What I learnt from taking my physical business online
It’s happened. I’m live.
I’ve taken my practical trade and converted it to online. Here are some learnings and insights that I’m ready to share to those of you wishing to do the same thing.
But first, what’s my trade?
I’m a creative brand strategist.
I’ve been toying with the idea of starting my own brand agency for some time, but it wasn’t until last year that I got excited about bundling that idea with an online learning component.
I found this idea attractive for two reasons:
Firstly, I got excited about the content side of things. I like creating in any form, and the idea of building a course and all the marketing gubbins that come with it appealed to me.
Secondly, I smiled upon the prospect of having a scalable source of income free from the burden of creating a large branding agency. Fingers crossed!
What’s the course?
A ‘free mini-course’ entitled Essential Brand Positioning for Start-Ups. I’ve been using a platform called Teachable to host the video lesson content. However, Teachable also lets you build a website around your course, and a blog and all the rest of it.
Teachable is a little mediocre on intrinsic beauty (weaker than Square Space, but better than Click Funnels), however, it’s certainly good enough to get my MVP out the door.
I should also mention that my personal brand identity is in MVP status. It was more important for me to be able to build something than build the final thing. So with that, my first lesson:
1 — Start small, then grow
This advice came right out of Teachable to be fair. I was ready to build a 30-lesson course, but their suggestion was to create something smaller and free to test the market appetite first. The idea is also to use this free course to build an email database.
I’m glad I did it this way round because in creating these 5 free lessons, I’ll be much better prepared for the big course when the time comes.
2 — Get live, then improve
I’m not Wolff Olins and the spotlight is not on me (yet), therefore I can afford to ‘go live’ under the radar. Which is what I have done. In about 6 weeks from now, I’ll rebrand myself, by which time I will have conquered many battles, including:
- Ironing all the bugs out of Teachable
- Writing several blogs
- Having a good idea about my first 18 Instagram posts
- Having 4 email workflows, flowing
- Collecting a bunch of feedback on my course
- Setting up Ad accounts, retargeting pools and analytics
- Gaining 200+ subscribers!
3 — Step back from your trade and document the process
I’ve been helping brands tell their stories for 15 years now. Oftentimes it’s an organic process that involves a fusion of desk research, meeting people and interpreting quantitative data. In real life, this will happen around the schedules of others in a mainly structured, but sometimes, slightly haphazard way.
The other thing is that you’re just as likely to have your big idea in a taxi ride as you are in a formal brainstorm.
These are great anecdotes, but don’t translate very well into course syllabuses.
To sell a process, you have to break it down, analyse all the little parts and put them in the right order. This is documenting your process.
In my case, I also needed to communicate the chapters present in running a brand positioning workshop, which is a real art. This has led me to create games and exercises for others to follow.
4 — Understand your personal value proposition
Especially in these COVID times, there’ll be a lot of people putting on various online courses. What will make yours different?
In my case, I get to lean on my experience. I don’t have an MBA and I haven’t worked at a large WPP consulting firm, but I have worked in two high-velocity start-ups in London, NY and LA.
Furthermore, a tonne of my friends have also founded start-ups, including the likes of Fiit.tv and Bulb. Big names!
Therefore my pool of stories that I can lean on, and personal connections that I can pull together is truly great.
The manner in which I conduct myself is as a storyteller. Blend these things and what you get is pure Simon Dean, the perfect brand practitioner for start-ups.
However, in my view, there’s one more thing I think you need have to be a successful online consultant… Which is next.
5 — Selling is easier when you develop your own IP
I have a framework: STANCE. This is my IP.
It’s an acronym and you work through it in order to arrive at a positioning statement for your brand.
STANCE is also the name of my company and it sounds good in a sentence: Find your STANCE. Take your STANCE, and so on.
Having a model or a framework such as this one really helps when it comes to shaping your thinking and it gives you something to sell — I have found that it’s easier to sell a thing than purely your own services.
6 — Practise your thinking (for free)
STANCE looks great on paper, but you have to get out there and do a few projects before you can put your money where your mouth is and say, “It works!”
And that’s where the ‘for free’ bit comes in. I practised my STANCE in three ways:
- on existing clients
- on hypothetical ones, such as Oatly, the alternative oat-based milk, and
- some free clients including Convex, an immersive performance arts company
Practise does make perfect. If I look at my early STANCEs they were a bit wordy and lacked attitude. If I look to where we got to with Convex, we arrived at the idea of ‘giving threatened environments a voice’ which perfectly sums up what they do.
7 — Confirm you know your audience
Just like a product or a service, your course needs an audience too. I have alluded to mine… Start-ups. However, during my research, more audiences have emerged. For example, young marketers wishing to add a branding string to their bow.
I had an instinctive feel for my audience, but have also published surveys to certain start-up communities. These surveys were well-received and offered good feedback, hence confirming my hypothesis!
Adding Typeform surveys is now a standard element to my client workflow to engage customers and even highlight those who can provide good testimonials or case studies in the future.
8 — Take it one step at a time
Success isn’t likely to come overnight. Just getting your operation working smoothly may take a few months!
Behind the scenes of my Teachable course are Zapier, Cloudflare, Mailchimp, and Typeform… I also have Monzo bank integrated with Xero accounting, Zoom for calls and Google for my business email — yet I have to wait 30 days before I can use my business Gmail to open a business Youtube! Oh, and I built a film studio!
With all of the above comes a lot of administrative burden and some panicked emails and tweets to various customer service teams. Mailchimp and Typeform customer service teams are excellent. Teachable is a bit of a challenge, but to their credit, I did the thing where you try and guess the CEO’s email to grab their attention. It worked! The guy, Ankur Nagpal, actually solved my problem personally!
So chip chip chip away and you’ll get there. Sometimes the mountain peak of success feels a long way away, then you turn around and see how far you’ve come. Enjoy those moments.
