Angela Profit:
I realized real quick that I was my worst enemy. So once I met a few people that really made me understand my numbers, it changed my business, it changed my life. So today we are chatting with CEO and scaling strategist … now if you don't understand what the word scaling means, that's okay, because a few your ago I didn't know what the hell it meant either. So Lane Booth is the CEO of the Project Booth, and she's going to talk to us today on how to scale to your next million.

Angela Profit:
Now, if you don't have a million dollars in revenue or gross sales or net sales and you don't even understand that, because I didn't understand it either for many years, she's going to share all that great insight with us today, and she makes it fun too. So Lane, thank you so much for being here today.

Lane Booth:
Yes, thank you so much for having me, Angela. I am super excited to be here.

Angela Profit:
So before we dive into your number scaling strategy journey, how did you get started in this whole world of, okay I'm going to do this thing, this thing called the Project Booth? Where did this all come from?

Speaker 3:
Welcome to Business Unveiled, the podcast designed to help you thrive in the creative community. Here's your host, events and productivity consultant, Angela Profit.

Angela Profit:
What's up GST leaders. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Business Unveiled where we share expert tips and secrets from top creative industry professionals. You know we're going to take you behind the scenes of our experiences, share with you what we've learned from them and how it's made us stronger. No one said it's easy owning a business, right? But it's a lot more fun when you've got a strong support team around you. That's exactly what we do at GSD Creative. We're right there by your side, and I'm so excited that you've chosen this podcast to take the first step in growing a productive, profitable and successful, wildly successful business within the hospitality and creative industry.

Angela Profit:
Today's episode is being brought to you by 99 Designs. 99 Designs is the global creative platform that makes it super easy for designers and clients to work together to create designs they absolutely love. You can get creative concepts from a multitude of talented designers. You get matched with the perfect designer to help you bring your idea to life from start to finish. From logos to packaging, apps to books, 99 Designs is a faster, simple and affordable way to find and work with creative talent.

Angela Profit:
You can save $10 today on your first design by visiting bit.ly/ap99designs. Give it a try.

Lane Booth:
Yes, that's a great question. I love telling this story too because I'm a believer of people. So I feel like, if you have a dream to do something, then that is your obligation and it's part of your journey to figure out what that is and then to go with it with everything you've got. That's exactly what my journey was like. I went through I call it the traditional path. Hey, go to school, high school, college, graduate, get a corporate career. But I found that was leaving me lacking. At the same time, starting a young family, I just felt like I didn't have time to see them.

Lane Booth:
So from there, I had this great corporate career where I did spend … We're a big, big company, so I was always figuring out the numbers so that the business leaders could make better decisions. So hey, why were sales down last month versus last year? Why are we not seeing the sales team generate the same amount of revenue? Why did this pair of pants not sell anything like this other pair of pants? Why is the red more then the blue?

Lane Booth:
So there's all these questions that were constantly coming up, and I was like, you know what, I bet small businesses need that kind of support too. So from there I started connecting with folks and reaching out and just trying to figure out, hey, what kind of problems are small businesses facing and would having more data around that, more clarity in the numbers, the better understanding of the upside and the downside of the decisions that they were making next, and was like, all right, how do we bring this to the table. So that's how the Project Booth was born.

Angela Profit:
I love it. I love it. For some of the people listening, who might be like I was several years ago, all these words … It's funny because I'll make up silly little acronyms. I was in a business class years ago and I'm like, how do you understand the difference between this and this. The stuff they told me to think of is just hilarious, but it makes me remember it. So as we're talking through KPIs and metrics and all of these words, don't assume that everybody knows what they are.

Angela Profit:
Ladies and gentlemen, it's okay if you don't. That's why you're listening to this podcast today so you can walk away and learn and be more informed as to how and why this is the most important thing. Again, in the beginning, it wasn't really fun for me. But then, once I understood, and now the first of every month that's how we bill, and that's how we do projections. I get very excited about numbers and scaling and all those kinds of things.

Lane Booth:
Yes.

Angela Profit:
So in terms of KPIs and what metrics would you say really matters … For those of us who don't know what KPIs or how to set them, it can completely kill your time if you don't know what you're doing here. So if you could share a little bit about that.

Lane Booth:
Absolutely. So let's just bring it down to basics. I am a big believer in making things simple so that you can take action, because no one understands complicated.

Angela Profit:
Yeah. Amen.

Lane Booth:
So KPIs are key performance indicators. It's a term that's been around for a while and it's kind of making its way into different segments of business now. Those key performance indicators, that's basically your milestones. Those are the flags that are coming up in your business to let you know, hey am I on the right track. I like to think of it as a basketball game. It's a lot easier to play and strategize when you can see the scoreboard and you know how many points your team has versus the other.

Lane Booth:
So it's the same sort of thing. We want to have some things that we can measure along the way in your business so that we don't get to the end of the year and be like, oh shoot, we completely missed our revenue goals, we completely missed our profit goals. No, you want to be able to figure that out much earlier on in the game. You want to know January, week one or week two, that how you're playing to win. So one thing too I wanted to clarify, a lot of times when you hear, hey you need to know your numbers, a lot of people think accounting and bookkeeping.

Angela Profit:
Oh, yes.

Lane Booth:
While that is very valuable, I want to highlight something for you guys. If you are just looking at the revenue in your business, that is the last thing that happens in your business to tell you if you've been doing a good job.

Angela Profit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lane Booth:
That's what we call a lagging indicator. That's what happens at the end. What you want to do to really be able to move and pivot in your business is to know what the leading indicators are. So leading, these are things like, hey how much traffic is coming to your website? What kind of conversion rates do you have? How many subscribers do you have on your list or on your social platforms? These are the inklings. These are the little breadcrumbs that are going to lead you through and let you know, hey, do I have enough stuff happening on the leading edge to know that, at the end of the day when we do get down to revenue and profits, that's going to be just a beautiful flow through of everything I was doing on the front end, if that makes sense.

Angela Profit:
Oh, absolutely. Yes, so thank you for clarifying that because it can be seen as accounting which, like you said, is very important. Knowing your numbers, like you said … I was looking on your website and, on the homepage, it says here are some of the tools that you can get all of this data from. I know people think data, ugh, or tracking it, ugh. Well, guess what? When you think you're making money and then you have extra money and you want to go take that money and do something with it, which a lot of people will say, oh I want to invest to market XYZ. But then you find out that you have no pixel code hooked up for Facebook and your Google analytics was never set up by your website developer because they were more concerned about making it look pretty on the front end but didn't set up the backend.

Angela Profit:
If you put courses on [inaudible 00:10:31] and you don't have the tracking codes set up for that. We use probably everything that you have on your website, Infusion Soft and Stripe, and Acuity, and Active Campaign, and Google Drive, and Shopify, and Instagram. You make decisions by your numbers. It's not what you think. When we decide to do an Insta Live with someone, we both look at our metrics and we both look at our analytics. It's like, what day of the week, what time are people on the most. Hey, sometimes it's Sunday night at 9:00PM central time. So guess what? We're going to do our Insta Live at that time because that's when the most people are on.

Angela Profit:
So those are just simple, like you were saying, keep it simple to where you let the data make the decisions, not you just do what you think, because that never is good.

Lane Booth:
Yes.

Angela Profit:
So talking about really scaling and scaling to your next million, and leveraging team members, and being productive with time and profits. Talk to us about what does that mean when you say scale to the next million, like oh that's no big deal. It's a lot of hard work to get there, so what would one do?

Lane Booth:
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like that's a great time to make a distinction there. I feel like there's a big difference between growing your business and scaling your business.

Angela Profit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lane Booth:
When you're in this growth mode, you are testing and trialing, and winning and failing, and you've just got a lot of things going on because essentially you are collecting data at this point. You're figuring out what works and what doesn't work. Once you have figured out what tends to work for you, then you really move into, okay now that I know what works, I want to go into scaling mode and I want to scale up what works as much as possible because that's where the fast wins are, that's where the rapid growth can happen.

Lane Booth:
Absolutely, I can come back later and do some more testing and trialing, but once I've figured out something that works, if my goal in my business is to make money, then I'm going to double down on what works and I'm going to stop doing the stuff that really does not support my business, that does not support profitability. Sometimes it's stopping the stuff that just is such a time suck that it needs to be a parking lot item anyway, because you, as CEO of your business, need to have that time, that cashflow and that predictability to know that, hey if I'm going to dump $10,000 into ads or marketing, that it's going to yield me $100,000 on the backend.

Angela Profit:
How would someone know that? Just for example, if I ran a Facebook ad and I spent $10,000 a week on a Facebook ad. If I'm making X, then I'm winning, right?

Lane Booth:
This is such a great example.

Angela Profit:
You know where I'm going with this, so I would love for you to explain and elaborate.

Lane Booth:
It's funny. I've got some Facebook ads that I was tweaking over the weekend too. It's funny because Facebook ads are actually pretty brilliant because you can track so much. You can see from the front end, all right, how many people are in this audience. How many people can see this ad? How many people clicked on it? How many people did the next call to action? So it's pretty brilliant on how much you can track along the way.

Lane Booth:
That doesn't happen in a lot of other platforms, and it doesn't typically happen when you as CEO are really taking that 30,000 foot view and looking at your business. There's usually not that type of clarity there. So I have to share a funny story. I was getting my ads up and running and I just noticed the click rate was just abysmal. It was like 0.2% or something. I was like, what is going on? So that triggered for me … I knew that that was a low number, and it triggered for me to go figure out how to solve it.

Lane Booth:
So come to find out one of the pixels wasn't firing in the right spot. So after a few minutes on support, we finally get it figured out.

Angela Profit:
Yeah.

Lane Booth:
But now, once I got that fixed, the ads started to start running and they started to creep up. So now I'm at the spot where basically that's a perfect scenario of, hey, are things running … I like to think of it as a stop light. So am I in the red? Am I yellow? Am I green? Green, everything is good. Yellow, I want to keep an eye on this. Red, hey we've got a caution alarm here. We've got to figure out what's going on.

Angela Profit:
Yeah.

Lane Booth:
You want to have that at different places in your business too. With your question, Angela, with the marketing. Hey, if I'm going to spend $10,000 on this Facebook ad, how much am I seeing in revenue? Be careful. Is that revenue coming from the Facebook ad? Because sometimes, if you don't have it tracked all the way through your funnel, you might have other ways of generating revenue that aren't necessarily for that ad. But if they are, then heck yeah, I will spend one dollar every day for Mark Zuckerberg to give me 10, and let's just keep that gravy train rolling.

Angela Profit:
Yes. That's what a lot of people don't understand. So I have been learning so much about it, and it is not that easy peeps. It is so … To me, I'm like this is so hard, but people who love numbers and love data, they eat this stuff up.

Lane Booth:
For lunch and dinner.

Angela Profit:
Yes. It is fun to understand, but when I have a Facebook expert with me on the phone or Zooming and I'm like, oh that's what that means. So they're like … Some people just throw it around like, yeah we spend 10 grand a week on Facebook, which seems like holy moly, that is a shit ton of money. But if you have a course up and you're making 20 grand, and you're at least making 50% of what you're putting out there for your marketing dollars, why would you not. It takes money to make money.

Angela Profit:
So that's where … but I will say too, it took us a long time to test and test and test and test. So many times, things were not set up appropriately. It was my fault. I was like, I've got to get somebody who can teach me or know … they keep changing stuff. What are some other great tools that business owners want to pay attention to outside of the Facebook metrics?

Lane Booth:
Yeah, that's a great question. I get asked this question a lot actually. One of the best things you can do, if you don't have this set up already … If you have a website, which everyone should be raising their hand right now. If you have a website, you need Google Analytics hooked up to your website.

Angela Profit:
Amen.

Lane Booth:
I think I even heard you talking about this on a recent episode, Angela, with someone.

Angela Profit:
Probably, yeah.

Lane Booth:
This is such a wealth of knowledge. This can tell you where-

Angela Profit:
Free.

Lane Booth:
Free, yes. So please hook it up. It doesn't cost you anything, except for maybe five minutes of your time. Pick a YouTube how to thing and you're' good to go.

Angela Profit:
Yep.

Lane Booth:
So this tells you where traffic is coming in so you can see the results of your labor. So all right, I'm doing 1000 posts on Instagram. Is that generating traffic to my website? Is that what I wanted Instagram to do? What's happening on LinkedIn? Is that driving people to my website? You can really see all from one hub where is traffic coming into your website. What are they clicking on? What's resonating? What are the most viewed pages?

Lane Booth:
From there, it's a lot easier … We actually had a client the other day where … She has a lot of different things to look at on her website, but her blog is really crushing it. So when we see, hey where's the traffic coming from to her blog, and we see, oh man, Pinterest is just really, really amazing at generating traffic and also click throughs to the products that she offers, we're going to play how to amplify that. How do we scale that? Do we spend more time on Pinterest? Do we do more pins? Do we do more promoted pins to increase that volume because we know it's working. We know that Pinterest traffic is already coming, so if we're going to double down somewhere first, that's going to be the first place we play, and we're not going to play over here on Facebook and SEO and some other things.

Lane Booth:
When we already know something that's really working, let's amplify that as much as possible before moving onto the next thing. There's power in momentum when you identify what's working.

Angela Profit:
And being consistent. With Pinterest, I would say every year we pick one platform where we're going to spend an hour a day and engage and share, and comment and like, and really build up authentic engagement. So last year was Pinterest. Just by default from doing a lot of weddings and being able to help a lot of clients do their dream events and stuff, there's a lot of pretty things to look at. So without even trying, just putting pictures on there. It's like, we get 20,000 views a month, no big deal. But then once we had an intern that was an hour a day, she would go on and she loved it. It's like, I like Pinterest, but I only use it when I have a client that shares it with me. Otherwise its' like a rabbit hole. It's like TikTok of all day I'm just completely like, I don't know if this is a good use of time.

Angela Profit:
There's so many things that I just want to pin and like and comment, be like oh my God, I love this. So I didn't really understand how effective that could be just by organically spending an hour a day. So by doing that in a year, it grew in the first two months to 700,000 views a month. So it's like, when you really put something into it … Then we were like, okay let's start running a few ads for various things on teaching people how to do design by psychology and things like that. We wouldn't have known to do that unless somebody told us to do it.

Angela Profit:
By looking at the analytics, it was so helpful to know to put our eggs in that basket. So it was just amazing. A lot of the tools that you have listed, some of them are paid, but if you're already paying for [inaudible 00:22:01] or you're paying to be part of Shopify, or they get a percentage, why would you not look at your analytics? Oh my gosh.

Lane Booth:
Yes.

Angela Profit:
It's so telling. So if people are using these things but they don't look at their numbers, but they know they need to, where can you fit in? When people come to you to help them, what does your ideal client look like?

Lane Booth:
Yeah. So one of the really great things is people that understand their numbers have a much greater, I wouldn't' say tolerance but, capacity to do more than they would have otherwise. So our folks, we work with small business owners and online businesses that are really … They've got that foundation put together so they know what's working, and now they really are in that space to say, okay, now I want to scale, now I want to double down, but I want to feel good about spending $10,000 on ads knowing that it's going to result in 100,000 in sales.

Lane Booth:
So our folks, they've been in business for a while. They're what we would call experienced, so they've been in business for a couple years and are really committed and excited for that growth. They want to be that business that is creating impact in their community and in their families, and then with their teams too. So those are the folks that we tend to work with when they've got something that's working but they're getting a little bit inundated with all the numbers. They know that there's power in the numbers. They just don't know how to harness it yet.

Lane Booth:
So that's what I feel like actually works really beautifully. We love partnering with creative visionary CEOs and then really coupling the data to that, kind of that Ying Yang on, hey let's bring both of this brilliance together so that we can really skyrocket the potential of the business going forward.

Angela Profit:
I love that. So for people who do not have dashboards set up, what would you say is the perfect dashboard that someone needs to be looking at, and are there tools that can aggregate all the data from 20 platforms and make one dashboard? Then how frequently should people be paying attention to a dashboard?

Lane Booth:
This is a great question. One thing too, just to clarify what a dashboard is-

Angela Profit:
Oh yeah.

Lane Booth:
It is very similar to the dashboard on your car. So we want to know how much fuel is in the tank. We want to know how many RPMs we're going at. We want to know what speed our business is heading. So much like that, a dashboard is a place where you can pull critical information and typically across platforms, so it's not just a QuickBooks report. But it is pulling, hey what's happening on social media, hey what's happening for my courses? Are people actually opening and going through them? All the way to, all right, how much revenue and profit was generated at the end of the day.

Lane Booth:
I find that most people are visual when it comes to learning, so the brilliant thing about a dashboard is that oftentimes it's actually putting the data into a picture that you can actually understand. It's a lot easier to see, oh wow, the spike went up in this graph versus a spreadsheet that's filled with a bunch of numbers that basically people think it's like binary code or something.

Lane Booth:
So a dashboard makes it visual. What's great is I actually tell people, if you are new to the dashboard space, you don't want any more than like 12 key metrics that you're looking at. While this can be different for everyone, there are a couple key things that I do see. Number one is having a good idea of what your social media is doing. So pulling in a critical stat for Facebook, for Instagram. All right, are followers an important metric, or is engagement a more important metric?

Lane Booth:
If you don't know, then let's watch both for a while to see what is actually more important in your business, because the idea isn't' to monitor everything. It's to monitor six to 12 things. So something on the front end with social media. Then the next piece I always invite people to look at is whatever it takes on the operations side of things. For me, when we're working with our clients, we have certain calls that are happening. So I want to be able to see, all right, how many calls per week is my team having. That, to me, shows that hey we're on track. So something operational like that.

Lane Booth:
Then on the backend, we always, always, always want to know what our revenue and what our profit is looking like. I will say the thing I see most people struggle with is that they have created an annual revenue target or an annual profit target, but they haven't broken it out by month. So this is coming back to the basketball analogy, we want to know if you're winning the game all throughout the year and not just find out at the end. So really having a piece where you are very clear on, hey what was my revenue goal for the month and what did I actually show up as.

Lane Booth:
So if my revenue goal was 50,000, did I hit 40 or did I hit 60? What did it actually end up being, because having that number in front of you every single day is a pretty powerful motivator to find out, all right, is it working, is it not? If it's not working, I'm going to jump in and take some action here.

Angela Profit:
Absolutely. Writing it down and looking at it every day will help you get there. It will also teach that you that, if you're in the middle of a global pandemic, or if you're like, this is how we're going to make revenue next year and these are our goals and these are our numbers, and then your business gets shut down, then guess what? You have to figure out how to get creative and how are you still going to hit that number and that target for that month, but in a different way. It forces you to think outside of the box and get very creative.

Angela Profit:
In fact, I've learned that real quick in not putting all your eggs in one basket and having just a brick and mortar versus no eCommerce, versus if you're all online and you have an online following, that's great if people can't go into a brick and mortar. So lots of little things to think about. Well, how would you … If someone came to you and said, okay I want to leave my job because I want to start my own business, how would you tell them to transition? What are the things that you would want them to think about?

Lane Booth:
Yes. I did this exact thing, so I'll speak from experience on this one.

Angela Profit:
Yeah.

Lane Booth:
So for me, I knew what I was making in corporate, so the first thing was what was the revenue I was going to require to live on to support my family in this transition time period. So if I had an idea of what that looked like, then I could back into a lot of the other pieces. So the number one thing would be what is the revenue that you need to generate, and then figure out what it is that you can offer to your audience and what problem can you solve through that offer because, from there, it makes it pretty simple.

Lane Booth:
If your goal is to make $100,000 your first year and you have $1000 offer, all right, we need to see 100 of those throughout the year, and let's break that down by month. I feel like the biggest piece is really just that initial planning step. To get really clear on the numbers, you're going to need to make that transition. Then the next step is honestly just connecting, connecting, connecting. Building relationships with people that are also serving that clientele so that you get to know the next person and the next person that eventually becomes your network, that eventually people can talk about you when you're not there. They become a bit of your sales team, and figure out how to tap into that because that human to human interaction is still the best way to get that visibility early on in your business for sure.

Angela Profit:
Yeah, and you personally … I know, working nights and weekends, you're pregnant. All this is happening to you, how was that?

Lane Booth:
Yes. So it's funny. I had people … I was starting as a side hustle. I wanted to validate my offer, so I found a first couple of clients. Then I was like, okay, I think I'm ready to make the leap here. I feel like we've got enough savings pulled aside. Then the next day I was like, I feel like I should take a test, and find out we're pregnant.

Angela Profit:
Oh my gosh.

Lane Booth:
I had plans of pretty much giving my notice within the following month or so and I was like, all right, we're going to have to tweak this a little bit. So I did stay on a little bit longer to bridge that gap and save up a little bit of extra money. The thing for me was I was so committed to the outcome not in the next month, but the outcome 10 years from now. I was just really excited to build something that was mine, to build something that had impact and freedom for my family going forward.

Lane Booth:
My first daughter was the reason I got started. My second daughter was the reason I had to really show up and make it happen in a quick time period.

Angela Profit:
Like thanks girls.

Lane Booth:
Yes. Mommy's motivators.

Angela Profit:
I love it.

Lane Booth:
So yeah, it was definitely a challenge and, honestly looking back on it, I'm like, man, I'm kind of a badass.

Angela Profit:
Yeah.

Lane Booth:
How did that even happen? But I remember in the moment, I just had my eye on the prize the whole time. There were going to be ups and downs, there were going to be wins and fails and struggles, but I definitely had the mindset that, if I was going to have challenges, if I was going to fail at something, then that also meant I was learning from it and I was going to be able to do it better next time.

Angela Profit:
I love it.

Lane Booth:
That was a big distinction that I feel like a lot of people can lose when it gets hard.

Angela Profit:
Yeah.

Lane Booth:
It will definitely get hard, but it's when you have that commitment to what you want long term and not the short term that makes all the difference.

Angela Profit:
I love that. So for people who are getting into or involved in, or they have no idea what a funnel is, I know that you're known as a funnel leak fixer for people who want to do online courses and online programs and products. For people who are listening that are selling things online or they are creating courses and they're trying to sell things online, what are some things that you have experienced with your own clientele where … You already shared one where you noticed that you knew something was wrong with a number on Facebook, and you went back and looked into it and the pixel wasn't firing.

Angela Profit:
So what are some common, I wouldn't say mistakes, but opportunities where people who are dealing with funnels or they want to deal with funnels … what are some of the common mistakes that you're seeing?

Lane Booth:
Yeah, this is a good question, Angela. So with the funnel, just to break it down, basically the funnel is, hey how do I attract, how do I bring in traffic to … let's just say to the website. So how do I generate traffic? How do I convert traffic into a buyer? Then how do I deliver on that promise on the backend.

Angela Profit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lane Booth:
So typically, you've got these very distinct segments of your business. So how am I attracting? How am I getting traffic? What's that viability look like? There tends to be a place to optimize in those segments. So that's where the data really shows its power. Hey, if I have a traffic problem and I know that I need one percent conversion rate or I know I need one million views this month to be able to generate the traffic to my website, if any part of that is broken, then it's real clear to be able to pop in and say, okay how do we fix this problem.

Lane Booth:
Then on the flip side, if it's running beautifully, how do I keep the CEO, that usually has tons of brilliant ideas, how do I keep them from not disrupting this so that it continues to work really well?

Angela Profit:
Yeah.

Lane Booth:
So there's typically, once you break down the key processes in the funnel and you set those KPIs, what are those key performance indicators, what do those numbers need to look like to know that we're winning, then it's basically … it can be almost like a monitoring system where it's like, okay this is firing, this is firing. Oh nope, we've got a problem here. So by breaking it down into those pieces, it allows you to fix certain areas that might be broken without disrupting the next stage in the funnel. Does that make sense?

Angela Profit:
Oh yeah, absolutely. We've been working on funnels for years and learning them, and Infusion Soft, which I don't recommend starting off that way. It should have been … I feel like I should have started at lead pages and click funnels and [inaudible 00:37:07] and then working your way up. I just went in head first and really started to understand and dive into what all of that means. Again, especially when business owners have to pivot and it can be very expensive to pay someone to build out funnels for you, but what I find is people don't even know what the journey needs to be because they don't look at their numbers and the analytics.

Angela Profit:
So I just wondered is that a common thing? Do you have to go through and teach people what that all means, or do they come to you and they're like, okay I have a built funnel but something is not working, can you help me?

Lane Booth:
Yeah, we usually tend to have more of the later. So creating a funnel takes some trial and error. So I kind of liken that back to your growth phase to figure out how it works. Then the second stage with scaling is really optimizing the funnels. So hey, it's working, but we definitely feel like there's opportunity to do things better or to improve here and we just don't know what steps to take to make that improvement.

Angela Profit:
Sometimes people get too close to it I feel like.

Lane Booth:
Yes. I'll say too, one of the other things we see is that they set it up and they looked at their numbers initially, but now it's been months down the road or honestly years down the road and they haven't looked at them since. They keep running the thing and they see revenue coming in and out. Money is kind of coming in and out of their bank account. They feel like everything is all right. So unfortunately the final metrics that they started with may not be the same funnel metrics that they're seeing now and they have no idea how much it might have shifted or changed.

Lane Booth:
Things are happening all the time. We're right in the middle of COVID-19 right now, so there are things that can impact the funnel. We can have seasonality, we can have holidays, we can have crazy events happening that those funnel metrics are those front end pieces that we can tap into so that the revenue keeps flowing on the backend. That's where most people are struggling.

Angela Profit:
How often do you think that people should evaluate their funnels and emails and the copy? What are best practices?

Lane Booth:
Yes, so I am an advocate for always monitoring your numbers. So I think you asked earlier. I don't know if we got to it, but I'm a big proponent of monitoring your data at least monthly. If you also discovered that there's a lot of fluctuations and certain metrics, then sometimes I actually recommend looking at things weekly. A lot of times that ends up being on the social media side of things. So at least monthly to be monitoring, like hey, are we still winning the game? Are we still on track here?

Angela Profit:
Yeah, the fact that people think that they can just set up an ad or a funnel and then walk away for even 30 days baffles me. I'm like, it's almost like a baby and it needs to be fed and changed. You can't just walk away from it. You can, but there's a lot of opportunity that can just call through the cracks. A lot of people, they're wasting money. One of the things I was looking at that said what we were going to talk about today, it's like stop wasting your money and your time and get very clear, and get clarity on what is actually needed.

Angela Profit:
The other thing that I've learned the hard way, I'm interested to know what your thoughts are. How many funnels do you recommend that people run at once?

Lane Booth:
One more than the ones that have been tested and proven.

Angela Profit:
Okay.

Lane Booth:
So I'm a big proponent in working with what's working. So until you have one funnel up and working, figure out how to make that one work, and then go on to the next thing. Sometimes, if you're in that growth phase still, you might need to be trialing a couple split tests in there. But I would say, for the most part, people have way too many, and they just need to get one solid funnel working and then you can go onto the next one.

Lane Booth:
Honestly, a lot of times the funnel doesn't necessarily need to go into a different call to action. You just need to be attracting people from a different traffic perspective. So whether you're offering a free masterclass or if you're offering a free PDF, at the end of the day, you want them to land on your landing page to buy your course.

Angela Profit:
Yeah.

Lane Booth:
It doesn't have to be different in all these different stages. A lot of times, if you know from the numbers that your landing page converts really well and that you're seeing solid revenue and profitability from that, then it's just a matter of, okay let's try a couple different attraction strategies. Let's play at the top of the funnel here and offer a couple of different ways for people to land on that landing page.

Angela Profit:
Yeah. I was going to say to you, what is the meaning of a funnel that's working. So would you say meaning it's actually profitable?

Lane Booth:
Absolutely, yes. That's a key piece that a lot of people bypass or they looked at it once when they first set things up. So profitable by means of, hey it's profitable all the way through your business, including your overhead, including your ad spend, including the team members that you have on your team. What is the true net profitability of a sale? So we'll go back to courses. If you have $1000 course, did you spend $100 in advertising to get that purchase? Did you have to employ your team a couple of hours to set things up?

Lane Booth:
So many times people will compare the ad spend to the revenue and say, oh, well my profitability was $900 for that course, but really there are a lot of other pieces that go into this and that's where I see a lot of the breakdown happening. So you really need to make sure that your funnel is profitable once all of the expenses are really tallied in together. That's kind of that costing and that profitability analysis that really does need to happen so that you don't end up spending thousands and thousands of dollars and actually see your bank account go into the red because, hey it's working, people are buying, but you're actually outspending it and you're spending too much on creating it versus the profitability that comes out on the back end.

Angela Profit:
Yeah. I can't tell you how many people. It's so funny because perception of what people see online and what's actually happening is two different things. Last week, I had a friend of mine. She was like, “Oh my God, I saw that ad and it looks like that's going amazing. You have a ton of shares and lots of engagement.” She's like, “You must be making like 15 grand a day or something.” I literally … I was drinking water and it spewed across. I'm on my treadmill desk walking. It spewed. I'm like, “Well Laura, that's great that you think that, but what's really happening, that whole funnel took seven and a half months to built. It cost me about $55,000 and, until I sell X amount, I'm not making jack shit on it,” because I put way too much time and effort into it because I'm such a flipping perfectionist.

Angela Profit:
But I am so determined to make my money back, and then to make … We're making tweaks and changes and we have been, and it's doing well, but it's going to be a little bit before it gets there because it took so long. So exactly what you just said. It's like, you've got to look at the big picture of what your overhead was and how much you paid. You can't do it all alone. That's something else I learned. We really try to focus on one funnel at a time. We used to do a bunch at a time, and then I joined this mastermind group and they're like, we do quarter one and two one product and one funnel, and then the next six months quarter three and four. In my head I'm like, are you guys lazy. Then they started sharing their scaling numbers and I'm like, what is this? I'm like, oh I'm actually the idiot because I'm not tweaking and changing and I didn't understand what scaling meant.

Angela Profit:
So one more just kind of opinionated question. As we've built and built and built, and the more groups that I'm in, I find that people are pre selling things before they fully finish and built it out, which is kind of like a Kickstarter campaign a little bit. But what are your best practices before people just start putting online courses out there in terms of pulling your audience? What are your thoughts? Do you think someone should have it all built out before you even start talking about it, or build a buzz a little bit first?

Lane Booth:
Yeah. This definitely is a question that comes up a lot. When you are starting something new, I am a big, big believer in making sure it sells before you create. So you can do a lot of the front end work to gage the interest to see how many people are wanting to buy and make the sale, and the brilliant thing about courses and programs is that you can deliver it live. You can drip it out week after week. It doesn't have to all come out at one time. You know what, a lot of people aren't going to do all eight weeks of your course at one time anyway.

Lane Booth:
So if this is a new product that no one's ever seen before, by all means, give yourself the grace and the space to create that one training for the week, to create it live. How much more engaged are we when we are honestly on a live call with someone that's walking us through, much like teaching a class? So that's what I've found has worked really well for not only my programs, but client programs that they have developed. So that's a big, big thing when you are selling for the first time. Please do consider just dripping it out week after week and creating it with the audience that you have attracted because you might have created something with the mindset of, hey, this is who's going to want to be in this course and in this program and who actually shows up might be different. They might be further along than you had expected. They might actually be further back and need more nurturing steps.

Lane Booth:
So when you actually have them there, then you can tailor it to them. That helps you from wasting your time in the long run.

Angela Profit:
100%. I'm so glad you said that. Some of the type A people that we work with, they're like no, I have to do it this way. I'm like, all right, well I wouldn't do that, but-

Lane Booth:
Girl, you type A people, you can get the week one done. Save weeks two through eight.

Angela Profit:
Yes. Yes, and save yourself a lot of heartache. So if people … You have a master class on your website. If people want to go through that, what is the best way that they can do that?

Lane Booth:
Yeah, I definitely invite you guys to check out how to scale to your next million where we dive into the five shifts that it really takes as CEO, as a small business leader, to make that happen and to level up your business to version 2.0. So you can check out that master class. It's at theprojectbooth.com/masterclass.

Angela Profit:
I love it. Then if somebody just wants to call you, they can book a call just by going to theprojectbooth.com/bookacall.

Lane Booth:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep.

Angela Profit:
Perfect.

Lane Booth:
And it's on the front page of the website as well if you just go to theprojectbooth.com.

Angela Profit:
Awesome. Then you have a Facebook group, and we'll put that in the show notes as well that's bitly link, bit.ly/backendbrilliance. I love that. Go follow Lane at theprojectbooth on Instagram and all the goods. Definitely check out her masterclass because there is so much good information on here and, if you're trying to just even grow your business and especially scale, you're going to want to know what she is teaching because this stuff is priceless and I've learned that the hard way. So thank you Lane for being on today.

Lane Booth:
My pleasure, Angela. Thanks so much for having me.

Angela Profit:
Yay. Everybody, thank you so much for listening. Be sure to tune in next week to another episode of Business Unveiled. Y'all have a great day. Bye.

Angela Profit:
Now that you have all the tools you need to conquer the world in GSD, just share this with your friends and your fellow GSD leaders and be sure you're a subscriber so you never miss the juicy details of business unveiled, and you can ask Siri to listen to the latest episode, but you've got to be a subscriber. Before I go, I have a huge favor to ask and it would mean the world to me. While you're listening, snap a quick screenshot, post it to your Instagram story, tag me at GSDleader_, and share with me your top takeaway from this episode and how it relates to you. Until next time, remember stay productive and profitable.

Speaker 3:
You've been listening to Business Unveiled with Angela Profit. Join us next time as we share our experiences to help you be more productive and profitable in your creative business. For more great resources, visit AngelaProfit.com.