Ping Pong Offers… I swear I have an actual plan for my business

Hello, hello, and welcome back to Business First Creatives podcast. I recently recorded an episode about my offer ecosystem that I was super excited to share with you this week, even scheduled it to go live. But I’ve realized that two years ago, I took my business in a direction that I now regret, and that’s okay because I learned a lot of lessons, and last year it may have just been the business that I needed so that I could sell something when I was offline.

But now it’s time for a pivot. So two years ago, I was looking for a way to get time back, and I did two major things. First, I changed the CRM blueprint to a completely self-paced course, removed the Facebook group, made it for all creatives instead of just photographers, and I took away the support. The second thing that I did was I took key templates out of the courses and used them to create a brand new template shop.

Last night I was listening to an episode of the Lazy Business Podcast with Emily Williams and Jess and I got absolute clarity in the changes that I wanna make in my business going forward. I mean, it was a 30 minute podcast episode and I came home and immediately started to do some things, and this is what I want to talk to you about today.

Now I’ve got ideas swirling around from a lot of different interactions I’ve had with people, particularly over the last three months. So first I did a growth audit with Emily Williams back in May, and she flat out asked me if I had the capacity to sell low ticket offers. The truth is, I don’t think I do.

It’s not what lights me up, and I don’t even think I have the audience for it, but it hasn’t stopped me from trying. Now, during the sales parade with seals Lockley, I found a way to talk about my offers. 50 times over a two week period outside of a traditional launch. And I didn’t die. In fact, since the parade ended a week ago, I have still shown up on Threads every single day.

And I finally posted my first Instagram story in months, and I’m actually looking forward to returning to Instagram after my upcoming birthday sabbatical. And last, but certainly not least, Kelsey McCormick of coming up Roses has gotten me to think about launches in a completely new way.

And while I didn’t make massive sales in the last launch of the blueprint or the email like you mean it course, I’ve collected a lot of super helpful data that I will use when I relaunch both of these offers before the end of 2025.

Now speaking about launching offers, you may have heard me talk a lot about the workflow FastPass in a few recent episodes, and that was the offer that I paraded for the first two weeks of July. Turns out I love that offer, but not how I positioned it. That is not what I want my warmup offer or my entry offer to be.

My gift is helping you with your client experience systems, but I can’t passively do that. So this brings me all the way back around to what actually kick started today’s episode, and that is the entry offer. Now, I’ve been thinking a lot about what everyone needs inside of their client experience systems.

You need a five minute booking process. You need strategic on-brand client communication that builds trust and connects at every point in your customer journey. And you also need the workflows that run them. But where do you start? So many of you come to me asking for help with workflows, but you often aren’t ready for them.

You haven’t designed your customer journey. You haven’t created all of the assets needed to build the workflows, and you don’t even have a booking process in place that frees up the time that you need in order to work on the workflows. But me telling you this is very different from me showing you the holes inside your current processes.

Last week I did a webinar for branding photographers and co-hosted it with my friend and client, Maddie Ashong. She has been on this podcast three different times, but it made me think a lot about where Maddie was when she came to me. Maddie was already running a high touch, super profitable business. I know this because I was inside her Dubsado and could see her numbers.

Hello. But she absolutely was convinced that all she needed was a pretty proposal and she was good to go. She thought her workflows were crushing it. It wasn’t until I pointed out all the holes in her communication and the places where she was doing things that Dubsado could actually do for her, that she realized even as a rockstar business owner, she had room to grow.

That’s why I’m repositioning my warmup and entry offer to be a low lift, highly impactful client experience audit. Now, I’ve been selling an audit for two years. The first one I sold during my birthday sale two years ago, but this is how I’m changing it going forward. No more full reviews of your CRM setup. I am not gonna go in HoneyBook and Dubsado anymore and tell you how you don’t have your calendar connected and you need to add your colors for your branding buttons. Those are not the things that matter the most. What matters most is your client experience. All I’m gonna do is have you tell me the offer, and I’m gonna run through it like your client and audit you on five touch points and three essentials.

The three essentials are, do you have a proposal that sells? Does your onboarding process build confidence and will your delivery and offboarding process get you referred or rebooked? It’s really that simple. Yes, I’m gonna go through your entire workflows if you have them, show you any errors, any immediate things that need to be fixed.

But I’m also gonna give you at least three action items to improve your client experience that you can implement within 24 hours. The only other warmup offer that I am going to keep is my proposal templates, because that’s the only thing I want people to create outside of designing your entire client experience.

So the newly updated client experience audit and the proposal template are my warmup offers. What about the rest of my offer ecosystem. What about the CRM blueprint?

My brand new systems in session, done with you, and all of the templates that are currently in the system shop, what is staying, what is getting deleted, and what’s getting a facelift? I’m gonna start sharing some of those details on next week’s episode, which happens to be my birthday.

So if you are ready to get my eyes on your client experience, please go to Colie james.com/audit. And there you will see a link to book one of these client experience audits.

Alright, that’s it for today’s episode. See you next time.