This series starts with an introduction to the 1000 True Fans concept and solopreneur Alexandria Brown. The first part demonstrates the hundreds of thousands of dollars that can come from a handful of manageable online income streams. The second part highlights three keys to attractive big-ticket VIP memberships and events and finds us exceeding our $1,000,000 goal with only 441 True Fans.
You may want to read these earlier posts for context on today’s topic. And nope, this is not a sponsored case study.
If you’ve been doubting that Ali could possibly do all this by herself, you’re right. There aren’t enough hours in a single day for one person to keep this multi-million dollar machine running and still have a life. And while her business does require outside help, it doesn’t require leased office space and a squad of employees. Believe it or not, Ali manages her $2 million/year business from her home in California with select online services and a small crew of virtual assistants.
Set the autopilot
The elegance of online transactions is the hands-off quality. Allowing technology to handle the repetitive, predictable tasks that it was designed to do frees us for what we are designed to do—imagine, strategize, and create.
Ali can focus on writing the content for her weekly newsletter because maintenance of her 22,000 28,000+ subscriber list is managed by an email server application. Her digital products (eBooks and teleseminars) are immediately available for download due to a robust and feature-rich shopping cart that manages the digital delivery while she develops more money-making products.
Instead of monitoring her email account for new subscribers and sales, she’s off at the gym, on a beach in Hawaii, busy creating at her desk, not drowning in an endless stream of time-consuming hands-on transactions.
What business functions can you hand off to technology?
And that creative time is critical: Ali’s products are extensive and I expect it takes hundreds of (wo)manhours to produce the content, create the virtual packaging, and develop the sales letters. But there’s little or no maintenance after that initial time investment. No continuous fulfillment horrors of handling payments, printing receipts, packing boxes, adding postage, and postal pick-up—and none of the related expenses, either.
Another type of automation I observed is how Ali “automatically” creates new products by repurposing content. Her Online Success Blueprint Workshop in a Box is an admitted repackage of the content from her live-event workshop. From her sales pages, I estimated her 2007 workshop event yielded $569,430 in ticket fees, and the same content repackaged as a kit pulled in an additional $220,059.
Don’t get it twisted…pulling together the kit wasn’t automatic. At all. Creating 147 kits of CDs and worksheets and notebooks and whatnot was surely a mighty task. But the kits’ content was automatically created in the development and presentation of the workshop. Delivering the Online Success Blueprint Workshop in a Box requires fulfillment steps avoided with the digital products, but burning CDs and licking stamps is well worth an additional $220K+ from content you already have on hand, yes?
And hey, it’s not like Ali’s doing the production or fulfillment work herself anyway. She’s touted the value of using a virtual assistant for years, and I recall hearing in a teleseminar that she contracts three VAs to keep things running smoothly.
Hand it over
It’s important to note that Ali contracts her help, she doesn’t employ, and therefore deftly avoids the Human Resources Hell of benefits and taxes. Instead, she hires virtual assistants (VAs)—independently contracted administrative assistants who work from their own home offices.
Ali has written numerous articles on the topic of delegation, and if she walks like she talks, I expect she hasn’t touched a single bit of administrative work in years. I feel sure her VAs manage the mail order fulfillment we just talked about, as well as customer service, scheduling, assembling and sending off the weekly email newsletter, answering phones, and the other 3,247 mission-critical tasks that support every business—online or offline. Anything that someone else can do is done by someone else.
Like any executive, Ali’s not handing off these tasks to others because they’re not important. In fact, these tasks are too important—and too numerous—for anything but a specialist with a singular focus. Like any executive, she needs dependable, detail-oriented assistance with the day-to-day operations so she can work with the big picture.
And that likely includes all of her housework, grocery shopping, cooking, and errands. I remember Ali mentioning hiring someone to go to the cleaners for her, in a teleseminar years ago. I thought then, like now, on how much time I spent managing all the critical necessities of my life that someone else could do. It was a lot.
What tasks could you give away?
What would you do with that recovered time?
How I’m going to automate
Starting without a bean, I don’t have cash to pay myself, so I’ll need to manage my own administrivia for a time, but there are plenty of free and affordable online tools to automate my budding plan. As I see it right now, I’ll get along fine with old friends like PayPal for payment processing and iContact for email newsletters, and new (to me) services like E-Junkie‘s way-more-than-a-shopping-cart shopping cart.
And when it’s time to give tasks away, things like accounting surely belong in the hands of professionals. For household tasks, the first—and maybe only—task I would give away is cleaning our apartment. It’s a small space, and I’m a lamer for even thinking of paying someone else to clean it, but seriously? :)
What else—and what more—could you do this year
if you didn’t do the tasks that others could do?
Next in series » Wrap-up: Between the Lines
