In this very candid episode, Jamie Atkinson shares how he had a meteoric rise in his coaching business, sharing the stage with Russell Brunson and making almost $300,000 in a year to stalling out, facing shrinking profits and personal blocks, and how he is turning it around.
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Resources mentioned
Five Days to Monetize your Podcast
Changemakersmovement.com/fivedays
Jamie’s Podcasting 101 Facebook Group
3 Key Points
Adding more products when you want to increase your profits only leads to burnout for you and/or your team.
You have to grow yourself to grow your business.
Authenticity grows your bank account.
Transcript
Ellen: Hi, and welcome to Episode 78. Today my guest is Jamie Atkinson. I’m going to talk about how I met Jamie. And then, I’m going to let him tell you more about him. So, I don’t know. I guess I was just scrolling around on Facebook. Somehow, I ended up in either on your profile page or in a group, one or the other; and you did a video, and it was on podcasting, and it was on how you make money on podcasting. And up to that time, I had not heard anyone talk about making money from your guests. It was all about how you have to have a lot of people following you. And so, it was so different from what I’d heard that it was like, it was shocking, but it was like, “Wow, this is really interesting”.
And then, the fact that you’re so young. Well, it seems, I should say, it seemed like you had so much of this figured out because we’ve been talking and of course, we talk about how everybody goes through their ups and downs. But I was impressed enough that I started following you, and I do get your emails, and I read your emails. And I was also telling you, I’m on tons of lists because I’m always looking for swipes and just what people are doing, but they’re very few that I actually read and yours is one that I read. So. Welcome to the call.
[02:07] Jamie: I am so grateful for that. Like, it really means a ton when you hear from people who are actually reading your emails and consuming, and to say that you read my emails and you don’t read a lot of them is, is really an honor. So, thank you so much. And yeah, it’s fun. I was just going to say, we’re going to just kind of like improv this thing all the way through and just see where this conversation takes us.
Ellen: Yeah. Well, you give a lot of value, and I love that, and it’s real. And so, that’s why that was the thing I told you I wanted to talk about. I want to talk about, this being real and sharing some stuff that’s really going on behind the scenes. I was very impressed to begin with because you were connected to Russell Brunson. I know that, and I’m in Click Funnels. So, that was one of the things that originally got my attention; you got to speak. So, why don’t you talk a little bit about how that came about?
[02:54] Jamie: Yeah. I think one of the most powerful things that I, that I learned in the year that I was inside of one of Russell’s coaching programs is that it’s really easy in a lot of ways to be a very good student. And one of the biggest things that I recognized, at Funnel Hacking Live, the very first time I went, which if you guys don’t know, that’s Russell Brunson’s big event for Click Funnels is I realized at that event that transparency was going to be the key for me.
I listened to this really powerful talk. This speaker called Nicholas Bailey talked about how your mess becomes your message. He was talking about a story of him when he was younger, where he actually was really, really a fit. But when he was younger, he was super overweight and he never wanted to tell people about his past, and all the time, he found that it was really hard for him to connect with people.
[03:46]: And, one day, he was trying to grow his business, and he had this really big talk, and he ended up standing in front of this group of people and just ended up breaking down, crying and telling his story about how now he’s super fit, but he was struggling with his weight when he was younger. And for forty minutes, he talked about all of this vulnerability and fear and things he struggled with his whole life. And at the end of this talk, after he never spoke about his product, he signed up more people than he’d ever done before.
Ellen: Wow.
Jamie: For him, it was this like huge awakening. It was like, “Oh my gosh, like, people don’t care about what my product is, people care about me and what I put out there. It’s all about this trust.” And what I think so many of us forget sometimes, is that when we’re in this game, we feel like we have to be this perfect image. Right? We have this business persona; we have to be the business owner or the business woman who, nothing ever goes wrong and everything’s fine. And all of those things and,
[04:40] Ellen: Or, the other side. I got to tell you, the other side is us. Like, we’ve been in lockdown since March. I feel like my life is just boring.
Jamie: Yeah, right. We fled the country, it was that boring.
Ellen: Yeah, yeah.
Jamie: Yeah, to spice it up. But it’s so interesting to me that the thing that helped me to really break free, to really stand out from the crowd was this idea of vulnerability and actually just putting myself out there. And it was funny that you actually said before the interview, that was one of the favorite things that you saw from me recently…
[05:13] Ellen: Yes.
Jamie: … was this email that I sent out where I said, “Hey, here’s the reason in the last six months, my revenue has been dropping,” and I just tore back the curtain and told people exactly what was going on. And to go back to your original question, which was like, “Hey, how did you get connected with the Russell?”
Ellen: Yeah.
Jamie: Once I realized that what Russell was talking about was go out and publish and just do it and put yourself out there. I just want it to be a great student. So, I went out and I did a podcast, and I wanted to stand out inside of that community. And the really great thing about that was that by publishing, by doing what Russell said, and by being a really active voice inside of one of his really higher-paid programs, it gave me the exposure where people started to talk about me. And honestly, I’ll be real with you, Ellen, that relationship that I developed with Russell, it sort of died off a little bit because after January, I wasn’t in that program anymore; the lockdown happened; I wasn’t going to any of his events. And, I have hope in my heart that one day I can rekindle that.
[06:13] Ellen: Right, right.
Jamie: But only through effort. Right? And so, for me, with anybody who’s listening right now, who’s thinking, “How do I get into people’s world?” Really, it’s about proximity. If you can get within proximity and you can be the person that’s making them look awesome, then you’re going to get their attention and they’re going to start listening to what you’ve got to offer. And for me, that was my secret with Russell. It was just be a great student, have massive success, give him all the credit, because honestly it was all down to him as to why I was successful.
Ellen: Right.
Jamie: And that allowed me that opportunity…
[06:48] Ellen: And you have to be willing to spend money. That’s one of the things that I really reconnected with like when I first started in this business, we spent a lot of money in the first few years, and went to a lot of events, and bought a lot of programs and all that. Well, I got deeply into debt from that. So, what I learned was, yeah, you need to show up, but you also need to be careful.
Jamie: Yeah. And for me, as well, it comes in swings and roundabouts, like, a year ago I was heavily investing a lot of programs, six months ago even, and the last six months has been very light for me because I’m in implementation mode,
Ellen: Right.
[07:25] Jamie: I’m actually noticing right now that I’m going over this crest where I’m going to start getting back into learning mode and growing mode and needing to network with individuals. And, I think this is the thing that most people forget about when you invest into these high-level programs. It’s rarely the program that helps you, it’s usually the people who are in the program with you. And for me, that was the whole thing with that program was the people around me. Those were the people that helped me see that podcasting could be my superpower. And here we are today.
Ellen: Yeah, yeah, no, I’m in some programs and yeah, I’ve seen the same thing. Actually, the programs are really good too, and I am learning a lot, but also yeah, the people that you get around, and I’ve definitely gotten clients from breakout rooms.
[08:11] Jamie: Yeah. Even bigger than clients sometimes, are those relationships,
Ellen: Yeah, strategic partnerships.
Jamie: Yeah and I found that a ton. There was a couple of guys that I met back at Funnel Hacking Live, and I actually met them at Steve Lawson’s first offer, Offer Lab, I’m sorry, Offer Mind Event. And that was nearly a year and a half ago. I think, yeah, nearly, well, maybe about a year ago and our relationship has continued to develop, and we’ve done a couple of small things together, but I know that, in my heart, that within a couple of year’s time, I know there’s going to be some big collaboration that happens, but it doesn’t have to be now. Right? It can be something that as long as I keep nurturing that friendship, that’s going to be something that grows in the future.
Actually, one of my good buddies, Austin Dixon is a great example of this. He is a master connector and he just connects and gives so much value, but genuine value without wanting anything in return. And, he was sowing those seeds for twelve to eighteen months. And now, it’s all starting to come back to him from these amazing connections that he’s made.
[9:13] Ellen: Well, let’s get back to what you were talking about before. So, you were talking about how your income went down. So, I want to talk about that a little bit.
Jamie: I would love to talk about that.
Ellen: So, why do you think, I love this topic because it happened to me too. So, why do you think this, why did this happen for you?
Jamie: I think it’s interesting because I was just speaking with my coach yesterday, and me and my one-to-one coach, the reason I left the Two Comma Club X Program is that I decided to take that money I was investing in and hire a one-to-one coach, because I knew that the work that I needed to get to the Two Comma Club Award and to make a million dollars in my business, which was my goal at the time, to do that I knew I needed massive personal growth. I knew that if I went ahead and tried to just build the business, I was going to hit a wall, and I was probably going to crash and burn. So, I,
[10:03] Ellen: Well, that’s very smart that you knew that cause a lot of people don’t know that. It’s like a lot of times, I’ve gone through that too, where it’s like, you’ll get in a program and it’s relatively inexpensive and you can afford it. But like you said, you reach a point where you just need one-on-one and some of these coaches are so expensive.
Jamie: Yeah. Great coaches are expensive for a very good reason., I spend a lot of money for like thirty minutes of his time every single week. And over the last nine months, we’re actually coming to the point now where, what he told me was going to happen on the second coaching session that we had together, has now sort of run its course. And it’s really interesting to see that, because the business can’t grow without the personal growth.
Ellen: Right.
Jamie: And when we look at the reason that our revenue dropped in this year it’s a similar challenge, I think a lot of entrepreneurs hit, but they usually, I think hit it a little bit later than what we did.
[10:58] Ellen: You made a lot of money very quickly.
Jamie: Yeah, we were really lucky. So, we launched the program, and we had a really great Facebook group. and we had this system where we would do a three or a five-day training, and we would sell our core program on the backend. And in the space of twelve months , and even less than that, we did great. The previous year we’d done about 25K, we 10X, we did 250K that following year and being the ambitious young soul I was, I was like, “Let’s double again.” Right? “Let’s go up to 500,000 this year.” And that was the goal that we set. And one of the challenges that we hit was that right up in January we lost one of our Facebook profiles.
Ellen: Oh, no.
[11:36] Jamie: It got completely shut down by Facebook. And that was one of our big lead-generation sources. So, we weren’t getting any fresh blood in; we weren’t getting any new people into our communities, but even though our launches were getting better and our webinars were getting better, we were at this max limit of our warm audience. And if anybody’s listening and doesn’t know what that means, essentially, it’s the people in your world that know about you, right?
Ellen: Right.
Jamie: If you just selling…
Ellen: That’s exactly why mine cratered, it was the same thing. It was a different time and so, Facebook didn’t exist. It wasn’t with social media, but the same thing happened where what I was doing that had been working, I kind of backed off on, and then wondered why it wasn’t growing, and it wasn’t growing because I wasn’t continuing to do really good lead generation.
[12:25] Jamie: Yeah. And I find this really interesting cause I started to study other people who’ve been doing this, and something I noticed myself doing was that because my program wasn’t selling because I’d already sold to a lot of my warm audience,
Ellen: Right.
Jamie: I need to make something new, right? And it’d be like launched a new program, launch the next thing…
Ellen: And then, you get into burnout.
Jamie: Right. And you know what? It wasn’t even burnout for me, it was burnout for my team. And this was around about in June, about June time, where my team was like, Jamie, like you’re creating so many things that we just can’t keep up. It was putting strain on my relationship. It was putting a strain on my team. They were exhausted. They were scrambling. There was delivery that was starting to fail. So, we had to really pull back and say, “Okay, well, how are we going to fix this?
[13:06] Ellen: Right. You fix it by getting the relationships and their lists, not building more stuff. I did the same thing, creating more stuff. And that is the wrong way to go.
Jamie: Right, right. I actually listened to a training recently. Again, one of Steve Lawson’s events where Russell was breaking down about what had happened inside of his inner circle. And he said the same thing. He said, “What happened was most of his inner circle students who started, they’d have these million-dollar-a-year businesses, but they’d be hopping from product to product, to product with their lists. And they didn’t have any way to bring in these leads.”
[13:38] So, we tried to fix that. We tried to fix that in June and July. And I did a live webinar every week for about twelve weeks straight. And our revenue exploded. We went from doing, 25K to $30,000 a month to doing $50,000 a month each month.
Ellen: And this was with other people’s lists?
Jamie: This was just a Facebook ad to a live webinar. And I was doing a live webinar every week. But the reason that and I’m kind of building up here to the reason why our revenue dropped,
Ellen: Yeah, yeah.
Jamie: You can sense the drama; it’s coming right, but that went really well. But one of the biggest challenges I kind of hit something that my coach calls “my financial thermostat.”
[14:17] Ellen: Ah, yeah. The old financial thermostat.
Jamie: That dang thing, right? And I didn’t realize this at the time, but I had this self-imposed limiting belief about how much money I was okay with earning. And actually, it comes from a relationship with my dad when I was younger. He was terrible with money. And my mom was really frugal. And, there was always this stress around money. And I actually have a really hard time talking to my dad about money now because I worry a lot that he expects like, because I have a good business now, that I should just pay his way. So, it’s really difficult to have those conversations with him. And that’s held me back a lot. And I’m sure lots of people here have challenges in their past. And for me, what happened was I knew what I needed to do: lead generation to a sales event.
[15:10]: What’s the sales event? It’s a webinar, right? We’ve got the webinar, it converts the delivery of the program is great. The results are great. The webinar converts like crazy, all I need to do is turn the tap up. But because of these limiting beliefs, it just became this minefield of inaction. And my coach was breaking this down for me a couple of weeks ago,” he said, “There’s three types of actions. You’ve got proactive, reactive and inactive.
And he says, what’s happened is the more and more you’ve tried to fix these problems, the more you’ve put this mounted pressure on yourself. And every single day, I’ll be writing out this to-do list. And I’m trying to live up to the expectations of my team, and my girlfriend and my team are looking at me as the CEO. And I’m like, “Man, they expect so much of me. I’ve got to go and get so much done.” And there’s so much on my to-do list that I just keep failing and failing.
[16:00] Ellen: That’s exactly what happened to me.
Jamie: And so many people…
Ellen: That’s exactly what happened to me. It was like I was getting more and more successful, and I was feeling more and more pressure to have to keep it up. Yeah, same exact thing.
Jamie: You know the crazy thing was that it wasn’t actually what my team was thinking.
Ellen: It was like what you were thinking. Right?
Jamie: It’s what I thought my team was thinking. And the problem with this is as this was happening is every single day, I didn’t realize this, but I was chipping away at my confidence because every day where I said, “ I’m going to do something,” and I didn’t do it, my inner subconscious said, “Jamie, you’re a liar.” And every day it got worse, and it got worse, and it got worse. And the problem was, the worst that it got, the more that I stopped being proactive. The more that all of the things that I was trying to do started to get dragged into that inaction.
Ellen: I’m so glad we’re talking about this. I don’t hear anybody talking about this.
[16:54] Jamie: Well, I only just discovered this recently. We were doing a coaching and a breakdown session and my coach said to me, he said, “Jamie, you know, how many days have you felt like you wanted to get more done in the last thirty days?” I’m like,” Oh my gosh, every single day, like every single day, I feel like I don’t have enough time, and I should have done more.” And for me, and I know for so many people, I’m like my own worst coach. Like I’m the most heavily critical person of myself that can be.
Ellen: Yeah. Me too.
Jamie: Like all the time. I’m like, “I’m not good enough. I’m not doing enough. I should be doing more.” And my coach said something really powerful to me. He said, “Jamie, you are not a superhero. You’re just an average dude with some superhuman skills, right?” He says, “You are just a normal person. You are only capable of what an average person is capable of”
Ellen: It’s so funny. I got to tell you this, because one day I did this post and my husband had said to me, something, I can’t even remember how I came up, but it was something like this. But the post was, “What do you mean? I’m not Wonder Woman?”(not Super Woman} That was the post. It came exactly from what you’re talking about.
[18:06]: Jamie: And we think we are. I remember one week on my to-do list and I was like, “Redo my upsell videos for all three of my upsells, and a new sales page, and redo part of my webinar. Like that was like twelve to sixteen weeks of work. And I was like, “Do it in a week.” And it was just so unrealistic. And because it was me trying to live up to these expectations and the challenge with this is I started to try to do all these things got stuck in inaction, and there was only one that I needed to do.
And it was to outsource my lead generation. It was to use paid media was to run Facebook ads, hire a team, whatever it was, I knew that that was the piece that I needed to do. And I was avoiding it like the plague because I was terrified of spending that money. And the reason I was terrified…
[18:56] Ellen: But you don’t have to do it that way, you could reach out to people, do it as joint ventures.
Jamie: Of course, right.
Ellen: Until you felt more comfortable.
[19:03] Jamie: Of course, there are a lot of ways you can do it. And actually, that’s exactly what we tried for a couple of months. We changed our focus and we said, “Okay, let’s do Dream 100 and it worked to a degree, and we’d probably get it done.
Ellen: Wait, wait, wait. For people that don’t know what Dream 100’s are. Tell them what Dream 100’s are.
[19:17] Jamie: Dream 100’s are very simple. It’s really just partnerships. You go to somebody who has an audience, you have a product that makes sense for their audience and you say, “Hey, let’s sell this together. I’ll do the sale, I’ll do the delivery, and you bring the people to the party and we can both make money together.” And the principle behind the Dream 100 is you basically go out and say, “Okay, I want to make a partnership with somebody, here’s a hundred people that I want to be a partner with, or to have some kind of influence with over the next six weeks to six months to six years, you go out and you reach out to them. And…
Ellen: Right, and sometimes, you have to be realistic about your Dream 100. If you’re not making much money, you can’t go to Russell Brunson, but it could still be on your ultimate dream list. You got to build up to this…
[20:01] Jamie: And this is the cool thing. I would challenge that belief as well, because if you look at what I did like, I wasn’t like…
Ellen: Yeah, well, okay, but you spend a lot of money to get in there, but yeah, there are other ways, there are other ways,
Jamie: Yes.
Ellen: One way or another, but I’m thinking more organic organically. Yeah. Yeah.
Jamie: And what I love about that strategy is that it’s super doable, but what was interesting about this Ellen, it didn’t matter what strategy I tried to do. It didn’t matter whether I did Dream 100 or Facebook ads, or went to organic or hit up LinkedIn, or went to YouTube, the tactic wasn’t the problem, the problem…
Ellen: It’s the mental block.
Jamie: It’s the mental that breeds that. And it was every single time we got close to what I knew was the key to scaling, I’d have some kind of internal thing that knocked me out the loop. And it was because I wasn’t comfortable with this idea of the money thing.
[20:53] Ellen: So, how did you get past your financial thermostat?
Jamie: Well, this is a really great question because I’m literally, I just came off of a week off on vacation. And I’m not sort of frightened to say this, but like, I think I only just did it, like literally a few days ago. And the reason I’m saying that is that over the last couple of weeks, and what you just kind of heard me talk about with the understanding about why I was hurting myself and why I was not trusting myself, all of that explanation basically came down to, because I tried to do too much every day my subconscious found out I was a liar, and then I couldn’t trust myself. Right? I had no trust. No, self-love.My coach said to me, one day, he says, “Dude, you’re doing some incredible stuff, like do you think you’re awesome? And I was like, “ No, who thinks they’re awesome?”
Ellen: Laughs.
Jamie: And he’s like, “Okay, that’s a problem right there, because everybody I know, thinks you’re awesome and you don’t.
Ellen: Yeah.
Jamie: “Like, no.
“But you are.”
And, it was this idea of self-love that I was missing. And…
[21:56] Ellen: Oh God, I love this. I love this. I was just editing a podcast. We’ll have already played by the time this one plays. And again, I don’t remember what we’re talking about, but it was something about somebody saying that I was fabulous. And she said, “Well, you are fabulous. “And I realized that when I played it back, I didn’t even say, “Thank you.” I just went right on to the next thing.
Jamie: And there’s an amazing book called “The Big Leap,” which I recently read. And, he talks a lot about the deflectors, right? He said, he went on the golf course with these master deflectors and every time he was like, “Great putt, Jim,” he was like, “Oh, I just got lucky on that one.” Or, “Oh my gosh, fantastic swing, Ron.” He’s like, “Yeah, but I wouldn’t usually get that on any other day.“ And they would just be deflecting and deflecting and deflecting and deflecting.
And so often, what we don’t realize is that our subconscious is pushing away all of the things that are trying to happen to us. And if we just take a minute to sort of recognize that and realize that all of the answers are there most of the time. It’s a little bit like losing weight. Right? Everybody knows how to lose weight.
[23:01] Ellen: They just don’t want to do what they have to do.
Jamie: They don’t want to work out, right? It’s not complicated; just because it’s simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy, right? Because we have all of these things that go on in our mind.
Ellen: Issues about why we can’t have that.
Jamie: Yeah.
Ellen: Or, why we don’t deserve that.
Jamie: Same thing with business, right? Like it’s very, very simple to make a lot of money with business, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy, right?
Ellen: Yeah.
Jamie: We know, “Hey, get some traffic, get an offer that converts. go deliver the product.” But just because we know that that path is simple, it’s difficult to walk. So, for me, the biggest thing that’s kind of helped me get through this financial block is, first of all, having a great team around me that supports me, but really taking that second to be very introspective and to recognize what’s happening. And I’ve only been able to do that because of the people around me who I can talk to.
Ellen: And even when you know it, sometimes, it’s still really hard depending on what your childhood was like, because like, in my case, if I got something good, somehow it made my mother feel bad. So, it was like pushing good things away because I wanted her to love me and I wanted her to be happy. So, sometimes, it’s deep-seated stuff. You really have to get in there with a crowbar and you might need some therapy, not just a mindset coach. I mean, it really just depends.
[24:19] Jamie: And it’s, it’s so powerful that you set that because for years I never did therapy. I literally just started therapy three weeks ago, first time ever. And it was interesting for me to realize that therapy is just a tool. This is just a tool for us to go and use somebody that knows a lot about how the brain works, about how psychology works, about how your mind works that can help you untangle this mess in a way that you have no idea. Like it’s a little bit like going on to a racetrack and like, you’re trying to drive this car with a thousand horsepower. And then some guy comes along and says, “Hey, just so you take in the wrong line. Like, this is the line, by the way, here’s the break. Here’s how you use the brake. You’re actually stepping on the accelerator when you’re trying to slow down. And that’s why you keep running into the barrier.” And you’re like, “Oh my gosh, like, this makes so much sense now.” Like “I see. And I understand,” and once you can understand where you’re going wrong, that’s not always everything, but no, and for me, that’s been, just in a week it’s been about, okay,
Ellen: So, do you have to tell yourself how fabulous you are every day now?
Jamie : See what I’ve been doing? And that definitely helps. There’s a couple of things, I’m not a religious person. And one thing that is amazing about Christianity and a lot of religion is that they have forgiveness built in. Right? And it’s like, “Oh my gosh, like Jesus saved me on man.” Whatever you say, it’s always forgiven and religion helps you out there.” Right? I didn’t know. Not because I wasn’t raised religious. And so,
Ellen: I wasn’t really either.
Jamie: I didn’t have this built-in forgiveness system, so I never forgave myself and I constantly held onto everything. So, the couple of things that I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks, which has helped me with this is the first thing I’ve done is set these non-negotiables and guys, these non-negotiables aren’t crazy. Let me run them through them. The first one is to brush my teeth twice a day. Now, as an English person, sometimes people would say “No, English people don’t brush their teeth.” That’s right. So that’s one of my non-negotiables brush my teeth twice a day. Another one of my non-negotiables is to like scrape my tongue. Another one is to show up to my team meeting with 150% of a positive attitude. The other one is to drink water. And, it’s really, really simple. It’s just these like piles of stuff around the house. Just…
[26:42] Ellen: Water, water everywhere. Yeah.
Jamie: I can’t emphasize enough how dramatically different I feel from just ten days of not letting myself down. Yeah. Because every single day I would say, “I’m going to do this,” and then I wouldn’t do it.
Ellen: Yeah. But also, forgiveness of yourself when you don’t do it is important too. I started doing a gratitude journal and I noticed I missed a day and I had to go, “Okay, I missed a day. Sorry.”
Jamie: And this was the second part of what I did. And actually, it was really funny because this last week there’s a couple of things that have changed. First thing is I started surfing. So, you can’t live in Costa Rica and not surf. So that, that was a new thing that I tried this week. My surf instructor said, as I was talking to him about this stuff and it was being vulnerable and he shared a lot of vulnerable stuff back to me, and he said, “Oh, I’ve got this mantra that I use.” And he said, “It’s called ho’oponopono, and it’s this Hawaiian mantra. And literally with this mantra, it’s just four words in sequence. And it’s “I’m sorry, please forgive me. I love you. I thank you.” And you say it like 108 times. I was like, “Oh my God, I needed a way to forgive myself.”
I’ve known I’ve needed it. And then I’ve just served with this random guy. And he just gave me this way to forgive isn’t the world wonderful? How it just gives us and we need them. So, all I’ve done in the last two weeks is just these two things. I’ve just had these non-negotiables that I do every day. And if there’s anything that goes wrong or if there’s anything that I don’t feel great about in the morning, I do this little forgiveness mantra, and in the evening I do before I go to bed. And it’s so crazy to think about all of the crazy shit I’ve been trying to do for eight months, from challenges to competitions, to this, to that, to 17 different funnels to all of that stuff and all I really needed to do was to get good with myself. And now this week, we’ve just hired the right ads team, who we’re just going to do this all for me.
[28:44] And, , the process of just letting go and, and doing the thing that I knew I needed to do all along, right. The coach had to, “Oh my God, fantastic.” And he pulled out a journal and he said, “Look at this.” And it was dated sometime in like March when we first started coaching together. And it was a goal that I’d written that said, “Outsource ads.” In brackets it said, “This is the thing I need to scale. This is it. This is the only thing.” And I’d been dodging that for months and months and months and months, and it doesn’t need to be ads. Like you said, it could be anything, it could be 100, but it’s just one thing, really
[29:19] Ellen: It’s changing something that changes the equation.
Jamie: Yeah. And it’s giving yourself that permission to say, okay, now I can recognize that I’m going to go and grow. And this is a great time to say, right now our revenue isn’t been massively fixed, the last three months we’ve been building a lot of systems inside of our business and our revenue the last three months. And I’m super open to share. This was, , three months ago, it was about 30,000, the second before it was 24,000 and then this month was twenty-two. And then, and then it was just 21,000. So, it’s been dropping, it’s dropping, it’s dropping. Yeah.
Ellen: Most people would be very happy to be making that kind of money.
Jamie: Yeah. and be aware that, the expense is higher as well, right? So it’s like, it’s not that much money profit, but the thing that, that, and the reason I wanted to share that is that, for anybody that’s listening to this and whether you’re listening to this now, or in three months’ time, or in six-months’ time, go onto my email list, I’m super open with what I own and sharing it because I think it’s great to see the path.
Ellen: I agree.
Jamie: Like if you can see the growth of the business, the drops in the business, and you can listen to the stories at those times and you can understand like what I’m going through and what I went through and the same for other people as well,
[30:35] Ellen: So important and a big, big problem that I see in this business is people not sharing that stuff like trying to act like everything’s great all the time. And I talk about it, all the time on the pod, not all the time, but on the podcast, I’m pretty honest about things too. I know. And just, yeah.
Jamie: And when people do that, it’s powerful. Emily Hirsch is a big entrepreneur that I follow and she just recently put out a podcast episode on, on her show where she said, “Hey, my last live launch, I did, didn’t go very well.” And bear in mind, she’s a Facebook ad agency. She literally runs campaigns for people, launches for people. And she was just there with a hand up in the air saying, my last one didn’t go well.
Yeah. I know from Alex, Charfen who we interviewed the other day just saying, because she told him, she booked so many sales call on the back end of that podcast episode and makes you wonder like, “Well, why would somebody want to hire her after she just said it was so wrong, right?” Like that doesn’t make logical sense, but because we’re human beings, when people hear that they trust it, someone who’s just like feeding me a pack of lies and they also think to themselves, “Wow, if they’re willing to be vulnerable about this, she must really have a together in other areas”
And that’s the way that you can build a lot of trust with your audience. So yeah, I’m a big fan of that transparency and watch this space. Like I really do believe in the next couple of months, we’re going to see really big growth inside of our company because I’ve been willing to sort of grow and realize that like there’s some stuff that was like not right for me and it was hard to accept and even harder to talk about and even harder to get through.
[31:23] Ellen: Well, I love you for it. And I absolutely adore you.
Jamie: Thank you. Well, I think it’s important to share because so many people go through it and they feel silent. And especially now in the times we’re in, people are under a lot of pressure. It’s a lot going on.
Ellen: Well, before we go, this has been really great. I’m so glad that we talked about this. It’s so good that I would really love to do another podcast, which we’re going to do. So, we’re going to close this one out and then we’re going to do another podcast. So, that’s it for this week, but how can people contact you?
[32:45] Jamie: Well, the thing that I would love to do is if any of you guys have been going through any of these challenges yourself, or if I can just give you any help or any guidance at all, the best way to reach me is probably just through Instagram. You can go to instagram.com/jamieatkinson. That’s J A M I E A T K I N S O N And just shoot me a message and I’m super happy to help you guys out. If you want to join our community, we have a Facebook group called Podcasting 101 and you can find out all about all the cool podcasts. We didn’t really didn’t get into much podcasts.
Ellen: So, we’re going to do on the next one.
Jamie: On the next one, you should tune in, Hey, if you listen to this one, and the final thing that I wanted to do is that we actually have an amazing free training that we just decided to put out where we kind of give away all of our monetization secrets. So, would it be cool if I shared that with your audience because sure, absolutely. A lot of people want to find out how to make money with their show. So, if you guys want to find that out, it’s actually a mini pop-up podcast. There’s five episodes. You can get through it really quick, and it’s called Five Days to Monetize your Podcast. And if you want to access that for free, you can go to changemakersmovement.com/fivedays Just the number five days Yeah.
Ellen: Tell you about that too. I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts, and I listened to all five days.
Jamie: Amazing! Well, that’s awesome. That’s a real-life testimonial!
Ellen: There you go.
[34:00] Ellen: Yeah. Jamie is very entertaining. So next, I’m adding a new section to this podcast, and it’s called Books Open Doors Insights
it will include a tip, strategy, or musing as well as resources, announcements and I might add upcoming events.
So, we talked about something related to the interview, what’s holding you back or stopping you from moving forward and so I want to share with you the 5 steps that I shared in an event I just did, The 5- Day Bestseller Breakthrough Challenge (taking your book from idea to outline). so if you want more credibility and expert status, if you want a bigger reach, if you want to make a bigger impact, if you want to make more money, and leave a lasting legacy, then this is what you want to do-write a book!
So I created the 5 Day Bestseller Breakthrough Challenge and it is free and I’m going to go through the steps that I went through in the challenge.
The first is the importance of having passion for what you do. If you don’t have passion for what you do, chances are you’re not going to stick with it and I see this over and over in my (Write Your Bestseller in 7 Days) Bootcamp where people pick a topic because they don’t know what to write about, and then when it gets a little difficult or they get part way into it and all of the sudden they lose their motivation so you want to do something that you are passionate about-you want to have passion for that topic.
Next, you want to know what is your why? Why do you want to write this book? Why do you want to write it now? What’s it going to do for you? What’s it going to do for your business, for your life because, again, if you start losing motivation and keep remembering why you’re doing this in the first place-why you wanted it.
And then the third thing is knowing what skills you have that you can use because it’s very difficult to be an expert at something if you aren’t good at it, so you have to have skills that you can use, so that’s what’s in training #1: passion, your motivation-your why, and your skill set.
Next, is who is your ideal client? So, you have to know who your ideal client is because you are going to set up your marketing materials to speak to that ideal client. So if you don’t know who they are , what motivates them, how they react to things, then it’s very difficult to connect with them and you’re not going to sell books or anything else, so it’s very important to know who they are.
And then the next thing is what problems do you solve? So you want to know what problems are keeping your ideal clients up at night. What’s urgent for them? What do they need right now that you can provide for them. Because people buy when they have an urgent need. Otherwise they’ll say, “Oh, I’ll wait. I’ll put it off. I don’t need it right now.” So, you’ve got to know what those are and I teach you how to find out what those are from your ideal clients.
Next, is how to position your book so it stands out from the competition and lets your ideal buyers know this is absolutely the book they need to have and that this is the one that is urgent that is going to solve their problem.
And then the last part is creating an outline, and I call this my Magic Outline because I’ve set it up in such a way that it makes it very easy for people to set up their outline, and then follow it because you need a roadmap. One of the reasons, so many clients get stuck, when they do, is that they have not filled out the Magic Outline. And every time when they say, “I’m stuck I don’t know what to do.” And I’ll say, “Did you do the outline?” And they’ll say, “No.” And I’ll say, “Why didn’t you do the outline?” And they’ll say, “I don’t know.” So, it looks so simple and for some reason people think they can just skip over it, but you can’t skip over it because let’s say you wanted to go from L.A. to New York and you got on the closest freeway, but the closest freeway doesn’t go to New York. It goes to Canada and Mexico, so you have to know where you’re going. And you have to have that roadmap to get there. So, that’s the last one.
And I don’t know if I said this but when we’re talking about positioning your book, it’s not only how it stands out but how you write your title and subtitle and how you do that. It has to connect. It has to connect with your audience. It has to get them excited; it has to be memorable so it’s easy to remember, so all these things are important.
And then in the outline part, you want to take that title put it up at the top of your page (outline) so as you’re creating your outline, you’re always going back to make sure that everything you up t in your outline refers back to what you said your book is about (in each chapter) because that’s another thing people do; they start to write one book and then they kind of go off track and they forget what their book was supposed to be about. So, you want to make sure you don’t do that.
So, the live challenge is over, but the trainings are still available through this Friday, January 22nd and I also gave over $200 in free gifts in the free launch that you can get access to by registering for the challenge and the gifts and that challenge is at: www.bestsellerbreakthrough.com/challenge-freebies
So that’s it for today to get the transcript, go to https://booksopendoors.com/podcast. You’re welcome to join our community, our Facebook group, and that link is on the podcast page.
And when you’re on the podcast page, be sure to grab a copy of Book Planning Secrets, A simple 4-Step Guide to Writing a Bestseller. If you’d like to write your own book or if you’re already writing books and you want to do it faster and easier, be sure to grab your copy.
So, till next time. Bye-bye.
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