yourself, and that's something you need to work on, because if you're running a business, you need to be able to back yourself, and you need to know that when you invest, you're going to show up to the process and that money's going to be returned to you in some capacity later down the line.

All right, when investing in mentorship in your business on whatever thing that's going to help you build the skill you need to do what you want to do, make sure you find the right mentor for you. Who specializes in the thing that you want to do, right? So if you want to learn how to sell high ticket premium one-on-one packages, right?

Find a mentor who does that and learn from them. If you prefer to launch digital courses and group programs, find a mentor who specializes in that. If you prefer to build a tutoring company online and you want to hire lots of tutors, and that's the business model you want to go for. Go find someone who's done that and let them guide you.

Decide your business model and your vision, and then find a mentor who you resonate with, who has results, right? So make sure that they have proven results in that area. Always check that out, that they have results and often if their students have results. These are two things you want to look at, and also check in with your intuition about the coaching and teaching style and see that if, that they resonate with you that what they, how they teach, resonates with you, their, their values resonate with you.

The way they run their business resonates with you. That's very important. You want to have that alignment. Now, I'm not saying you need to have a mentor and a coach to be successful. I'm literally not outsourcing that success to someone else for you. And I'm not saying you need to go and spend all of your money and put yourself in a very problematic financial situation for this.

What I'm saying is that, as a business owner, investing in your business is part of the journey. It's part of running a business. You’re not going to be able to grow a business if you're not going to put any investment in, right? And making money and putting money into your business is going to help your business grow.

And that works for even paid advertising and mentorship. Part of building a business is investing in it. And I want you to think of it like that. I have spent like $50,000 at least on coaches and courses and mentorship, and I've spent probably, I don't know, nearly a hundred thousand dollars on Facebook ads.

I spend money to make money and I've just, I'm, I made that shift a good couple of years ago. It was a big shift for me as a teacher to make, but I realized that I needed to spend money to make money. I didn't have to, you know, put myself in problematic financial situations, but I, I went in with a mindset that every time I invest, I rise up in my power as a business owner, and I know the return on investment is already on its way back to me, and that's the kind of energy and mindset I want you to possess as you step into your CEO self.

Okay? All right. Number two is automating your business with systems. Okay, so this really is a no-brainer for me, but a lot of start-up entrepreneurs in business, they don't automate their business at all. Their online business and they patch together all sorts of things to try and make it work. And it is such a time drainer, like it just costs them so much time, for example.

They will have a mail trim for emails. They'll have a Wix for the website. They'll use POD for courses. They'll use WhatsApp to send messages. Then they're manually building their email list by asking people to give them their email manually, and they're going and they're entering it into an Excel spreadsheet.

And just thinking about this makes me. Literally tired. If I went this route to my business, I honestly would never have made it because I would've hated the process so much that I would've been like, there is no way I'm continuing this. This is the perfect way to burn yourself out, make the process very unpleasant and give up.

So what is the solution? The solution to this is investing in an all-in-one business platform that does everything you need in your education, in your online education, business in one. Okay? This includes your funnels, okay? This includes your website, your checkout pages where people can pay you your email order responder for you to broadcast emails, your course hosting platform, your blog posts, your call booking scheduler there are so many pieces of an online business that you want and you would need for you to launch a course and you know, build an email list and nurture that email list.

There are things that you need, okay? And there are loads of these all-in-one platforms that exist. So many options, so many price points. My favourite one is the Course Creators kit, their starter version at the moment, I'm not saying this is forever. We're in 2022 now at the end of that year. At the moment, it's $69 per month, and it includes everything you need all in one, so you can automate most of your online business using just the system, and I consider this as like my rental costs for my business.

And I'm sorry, $69 for a rent is very cheap. like compared to a brick-and-mortar business, you are winning at life. Course creators Kit is my favourite, I run my entire business through it. They've got the best support system ever. Like they treat you like a, like a human being, not like a number.

And they are like incredibly supportive and that's very important. If you're running a business right on a system, you need that support. I will post a link in my show notes for CCK for you to check it out, but really. Just spend some money on an all-in-one system that you can automate running your business, because that's the whole dreamy thing about an online education business is automation.

Like automation is sexy as anything because it gives you back your time. And with that time. You have that mental space, that white space that you can then create from, and then you can create offers and you can create better products, and you can create better content because you've got more time. And you can put that time in areas that are actually going to move the needle in your business instead of like manually doing everything and making yourself miserable.

And this is what stepping into your CEO version of you looks like. It's not thinking, how am I going to do this the cheapest way? It's, it's thinking, how am I going to do this in the best way that's going to bring the best return on investment for me and my business in the long run and make this process enjoyable for me so I can sustain it?

By paying money, you are saving yourself thousands of hours of time, and your time, especially in the earlier phases of a business, is very, very important and valuable. For example, podcasting for me, I was like, cool, I want to create this podcast. What can I. To make this process so easy for me and enjoyable that I can continue creating a podcast every week for the next couple of years, that's a big commitment.

I knew I needed to invest in a great microphone. I needed to. Get my team, pay, pay team members to edit and like do all of the post production of the podcast. I pay people for that. And I have a system that I record the podcast on, like I'm, I pay for the thing that's going to make my life easier.

And now I love podcasting because I've streamlined the process. I don't find it annoying. Everything works and I just love doing it. And that's because of the fact that I'm paying people to do the things that I don't like. Right? Like I'm not going to edit my podcast. That sounds terrible for me. So you want to think of it like, how can I make this more enjoyable, easier for me, and save me lots of time.

Okay. The next thing is pricing your offers for profit. This is a message sent with utmost love. If you are going for, say, a 50 K, $50,000 year in your business, or maybe you want to say hit a hundred thousand dollars in a year. Let's have a little review on what your prices are. Often, I see a disconnect between your business goal and the pricing of the offer and the product.

If you're an educator who has started their business and you haven't ever launched yet, and you plan on launching a course, if your goal is to make, say, 50k in your first year in business, but pricing your offer at $150, then I have some sobering truth for you, some sobering news for you. You're going to have to sell 350 courses to hit that in your first year.

And based on a typical sales conversion of 2%, which is like industry standard, this means you'd need an email list of 15,000 people. So when you are looking at the data of things, and really it is a numbers game to a certain extent, it is quite shocking. 15,000 people on an email list. Do you know how long it would take you to build an email list of that organically?

Probably pretty long. Unless you're like an organic magician unicorn, which I mean, you can be of course, as possible. And of course you can use paid advertising to do that, but that's going to cut into your profits. And I don't recommend running paid ads if your product is so cheap because the cost to acquire the lead will be too high and you're not going to see a return on that ad spend at the end of that launch.

What is the solution here? The solution is for you to think bigger and start creating a more valuable offer that solves a bigger problem, that has a bigger transformation to it that warrants a bigger price point. So look at your yearly business revenue goal. Or maybe you have a launch goal and reverse engineer a price that makes sense and gets you there.

And if you immediately say, oh, I cannot charge more than a hundred dollars for my product, I challenge you right now on that. I believe that you can add more value to your product, make it even better so you can charge more. And maybe you need to position yourself as a premium brand and not the cheapest in your industry.

That I definitely recommend, and maybe you're speaking to the wrong avatar, and you to increase your sophistication of who you're speaking to and who you're helping, and maybe you're missing the, the, the bigger problem with your avatar and you're missing like what problem you're solving because the bigger the problem that you can solve.

That's like people are very, like, they really want to solve it, the higher the price point you can make. I really want to challenge you. In your thinking around your offer, and instead of competing on price, compete on value. Okay? Once you increase your prices, you'll be amazed at how that shifts your energy and how you take action and show up in your business.

It holds you more accountable to doing an excellent job for your students. And you will rise up to that challenge. My question to you is, what is your business revenue for the next year or for the next launch, and what is your price point of your offer? How many units of that offer do you need to sell in order to hit that goal?

Is that achievable? Does that price make sense to hit that goal? If not, you need to look at raising the price and rising up to the challenge and making it an even better offer. And that is a really great challenge for you in the sense that it's going to make you really step out of your comfort zone and push your mind, think creatively and really create an offer that's solving a real pain that's really desirable to your audience that people actually want to buy.

Okay? That is what the CEO version of you would do. Okay? And that's what I would love to invite you to do. So go and think about that. And the fourth thing for today, the fourth thing is taking actions that move the needle in your business. There are a gazillion things that your online business will demand from you.

Especially in the first year or two. This is because you are likely bootstrapping your business. You're trying to keep costs down, and you're doing all the work yourself. That means you are wearing all the hats in your business, and I did this myself. You are the salesperson. You are the content creator.

You are in charge of operations and the tech. You're in charge of marketing and launching. You are the face of the business. You're the person who creates the graphics and the branding. You are the funnel builder. You are the course creator. You're the coach who delivers on the product, or you're the teacher who delivers on the product.

You likely do it. And there is no shame in that. That is literally what I did, and I am so grateful for that because I built mad skills in all those areas because I was in the arena doing all of that in my business. The only thing that I didn't do was I actually did a lot of it. I did Facebook ads, I did everything myself.

The only thing that I didn't focus on the most was like video editing and back-end tech because Mike, my partner in life and business, he did video editing and tech. So that's like the only thing I didn't do, but I did everything else. And you build mad skills, and I do recommend you building the skill set first before you outsource the thing.

Because if you just outsource from the start, you never build the skill and then you, you actually can't sustain your business because if you have no idea how to build a funnel or anything like that. And you outsource the whole thing to someone else, like what happens when that person leaves? Like, how you going to continue your business?

So building the skill is really important. It's a good thing if you're doing all the stuff in your business, but. I see a lot of people spending too much time on areas that just won't make a difference in their business. Like that's not going to really move the needle in their business. For example, procrast on branding, okay, spending hours and hours on Canva, creating beautiful graphics and logos and lovely.

Things that look super nice on the eye, I'm sorry to tell you, but that's just a way of staying in your comfort zone that is not actually going to bring in the bacon. And the same goes for spending hours and hours creating the perfect course with the most beautiful workbooks and worksheets. Really well, highly recorded course.

No one's going to buy your course because it's got perfect recordings. You have the most beautiful workbooks. They buy your program because of your positioning, your messaging, the transformation that you're offering. And the problem that you're solving, like you're bringing them to a place of pleasure and you're moving them away from their pain and that's what they're paying for.

If you're spending all your time building the most beautiful course, you're also costing yourself precious time. You're not moving the needle in your business. So what actions can you start taking that move the needle in your business? One of those things is generating leads. That is often done through organic marketing.

Whether that be on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or paid advertising, of course, you want to be generating leads that are your ideal student avatar within your niche, and that means your daily focus should be on creating some sort of content for brand awareness. For example, Instagram, you would do reals.

And that, that's what you do to get your, your business out into the world and show people how you can help them. And then you always want to guide those people from the socials onto an email list. And then you want to nurture them on your email. So decide what your content strategy is, how you're going to get in front of the right people, and then prioritize it and do it every.

The second thing is making offers and actually selling stuff. If you aren't selling anything and you don't have an offer, then you've just got an expensive hobby. You want to create a great offer and you want to repeatedly sell it, whether that's on an evergreen basis, which means all the time or on a live launch basis, which means open and close enrollment.

Both of those strategies work. It just depends on your style. I love the live launch style personally. Okay. The third thing you can do that can move the needle in your business is audience nurturing. So once people are on your email list, you actually want to nurture them. You don't want them to just sit there and forget about you, so you want to nurture them, send them a newsletter of some sorts.

You can decide on that frequency yourself, but spending some time on this will have a huge return on investment because when you sell or launch something, you actually have a warm email list that you can sell your product to, and it's much more likely that those people are actually going to purchase from you.

Then someone who hardly knows you or knows what you do, and just because they follow you on social media doesn't mean. They're like a super warm lead. Of course they can be. Organic marketing is very powerful, but getting them on that email list is just another way to secure that. You can continue nurturing that relationship and connecting with those people so you won't always be prioritizing some sort of nurturing, whether that's.

Email list, social media? Both. I typically do both. All right, and the next thing that I would say makes a really big difference is actually just going live and creating video-based content. This is really a powerful way to grow business online. So video is like the king of the content in the online world at the moment.

If you are doing a live once a week. That would build know like, and trust, it would grow your audience. You can also do collaborations with other people. Get in front of their people, get in front of their audience. Collaborations are amazing. Video based content is a really great way to channel your content.

Like if you want to make this like. A bit easier for you. Like I would just say go and focus on video-based content because that seems to be the best in building. No, like and trust and yeah, typically people shy away from that cause they're super scared to go live. They're super scared to put their face on video.

But really I want you to go and challenge yourself to do that cause it actually makes a big difference and you can really build an engaged. Just by consistently doing that, say on your Instagram channel. In a nutshell, focus on the tasks that create traffic and generate leads within your niche. So your ideal student.

You want to nurture those leads and then you want to sell and make offers, and you want to have like a, a selling system, like a launch strategy or evergreen strategy, whatever. Whatever suits you. Those are some really practical ways that you can start stepping into your CEO self as an entrepreneur. I'll just recap.

Number one, invest in mentorship. Invest in building your skills. Skills can never be taken away from you. No matter what happens in the economy, no matter how shitty the recession is. If you have some mad skills and you know how to sell and you know how to launch and you know how to copyright and speak on camera like you are winning, okay?

You are winning. You're going to weather the. And mentorship is super important. Okay? Number two, automate your business systems with an all-in-one platform. I love CCK. I'll drop that in the show notes. Just save yourself some time. Treat your business like a business. Number three, price your offer for profit so that it can lead you to your business revenue goals or your launch goals.

Don't undercharge and just charge a hundred dollars and think that that you're going to make a million. Dollars with that. Maybe it's possible. I'm not saying it's not, but it's probably quite unreal. Realistic, unless you have a big audience. And then the fourth thing is take actions that move the needle in your business daily and start, start focusing on those things.

And a nice way to see that is often the action that scares you the most is the action you should be doing the most. That is launching selling, speaking live on video. All of those things typically scare people the most, and marketing. But those are the things that you want to be doing. You want to actually get visible online.

You want to be launching and selling and creating offers and speaking on camera and all that jazz. If it scares you a little bit, then I think you should do it. That's how I feel when I think about my business and I'm like, Ooh, that feel, I've got a resistance to that. That scares me. That's out of my comfort zone.

I'm like, okay, cool. That's the thing I should be doing, because that's probably the thing that's going to move the needle in my business. So yeah, if you can't do all of these things, just do some of these things maybe start with one and then layer it in. It will make a huge difference. So, which one of these things are you going to take action on now?

Maybe you need to automate your business, maybe need to improve your, increase your price. Maybe you need to stop procrast to branding. Maybe you need to find a mentor. Or invest in a course to learn a skill, let me know. Send me a message on Instagram or post. Post me an email. Post me an email. Shoot me an email is probably the better term for that.

I'd love to hear what you're going to action on. I think this was quite a practical podcast with some things that you can sort of get going with immediately that will really make a difference in your business success. And have made a huge difference in my journey. I hope you loved the podcast. I loved chatting to you today. Have an amazing rest of your day, and I will chat with you soon.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you haven't yet joined the waitlist for the Educators Income Booster Bootcamp, then head to my website at Digiteach.biz to sign up. This is going to be the best life training experience, helping you take your knowledge and map it out into a desirable course that can sell for years to come so that you can scale your income and impact like crazy.

I appreciate you so much, and I can't wait to connect with you in the next episode. In the meantime, go create a business and life you love.