[Transcript starts at 0:40]
Hello, hello, hello. My podcast people and thank you for joining me for your day. Another episode of My favorite Online Business, a podcast if you are listening, tuning in watching on the day that it drops. It is Monday, September, September. It's September sep, September 22nd. Right off the bat, doors are open for the final round ever.
Fun whenever folks of the Instagram intensive, for those of you who don't know, and if you don't know, I'm just gonna take it as you are brand new to the ecosystem. And in that case, I say welcome. The Instagram intensive is my six week online group coaching program that teaches health and fitness professionals exactly how to use Instagram for online.
I'm gonna use this episode right here to talk about how to retire a product because I'm retiring. This product, the Instagram intensive, uh, and I'm not gonna use this episode to talk about the program. Uh, so I'm gonna direct you to check out the registration page for the program for all the details.
Right. Quick overview, though. It is six weeks long. Live calls for the program. Alright, six weeks long. Live calls every Tuesday at 4:00 PM PST. They last at least about two hours. Everything is recorded if you can't make it live. We start on September 30th. The price, which I know is what you care about is $597.
What we learn. Any testimonials, all of that jazz. Can be found on the registration page, which isn't actually that long. It's comprehensive, but not like, you know, never fucking ending. Um, so smash the link. It's in the show notes. Thank you Courtney. Thank you jojo. And you can read all the things there. If you have any questions, you can just text me three one, what is it?
3 1 0 7 3 7 2 3 4 5 Or send me a dm. Okay. I have run the intensive. 16 times folks, this will be round 17. I've taken over 550 professionals through it, and it's been my signature offer for 16 years now. Right? So, so, wow. For 16 years, did I say 16 years? For six years now. For six years. Uh, so why retire it if it was 16 years?
It's definitely like, okay, time to retire it, but for six years, why retire it? Because I'm ready. Right. Uh, and that is a segue into today's main topic, which is how to retire a product or a service. Right? If only it was how to retire, I just stopped there. How to retire, period. Uh, the answer to that is be independently wealthy.
Um, but I'm not, so I'm working and I'm retiring. This offer and something else will fill in its place. What I don't know. Um, but when we talk about retiring an offer that means. That it's no longer available for purchase, right? It's done. It's gone.
Um, and as I'm saying that, perhaps you are hearing adios money and that's fair. Um, but what I'm, what I'm hearing when I say it and what I'm actually saying when I say is Hello space. Um, so the reasons why you'd retire and offer, it's not successful. Um. You're streamlining your business. You have too many offers.
Those kind of go hand in hand there, right? You no longer, you know, it's no longer relevant to what you offer. It's no longer relevant to what you do. Like, you know, in my case, retiring something like the breathing with the maestro course, it made sense because I'm like, I'm not doing that shit anymore. I'm doing online business.
The stuff in it is still true and valid, um, but it's not what I do. Right, or maybe it's outdated. Um, perhaps you're teaching something in it, and the strategy in it, the, the concepts in it are outdated. So you retired or maybe just maybe you've outgrown it, right? This is a little bit where I'm at with the intensive.
It's still good. Uh, it still has valuable information, has correct information. It's not outdated. I've just outgrown it and I'm ready to be done with it. Um, and, and you know, another, I think the last reason here for why you might retire an offer is that. Uh, you know, a reason that I haven't thought of, I don't know.
There, there could be other reasons. Um, so I wanna just, you know, uh, put them all out there. Um, but I do wanna circle back to the first one, which was that it's not successful. And note that as a business coach, I want you to try to run something until it is successful. Um, it's that very anti Roomba approach, right?
The Roomba, like you hit you, it goes forward, it hits, something goes in different direction, it hits something, it goes in different direction. We want that for a Roomba. We don't want that, want that for our business, right? We just go in a completely different direction. We want the Kool-Aid man approach, right?
Oh yeah. We want you to bust through the wall. So. When we are talking about retiring an offer, it's not, 'cause I always tried it once, it didn't work. Um, and this, and I mean this is kinda a bit of a deeper discussion and, and ties into other episodes that I've made about no launch. Should be a guess. You should go into it having listened.
You have an audience, you're listening, you're asking them, you're building things they want, and you know how many people will buy. It's not a guess, it's math. Um, but. Today we're gonna talk about, uh, why I retire, right? And so I think the most important part of retiring an offer is giving yourself a financial runway or, uh, a bit of a buffer, right?
Especially if this thing is still bringing in money, right? Of note, it is not at all uncommon that you will have to take steps backwards financially in order to move forward, quote unquote move forward with things or change things. And this is a bit maybe, you know, of a tangential topic, but it's something that I see when folks are, you know, trying to transition or switch from.
One-on-one, and they're looking to have more, you know, group offers and they become very resistant because there's going to be a dip in income. And it's like, I told you this, if you're trying to make more time, often, oftentimes the way you make more time is by taking a, a decrease in your revenue. So, okay.
Right. Nothing changes. If nothing changes. And your income will often change temporarily at least, so that you can change how much time and space you have. So that you can change what you're doing and offering. Right. But Circle Max, what I was just saying. The most important part of, to me, the most important part of retiring an offer is creating that financial buffer.
Um, such that, you know, you, you have space and you have the ability to make better decisions, um, which may mean that you run things for a little longer than you want so that you can stack that paper. Right. This is the same advice that I give to my folks who wanna leave their job. And I'm like, yo, stay long enough to create the financial safety net.
Like, don't just quit. And then you're like, fuck I, I make, I just jump into the next bad thing. Right? Which may mean knowing your numbers. Right. I, I'm kind of loose with this, like, yes, know your numbers or like, no. And how much you're bringing in, how much you need, or, you know, the flip side, how much money do you need to feel safe?
How much money do you need to not make desperate decisions? Right? I, I. I am not like some, a super spreadsheet tracker of things. I have never been like that. I have a spreadsheet, so when I, there's a little bit of a tangent, but I'm gonna say it. When I do my financial meetings on, on Wednesdays, I write down like what the credit card bills are.
Like, I pay everything for my business on credit card, and then I pay the credit card off. But I don't like track things. I've ne I've never liked that. It feels stressful for me. I, I have Sandy as my, um. Bookkeeper because I don't, I like, don't like looking at it, but I do look at things overall and I'm like, is this number, I have a bunch of bank accounts.
I'm like, is this going up or down? Right. It's the same thing with like, when I plan my workouts, right. I, I program for myself at this point and y'all know, I've been talking about that and, and starting from Aaron's program, but overall programming for myself. I don't track like the number of sets per week.
I just see like, am I, does what I look like, is that changing? Am I getting stronger? So I do write down the exercises. I do write down how much I did right? But I'm not like fucking in the sheet, like looking at it each time. I'm like loosely looking at the, looking at the outcome and being like, am I happy with the outcome?
No. Then like I have to change something. Now this is where it's helpful to track something. 'cause you're like, well, what the fuck do I change? So. In this case, I have the information, right, but I'm not like studying and be like, it's study 11 sets or 11 to between 11 and 20 sets. And I'm doing, it's just like, Hey, I'm gonna do this.
I'm gonna go by how it feels and see the outcome. And then if it's not what I want, who I can go back into this spreadsheet because I do have that. Um, so it's just kinda like me always wanting to give you permission to do the things in the way that work best for you, but also being like objectivity can matter and does matter.
And so have like at least one put in there in the real world, right? So. Creating that financial buffer, that financial safety net may mean getting into the numbers and what that looks like for you is is up to you. Right. So maybe that's knowing how much money you need to make per month. Maybe it's knowing how much like your feeling safe number is and that, and you know, I always say go to a meet, study his stuff, learn from him.
Um, because part of that is the money psychology side of things. And it's just like people can make up a number, but then the number keeps growing of like, oh, when I have this much money, I'll feel good when I have this much money. So like part of that is going into your money psychology and, and, and getting objective about things.
But um, again. Creating the financial buffer so that you don't just go and make shitty decisions after and desperate decisions. Right. So moving on to the act, the actual action items for retiring a product or service. Um. It's nothing needs to be as complex. Like it's not that super fucking complex of a thing, but so you, you could absolutely just be like, fuck it, I'm retiring this thing and you just stop offering it.
You don't have to make a big to-do about it, you just stop offering it. That is one. Um, what can be nice though, and what I'm doing obviously with the intensive, is I'm promoting and advertising it as the last go round. Um, which is a nice thing to do, especially if this thing has some notoriety and people that perhaps have, you know, continued to add themselves to the wait list multiple times, you know, for a few rounds and people that are kind of on the fence.
About taking it and they're kind of just largely waiting for the right time or they're waiting for some external force to come and knock them off the fence and it's like, okay, well here's the external force sign up or don't, I don't really care either way, but like, here's the thing that's going to push the decision for you.
Um, so how much you promote it and advertise it, as always is up to you, right? 100% up to you as is typically and always the case for all things. When you have an audience that actually buys stuff, the more you promote it. The more you of the things you'll sell. There is like a diminishing returns I think when you're just like start to annoy people.
But that's like a pretty high ceiling and I think the majority of are still not gonna mean close to that. Um, but like if you send one email, you'll probably make more sales. If you sent two, you'll probably make more sales. If you sent five, you will not make more sales if you sent 500, right? There is a diminishing returns on this thing, but you see how like five is more than one and you'd probably make more sales if you would send five emails as opposed to one.
Uh, depending on if you have that audience that actually buys stuff. Right. Um, so I put, yeah, there's some caveats there, but they're like common sense caveats there. Um, so do with that information as you will. You wanna send more emails? You wanna do more promotion, do it. You don't. That's fine too. Um. I'm thinking.
'cause I, I, it's, as I'm talking about, 'cause the outcome of that is like, more money. Do you want more money? Do you need more money? It's not a bad thing. Do you want more money? Um, but there was a, a meme and shout out to, uh, Kristen. Kristen Mann posted it and it was Kermit and he was sitting on the edge of like a sofa or a, I think it's a sofa.
And he had like a little, it was his whole body and he had like, his little legs and, uh, it wasn't, it was like a puppet. It wasn't, it wasn't a cartoon. And he had like a, a teacup on his, in his lap. And he was just like looking like kind of melancholy. And the caption at the top was, it said. Let's get this bread, I guess.
And for some reason that shit, I saved it. That shit cracked me the fuck up. And I messaged Kristen and I was like, why did I laugh so hard at this? And she was like, me too. Like that shit's funny. Um, so go ahead, make money. Like I'm, I want you to make money that's so wrong with making money. Um, but you all just know that, that that's not like my number one reason for doing things.
It's not like the thing that drives me. And so I, I thought that that. That me was funny. Um, but action item wise, let's get back to that. Number one, we gotta create, create that financial buffer. Number two, promote this thing as much as you want. Let people know it's going away. Then number three, run it right.
Sell it and run it. That one last time. You can discount it if you want or don't, doesn't matter. Me. Um, if it's a live thing, I probably, I personally wouldn't discount it. I'm not discounting the intensive. Um, if it's self-paced. Or DIY thing, uh, it could absolutely act as a double incentive to be like, it's going away and it's discounted.
Obviously, I never discounted more than like my, like the initial price that I had it at and like the deepest discount always go to my earliest adopters. But if you wanna discount it, you can. If you don't, that's fine too. Um, should you add things to it? Honestly, it's up to you. I'm actually kind of thinking about that right now and adding some stuff to the intensive and not as a way to get more people in, but as a way to kind of segue it and tie it into whatever might come next.
I have a few ideas of things, not, I'm not super certain, but I'm kind of like, Hey, I could put these things in and it's. Again, it's not an incentive to get people to join. You could use it as an incentive. Um, I'm not marketing because I don't really know what I wanna do with it, but I might introduce it during this round and be like, cool.
It's a cool segue into the next thing I wanna offer. Um, bringing in some ai, bringing in some business coaching into, into the intensive, some more business coaching than I normally do. Um, so I guess actually I'm advertising right now. 'cause this episode now I think about it drops on the day that it's open to the public.
Um, but I haven't, I haven't figured out quite fully what I wanna do with that. Um. So we'll see. Um, but like I said, if you wanna add things, it might make sense to add something or change it a little so it ties into the new direction that you are going. It just depends on your personal situation. Okay, so that means this is the next step.
We said step one, create the financial buffer. Step two, promote this offer as much as you want. Label notes, it's going away. Step three, run it slash sell it. Step four. Stick to your word and don't bring that shit back. Right. Unless you, unless when you're, yes, you can always do what you want, but it's also like, stick to your word here because the next thing you say, it's going away.
People are gonna be like, yeah, fucking sure it is. Um, so unless you say that, you reserve the right to bring it back at any time. And I'm thinking about Annie Miller, she's doing this right now, and I think it's, it's good, right? She's like. I'm retiring it, it's going away. I do reserve the right to bring this back at a different time.
Um, but this, it makes sense for her because she's going all in on programming, right? As opposed to business coaching. So she's getting rid of the business coaching offer that she has and yeah, she could bring it back later, but she's like, Hey, this is my focus right now for this season I'm in. Maybe it comes back later, maybe it doesn't love that.
Um, but you can't be wishy-washy, you know, on back and forth with shit and bringing it out of retirement and then retiring it, and then bringing it out of retirement. Like, come on. We we're in the business of trust, right? So the next step, right, we said create the financial buffer. Number two, promote it as much as you want.
Number three, run it. Sell it. Number four, stick to your word. Don't bring it back. And then number five, fill in the space that you've created or allow that space to be filled in by the universe, right? If you are streamlining your offers, uh, then you likely already have things in place and you've done the math and you've reorganized the things so you can just run with that direction.
If you're retiring the offer, the service, the product, because you're just ready to be done. Like I am with the intensive. Then, you know, to me it becomes about leaning into the space and that's what I'm doing, right. The space that you've created. And obviously I have things going on with my other podcast, Chachi, pt, curious.
If you haven't checked it out, check it out. We'll link it in the show notes. Thank you, Courtney. Thank you Joe. Um, I have my podcast program, uh, press publish. We will actually drop the, um, wait list for that in the show notes as well. Thank you, Courtney. Thank you, jojo. Um, and now it's also going to be about looking for things that I wanna do, right?
Listening for things that are needed and being open to what the universe. Serves up to fill in that space. We will see, like, again, I'm thinking about adding some stuff into the intensive maybe, um, that, that, so I can try it out in the new direction, but, but we'll see. Um. We'll see, right? So to recap those steps here, number one, create the financial buffer.
Number two, promote the offer the service to product as much as you want. Number three, run it. Sell it. Number four, stick to your word. Don't bring that bitch back. Number five, fill in that space or allow that space to be filled in by the universe. Alright, as per always, I hope that you can see that my approach is not to overcomplicate things.
And more than anything, it is to give you the permission that you don't need to retire things, to stop doing things, to stop offering things. You can do that. You can just stop. I, and I think we're gonna see a lot of that actually probably in this year and in the next year, mainly 'cause of the cycles that we go through, right?
I think we kinda all go through these cycles together. Um, and it's been five years since COVID fucking wild, right? And what worked during COVID, what was launched during COVID is no longer working or it's no longer necessary. It's no longer needed. And so people are shifting and evolving and if that's you as a business owner, this is the permission that you do not need to stop offering some shit.
It's okay. I create the financial buffer if you need one. Uh, and then go through those steps and, and see, see where the universe takes you. All right. Don't forget folks, doors are open this week for the last time ever. For the 17th and final round of the Instagram intensive, all the deets are on the registration page, so check that out.
Like I said before, if you have any questions, hit me up. Happy to chat. All right, that's all that I got for you, as always. Endlessly, endlessly. One more time, endlessly appreciative for every single one of you. Until next time, friends, maestro out.
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