Craftsman Creative

[00:00:00] All right. Welcome. Welcome. We have episode four of the movie Framework Today. I'm very, very excited for this one because this is really, The meat of the framework, it's implementing systems. So the movie framework is a framework to build out all of the systems that your business needs in order to work.

Because here's the principle, you don't actually have a business until you have all these systems operational in place working and generating the outcomes that you desire for your business. Many creators especially think that if they have an audience, they have a business, or if they have a product, they have a business, or if they have a client or customers, they have a business.

Now, it's true that anyone can get started and create a, let's call it a small B. Business where you've created an LLC and you've incorporated, and you have business cards and a website and all those things, but all those trappings do not constitute a business. A business [00:01:00] is when you have at least a minimum amount of systems in place.

That are generating the outcomes that you want to have a sustainable, resilient, profitable business for the long term. So that's what today's episode is about. I wanna walk you through what I'm calling the four core systems, and there's a little overlap between the last episode, the visibility episode, because the first system is so important, the content and awareness system.

I gave it its own thing because without visibility, without awareness, if nobody knows your system or your business exists, you're not gonna have any clients or customers. It's just not gonna happen. So that one is essential. Um, that's the main one to build out. If you don't have visibility, start there.

But now we're gonna kind of put that into a, a bigger framework or a bigger. Four core systems that every business needs in order to [00:02:00] have these outcomes. So let's talk about what those are, and I'm gonna dive into one of them into a little bit more depth. But just know that these are things that could be hours and hours, days and days.

Like inside the uh, society of Independent Creators. We did the 10 K challenge, and each one of these got their. Day, their own, you know, hour and a half, two hour, um, conversation or session. And then I even went in and built out ancillary videos to support, just to answer questions and to, you know, extend and go deeper because I wanted to make sure everybody had what they needed in order to build all these systems out.

So little plug there. If you want to go deeper on all of these systems, join us in the Society of Independent Creators dot. Know the Just Society of independent creators.com, and that's where we go deeper on all this stuff and we build these businesses together. So, What are the four core systems and how do we build them?

All right. [00:03:00] System number one I already talked about. It's your content and awareness system, and the purpose of this system is to generate prospects. So what you're doing is putting content out into the world, just like we talked about in the last episode, to get awareness for your business, to attract the right ideal customer, the people that overvalue what you do.

Let them know. Put a signal and a beacon out into the world to say, I exist and I can help you with the thing you want. And as soon as they see that and they recognize it, if that content is doing its job, they're going to become a prospect, meaning they are looking into your business. All right, so the whole point of the content and awareness system.

That's system number one is to generate prospects. All right? System number two, as soon as they are a prospect, that means that they're diving into your long form content. They've gotten off of a platform. They are on your podcast or your YouTube channel, or even better, they're on your website. They're looking at your blog [00:04:00] posts or your newsletter archives, or your e you know, your, um, five part series that you've written out on your blog.

Those kind of things. They're on a platform that you. And you have ways to capture their information if they wanna learn more, so you can send it to 'em. Remember we talked about lead magnets? So you've got things like scorecards and email courses and audio courses and digital downloads, and a free copy of your book or free video series, any of those things.

Constitute a lead magnet, and that's an exchange or a transaction that doesn't cost any money, but it's a transaction where they're giving over their permission and their contact info in exchange for something valuable. Right? Um, in a lead generation workshop I did back in like October, November of 2022, talked about.

Concept or this prompt of what would someone pay you a thousand dollars to learn? Not necessarily you, but what would they p be willing to pay a [00:05:00] thousand dollars for information, unlocking something, getting unstuck. Um, a process, a system, a framework, any of those things. If you can bundle up something that someone would generally pay a thousand dollars for and put it into a free lead magnet, that becomes an extremely valuable asset for your business.

So, I'm really relying right now on things like scorecards. I'll put a link to score app, which is what I'm using for my scorecards. Those have been great because I, I usually charge hundreds of dollars to do like a consulting call or a strategy call where we would dive into those kind of questions and surface, like, where are you at in your business?

Where do you want to go and how are you gonna get there? And we create a plan, but the scorecard can do a lot of that for me and. A person taking the scorecard gets the same outcome of, oh, now I have clarity as to where I am and I know where I want to go. And now the next step is click on this link or this call to action in order to figure out how to get there.[00:06:00]

So while it's maybe less valuable than a 90 minute strategy call, it's certainly valuable, uh, whether or not it's a thousand dollars worth of value, that's up to the person taking it to decide. But it's really, really been a, a huge benefit cuz I can. Infinite number of those every month. Cause it doesn't take any of my time.

I'm right now getting 60 or 70 a month and that's been great to generate leads so, Content system number one, generates prospects. Lead generation system number two, generates leads. So that's your website and your email capture and your lead generations. Now the third system is your engagement system.

This is the point of this system is to generate customers, to generate transactions and purchases to help people go from lead to customer. Now, whether that happens in a day or a week or a month or a year or five years, It really de is dependent on the system that you build. And that's why I [00:07:00] prefer using email as my engagement system.

So I'm, I've got other ways where I'm like directly reaching out to people and I'm recording little screen capture videos for some of the people that take my scorecard. Those are part of the engagement system, everything. Reaching out one-on-one, hopping on a call, doing, um, complimentary strategy sessions or discovery calls, any of those things are part of engagement.

Once they've become a lead, how are you helping them progress to the point where they then decide, oh, you know what? I really think that the next step for me is to purchase this product or engage this business to help me solve my problem. The reason I like email is because of this fact. Um, I think it was Dean Jackson and his team did a study and what they concluded was that 85% of purchases that happen in the first two years of a business happened after the first 90 days.[00:08:00]

Let me say that again. Cause it's huge. 85% of purchases that happen in the first two years of a business occur after. The first 90 days, what that means is if you're selling customers and you're selling 'em day one, or within the first week or the first month, you could five x your business simply by engaging your leads for longer than 90 days because statistically speaking, 85% of purchases happen after the first 90 days.

I can speak to this myself that I did a podcast last, uh, June or July, and just this month in March, got an email from someone who'd been on my list for six months. Who had initially heard me on that podcast, but it took them six months of getting my newsletter, attending workshops, all those things to re finally go, you know what?

I want to talk with Darren. They hired me for one of these 90 minute strategy [00:09:00] calls, and it was a great conversation. So if I didn't have email, As a way to do that, that's $500 that I would've missed out on, and that sort of thing happens weekly, right? Every week I have people reaching out who, and I go in and I check on, all right, where did that per lead come from?

How long have they been on my list? And without fail, it's usually, I shouldn't say without fail, but it's typically 85% of the time is probably accurate that they've been on my list for months and months and months. I had someone sign up for the 10 k. Um, I looked at where they came from. They found me on a, from a promotion that I did in a newsletter back in May of last year, and they joined in December.

So that's like, you know, seven months that they were on my list getting value from me. And by the time they showed up, they were pre-sold. They knew that what I was offering was gonna help them and they bought without me even knowing who they were. So that is pretty cool, and that's what email has the power to do.

So. System [00:10:00] three engagement system. Your job there is to turn leads into customers and get them to buy something. Generally, it's a low ticket item. Usually people aren't going to buy a 10 or $15,000 thing without hopping on a call. But if your email is doing its job, by the time they get on that call, they're pre-sold and they're ready to hire you.

And that's what happens for me. Every time I have a new client, they're not coming to me out of the blue. They've been on my list for months. And by the time that they've attended enough workshops and gotten enough newsletters and things like that, They finally go, you know what? I think that's the next step.

And then they buy, they're ready to go. So the last one I want to dive in deeper on is your product ecosystem. And this is where you turn customers into clients. And I like that delineation. I've heard both words used interchangeably. Customers, clients, clients, customers, and sometimes service-based business will call.

Customers, clients because it [00:11:00] just sounds better. And they're longer term engagements than just one-off, uh, purchases. It's usually weeks or months worth of work that they're gonna be spending time together. So that feels more like a client than a single cus single event customer. But the reason I like this delineation is because, Customers are people who have bought once.

Clients are people who have bought multiple times, so that could be either multiple payments for a single thing, a single offer that you have. It could be that they've bought multiple, um, products that you offer, so maybe they've bought your book and then they've bought your course, and then they signed up for your community and then they hired you for coaching.

That's certainly a. Right, because they're in it for the long term. So I like the idea of turning customers into clients, and you can't do that unless you have a product ecosystem. So products, here's the principle. Products don't make money. The products are, they're businesses make money through [00:12:00] ecosystems, not just products.

So those are the four systems, content and awareness, lead generation, engagement, and product. The goal for each one, and I include these goals, and it's important because you want to know what the outcome is for that part of the system or that system in your business because you want to be able to identify what isn't working, so you have prospects.

Customers and clients. Now, if you look at your business and all these are are built out, you can quickly identify, well, where is the constraint? Where can you go and fix the problem or improve or optimize the system in order to generate a better outcome, which is more revenue and more resiliency for your business?

We talked about the content system last time. I really want to just quickly touch on product ecosystem cuz as people come into my business through the scorecard, I see this time and time again as I'm looking at these leads coming in, I go, [00:13:00] oh, well, part of the reason is they only have one of the three product ecosystems in place and that's why they aren't making as enough money.

This was my situation. I had low ticket items. Where I had things that were priced between $20 and $500. I had the, on the High End Society of Independent Creators, and that's a digital product. They can buy it without me, you know, needing to deliver anything. It really is just, you buy it, you get access to a community and you're in.

Um, I have courses that are, you know, 50 to $150. And then I had a book that, or have a book that's $20. So, The problem is I don't have a large enough audience or enough traffic or enough scale to turn that into a 10 or 20 or $50,000 a month business right now. There's certainly people who are doing that, selling $150 courses and making a hundred K a month.

My friend Justin Welsh is doing that. He's probably at 150 or 160 a month. He's doing a million and a half, 2 million a year just selling courses. He has two courses. He sells [00:14:00] sponsorships. That's all he does. So it's certainly possible, but he also has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media and, you know, three, five, sometimes even 10,000 people per day visiting his site and seeing those calls to action and buying his stuff.

So it requires a lot of scale in order to have a low ticket item be your entire business. So what are the other two parts of a product ecosystem that you could build out to make it more. And make it so that you've got the, uh, a nice mix of high leverage and high profit products and offers. So at the top you have what's called a done for you offer.

Now, this should not be something that costs 500 or $2,000 because a, a really great core done for you offer, like the, the big offer that your business. Creates should generate a couple thousand dollars of profit for your business every time someone says yes. So if you're a video [00:15:00] production company and you're charging $15,000 for a video, it's not enough because by the time you pay out your contractors, pay the locations, rent the equipment, pay for the food, pay yourself.

That costs $15,000. Um, and so there's no profit there, so you never are able to grow with that $15,000 offer. So at, at minimum it should charge, you should be charging 17 five. But I've consulted, uh, a number of video production companies and gone in and said, look, that offer should now be $30,000. And you should have a 50% profit margin.

Now, that 50% probably includes the owner's compensation, but your business and all the expenses should be in 50% and the other 50% is profit. Um, that's how we ran our business and it worked great. Uh, while it worked until we, we, the problem was we didn't have all the other systems in place, so our business fell apart, but the product ecosystem was solid.[00:16:00]

All right, so at the top, you have your done for you offer. Right now, if you have an offer that's kind of in the 2000, let's call it the 500 to $2,500 range. Experiment with adding a zero to that and what would that offer look like? What else could you include? Um, could you extend the amount of time that you're working with them?

Could it include more of your one-on-one time or where you actually are going in and doing it for them? It's a done for you offer. So experiment with that and figure out what would a $10,000 or a $20,000 offer look like. If you're a business that's already charging 10 or 20, what would a 25 or a 30 or even a $50,000 offer look like?

And if that's scary to you and you're going, there's no way. Well, that's a mindset thing. You gotta go back to the mindset episode and figure out why are you stuck there? Why is there a limit to how much you think you can charge in your business? It's just about stacking more value and helping them get bigger outcomes on the other.

On the other end of that service. So then in the middle you have your done with you [00:17:00] service. That's like your group coaching or your one-on-one coaching. Your courses that have a live aspect, like live cohort-based courses, events, things like that. They cost 500 to $2,500. And this could even be your freelancing or your hourly project type stuff, but I would highly recommend to move anything where you're doing it for them to move it up into that 2,500 plus range.

Because you want to be, you want to have profit there and you want to have something in the middle where you can. Consult or coach or work with them, but they are doing the implementation themselves. Your clients or your customers are doing that implementation themselves with your help. So coaching, consulting certainly falls into that.

Events, all those things I mentioned, and those should cost 500 to $2,500. Now I'm checking myself right now because you know, I've got another event that I want to do this summer, and the thought was, well, I'm just [00:18:00] gonna add a hundred dollars to the price point. That I charged earlier in this year, I charged $200, um, 199 for just access to the 10 K challenge, and it was 4 95 to join the community.

Well, if I'm preaching my own or if I'm living by what I preach, I really should be charging 4 95 for the event and more like a thousand or 1500 for the the community, but I feel like it's not quite there yet. So you can grow into. But that's really the sweet spot where you're making $500 more or more every time someone says yes to one of these done with you offers.

Really, it's just compensating you for your time. Like for an hour of my time, I absolutely should be charging $500. Um, I'm trying to get to the point where I can charge a thousand for a 90 minute session, um, strategy sessions, something like that. And that's a sweet spot. But you also need enough demand from your content awareness and your lead generation system to where you can.

A [00:19:00] premium on your time and your services. Product ecosystem. Three parts done for you, which is 22,000, $2,500 and up. Every time someone says yes, you make profit into your business. That allows you to grow and scale and hire people and invest and have profit that can be paid out to you. Then in the middle you're done with you offer.

That's your consulting, coaching events, life courses, things like that. And then on the bottom you have your done by you or the do-it-yourself versions. That's your courses, your book, your um, anything where you are not involved. It doesn't require any one-on-one or one to many time. You don't have to show up anywhere.

It just sells on its own. People access it, they do it on their own, they do all the implementation and maybe there's an upsell to. You know, get a discounted mentoring call or consulting call once they finish that product or something, right? So you can upsell and turn them from a customer of your product into a client of your business.[00:20:00]

All right. Where do you start though? If you have expertise and experience, I would start by adding the done for you high value offer. Otherwise, just add one more piece to the puzzle. If you currently do the freelancing or coaching stuff, add a digital product, a, an ebook that you can charge 20 bucks for, or a digital download or a course or anything like that, that you can charge between 20 and $200.

Create that. Um, get, get two pieces built out. If you have one, add another. And if you have a lot of valuable experience and expertise and you go through that experiment, um, experiment of adding a zero to your top offer, and now you've got something that could. Potentially be sold for 10, 15, 20, 20 $5,000.

Start there and start finding the people who would value that and put that offer in front of them and start selling it. Because here's what's amazing with the product ecosystem, you could sell one or two of those high [00:21:00] value offers a month. And have a really, really great business. When I did this in November-ish of last year, 20 20 20, sorry, 2022, I went from $1,500 a month to $15,000 a month in one month, November to December, 1500, 15,000.

Just by adding a single high value offer to my business and expanding out this product ecosystem, and now I'm scaling that up with my other systems, better content and awareness, like this podcast lead generation system that gets people to my scorecard or my email list so I can engage them and then get more people into that ecosystem and becoming high value clients.

I could do two or three of those a month at most, but still that would. 20, 30, 40,000 a month, which is more than I could probably handle as a one person business. So that's why to do it. That's why you gotta do it. Product ecosystems, make a business, not [00:22:00] products. All right? The two most common objections that I hear to this is, number one, I don't know how to do this well.

This is a mindset shift I want you to make, get resourceful and figure it out. Okay. I know it's a little bit tough love there, but that's the reality. Like the people who succeed in creative businesses, they just have this sense of resourcefulness, like we talked about with mindset. I. And they figure stuff out and they go and get it.

And if they don't know, they find someone like me, for example, who could help you implement all this stuff so you don't have to do it alone. So you join a community or you hire a coach, or you work with somebody who has training and coaching and education about how to do it, and then you do it. Okay? So get resourceful and take action.

That's the mindset pieces we talked about before. And then the second thing is, well, I don't have time. I have a full-time job. I'm still working full-time, and I, I, I'm not gonna have a break until the summer or until I retire. I've heard all these things in the last couple months. Well, um, sorry. More tough love coming your way.[00:23:00]

Make time. This doesn't happen on its own. It's not something that just magically appears. It requires action and faith and resourcefulness. Those same mindset pieces that we talked about in episode one of this. So it might only be 20 minutes a. It might be an hour a day, it might be an hour a week. That's okay.

But you have to be making progress and you have to be taking action or else it will never happen. Okay. I'm sorry to be blunt there and Frank, but that's just the reality of the situation here, folks. All right, so let's sum everything up. Implementing systems. If you want to build a one person, six figure business or.

Run. If you run a multi-person, you want it to be a seven figure creative business. You have to have all these systems in place and they need to be generating the outcomes that you want. Again, content and awareness generates prospects. Your lead generation system generates leads, your engagement [00:24:00] system generates customers and your product ecosystem turns customers into clients.

These. Are essential to your business. Yes, there are other systems like finances and sales and operations, but I want you to just focus on the four core systems for now. Get them built, get them operational, get them optimized, and you will have a business. That's the promise with all of this is you don't have a business until you have these systems in place.

As soon as you do. You have this instant jump from, I thought I had a business to I have a business. And you're gonna be shocked at how different those two things are. Your business is perfectly optimized for the outcomes you currently experience want. Say that one more time. Your business is perfectly optimized for the outcomes you currently experience.

So if you are not making enough money, if you don't have enough leads, if you don't have recurring, It's because the system that you [00:25:00] have is perfectly optimized for those outcomes. So if you want different or better outcomes, you need to optimize your system. Go and identify the constraint or identify the system that you haven't built out yet.

Build it, optimize it. Fix the constraint. Remove the constraint. That's how you build your business. Okay, so if you haven't yet, my recommendation would be to start with the scorecard. So it will help identify what systems you already have and what systems need attention, because it'll give you a score in each of these sections.

It will rank you. In mindset and outcomes, visibility, implementation of systems, and then what we're gonna cover next time, which is expanding your impact. The issue there is most people try to expand from the start, and you have to have a business in place with these four core systems before you start expanding your impact.

So if you would like some help implementing this system, these systems in your [00:26:00] business, You can just email me. My email is darren craftsman creative.co. It's d a r e n one r n n e, craftsman creative.co. And I will help you. That's my promise. That's all I am here for is making this podcast, doing these workshops, creating these courses and events.

It's all to help creatives like. Build better businesses, bespoke creative businesses. So, sh, reach out to me, or if you're not yet, take the scorecard or get on my email list and let's start chatting about how we can help you get the outcomes you want in your business. Thanks, and I'll see you in the next episode.