Marketing Your Business - Marketing Strategies for Business Owners

Susan Bradley went out for a drink with her husband and decided, right there, to shut off a million dollars a year in sales. It was most of what her company sold. The business scaled from there, and she later sold it a year ahead of her own plan. Today she sells about $300,000 of coaching calls a year inside her membership and keeps roughly $5 of it. The coaches get paid, 19 Zoom accounts eat the rest, and her retention has sat at 95 or 96% ever since. That trade is deliberate, and it is the clearest example of how she thinks about every business she has ever run. She has built, bought and sold multiple companies. She decides what the numbers have to look like first, then works backwards. When she bought her shoe company she hired an accountant, told him the price she wanted to sell it for, and asked what the numbers would have to look like to get there. She gave herself five years. They sold it in four. Before that came what she calls "20 years of torture," a business she scaled to a million dollar year and a small chain of retail stores. Eight straight years of growth ended with one down year, and that Christmas her mother announced she had finished all her shopping online. Susan closed roughly a million dollars of wholesale revenue on purpose and went all in on selling direct. Today she teaches thousands of ecommerce store owners through The Social Sales Girls. Her first paid course was $97 and sold exactly one copy. In this conversation, Susan and I break down: - The question she asked her accountant on the day she bought the company - Why she closed about a million dollars of wholesale revenue on purpose - Her own one sentence explanation for why the $97 course sold one copy - What changed between 68 members and 180 - The tick box on her opt in pages that 50 to 70% of people check - Why the podcast is the only front door she funds, and the 15% number underneath it - The three numbers she checks before she calls anything a failure FREE RESOURCE: The three frameworks from this episode, one page each, nothing to sign up for → https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH SUSAN: - The Social Sales Girls: https://thesocialsalesgirls.com - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/socialsalesgirls - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesocialsalesgirls - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2GHerESs_5Kd0c0dhKvH6g CONNECT WITH STU: - Website: https://stu.me - Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz - Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren - Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me - Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe for new episodes every week.

There's a free workshop coming up where Stu is showing exactly what's possible when you start something today. Secure your spot: https://membershipworkshop.com --- You don't need to be a developer anymore. You just need to be a builder. In this episode, Tyler and Bex join me to talk about AI agents and workflows, sub-agents, orchestrators, and tools like Claude Code. But the part that actually matters isn't the technical stuff. It's what it means for anyone with an idea. My son had no coding experience, no design skills, and an idea for a dog walking business. Thirty-five minutes later, he had a poster, a working website, and a live domain. Not because he was technical. Because he just asked. In this episode: - What AI agents and sub-agents actually do, explained simply - The dog walking business built start to finish in 35 minutes - Why the gap between having an idea and having the thing has never been smaller - One warning worth hearing: how easy it is to fall down the rabbit hole CONNECT WITH STU: Website: https://stu.me Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Robert Hartwell spent almost ten years as a Broadway performer, performing eight times a week. In 2017 he faked being sick so he could skip his own show and sit in the back of my live event in Toronto, because that was the only way he could get a day to work on what came next. He walked out believing he could teach singing, dancing and acting to young people through a membership. Three years later Broadway shut down, and what he had quietly built was the only thing standing. He locked himself in a studio for three days and recorded a year of content. He gave himself one number to leave Broadway: 30 people into the summer program. He got 33. And the business went from six figures to seven figures and multiple seven figures once he let go of the identity he was holding on to. Now he runs a second business coaching entrepreneurs on story selling. Which is how we got to the part of this conversation I keep thinking about: a five day challenge into a 12 month program with 40 openly promised spots, that closed at 26. He did not go quiet. He said the number out loud, to the buyers, on camera. In this conversation, Robert and I break down: - The four questions he asks parents that turn one class into a three or four year commitment - The gap-and-bridge move underneath every offer he makes, and the guardrail he puts on it - The green, yellow and red system behind his retention - The three stories he tells to sell anything, and why the order matters more than the stories - Why he turns away buyers who can pay - What he said after a launch came in at 26 out of 40, and what he did the following week FREE RESOURCE: The three frameworks from this episode, one page each, nothing to sign up for → https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH ROBERT: - The Broadway Collective: https://bwaycollective.com - Personal site: http://robert-hartwell.com - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sirroberttakespics - The Broadway Collective on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bwaycollective CONNECT WITH STU: - Website: https://stu.me - Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz - Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren - Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me - Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe for new episodes every week.

There's a free workshop coming up where I am showing exactly what's possible when you start something today. Secure your spot: https://membershipworkshop.com --- Every week, a few things show up in my feed that make me stop scrolling. This week, four of them were worth talking about. Tyler and Rebecca join me to break down: - Bad membership sales advice from a well-known marketing coach (whom I still very much respect), and why discounting, bundling, or offering a trial up front usually backfires - AI learning loops, and what they could mean for how we use AI tools going forward - A free tool called Google Search Console that shows exactly what people are searching for on your Instagram - A couple with under 10,000 followers who tracked down a grocery store employee for his perfectly stacked shelves, gave him his flowers, and raised nearly $9,000 for him after the video hit 9 million views That last one is the reason we started doing this segment. It's a good reminder of what a platform can actually be used for. CONNECT WITH STU: Website: https://stu.me Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Tracy Henning has been selling real estate for over 32 years and she is still selling today. She also runs the largest Canva Facebook group for real estate agents anywhere, with over 60,000 members in it. Here is the part that got me: 40 percent of the people who pay for her membership every month came out of that free group. She became an agent at 21, in her words "a 21 year old female agent in an industry that was made up of 55 year old males." She made it to number one, sat on her real estate board for 10 years, and was the youngest woman ever to serve as its president. Then she hit "okay, now what?" The answer started as one free Facebook group in 2019 with a clever name that went nowhere. She renamed it around the exact words agents were already typing into the search bar, and it blew up. In this conversation, Tracy and I break down: - The name change that took a quiet group to over 60,000 members - Why a group name works like a search bar - The pinned post that turns browsers into email addresses - Two spots inside a group that almost everyone leaves empty - How much daily work a 60,000 member group actually takes - What she keeps free and what stays behind the paid door - $79 a month, priced so one more home sale covers the year - Too young at 21, too old now, and the answer she gives herself FREE RESOURCE: Get the 3 frameworks from this episode → https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH TRACY: - Website: https://porchlyte.com - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/porchlyte - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PorchLyteForTheModernRealtor - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/porchlyte CONNECT WITH STU: - Website: https://stu.me - Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz - Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren - Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me - Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe for new episodes every week.