Taking small steps and big leaps thanks to business support with Kay Peacey

[00:00:00] Rene: Hey everyone. Welcome to Your First Digital Product, a show that helps maxed-out service providers create their first digital product so they can gain an additional income stream, grow their impact without increasing one-on-one work and experience more time freedom. On the show, I talk to business owners who have launched digital products and dig deep into how you can create, launch, and market your first digital product. I’m your host, Rene Morozowich. Let’s go.

[00:00:28] Hey everybody. Today I’m here with Kay Peacey and Kay has honed her email marketing automation skills to ninja levels over five years of consulting and training for small businesses all over the world.

[00:00:40] She’s the UK’s leading ActiveCampaign specialist and the founder of Slick Business. Hey, Kay, how are you?

[00:00:46] Kay: I’m good today. Thank you. It’s so nice to meet you.

[00:00:49] Rene: I know you too. I followed you on Twitter for a while. This is like how every episode starts. I followed you on Twitter for a while. Yep. And like what you’re doing, see you have some products, reached out.

[00:01:00] I’m so happy that you agreed to be on the show so you can share all of your experiences with us namely your first product. So, well first, do you wanna tell us a little bit more about yourself? Other than that, you know, one sentence bio that I just read.

[00:01:13] Kay: Yeah, sure. Actually, you know, I should edit that bio because it says the UK’s leading specialist.

[00:01:17] I’m gonna own it. I am the world’s Leading ActiveCampaign specialist.

[00:01:19] Rene: Oh, sweet. Okay. Yeah, I can, we can totally do that.

[00:01:21] Kay: I need, need to update that one. Nice. Yeah, so I’m owning it. I am the ActiveCampaign queen. I know that product inside out backwards forwards. So for those of you who don’t know, ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform.

[00:01:34] People often associate it more strongly with email marketing. So it’s like you’ve got these many, many email service providers in the market. ActiveCampaign is one of those, but it’s more about automation. So it does lots of wonderful things to make life easier for business people. And I became an accidental ActiveCampaign specialist about six years ago, literally because a friend of mine who lives down the hill, Melissa Love, needed someone to learn how to use [00:02:00] ActiveCampaign and couldn’t find anyone.

[00:02:01] And she said, Hey, you seem like a smart person. Go learn how to do this. Nice. Oh my goodness. It’s like the unicorn career for me just landed in my lap.

[00:02:11] Rene: That’s awesome.

[00:02:12] Kay: And here we are now. Yeah, it is. It’s awesome.

[00:02:14] Rene: That’s very good. It’s so nice to be able to wake up in the morning and be really excited about what you’re doing.

[00:02:19] I think it makes such a difference. I’ve, I don’t know about your past experience, but I’ve definitely been doing things that I was not excited to do when I woke up in the morning. So, having something that is, you know, that you’re really like, just a really good fit, I think is amazing.

[00:02:34] Kay: Yeah. I, I consider it a real, a gift. A gift from, from of serendipity. I was 45 when I started using ActiveCampaign and I was not expecting to find a whole new layer of, of glorious stuff to do at that stage. It’s weird because it brings together lots of things that I’ve done previously. And honestly, you couldn’t, you couldn’t have predicted it. But here we are. So that’s all good.

[00:02:55] Rene: That’s awesome. And that’s even better, especially if you’re not looking for it and it kind of just comes to you in an unexpected way. And yeah. So that’s probably a different podcast. But let’s, yes, let’s dive, I know we could probably fall down that rabbit hole for a while, but, so let’s talk about your first digital product. So what was it? Um, is it still out there? Who is the audience? Um, maybe just start with those and then we’ll, we’ll dive in a little bit more.

[00:03:17] Kay: Okay. So I’m gonna start with the very first product I made. The very first digital thing I made, um, that was not consulting. So I’ve been consulting for a while and I rocked out very quickly a training that I decided to call Accelerated ActiveCampaign.

[00:03:34] Um, and it was built out of this sort of frustration that I kept answering people’s questions about ActiveCampaign. It was the same questions all the time, and I was like, look, I can just put all this in videos. And then they, they, they can just help themselves and crack on with it without needing to come and get hold of me.

[00:03:50] So it was driven by serving ActiveCampaign users. Um, I knocked it out in one morning and it’s a completely free training because I’m too chicken to charge for it. [00:04:00]

[00:04:00] Rene: Oh no. Oh no.

[00:04:01] Kay: Oh yeah. So this, it was weird, right? Because this course, the free one turned out to be, is still my best lead magnet now. It’s still running right now.

[00:04:11] Um, bringing people in and teaching them these core really important things about ActiveCampaign and I’m still in love with it, which is pretty impressive cuz that was like five years ago that I made that, but I wasn’t charging anyone for it. At all because I was too scared.

[00:04:25] Rene: So you got it done really quickly, so that’s amazing. I think a problem that a lot of people have is they wanna put every single thing into it. So how did you kind of scale it so that it isn’t just like everything? Was it only answering the questions that people had come to you with or how did you determine what to include?

[00:04:43] Kay: That’s such a great question because ActiveCampaign marketing automation, email strategy, it is a huge and really technical topic. The course that one accelerated ActiveCampaign jumped off from the questions that I saw again and again and again and again. The the questions that I’d answered dozens of time, and I just didn’t overthink it.

[00:05:03] I just knew in my teacher’s heart, right? Mm-hmm. I trained as a teacher and I think that that’s a really important part of the story is that I knew what are the things that every single person is tripping up on here and that they need to know to unlock the wonders of ActiveCampaigns, like this amazing box of tricks in there. Mm-hmm. But there are some really fundamental underpinning things and I just, I just knew what they were by this point. Mm-hmm. So the course just zoomed straight in on those. This is the stuff you absolutely need to know. Have this. Go forth and automate things.

[00:05:36] Rene: Yeah. That’s amazing. Yeah, and I like that, like the very fundamentals of things that people just like, you need to know these things in order to do anything else.

[00:05:44] Kay: It was kind of selfish because actually it was designed to get people off my back and out of my inbox. Honestly.

[00:05:48] Rene: That’s ok.

[00:05:49] Kay: It still serves the same purpose. If someone asks me about certain topics, I’m like just go do Accelerated ActiveCampaign. I don’t wanna hear about it. Go do that track.

[00:05:57] Rene: Yeah. Come back later. Come back after.

[00:05:58] Kay: Come back when you’ve done that, because that [00:06:00] will answer probably 90% of the first set of questions everyone has that will allow them to succeed with ActiveCampaign are covered in this one training.

[00:06:07] So anyway, that was the first thing. Then I realized I would like to do something that was actually gonna earn me some money into the business. And I wrestled with that probably for two years and I never did anything about it. I actually recorded a lot of training. I spent two weeks recording training.

[00:06:25] I didn’t do any consulting and recorded a ton of stuff thinking that I would make this one ActiveCampaign course to slay them all. And it turned into a monster and I just got completely overwhelmed, chickened out, and didn’t do anything else for two years. And then I joined a membership called Atomic because I knew that I needed to pin myself down somehow.

[00:06:48] I needed somebody to get me over the hump and get that first digital product out. Cuz it wasn’t about a lack of skill. I had all the skills. I knew what I was doing. Accelerated ActiveCampaign was doing great, I’d already recorded it. Mm-hmm. Like everything was there except me. I was the one who wasn’t turning up and I had people trying to buy stuff off me in the mail. I had nothing to sell.

[00:07:08] Rene: So the difference was charging for it or the difference was maybe the scope, like if, did the scope get too big? What, what exactly was the difference?

[00:07:16] Kay: No, the, I managed to pin it down to a single course, so I, I’d framed it up even as I’m gonna do a course about deliverability because you know, that’s so sexy.

[00:07:25] Rene: Yeah, right. No, it, I I think it is. Yeah. I was like, it is.

[00:07:29] Kay: Right. So there’s, there’s a whole bunch of ActiveCampaign users. Once you get to a certain point in sending emails, it dawns on you that you need to make sure your emails actually get delivered to the inbox. So the, this particular course was very targeted at ActiveCampaign users who knew enough to know that they needed to know about deliverability and engagement.

[00:07:47] All right. Very specific. And what that meant was that I could put some boundaries around the side of it. I could make, okay, a standalone course that covered this specific topic really, really well. Mm-hmm. And I knew it was stuff that nobody else was [00:08:00] teaching well. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I had the product all lined up, but the, yeah, the barrier was definitely persuading me that it was okay to ask people to give me money in exchange for that course. Mm-hmm. So weird.

[00:08:11] Rene: Yeah. I definitely think it makes sense and I, and I have heard that kind of thing before. So tell me a little bit about the membership then. Like what was it specifically? Was it just you telling somebody else, Hey, I’m going to do this, and then like, did they hold you accountable in a certain way or is it just because you told somebody else you were going to do it?

[00:08:27] Kay: It’s more than that. It’s, it was definitely more than telling someone I was gonna do it. I’d been talking about it for probably years. Years. I knew I had this in me. I knew that I should be doing it. The demand was there. No one else was doing it. I could do it. I was so mad at myself for not doing it.

[00:08:43] I was really angry with myself for not doing it because it was such an obvious thing for me to do. And so I joined this membership, it’s called Atomic, and it’s run by two guys who live up in the north of England called Andrew & Pete. And I had a few friends, business colleagues who’d already been through this, and I knew that their mission was to help little teeny tiny businesses grow in the way that they knew they wanted to, but that they were stuck for some reason. And I knew I was stuck and needed some help. Mm-hmm. So my big move, I joined it and I had been in there about two months, and then I posted into their community and it was a picture of me in a bamboo thicket.

[00:09:16] So the bamboos were like the, the prison rails. The prison bars, and it was, and I posted and it literally said, please help me break out of my prison. I’m, I’m trapped and I need help. So it was a very vulnerable post. I was just like, God, I just need help here. And three people from the community stepped in and joined forces to make me do it.

[00:09:41] Rene: Oh.

[00:09:41] Kay: Like they’re standing over me on a Zoom call saying hit the button to publish that page.

[00:09:47] Rene: Wow.

[00:09:47] Kay: You’re not going away until you do it. They’re checking in on me. Mm-hmm. They’re doing like little counseling sessions on like, what the hell? Okay. You’re being ridiculous here. And you know it. Press the button.

[00:09:58] Mm-hmm. They just got me over the [00:10:00] line. Nice. It was amazing. Yeah.

[00:10:03] Rene: That’s amazing. Yeah. That’s very cool. I love that. Sometimes you just need somebody to help you, even if all the things are pointing in the right direction. We just get stuck at different points.

[00:10:12] Yeah. Or, you know, different areas, like just having someone else to kind of help us just take that next step.

[00:10:19] Kay: Yeah. And I think some of the, the reason it succeeded was partly because I know myself well enough at my advanced age, I know myself well enough to know that I will keep finding reasons not to do it.

[00:10:31] Mm-hmm. Unless someone pins me down. Mm-hmm. And we keep cycling around this in my business, like I’m hitting another bump right now where I’m thinking I really need someone to do the pincer movement again. To get this next thing out of the box. Mm-hmm. Because I know from experience that I’m just not gonna do it until someone pins me down and makes me really nail down a timeline and then compels me to do it.

[00:10:51] Rene: Right. And it’s so different like working in your own business. You don’t have a boss who is like, Hey, it’s due on Friday. You really have to figure out how you can move your business forward. And a lot of times that is getting outside help. It’s not just locking yourself in the room or whatever, like it, it is finding, people, find finding coworkers, almost peers, you know, that can help you and we help each other. So I, it’s just better. Yeah. It’s better than regular business.

[00:11:19] Kay: Yeah. I, I totally agree. And it was interesting to me that the people who got me over the line with that, were not people that I knew before. They were strangers. Mm-hmm. In effect to me, part of the, the same community. But they were strangers to me because I had some very close business friends, um, who had tried many, many times to help me get past that and, and done so much work with me, but it just wasn’t doing it.

[00:11:39] It wasn’t effective on me. So I think there’s something about particular personalities and life histories. All these things come into play when you are trying to do something that’s new and scary and, and vulnerable that you, like for me, I was convinced no one was ever gonna buy it, which was ridiculous.

[00:11:54] Rene: Because you knew, because you had the demand, people were already asking for it, and you knew that’s what people needed next.

[00:11:59] Kay: [00:12:00] Yeah. Yeah. In my logical brain, I knew absolutely that not only was it gonna be the free course, then the paid course, and then a much, much, much bigger thing. I knew that.

[00:12:08] Mm-hmm. But actually making it happen somehow felt really, really dangerous and scary and impossible.

[00:12:14] Rene: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder why that, you know what, why specific, some, probably some psychology behind that. Um.

[00:12:19] Kay: Oh yeah. It’s business therapy, man. Yeah. A lot. We know this now.

[00:12:25] Rene: Business therapy. Yes. I, I totally agree.

[00:12:26] Yeah. Um, so I’m, I’m curious how you felt right after you hit publish, like, was that. Because I have had some conversations with people who they’ve gotten to the publish point, but then the marketing point, they were scared of, you know? So I, I think there can be different scary points, you know, sometimes starting is scary, sometimes um, you know, that last 75%, sometimes hitting publish. Sometimes then once it’s out there promoting it is scary. Were you okay after you hit publish? Or did you have some.

[00:12:57] Kay: No, no one was not okay. So I managed to hit publish and I had lovely, lovely beta students come in. So we priced it low to start off with.

[00:13:06] Nice. And it immediately sold out. I started with like 10 spots and immediately, like within hours, the whole, all of them sold. Mm-hmm. Um, so then we put it on general sale and it was, the sales were kind of trickling in. Even, this is really embarrassing. Even though I’m an email marketing automation specialist, I somehow couldn’t bring myself to make an email funnel to sell that course.

[00:13:28] Rene: Oh, it’s hard to do stuff for ourselves.

[00:13:32] Kay: That’s so hard. That is hard. It’s so hard. And I’m still playing that little game with myself on lots of levels as well. But yeah, so I, for a long time, I didn’t really talk about the course. It was like I could have it. I’d managed to get myself to have it and have a page on my website that mentioned it, but I didn’t do anything to actually tell people about or sell it.

[00:13:50] I didn’t have a blog that led to it. Um, and I remember complaining to one of my close business friends, oh, the course isn’t selling very well, and she said, what? That course that you [00:14:00] have no funnel leading to that you never talk about. That’s right. I was like, yeah, alright.

[00:14:05] Rene: Yes. Yeah, no, I totally agree with that.

[00:14:08] Like sometimes I, I think like, I don’t mind publishing things on the internet because I just assume that the internet so big is so big that nobody’s going to see.

[00:14:17] Kay: Nobody’s gonna find it.

[00:14:18] Rene: Right. Like every, it’s just gonna be invisible, even though I did hit publish. Um, yeah. But yeah, I think that the, that, that marketing piece and really like the difference between consulting and working with businesses one-on-one and doing your own thing and promoting something that you created like that. There’s a big difference there. And maybe we’re okay marketing our services, but marketing a product I is a different, it’s a different game, right?

[00:14:47] Kay: It’s, it’s so, so, so much. Yeah, I, and I still don’t really understand the mechanics of that.

[00:14:53] It, like emotionally I don’t, and psychologically I don’t understand why they’re so different, but they definitely are. Even at the time I was making that first course, I was quite happy to stand up and say, I’m the best ActiveCampaign Consultant in the UK. No problem saying that to anyone, but asking people to give me money for something that I wasn’t delivering in person mm-hmm.

[00:15:12] Somehow felt completely different. And then that, that responsibility of then having to really, um, shout from the rooftops, this thing is here. It’s great. You should buy it. It will solve these problems for you. I could rattle it out in a one-to-one conversation. I would talk about it very freely and sell it, but putting that somehow into this electronic and digital form.

[00:15:34] And letting it be seen without me knowing it was being seen.

[00:15:37] Rene: Yes. Without you there. Yeah. I don’t know your experience, but like working one-on-one with clients, you know, typically, like, I, like I, my background’s in, in web design development, like, Hmm. We, we’ll get on a call, I will talk to them and I will see kind of like what they understand, what they don’t understand.

[00:15:53] They can ask questions. I can be, you know, as personable as I can. Right. You know, you’re, you’re kind of, you’re selling [00:16:00] even really without selling it. But yeah, when you are not there at all, you’ve just recorded things or you’ve written things or whatever, and then you’re at the grocery store, you know, while people are looking at it, it’s.

[00:16:11] Kay: They’re reading your stuff, judging you.

[00:16:13] Rene: Yes. Yes. And you’re wondering, are they reading it? Are they getting it all? How are they consuming it? Like do they, what if they have questions and then they’re just leaving? Yeah. I think it, it, oh God, it’s definitely a different, different experience.

[00:16:25] Kay: It’s like a vision of, it’s like a vision of hell, isn’t it?

[00:16:27] That goes on in the back of your head when you, when when this is so good to hear this from someone else.

[00:16:32] Rene: Like I understand.

[00:16:33] Kay: That’s definitely how it feels in my head. Hoardes of people looking at you and going, oh, no.

[00:16:38] Rene: Yes. Yeah. What? Or just, or being confused and just leaving. Mm-hmm. Or like you, there’s no really opportunity. You, I think you just have to kind of like, make the marketing the best you can and try to get feedback however you can get it to, to change it.

[00:16:54] You sit down and you write it, you understand it, but somebody else coming, you don’t know what they don’t know and you don’t know why they’re not sticking around. Why they’re not.

[00:17:02] Kay: Yeah. And then, and then you just give up because there’s just too many barriers. So the the trick for me was to get over that by just doing it. Yes, do it, do it, do it, yes, do it, do it. My team did a, a pincer movement intervention on me and we started putting out content every single day and every week and, and we managed to get blogs up and we discovered that I’m fine on video if you start me off with video.

[00:17:23] Great. I can talk about it. Happy as Larry. Mm-hmm. If you try and make me write something to start off with, I find that much, much harder. So we are, we continually lean into video first. Mm-hmm. Um, and I, in fact, I’m trying to try and do that even more as we go into the next year, um, because I’m definitely freer in that medium.

[00:17:41] Mm-hmm. Partly because I grew up in the era when everything was in print. Um, and I did proofreading for exam companies and stuff, and you can’t, you, you have to overthink that sounds, your job is to overthink everything and check everything and not let it out of the door for two months until you’ve been through it 10 times.

[00:17:58] Mm-hmm. You can’t [00:18:00] do that. If you’ve got this course to sell and emails to get out and content to publish, you can’t keep doing that. And so for me, I had to really smash through this horrible, horrible fear barrier of mm-hmm of doing stuff that wasn’t perfect.

[00:18:13] Rene: Perfect. Yes.

[00:18:15] Kay: Oh yeah. The perfection is a beast.

[00:18:17] Rene: Yes, it totally is. But I like that you, that you identified, you know, something about yourself that you, you like video, you prefer video, some people don’t and that’s fine. But just finding that thing that you prefer. And then I think a lot of times the content, other forms of content can come from it. So if you record a video, a blog post can come from that.

[00:18:36] An email can come from that, social post can come from that, but you, you kind of get the content together instead of just staring in a blank screen, like, I’m gonna write a thousand word blog post, or a 3000 word blog post. Like, that’s hard to get started. Yeah. Or something like that.

[00:18:51] Kay: Yeah. Yeah. I think the next evolution for my content model in our business is to have, have a team of people who take my videos and make the other things happen, because I still find it difficult.

[00:19:02] I still overthink. As soon as I’m in typed words, mm-hmm, I overthink.

[00:19:07] Rene: And if you already have that content created in video form, I think that would be a great, yeah, great task for a virtual assistant or a writer. Something, you know, somebody that they can. Yeah. Take all that good stuff and you know. Absolutely. Create the other things.

[00:19:21] Kay: One of the challenges for the particular niche that I’m in, because it’s uh, it’s extremely technical in many ways because it is very specific to this one platform that has a lot of technical things that you need to know. And so for me, hiring a team has been a real mission to find my unicorns, uh, who are the people who have those skills, who will enjoy working with me, and I enjoy working with them.

[00:19:44] And they like that sort of tech because I don’t think you can reasonably write a blog about something wonderful about ActiveCampaign if you don’t at least love that platform. Right. And right. Looking at you have to.

[00:19:56] Rene: Yeah. Yeah, it is a lot of challenges.

[00:19:58] Kay: I have a lovely team now. I have [00:20:00] a team of around, that’s awesome, around five people who, who freelance into the business and they all get in into ActiveCampaign. You can be into it. Yeah. That’s awesome. So we are ready to gear up to the next level now here.

[00:20:12] Rene: Nice. I like it. I like it. And, and the continual growing. Like, I, I just think that’s so satisfying too. And again, like, it, it’s a directed, it’s your pace and directed from you, you know, you’re not, you’re not waiting for a boss to say like, okay, well I’m going to you, or here’s a different job, or you’re gonna do things differently.

[00:20:29] You know, you get to pick and you, you feel ready, you know, and maybe scared, but you feel like, okay, you know, what’s, what’s the next step? I, I know I want to take this step. How can I take this step? How can I surround myself with people to support me? Or how can I just break through these, these barriers, um, to be able to, you know, continue to move forward.

[00:20:49] I just think it’s so exciting. I, I, I’m jazzed about it.

[00:20:52] Kay: But it’s, it’s, it’s a really thrilling journey and that’s something that’s really lovely about being in a membership like the Atomic one. Mm-hmm. So they’re the ones I mentioned at the beginning that I joined to get me over that huge barrier. Cause I was like, someone’s gotta be able to fix this.

[00:21:06] Mm-hmm. Actually, do you know, I remember being on the pre-sale, like the pre-sales call with them and saying, if you can do this, I salute you because nobody else has managed to get me to do this. And they did. So they got a great testimonial about three months in, and I’m still part of that membership now. I feel like it’s like being in high school and you’re reaching up into the, the senior years of high school. Mm-hmm. I’m like, oh, I’m one of the big girls now. That’s nice.

[00:21:29] Rene: Big time. Yes. I totally get it. So anything else you wanna say about that one? You know, any final thoughts or do you wanna talk about the academy next?

[00:21:39] Kay: Let’s talk about the academy. Okay, let’s do it. So yeah, one of the, um, barriers of me figuring out what I could sell was that the scope of ActiveCampaign as a platform and the things that people want to learn and know and get excited about and be able to do with it is huge. Mm-hmm. It’s absolutely huge.

[00:21:59] [00:22:00] So after I’d done the deliverability training, which was, you know, it was ticking over, it was selling, well, once I finally did some emails about it, um, I was like, okay, I wanna do the next thing. And it dawned on me that it wasn’t gonna be a set of courses because a set of courses just wasn’t gonna be enough.

[00:22:16] Mm-hmm. By running that first digital paid training, I’d learned so much about how people who wanted the solutions, so they wanted someone to cut through the nonsense, show them what they could or should be doing with email marketing and automation, why they should be doing it in that particular way, and then understanding the platform.

[00:22:38] I realized there was so much teaching involved. Mm-hmm. And that it needed to meet users where they were at. So it needed to be driven by, here’s this business, whatever it is, because the range of businesses that use this tech is enormous. Mm-hmm. From tiny solo entrepreneurs making a craft thing and selling it locally right up to global corporates. I realized that there’s no possible way you could have a set of courses that would cover their needs in the way that I wanted to meet them, in the way that I knew I could.

[00:23:07] It dawned on me that this was gonna have to be a membership. And luckily I knew Mike and Cali from the Membership Geeks and I dunno if you’ve come across them, they run a membership about memberships.

[00:23:17] Rene: But I’m writing it down.

[00:23:18] Kay: Yeah, write it down. Memb. They’ve got a membership called the Membership Academy Geeks and it’s about how to run memberships.

[00:23:23] Nice. Right. Um, okay. And they are amazing. And I’d been to a conference of theirs and I just, something twigged inside me of like, ah, this is what it is. I did need a pincer movement again to get me over the line. I needed an intervention from my business besties who pinned me down and made me set a launch date and helped me write a launch program for the ActiveCampaign Academy.

[00:23:46] Um, and we got it out in beta with a handful of members and it’s thriving now. We’re a year and a half in now to the ActiveCampaign Academy. We launched really strong and it was very exciting to do that. Nice. Also [00:24:00] very scary, and it’s made up of courses, which include the original deliverability training and accelerated ActiveCampaign.

[00:24:07] They’re both in there. And then there’s another, there was a set of other key courses. There’s maybe 20 or 30 courses in total now. Mm-hmm. In there. But it’s got these amazing components outside of it. It came from the experience of teaching the deliverability. So we’ve also got a really strong community, which we run on a platform called Circle.

[00:24:26] Okay. So that we are not in social media, we’re outside of that. But it’s got a really lovely community feel and it’s very member driven. So they can ask me anything, absolutely anything, and they can ask me that either in the community or in the office hours. And we run office hours, calls live twice a week, every week.

[00:24:43] Wow. Yeah, they’re like the highlight of my week. They’re so much fun because it’s really just anything can come at you. Mm-hmm.

[00:24:53] Rene: Yeah. I like that. So people can join live and then get their questions answered. Yeah. And uh, or they can, they watch the replays too. Do you have replays for the office hours?

[00:25:02] Kay: No. Now we don’t do replays of the office hours, which is unusual. I know. There are two reasons really. One, they’re very frequent, and if we were processing that amount of video, you would end up with a huge stash of video very quickly. Makes sense. It would be really hard to index them in a way that would make it worthwhile because it would be very hard for anyone to find anything.

[00:25:22] I know there is tech that does that. Mm-hmm. But the secondary reason is that when you are working in the backend of automation tech like that and email tech, you are troubleshooting stuff or looking at processes. Inevitably you are going to see information that involves personal data. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:25:39] There’s you, you can’t troubleshoot stuff or get involved in, how do I put this together without looking behind the scenes. Mm-hmm. And so we took a decision really early on that office hours were never to be recorded. We, but what we do do is we make a digest, a learning digest. So we take three learning points from every [00:26:00] single office hour, and those are completely cataloged.

[00:26:02] So you get the full back catalog of those. Nice. We take three teaching points from every single one. Write them up, put them straight into the community, and then we send out an email every week. And that’s like, nice little Friday learning point. Even if you can’t come to the office hours, you can read the email on a Friday, um, and catch up on the things that came up.

[00:26:21] Rene: Yeah. And that’s so much easier to digest than like, here, watch these hours and hours of calls that you missed this week. Like people wouldn’t do that. So like they’re actually getting more from you by, you know, you summarizing and not giving those calls. I think, I think people miss that, that point. They want to give everything, but it, it’s, it’s too overwhelming.

[00:26:41] Like if by giving a little bit less, they’re actually getting more from it.

[00:26:45] Kay: Yeah. And it, you know, we’ve been challenged on that a few times because we, we have people all around the globe and I know that, um, for some of our people who are in Australia, it would be kind of nice to have them recorded, but we feel that very strongly that this is the right model. Mm-hmm. For us.

[00:27:02] Rene: Yeah. For you.

[00:27:02] Kay: Yeah. And we move the timings around to try and get it so that everyone can come. Mm-hmm. But because it’s live, we never do them in the late evening because frankly, I’m a bit rubbish after six o’clock.

[00:27:12] Rene: Yeah. Time, right? Yeah. Just it’s not, it’s not working.

[00:27:15] Kay: Yeah. We believe you should get the sparkliest on the ball version of me.

[00:27:19] If you, if you’re gonna make time to come to an office hours, then you deserve the best. Yes. Uh, but yeah, I think we have the right balance because the, the digest that we write have screen drops and images and videos. Lots of little on the fly tutorials. Mm-hmm. So if, if there’s something we haven’t covered already and someone asks about it, I’ll just make them a Loom tutorial and put it in there straight away.

[00:27:41] Rene: I love Loom.

[00:27:42] Kay: I know. It’s my favorite. It’s so fluent, isn’t it? And yes. So I guess that’s my main learning, the difference between the course where everything was how I thought it should be. Mm-hmm. And I know I’m kind of right. If that’s not necessarily the easiest thing to sell. [00:28:00] Mm-hmm. Is telling people stuff you know, they need to know, but they might not wanna hear about.

[00:28:04] Yes. Shifting from that to this extremely member-driven model where it’s you tell me where you are, I will help you.

[00:28:12] Rene: For where you are. Yeah, that makes sense.

[00:28:13] Kay: Wherever you are at, and we’ve got this growing bank of resources all, and it’s all got a directory on it, you can search the whole shebang. It’s like a brain dump with Auntie K.

[00:28:23] All the ActiveCampaign stuff is all there for them to dip into anytime and it’s really working and I love it.

[00:28:29] Rene: Yeah, it’s amazing when it all comes together. Like, you know, you, you probably thought of it beforehand, but then like now that it’s actually happening and people are responding, and so when people join the membership, did they, like how long did they stick around? Is it, you know, is it a yearly thing? Is it monthly?

[00:28:47] Kay: We have two levels. We have essential and advanced. And the reason we do that is because it’s such a massive platform and you can be working at very different levels in ActiveCampaign. Mm-hmm. They have different plan levels with different features.

[00:28:58] Yes. And we were like, it’s not fair to charge more money for the top featured people and then charge the, the people who don’t have access to those features, the same amount of money. Okay. So we split it into two levels, right? Um, and then you can pay monthly or you can go annual if you want to and, and get a bit of a discount on that.

[00:29:15] My philosophy has always been really strongly that you should be able to come and go freely to this membership because it is a technical, strategic membership that’s very focused on one part of running your business. And the reality is business owners in SMEs, they’re not focused on their email marketing automation every single month.

[00:29:35] Mm-hmm. That’s not how it works. With ActiveCampaign, people tend to surge. They’re either migrating into it or they’re like, okay, I’ve got a new product, or I’m gonna do a webinar. I’ve got an event coming up, boom. I want to get this stuff done. Mm-hmm. And I wanted it to be okay to come in, get what you need and then leave again.

[00:29:55] Mm-hmm. So we’ve stuck to that really firmly. So we have people who come in and out, which I really like. Oh, nice. [00:30:00] They’re like old friends. They come back in again.

[00:30:01] Rene: Yeah. That’s when they’re ready to do something else.

[00:30:04] Kay: Yeah. It’s not like you’re dead to us when you leave. Yes. Yeah. Like you left. Yeah.

[00:30:07] It’s the key end. Yeah. You can come back anytime and talk back from a minute. So we have a real mix of people. We have people who come in just for one month, we call that you can gorge and go. Mm-hmm. And that’s okay. So you could come in and do the deliverability course for way less than we were charging for it.

[00:30:21] There’s a standalone course and then push off again. That’s fine. But we also have people who are really in for the long term. So we’ve got both ends of the scale because we have consultants and people who deliver ActiveCampaign services to other businesses. Mm-hmm. Okay. So we’re like the teacher’s teacher.

[00:30:36] Nice. Um, which is really nice. Right? Yeah. So we’ve got a community that involves people who are very expert in ActiveCampaign and who are working at a very high level, and they’re gonna stay in hopefully for years, I think. Mm-hmm. Um, and they’re all over the world. And then we’ve got people, typically the small businesses, I would say stay between four and eight months.

[00:30:55] Okay, nice. That’s about right to really dig in and get some solid learning in and then it’s like, okay, you know how to fish now or off you go. Mm-hmm. Carry on catching fish and come back when you want to learn how to catch something different.

[00:31:07] Rene: Like sharks.

[00:31:08] Kay: Or Yeah. Yeah. When you’re ready for the sharks, come back, come on back. I like that. I’ll help you with that.

[00:31:14] Stealing that nice.

[00:31:16] Rene: So they come, they join the membership. Mm-hmm. They get access to the office hours, they get access to the courses that are in there. They can take them at their own pace. Do you have an option where they can work with you one-on-one within that, or is there any, is there any bit of you or is that that’s what they get.

[00:31:31] Oh, and the Circle community.

[00:31:33] Kay: Yeah, so the access to me via the Circle community and the office hours is really high level. Okay. It’s as if you were consulting with me, but it’s broken up into lots of little chunks. Mm-hmm. And actually, the reason I did it that way is because for me, I’ve tried teaching people ActiveCampaign in big blocks, like an hour at a time.

[00:31:49] It actually doesn’t work that well. Okay. It can do. The reality is for most people, consuming that kind of knowledge and really getting it to bed in [00:32:00] means you need to learn a bit. Go do it. Go do it. Mm-hmm. A bit more. Don’t do it. Learn a bit more. Go and do it. Mm-hmm. When you teach mathematics, you don’t just the whole world, here’s all the math.

[00:32:11] Yeah. One go. You teach them how to, to do one thing and one thing and one thing, and then, then you show them how to put those three things together. Mm. So there’s a reason that I do not offer one-to-one time right now. Mm-hmm. Because actually, I don’t think it’s the best way to learn ActiveCampaign.

[00:32:25] Mm-hmm. And I’m a trained teacher and I actually do know what I’m talking about on this one.

[00:32:29] Rene: Nice. I like it. I like it. Well, and if it works for you and it works for people and it works for what you’re teaching them specifically, like, then I think that makes sense. You know, it all fits together.

[00:32:39] Kay: Yeah. And I do know, I’m aware that sometimes some people need, do, need an extra pair of experienced hands to get into their ActiveCampaign account and do some implementation with them.

[00:32:48] Mm-hmm. And what we do in those circumstances, we, we sort of match make people, if we’ve got a member who needs some extra help, we will pair them up with a service provider who has hopefully some capacity to fit them in and has the right skill set for what they need. Matchmaking.

[00:33:01] Rene: Yeah, that’s fun too.

[00:33:03] It’s always fun to connect to people like, I don’t know. That’s very satisfying.

[00:33:06] Kay: Yeah. We’ve got a whole little ecosystem going in there. Yeah. Of, of people, of people working together. It’s really exciting. I love it.

[00:33:13] Rene: Yeah.

[00:33:14] So I have a question about the content specifically. Um, because this is technical and ActiveCampaign does change. How do you keep up with old videos that are, the concepts are the same, you know, maybe segmenting a list or whatever, but the interface is now totally different. Like, do you have some sort of a scheduled, um, like, you know, every month we just redo some videos? Or like, how do you manage that?

[00:33:40] Because you have a lot of content already. You know, there are certain things that are changing. How? How do you know what to go back and change when?

[00:33:48] Kay: Oh, that is such a great question. That’s such a great question. So how we handle it right now is we have a disclaimer basically on every page. It’s in the footer that says things may look different than how they [00:34:00] look. Where there is substantial change, we will try and circle back to it as soon as we can. If you see something that’s wildly different to how it’s looking on your screen and we haven’t done it yet mm-hmm. Give us a poke in the Circle community. Yeah. So we, we, we empower our members and I realize this kind of sounds like a cop out.

[00:34:16] But it’s not well, but because it’s what actually works in the real world.

[00:34:21] Rene: Yes, I think so. And I think that like, so let’s say you had a video that, that actually nobody’s watching and you’re redoing that every six months, nobody actually cares about that video.

[00:34:31] Right.

[00:34:31] Kay: And it happened to me this week. Um, someone went into a, uh, a course that we have about how to.

[00:34:38] How to set up from nose to tail, a lead magnet, opt-in delivery, and follow up. So it includes the landing page, the form, the emails, everything you need to be able to go set that up from scratch. And ActiveCampaign changed their email builder last year in October, and at the time I went and put a note on that lesson. Lesson that has these sort of imports. You can import the emails. And I went and stuck a note on it and said, by the way, if you’re seeing this, and it’s been a really long time since that change, and you want the fresh copies, just gimme a poke in Circle. So someone saw that came and prodded me, and the next day I go, I went and sorted it out for them.

[00:35:16] Mm-hmm. Nice. So yeah, we work on an as needed basis. Mm-hmm. For the most part. Because if we, it’s like you said, if we tried to edit everything so that it looked exactly like it does right now. We would never get anything done, done, and the members would not get the help that they actually need. Mm-hmm.

[00:35:32] That’s the reality.

[00:35:33] Rene: Right. And I think that, like, as a member, if I, you know, if, if, if I join something and I see that and then I reach out and they respond with a new video, I feel like you feel more like you’re even happier with that kind of service because you feel heard and listened to and you know, like, I think that that’s actually a better experience for, for people too. You and for them.

[00:35:56] Kay: Yeah. I, I think so. And if I get that feedback from, from my [00:36:00] absolutely lovely members. They’re wonderful. Um, and I feel very connected with them. Mm-hmm. Which is part of the privilege of running training in this framework, that having this framework fill my digital product mm-hmm. Has worked so beautifully for me.

[00:36:15] I feel enriched by it. My family is enriched by it. Mm-hmm. Because we connect with people from all over the world. Doing their amazing businesses. We have someone who delivers corporate training using sheep herding. We have someone who teaches the in, um, uh, Israel. We, we have people all over the world delivering their amazing business talents mm-hmm.

[00:36:39] To their audience. And, and the ripple from what we do here spreads because when we help them, they then serve their business veteran. They go launch their digital product. Right?

[00:36:49] Ooh, yes.

[00:36:50] Rene: Yeah. Yeah, it’s nice. It’s, I know we, we don’t think about it. know, A lot of people say like, oh, well, I’m not a doctor or something.

[00:36:57] Well, you know, I, I think that there’s still an opportunity to make a real difference in somebody else’s business, in somebody else’s life in that business. And then their customers, you know, who they’re serving.

[00:37:08] Kay: Yes, we have a testimonial on the sales page for the academy that was, is from one of our members in the very early days.

[00:37:15] And it’s exactly that and, and it makes me cry when I watch it cause it’s amazing. What a great feeling. What a great feeling to, to have, to be able to have an impact and do doing something that you feel so passionate about. Mm-hmm. It sounds kind of cliche, but I do, I get very overexcited.

[00:37:32] Rene: No, I believe you.

[00:37:33] Yeah. And I think, you know, the things that like tick a lot of boxes for you, like doing this and helping people ticks a lot of boxes for me personally. Like I love project management, I love the automation. I love checking things off. So like having somebody come to me and say like, I need help launching my product and being able to then help them actually launch it, I think is fun.

[00:37:55] And like I, when I did a lot of web work clients would come to me, I’d work with them [00:38:00] one-on-one, and we’d work together and I’d get the site launched and I would say, oh, your site is launched. It’s so exciting. And they wouldn’t be very excited. And I would think like you just spent thousands of dollars to have this done.

[00:38:11] But when you work with somebody and they launch a $49 product, they are very excited and I am very excited. Yeah. To help them take that next step in their business. It is much more fulfilling for me personally. Yeah. And maybe for them. So it’s, it, it’s weird how things work out.

[00:38:29] Kay: It’s a very tangible outcome, isn’t it?

[00:38:32] Mm-hmm. I think building stuff in ActiveCampaign can be like that. We build a lot of automation, so you’ve got this crazy stuff on screen and the contacts are kind of going through it like a marble run. Mm-hmm. And, and your job is to build marble runs, so it actually does what you want it to do.

[00:38:46] Rene: Oh, that’s fun.

[00:38:47] Kay: Yeah. Um, and people build these crazy marble runs. They’re just like absolute chaos, spaghetti on the screen. Mm-hmm. And then when we take that and we can show them, oh, you could build that just in, all in one line with with this special thing at the bottom. And they build it and it works, and it’s just like, oh yeah.

[00:39:06] Oh my God. That was magic.

[00:39:08] Rene: And just simplifying. Yeah, simplifying the chaos. Yeah. Is very, yes.

[00:39:13] Kay: What’s not to like, right?

[00:39:14] Rene: Yes. I know, right? Who out there doesn’t like email?

[00:39:18] Kay: Actually one of the interesting side effects of the membership has, and, and it’s unexpected, is that some of the members who came in, uh, a year or more ago because they wanted to learn to use ActiveCampaign for their own particular business in their own particular industry niche, have got so into it and so skilled that they are now offering ActiveCampaign services to other businesses in their niche.

[00:39:42] Rene: Wow. That’s amazing.

[00:39:43] Kay: That’s amazing. Doesn’t that rock? Yeah, I’m proud. I think that’s very cool. Proud. They’re, they’re my babies. I’m so proud of them when I see someone do that.

[00:39:50] Rene: And I think that brings up another good point that they’re not your competitors. You know, they’re not, you’re not like training your competitors where, [00:40:00] you know, business is going to be taken away.

[00:40:02] There are a lot of people out there. There are a lot of businesses, there are a lot of people who need help and yeah. I think that approach and, you know, looking at it that way, that there’s not a competition. There’s more than enough work to go around. We can all be happy. Uh, doing it I think is a good, good way to look at.

[00:40:20] Kay: That is so true of ActiveCampaign. We had this exact conversation this week because somebody who is a consultant, um, consultant level, uh, ActiveCampaign service provider came into the membership and they’d been sort of delaying because they felt like they were in competition, and I’m like, No, we’re not in competition.

[00:40:36] It’s all good. The, the, the rising tide lifts all boats. Mm-hmm. Yes. We get our heads together and we make magic happen for our clients, and there are not enough skilled ActiveCampaign consultants or VAs or business managers to go around. Mm-hmm. Not by a long way.

[00:40:51] Rene: Right, right. Yes. And everybody like you, I learned something from everybody that I come into contact with.

[00:40:57] Whether they don’t know as much about the topic, you know, that we’re, we’re talking about, or they know more than I know. Like there’s an opportunity to learn from every, every level.

[00:41:08] Kay: Absolutely. And I think that’s why community is such a, a pleasure as well to have as, as part of this framework for the digital product.

[00:41:15] One of the reasons I wanted to do it as a membership is because I really wanted there to be community and mm-hmm. A sense of belonging, um, and, and riding alongside people. Mm-hmm. Where you could talk about anything and everything. And I feel like the membership really allowed us to do that in a way that a course as a digital product, this, it would teach the thing, but it didn’t make me feel connected in the way that I wanted.

[00:41:40] Rene: Right. And I like that there are different opportunities for digital products. With a course or starting with a template or a video or whatever it is, and then kind of building that, that product ladder and, and you’re also seeing like what people need.

[00:41:54] So giving them these courses in the membership is great. They, they could also benefit from [00:42:00] office hours. They could also benefit from the Circle community, so it doesn’t have to be just straight up service or straight up digital product. You can kind of blend these things together where you give some of yourself.

[00:42:11] And they’re also kind of learning asynchronously, you know, based on the things that you’ve already created. Like it’s, it’s like a nice hybrid blend of things.

[00:42:19] Kay: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:42:20] Rene: That serves everybody.

[00:42:21] Kay: We call it like a concierge service. Oh yeah. If you come post into the community and say, right, I wanna do this, this, and this.

[00:42:28] Usually the next thing that happens is I ask a whole load of questions. Mm-hmm. Because I need to know where are you at right now? Mm-hmm. What do you, where, what’s the baseline here? Then we can direct you to the resources that we already have. If there’s something you don’t already have, we’re gonna make it for you right now.

[00:42:43] Mm-hmm. If we need to talk about it live, come to office hours. Mm-hmm.

[00:42:47] Rene: Yeah. That’s great.

[00:42:49] Kay: It’s amazing the things that we’ve managed to accomplish and the, the, the leaps that our members have made is just, I’m in awe of them. It’s incredible.

[00:43:00] Rene: Yeah. That’s very cool. Very nice. Yay. Awesome.

[00:43:02] So anything else that you wanna talk about? Any of the things that we, that we didn’t, didn’t touch on? Or maybe your plans? Or?

[00:43:12] Kay: My plans. Yeah. Yeah. I want to grow the academy. I want to reach more ActiveCampaign users and there is a resistance to joining a thing that is called a membership or that runs on a subscription model because people feel like they have to stay for ages.

[00:43:27] Okay. That’s not how we roll. Mm-hmm. Um, I really want people to understand that you can dip in and out and actually it’s shockingly the great value to come in for a month, take what you need, and then push off again. Mm-hmm. Um, so I think we’ve got some work to do on that front. Um, I’d like to continue nurturing other ActiveCampaign service providers who are not in competition with me because I don’t do one-to-one, so I’m looking forward to adding some layers on the top, I think. Mm. We’re ready to do that, but yeah.

[00:43:54] Rene: Yeah, I like that. I like that. And these things kind of unfold, you know, as you’re, as you’re moving along, it’s, you know, people will [00:44:00] say like, where do you see yourself 10 years from now?

[00:44:01] I’m like, I, what am I doing in 10 minutes? Like, I think that they, they kind of, you know, unfold at like, you become ready, like you reach a certain point Yeah. You reach a certain knowledge level or something like that. And then the next part of the path, you know, opens up for you.

[00:44:15] Kay: Yeah, I’m in, I’m a big fan of doing things responsibly and member driven. Mm-hmm.

[00:44:21] Rene: Yeah, I like that. Yeah, totally agree. So just to summarize, um, maybe what two to three things do you recommend for people who have not yet created anything, any, any first product yet?

[00:44:35] Maybe they just haven’t started or maybe they are stuck somewhere. What would you recommend for them?

[00:44:41] Kay: Okay. Um, first one is do it. You have to do it and get something out in the world in beta format. Beta was a real turning point for me. Mm-hmm. Beta in the sense of much, much cheaper than I was planning to price it.

[00:44:59] Um, but actually out there in the world with a page where people could click it and buy it. Mm-hmm. Because that, that was a turning point for me the day I actually managed to push the button on that. And remember I needed a lot of help. Emotionally, psychologically, even though I knew it was gonna sell.

[00:45:13] Really? Mm-hmm. I still need a lot of help. So we all need help. Once it was on the page and 10 people had bought it within a couple of hours, so much of the, the, the huge wall disappeared. Mm-hmm. So getting it into beta and then watching what happens and being ready to change your mind about some of the things you thought you were gonna do and the way you were gonna do it, and just listening and watching the people who are consuming your first digital product. Mm-hmm. Right.

[00:45:41] Rene: Maybe people might also call it like a soft launch. Um, oh yeah. Yeah. I think you mentioned you put a specific number of slots up. Is that how you determine, some people do it on an amount of time or some people might do it maybe another way, like, is, is, did that feel the best to you, like saying, 10 [00:46:00] slots, we’re gonna fill these and then we’ll do a regular launch later. Or how does that work specifically?

[00:46:05] Kay: That’s a really good question. Do you know what? I think it was underlying, I think it was cuz I knew that there were, I could probably count at least six people who I knew would definitely buy it.

[00:46:15] Oh great. Cause so it was, it felt safe. Mm-hmm. I think it’s around safety. That number capping for me, for my particular weirdness about selling stuff, capping the numbers felt safe. And I actually did the same when we launched the academy. Um, I had 10 spots and I, and I actually handpicked my academy betas.

[00:46:35] Oh, nice. Because I knew they were so ready for this product. Okay. And I knew that, that we got on and they were the right people to come in and it was gonna work. We, we, when we did the academy launch, we actually, I emailed them individually and invited them and said, I really want you to come into this because I want you to help me make this.

[00:46:54] Mm-hmm. So I don’t know what form it’s gonna take. Um, so the number capping on the academy was more intentional because I knew that 10 to 13 people felt right for that. Mm-hmm. The number capping on the very first product, the deliverability training, I think was just, it was the number I could cope with. Mm-hmm. Emotionally.

[00:47:13] Rene: Right. And then so after those people purchased or you know, signed up, joined, and then you, then it was open for everyone, or then you waited for a specific amount of time?

[00:47:24] Kay: I think we ran it for a month or six weeks. Okay. And then it went to a proper launch. And even then, it wasn’t a launch launch, I, it was a very hidden quiet. A friend of mine calls it humble mumbling.

[00:47:37] Rene: I like it. Nice.

[00:47:40] Kay: I’ve, I’ve got a course, I’ve got a course. That’s everything. It’s alright. You might wanna buy it. It was very much like that. It was got a humble mumble launch.

[00:47:47] Second thing I think is nobody cares about the images, logos. Nobody cares. I’ve spent ages writing a logo for better engagement and deliverability. One, I’m not a designer. Two, it was [00:48:00] a diversionary activity. Three, nobody cares and I never used it. So yeah, don’t get hung up on the looks.

[00:48:07] Rene: That’s a good point of like the things that actually don’t matter, like that you’re, we’re spending time doing the things like, because we think it has to be that way or it has to be done, but nobody, yeah, those things don’t matter. It’s a distraction’s.

[00:48:18] Kay: About the layout of a page. It’s, it’s a, it’s a, a very valid diversionary tactic. Mm-hmm. And you have, I had to bust myself doing that. I was like.

[00:48:27] Rene: It’s sneaky. It’s because you’re like, well, I have to do this for that, you know, how could I not, how could I launch without a logo or, you know, whatever, whatever it is.

[00:48:35] Kay: Yeah. My, my particular pitfall is custom gifs. I’m like, I need a custom gif for that. I’m, in fact I’m doing it right now. I’m trying to build a lead magnet about the, about golden treasures of email. And I busted myself the other day, spending an hour on a custom gif that I still haven’t finished. I was like, damnit, you’re doing it again Peacey.

[00:48:54] Rene: There you are.

[00:48:55] Kay: Yep. Nobody cares. Anyway, that’s number two. Um, and number three is to get the technical help that you need to be able to do that minimum viable product. Mm. Get the help. So even for me, I’m like a highly technical person. Literally, the course was about email marketing and automation, but I had some big holes on the website front that I didn’t know how to do and that were absolutely terrifying.

[00:49:19] Um, and so, I had friends, colleagues, and hired people to fill those gaps, and it’s really important that you do that because otherwise you get bogged down. Mm-hmm. Um, spending all of your time and emotional energy and feeling like it’s all going horribly wrong because you are fighting something that you are actually not skilled at.

[00:49:37] Rene: Yes. Yeah. You’re not good at, and I’ve, I’ve run into this myself too with, with design, you know, trying to launch things and spending so long on the design and it doesn’t look very good. I could just hire somebody and then it looks amazing.

[00:49:49] Kay: I’m doing the same thing again right now. That same lead magnet.

[00:49:53] I’m like, I’m working on that page and I’m thinking, I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be hiring someone to make this page. Mm-hmm. So [00:50:00] these are lessons that I still have to learn and relearn every single time. It just doesn’t go away. Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:50:07] Rene: But maybe you can catch yourself more quickly now.

[00:50:10] Kay: It’s easier.

[00:50:10] Yeah. Like I can bust myself doing this and I have the team around me to, to make it easier. And I, you can see it happening and you’re like, oh yeah, I know I need to do this this time.

[00:50:19] Rene: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I like that sort of that self knowledge, because I feel like you can grow. It’s not an overnight, it’s not a switch, you know?

[00:50:25] We were like, well, I shouldn’t be doing that now. I’m never going to do it again because I caught myself. But it’s a, it’s a quicker realization than next time. I, yeah. It’s quicker you recognize it. Yeah. Yeah. I’m in a rabbit hole. We we’re getting, You don’t fall too far down in.

[00:50:37] Kay: Yeah. And getting, getting the support. The support that I’ve valued most has been from people who are teachers as well.

[00:50:43] So the membership geeks, guys that I talked about, the atomic guys, um, Laura Robinson from Latitude who has helped me with copywriting. She’s the one who says humble mumbling, uh, Melissa Love from the design space, who helps me with, um, my website. You know, these people are teachers as well. They’re the real unicorns in the tech space.

[00:51:04] If you find someone who will not only support you to get through the technical barriers like me with ActiveCampaign, right? Mm-hmm. I’ll support you to get through the ActiveCampaign email marketing automation barriers, but they don’t just do it for you. They’re going to teach you and upskill you.

[00:51:19] Mm-hmm. So, as you progress through having digital product, number one, number two, number three. Going up the scale, your skill base grows and grows and grows. And that’s such a great feeling. It’s enormously empowering.

[00:51:33] Rene: Right. Yeah, that makes, that makes sense. Very good. So tell us where we can find you online.

[00:51:38] Kay: Wonderful. Um, so I’m fairly active on LinkedIn and you can find me there under my name Kay Peacey. Um, I am on Facebook as well.

[00:51:47] We have a really lovely Facebook community that’s open to everyone, and that’s called Automate Your Business with ActiveCampaign. Um, and so that’s our hosted community and it’s full of ActiveCampaign [00:52:00] users from all over the world. And by the way, I had that audience before I launched my, even that first free course.

[00:52:06] The community’s been a key part of the growth and I highly recommend that as a, a strategy. Get some people around you who, who are gonna fan girl you and make you feel amazing cuz that helped get help. And then there’s my website, which is at slickbusiness.co. So my business name is Slick Business. We deliver the ActiveCampaign Academy, which is a subscription-based membership for ActiveCampaign users all over the world.

[00:52:31] And I am your host, the Queen of ActiveCampaign. Come find me. Slick Business.

[00:52:35] Rene: The world’s leading. I I heard you’re the world’s leading, leading ActiveCampaign consultant. Yeah, little bird told me that. We can spread that out. We’ll, we’ll spread that out there. It’s good. You can spread that. I’ll put that in the show notes too.

[00:52:48] Okay, well thank you so much for coming and I love to talk to you soon.

[00:52:51] Kay: Love to see you. Thank you.

[00:52:52] Rene: Take care. Bye.

[00:52:54] Hey, thanks for listening. I’d love to continue the conversation in your inbox. Email SUBSCRIBE to hey at yfdp.show or sign up in the show notes to get bimonthly emails about how you can create, launch, and market your first digital product. Can’t wait to see you there.