You are listening to Scale Your Joy, episode 2. Let’s get to it.

Welcome to Scale Your Joy, the only podcast that teaches high achievers with heart how to craft a life and build a business focused on freedom, joy, self-expression, and social impact. I’m your host, Kaneisha Grayson, a Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School grad, author, essayist, and self-made entrepreneur. I did it and you can do it too. Let’s get started.

Hey everyone. It’s Friday for me and I am having an amazing Friday. I would like to crown this Friday as my lifestyle freedom Friday. So a Friday in which I am really feeling the benefits of having lifestyle freedom. So I’m going to talk to you about what my Friday has been like so far today.

This morning I woke up, took my dog to the dog park. You know, Zadie, Zany Zadie. And then I had a graphic design strategy call with my friend Ana. She is helping me with the cover design for this podcast. And my producer’s graphic design team is also working on some samples for me to look at but we just had a lot of fun discussing concepts, color palettes and all those kind of things.

Then after that I had a great catch-up call with Dylan, who used to be the head of enrollment at my company, The Art of Applying. So he was the main person who would help bring in new clients into our program. And it was so fun to talk to him and hear about how great things are going in his life and career since he’s left The Art of Applying. And while we miss him at The Art of Applying, I’m so happy for him. And it was really wonderful to have that time to be able to catch up with him. Then I went back to the dog park with Zadie and then I went house hunting with my realtor.

So, I have recently decided that I would like to buy a house here in Austin, in my hometown. I’ve been a proud renter for a long time but about two weekends ago my boyfriend Tyler and I spent the whole weekend looking at houses for me to rent and I just got this fire inside of my heart that was like, “Wait a minute, I don’t want to pay Mike’s mortgage.”

I just call him Mike, he’s just like the faceless dude who has a lot of intergenerational wealth passed down through various forms of privilege, as well as his own income from his own hard work. And he owns, you know, two, three properties and he’s 31. That’s who Mike is in my mind. He’s just this made-up person.

But I was just looking at these houses and I’m like, “Tyler, I do not want to pay Mike’s mortgage. It is time for me to buy a house.” So I have started the house hunting home ownership journey. And today was the first day of going out to look at houses with my realtor. And I just had such a good time. We looked at a wide range of houses that are all within my budget.

The budget that I have chosen is $600,000. So, I can afford more than that but I have decided I would like to, as much as possible, keep the house within $600,000. And the real estate market here in Austin is so hot that it’s very likely I’m going to need to bid more than, quite a bit more, maybe 20% more than the list price on the house.

So, we went and looked at a variety of houses and I just had a lot of fun exploring different areas of South Austin, that’s where we looked and concentrated on today. Talking about what does work for me, what doesn’t work for me, how’s the yard, how is the finish out?

And me and my realtor just really mesh well and I really feel like she’s taking really great care of me and really taking time to get to know me and what matters to me, what doesn’t matter to me in a house. And I don’t expect that we’re going to find a house very, very quickly. But I do think that I’m going to have a lot of clarity in my home buying journey. And I’m really excited about that.

So, that is how I spent the first part of my Friday. So, after we did some house hunting, I came home, ate a late lunch. Got some chicken from like one of those Mexican like roasted chicken Pollo Loco, Pollo Rico, they’re always called like Pollo something, and here in Austin it’s called Pollo Rico. In California it’s Pollo Loco. It was so good; I love that type of chicken and I must learn how to make that kind of roasted chicken.

And I watched Bling Empire, which if you are not watching and you like reality TV, I highly recommend it. I do want to provide a trigger warning though for one particular character in the show who’s extraordinarily, he’s got some sort of emotional issues going on in the show and he’s really verbally abusive to his girlfriend in the show. And so just a trigger warning on that. But I find it a fascinating and highly entertaining show.

So anyway, I watched some Bling Empire while I ate lunch. And then I planned out this podcast episode for you. After that I will go back to the dog park with Zadie and then Tyler is coming over for the weekend. We’ll figure out what we’re having for dinner, and we’ll probably go to the dog park again.

All right, so that was a little bit of information about my lifestyle freedom Friday. And the things that you’re going to learn here with me on Scale Your Joy are going to give you the tools and strategies so that if you decide that you want more lifestyle freedom you can have it.
All right, so today’s listener spotlight is of Nina. She writes, “I’m really excited that you’re embarking on this journey.”

So, Nina is talking to me, Kaneisha. So, “Kaneisha, I’m really excited that you’re embarking on this journey. I’ve followed you for a while with your admissions consultancy, and I think you’re doing such great work. My own MBA plans have been put to the side because I’m awakening to new desires to serve the world in a more authentic way. I want to take deliberate actions that fulfill my soul while helping others live a life worth living too. I just know that there’s so much more for me to do besides sitting in an office cubicle. So why not support a fellow citizen of the world and learn from them as well?”

Oh, that was lovely. I loved that. Thank you, Nina. Okay, today we are going to learn our first framework of scaling your joy.
The first framework that we are learning is called the coaching business cycle, this is something that I’ve created, something that I’ve named. Should we add my name to it? Kaneisha’s coaching business cycle? But for short we’ll call it the coaching business cycle. And then for even more short we’ll call it the cycle, that sounds very mysterious and authoritative.

Things to know, I created the phrases that comprise this framework and I created like what the phrases are and I created them in the order that you hear them. But I need you to know that I did not create the concept of how to have a coaching business, or how to have an effective online business. What I’m teaching you in the coaching business cycle is what many, many, many other people on the internet are teaching. But I have packaged it in such a way that it is now a framework.

The same way that a business scholar or business professor at Harvard Business School is not creating the notion of, you know, a certain type of marketing. But they capture that notion and they communicate that notion in a framework so that they’re able to kind of package it and teach it in a nice, bite-sized chunk. So that’s what we’re doing with the coaching business cycle.

Another great thing to know about each step of the coaching business cycle that I’m going to teach you today is that you don’t need lots of money to complete any of the steps. Money is helpful. You’re going to need to invest some amount of money to do some of the steps, but you do not need tons and tons of money.

I would say that the entire coaching business cycle can be completed by you spending, let’s say, maybe $200 total. But a part of the business coaching cycle is bringing in money, because we’re charging for our services. So, as long as you’re charging more and bringing in more money than you’re spending then we’re profitable.

So, I just want you to know that the coaching business cycle, there are ways to use money in the coaching business cycle to speed up the cycle or to increase the effects of each step of the cycle, or to scale up the cycle. But you don’t need a lot of money to complete any of the steps of the cycle, which is what makes it so powerful.

Last thing I want you to know about the coaching business cycle is that each element and each step of the cycle influences and enhances the other elements and the other steps. And although they enhance and influence each other it is best to do them in order. That’s why I’m going to teach it in order, I’m going to repeat the steps. And then, of course, this is recorded and you can listen to this as many times as you like.

And I do encourage you to just relax and listen to this without taking any notes, without wracking your brain about each step of the coaching business cycle and trying to apply it to your business or to your potential business and just listen and absorb the information. And then you can go back and relisten to it and maybe take some notes or relisten to it and think about how each step of the cycle applies to your business or your potential business.

All right, are you ready for the coaching business cycle? The cycle. All right, let’s get started.

The first step of the coaching business cycle is you create content. So, at The Art of Applying we create content. We have chosen to create content via blog posts. So, we have a blog post that we publish every week at theartofapplying.com. We also publish content on YouTube. We have a YouTube video that comes out just about every week. And I’ll tell you later in the coaching business cycle what is actually in those YouTube videos.

But that’s step one, is you create content. You can choose to create content on a variety of platforms. The ones that we concentrate the most at The Art of Applying, my business, is creating content on our own website at theartofapplying.com as well as publishing YouTube videos.

That has not always been our strategy, I spent probably, I think, 9 years of the 11 years I’ve been in business primarily focusing on creating content on the blog and also answering questions on forums. But I actually don’t think that that step, that answering questions on forums, I think that actually that action goes in a different part of the cycle. So, pretend I didn’t say it yet. All right, step one is create content.

Step two is collect. That’s the next C, it’s collect. Collect emails. So, I don’t care if you have 1,000 followers on Instagram or 90,000 followers on Instagram, those followers don’t mean anything if, well they mean something, right? Because they’re giving you their attention, which is great. But what you don’t want to do is be trying to grow your presence on a bunch of social media platforms but you don’t actually own the relationship.

Owning the relationship means that you have those people’s email addresses so that you can then do the next step of the cycle, which is communicate consistently. And doing that cultivates trust. So, let’s stick to collect emails. So, once you create content, the content you create should help you collect their email addresses.

Now, some people may just give you their email address because you write something helpful and useful on your blog and then you say, “Can I have your email address?” But usually, they’re going to want something of value in exchange for their email address. And that might be something like, at The Art of Applying it might be like, “We will give you a resume template that we recommend you use for your applications. So, in exchange for your email address we’ll give you a resume template you can use in your application process.” So, step two is collect emails.

Step three is communicate consistently, and then in parenthesis I’ve written which cultivates trust. When I say consistently, I mean consistently. What do I mean by that? I do not mean that you need to communicate every day. At The Art of Applying, we send out a newsletter every week on Thursdays. And when I say it’s a newsletter it is not some complicated, beautifully designed newsletter type thing. Nope, it is just an email that we send through an email marketing system.

Examples of email marketing systems – we use Ontraport, but we used to use AWeber. What’s that? There’s a lot of them, I can’t remember the name of the very popular one. I want to call it email monkey, it’s totally not email monkey, but you’ll know it when you see it. Because it will sound something like email monkey. Mailchimp, maybe we should start the janky off-brand of Mailchimp and call it email monkey.

All right, so anyway you are using Mailchimp, or Ontraport, or AWeber, or janky email monkey to send communication to your people consistently. Don’t make it complicated, we use an email marketing system, we send out a simple, no graphics, just an email letting our people know, you know, “Hey, hope you’re having a great Thursday. Kaneisha here again, this week’s blog post is about A, B, and C.
And then we include a call to action, which is also an important part of the coaching business cycle. And so our call to action is book a quick call, book a 15-minute quick call with our team to talk about your applications. And that’s all we send every week. It’s very simple. So that’s step three, communicate consistently, which cultivates trust.

And just one last thing to say about communicating consistently is that whatever cycle, or whatever rhythm, or cadence of communication you choose, you need to stick with it as much as you can. Which is why you should not commit to something that’s like daily or three times a week when you’re starting out. You should commit to something more like, even if it’s once a month.

My podcast comes out every month and my people can count on it that by the end of a day of a month they’re going to get a new podcast episode from me. If a podcast is what you’ve decided is your content. Or if it’s a blog post, my people are going to hear from me twice and month and it’s always going to be the second Tuesday and the fourth Tuesday of every month.

More is not better than consistent, okay? So consistent is better than more. If you can do more and consistent awesome, but that might be a recipe for burnout. I would say as a person who’s beginning, if you can do it consistently, I would recommend a weekly cadence. So, once a week you write a blog post, or make a YouTube video, or like this podcast, release a podcast episode.

All right, the next step in the coaching business cycle is charge for your services. This part’s really important, you can’t make money if you have nothing for sale. Okay? So, go ahead and decide what you’re going to sell and make sure that you actually charge for it. We’ll talk in future episodes about how to decide how much to charge, how to price your services, how to create your packages. But for now, I just want you to know the important step to just keep in mind is you must charge for your services.

Next is call to action. You need to have a clear, specific call to action for your audience. That call to action needs to be one thing that you want them to do. For example, at the end of these early episodes of Scale Your Joy, the one call to action for you is to enter into our giveaway. It’s leave a review on Apple Podcasts and enter into the five-book bundle, to be able to possibly get the five-book bundle in the giveaway. That’s our one clear call to action. In the future, once the giveaway is over, we’ll have a different call to action.
The call to action needs to be something that leads the person to having a conversation with your team, so that might be a sales call, or leads to them considering buying whatever you’re offering.

So it’s possible that you are selling something that doesn’t require someone to talk to you beforehand. Let’s say you’re selling a, I don’t particularly recommend it, but let’s say you’re selling like a $15 e-book guide on something. I don’t recommend doing that for beginners. But let’s just say you’re selling a $15 e-book guide on how to get back on track with your new year’s resolutions. Then you could have your call to action be, “Hey, my e-book is $15.”

And you know, your call to action could be a sales page, which is literally just, think of it as a written infomercial for whatever you’re trying to sell. So that would be your call to action, is you want them to read the sales page and then the sales page will have a lot of buttons on it and bright things that are really encouraging the person to buy the book or to give you their email so they can read an excerpt of the e-book. So we’re on call to action and that is that step.

The next step is close the deal. So, closing the deal is where we actually collect money from someone in exchange for helping them achieve an outcome, because this is the coaching business cycle, right? So we are coaching people. We are either coaching people on weight loss, or we’re coaching people on mindset, or we’re coaching people on how to get into grad school, or coaching people on how to get a job at BCG, Bain or McKinsey.

So, closing the deal is the money exchange part because we are charging for our services, we already know how much our services cost and how much coaching with us costs, we’ve already given them a call to action. And you know what I think might be missing from my coaching cycle? Might be the word conversation. There needs to be some sort of conversation that happens between you and the buyer.
The conversation can be on an actual sales call or that conversation can be on that sales page where you’re addressing each of their questions, doubts, and objections in the sales page as you write it.

All right, so closing the deal, I know I’m skipping past it and making it sound like super easy, just close the deal. But just let me get through the steps and then we’ll dive into what closing the deal actually means on future episodes and how to actually get people to buy from you.

Once you close the deal this person is now your client, they’re not just a reader, or a fan, or a follower. They are now a paying client. This is the point where we coach the client. So, you take the client through a structured process where you help them unearth what’s not working right, show them what your process is, that’s what happens during the conversation stage of the coaching business cycle, and help them understand how you can help them.

You’ve closed the deal, you’ve exchanged cash, now they’re your client and you coach them. You take them through the process that you said you were going to take them through. While you are coaching the client you also want to do the next step, which is cultivate community among your clients.

So, even if you are doing one-on-one coaching, let’s say you are a one-on-one coach for dating you still want to not ignore the power of network effects. My client, Emanuel, recently told me that one of the things he loves about The Art of Applying is the powerful network effects. Meaning that the more people who join The Art of Applying as clients and as consultants, the more valuable having been a member or being a member of the community of The Art of Applying is.

So, you want to cultivate community among your clients. Even if you only have two clients, if you have their permission introduce them to each other. They can support each other.

After cultivate community you also want to celebrate their wins. Not just their win at the end, but their wins along the way. It can be really hard to stay encouraged when you are being coached through something difficult.

If your client could achieve success on their own maybe they wouldn’t have hired you. Or maybe they hired you because they just don’t want to do it alone or they don’t want to do it the hard way. And so it’s important to celebrate your client’s wins along the way, not just at the very end because you have to help keep them encouraged and also help them stay motivated to continue on through all the steps of your coaching process.

The next step is capture. Capture their story. It’s so important for both the client to have that sense of accomplishment and to really reflect of the journey that they’ve gone on with you, but also the coaching business cycle.

At The Art of Applying what we do to capture our client’s stories is I approach every client and ask, “Can I share your story? Can I interview you?” Sometimes we do video on, sometimes we do video off, sometimes we use their real name, sometimes we use an anonymized name. It’s very important to me that I capture my client’s stories and share them. So we share them on YouTube.

I said I was going to share what we publish on YouTube, stories y’all. Everyone loves a story. So our YouTube channel for The Art of Applying is lots of client stories talking about how hard things were when they didn’t have help. How they found The Art of Applying. What made them commit to working with The Art of Applying. What the experience was like, what they liked, what they learned. And then of course the triumph, what schools did you get into and how much money did you get?

Telling that story really benefits our clients because it helps remind them of how far they’ve come and reminds them that they can do this again. That while we’ve had an amazing journey together it was not magic, it was a process. It’s also the result of their hard work and dedication and persistence and tenacity.

It’s also helpful because these captured stories of your successful clients, it helps other people out there who are still suffering without your solution realize that, “Oh my goodness, that process that I read about on her website or that she talked to me about on a sales conversation, it actually worked for a real person. And maybe if might work for me.” And so those captured stories end up operating as the most compelling and authentic marketing material you could ever want. Okay? So that’s the capture step.

And then the next step is complete the engagement. It’s really important in coaching that you give people a sense of completion. The same way that we graduate from high school, and then we graduate from college, and then we graduate from grad school. We have that beautiful sense of completion where we are witnesses as we walk across the threshold from the person that we used to be to the person that we are now who has found the solution and who no longer has that problem. Or who has the problem and now knows how to navigate that problem with more ease and confidence.

And it’s really important to give people a sense of completion, to know when they have “won”. It doesn’t mean that they won’t be your client anymore, it might be that now it’s time for you to reengage the person to work on an even higher-level challenge or an even greater, deeper desire. But there should be a sense of completion for that particular problem.

So, at The Art of Applying our clients know from whenever they start working with us, they’re going to graduate out of our program May 1st of the next year. And so they have a graduation date and they know when things are going to wrap up. We do provide lots of options for continuing to work with us, working with us again, staying in touch, staying on as our client. But for anyone who feels like this has been enough for me, I have accomplished what I want, we give them that sense of completion instead of making people feel like they just got to hang around forever and ever.

That’s something that is really different about my coaching versus other coaching that you’ll see online. There’s a lot of advice around keep people as long as possible, keep people as your client forever, have them renew for year after year after year. And that’s great, if that is what your clients actually need. It’s not great if we’re just keeping people dependent on us in a disempowered way.

And so complete the engagement is actually the last step of this cycle. But it’s a cycle, so then we actually circle back to the first step which is create content. And remember, now because you have captured your client’s story with their permission, their written permission, you already have step one created for you.

If I’ve captured one of my client’s success stories of working with us that can now be the content that I put on YouTube. And then that YouTube video can be repurposed as a blog post. And I can write up a summary, or my team, I have a team now, but let’s say it’s just you, can write up a summary of that blog post and now you’ve got two pieces of content. You have a YouTube video, people might find you on YouTube, or you have a blog post where people can find you.

And so that is Kaneisha’s coaching business cycle. To recap, it’s create content. So create content, collect emails, communicate consistently, which cultivates trust. Charge for your services, have conversations and have calls to action. Close the deal, coach the client, cultivate community, celebrate. Capture, meaning capture their story, and then complete the engagement.

One little teaser for you is that there are more Cs coming and the additional Cs I’m going to teach you in future episodes, they describe the way that you should do each of these steps. And so stay tuned for the Cs that go along with the coaching business cycle.

And now I have some joy work for you. So joy work is my version of homework. And I know, because we are all type A’s we love homework, but instead we’re going to call it joy work. And so your joy work for this episode is to start with the first C, which is create content. And I want you to journal, doodle, and noodle on the kind of content that you would like to create.

Do you want to have a blog like scaleyourjoy.com, where you are having a blog post, I call them essays, I find that sounds more elevated to me, but they’re blog posts. Where you have blog posts come out every week. Do you want your content to be Instagram posts where you are posting on Instagram inspiring quotes related to what you want to coach people on three times a week? Is it YouTube videos? Do you want to create a YouTube video with one natural hair care tip once a week?

So, that’s what I want you to journal, doodle, and noodle on, I love that phrase, I made it up and I’m very proud of it. Or is it a podcast, right?

So I want you to just take some time, do your joy work, and then I would love to hear about it. So reach out to us at scaleyourjoy.com and let us know what you came up with form your, I’m going to say it one more time y’all, from your journal, doodling, and noodling on your joy work.

All right, that’s our episode for today. We learned about the coaching business cycle, also known as the cycle. And I can’t wait to tell you stories, and teach you more, and just hang out with you more next week. Have a great and amazing week.

To celebrate the launch of the show I’m giving away a Scale Your Joy audiobook e-book bundle. These are five hand-picked books that I have read and I love. They’re about life, joy, and entrepreneurship. And five lucky listeners will be chosen to win.

The way you enter is you subscribe, rate, and review Scale Your Joy on Apple Podcasts. It doesn’t have to be a five-star review, although I sure hope you’re loving the show. I want your honest feedback so I can create an amazing show that provides tons of value. Visit scaleyourjoy.com/welcome to learn more about the contest and how to enter.

I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in episode 11.