Hey, welcome back to the Life coach Launchpad. My name’s BJ and I’m here every week talking to you about all the online business things that, as it turns out, need to happen in order to have a successful life coaching business. I’m a business coach. I love to help life coaches make more money, get more clients, have more fun, and to do what they love to do, what they’re meant to do. And that’s coaching. So let’s dive right in. This is the launch episode. If you’ve been through a launch before, you might understand why I’m using my impending doom voice, because that’s how it can feel.

But I have a better way. I’ve done it enough times that I’ve come up with how to be prepared and it really is all about being prepared. So what is a launch? Launch. A launch is really getting blast sometimes feels like blasting information out to lots of people so that they can then make a decision to buy or not buy whatever you’re selling. So why are we doing a launch like this? Short blast versus more of a steady drip? And there’s kind of a couple of reasons, both from a supply and a demand side, that we’re looking to sell to more people at once. So think of like a free class, like a free webinar, free master class that you can get more people onto that platform and those people are watching and listening to you and you’re selling to more people versus an email going out once a week saying, hey, sign up whenever. It gives this time frame that this thing is usually like, doors are only open for a short amount of time, so it creates this scarcity and then more from the supply side that we are looking to serve more people at a time. A lot of times we’re talking about group coaching programs or in person events.

Like if you’re hosting a retreat, then this retreat happens at a certain time and you need to get that information out there to a lot of people so that some of them will buy. So today I’m talking a lot about this particular client. She’s my most longtime client, and for her and both for many coaches, before you get to a group coaching program, you’re probably going to want to do individual coaching first, which is when you are learning how to sell, you’re learning how to coach, and you’re really ironing out all the details. And then once you have the best version of your sales pipeline and how to coach, that’s when you can scale that up in terms of a group coaching program. But yeah, an individual coaching business can be so simple. It might look like a long form piece of content. Once a week, an email newsletter that comes from that, maybe some social posts that come from the long form content. After that, consults show up.

You do the consults, some of them say yes, and then you go do the coaching. So it’s the steady drip. Every step of the way. It’s a steady drip. Steady drip of content, steady drip of consult, steady drip of coaching. Everything is at a steady pace. Launch is quite the opposite. It means lots at once.

Before you get started on launch, there’s a strategy. Are you going to have a mini offer ahead of time with that? Mini offer with your signature offer? There’s going to be sales pages, there’s going to be emails, lots of emails. It doesn’t have to be. That is your choice. But that has been my experience. There’s automation, there’s tech, there’s software behind the launch. So I don’t mean to make this list, to make it seem like it’s hard, but it can feel like a lot. It can feel like a lot at once.

And my first launch launches, they felt like a lot for weeks for me, it was a lot of times I was doing last minute things. The day of the night before, I was making changes to emails right before they go out, I was making changes to sales pages during the launch. I’m not going to say I’m always past that, but with preparation, there’s a lot you can do so that there’s less of it. And that really is the biggest trick to making it feel less overwhelming is getting as much done ahead of time as possible, so that when you’re in the launch, you’re just executing, there’s less creating and that gets your headspace in a better place so that you can really focus on listening to the feedback coming in and delivering whatever you’re offering. So in terms of managing the launch, here’s how I do it. It really comes down to this master spreadsheet. I use Google sheets that lists all the emails and tasks that need to be done. There’s along the columns, so along the horizontal axis on the top, there’s just one column for each day.

In one of the first columns I have the list of all the emails, all the tasks that need to happen so that each cell represents a specific task on a specific day or an email that goes out is scheduled for a particular time. I have yellow cells that represent events such as days of the mini program or free masterclass or doors closed, first class of the actual program, et cetera. And by the way, I’m going to describe all this, but it’s going to be way easier to see, to actually see. So I’m going to have the spreadsheet [email protected]. This is episode 14. So when I complete an email or a task, I will go change that cell to be green for an email. I will actually mark it green once it’s scheduled. When I have the email written, I will mark it yellow, which means most of the work is done, but it has not been sent out to the audience yet.

So it is not complete, cannot be marked green yet. A lot of times I’ll have a copywriter writing the emails for me because writing content can take a long time and it’s just great to have an expert who’s very used to doing this and can learn your voice. So when I get that copy from the copywriter, I will copy paste and do some light editing, put that into the email marketing software, and once it’s saved, then it’s yellow. It goes yellow on the spreadsheet. For me, just to make it really obvious where we are on this schedule, I have a vertical red dotted line representing today. So every day that, yes, I do look at the spreadsheet every day, by the way, during a launch. And every day I’m going to move this line one cell to the right, one column to the right. Because when that yellow line is on top of a task, then it just makes it abundantly clear that that needs to be done.

Each email that’s on the spreadsheet is represented by a short code. So these cells are pretty small. You can see a color really easily, but I don’t have a lot of room to write like the whole subject. So I’ll just write a short code. It’ll be like EC and then a number or MC and then a number so that then I can go match that short code with the name of an email in my email marketing software. So the spreadsheet will say MC 13 needs to be sent out. On this day, I can go to my email marketing software and look for MC 13 and make sure that it becomes yellow. Yellow means that it’s written, I need to send it and then mark it green on my spreadsheet.

So this red line should never pass by a task unless it has been marked green. I know talking about these, marking it from yellow to green is really hard to hear verbally. It makes a lot of sense when you go see the spreadsheet. And also this is total process stuff. As a manufacturing engineer, I was just an expert at processes because in this case, I’m looking at the spreadsheet every day. But if you’re creating a process for other people to follow, you need to make it really clear, crystal clear. And that’s what that dashed red vertical line means. It’s so that I could hand this spreadsheet off to a project manager someday and they would be able to execute it for me.

So one of the things that makes this launch a little more complicated than I feel like it should be is that the email marketing software we use is entreprort, which is great. It can do so many different things, but it makes sending emails fairly manual, unfortunately, and it comes down to that. The sender list, when you schedule an email is static. I can’t tell the email to be sent to people with a certain tag, and then after it’s scheduled, if you add that tag to more people, to more contacts, that they will also be included in that scheduled email. But it is not like that. So after I schedule it, if I wanted to go to more or less people, I’d have to cancel it and resend it, which is just kind of a hassle. While I’m complaining about entreprort, the email content, like the body, the subject is not updated after the email is scheduled. So if I schedule an email to be sent tomorrow and then I change that email, what will be sent does not change.

And I’ve found this out the hard way. And my point to mentioning this because I think it’s pretty specific to entrepreneur. I’ve used a handful of other email marketing softwares and this does not apply. I’m telling you, so that you can be grateful if your email marketing software does do this, because I definitely took it for granted. Another bit of information on the spreadsheet is that which email segments, which contacts, which have, which tags are being sent to, and this can definitely get complicated depending on how complicated you make your launch. But we’ve found that we end up getting a lot of emails. If someone opts in for a free master class or pays for the mini program or worse, signs up for the full program, and they continue to get promotional emails about what they already signed up for, it’s just tacky and you’re going to get emails about it. So you need to make sure that the segmentation under your emails is correct.

If you end up adding or deleting an email or a task that gets changed in the spreadsheet, but then it also needs to get changed in the email marketing software. And this is kind of the downside of keeping track of things in two different places. But it does have some advantages. Also, I’m not going to talk anymore about this spreadsheet because you’re probably snoozing away over there. But if you are, come back to me. Another thing that I’m doing in the spreadsheet, oh, here I go again about the spreadsheet. But it’s in another tab. And you know what? This is more exciting because I’m talking about the results.

I’m talking about the dollars spent in terms of advertising dollars coming in clicks from emails. We’ll also do like my clients and I, we will sit down and we will do an after action report. What worked well, what didn’t? What would we want to change next time? Because you will forget all about this. There will never be a time where this information is fresher in your mind. The best time to go over this is right at the end of the launch. I would say the spreadsheet is really the biggest source of staying organized in terms of my folders. I use Mac, so I’m in finder, keep my folders really well organized so that I can go through and easily find information from past launches because there’s a lot of graphics that get created and files that just have to be managed. We often have work free workbooks that come out.

Okay, I’m going to leave it at that. Go check out the [email protected]. It’s just, and if you need any help with your launch or have questions about how best practices for launch, let me know. I’ll see you next week.