Tara (00:50):
Hello and welcome back to the Art of Estate Planning Podcast. I am so excited for you to be joining me today, and this episode is a little bit out of the ordinary or off topic from our usual testamentary trust and estate planning topics, but I do hope that for those of you who are curious, you get a lot out of it.
(01:14):
So today I want to talk a little bit about setting up a digital products or online business. So as you probably know, that is actually the type of business that I run and I get asked about it all the time from other lawyers or professionals who are thinking about going into that space and digitising and commodifying their intellectual property about how to do it and my tips and tricks to try and find out if it's right for them.
(01:48):
So I thought I would actually record a podcast episode about it, try and get all of my thoughts and ideas down in one place so that if you are curious or thinking about it or just wondering how these types of businesses work, then this could be a good resource for you. So you might be aware the out of estate planning, it is actually registered as an incorporated legal practise, so a law firm with the Queensland Law Society, but we don't deliver traditional legal services.
(02:26):
Instead, we offer estate planning precedents or templates to other estate planning lawyers. We provide training and also mentoring through our TT precedents club membership. So we actually have a membership. We have digital courses and we also have digital products or resources on templates. So we kind of actually cover the spectrum in terms of what people could do with this type of online business. Also, in case you didn't know, just for as a side note, I guess my husband also has a online business for his profession as well. So he is a doctor specialising in shoulder pain as a physiotherapist and he has a business called Shoulder Physio. And in that business he teaches other allied health professionals how to treat their patient's shoulder pain and he teaches them about the latest evidence and techniques and well, I don't even really, I'm not going to pretend to know exactly what he does.
(03:37):
I do help him run the backup. So it's actually interesting because the backend of his business runs almost identically to my business, even though we are offering completely different products and services and we have different audiences. But we've been doing both of those businesses for at least six years now or maybe more like, well, 2018 is when I sold my very first online course. So that's actually seven years plus, and we've been doing it full-time for about six years now. So I am by no means an expert on this topic, but I have learned a thing or two from running two different digital products businesses from a professional services background. So I guess my headline comments are, I think I've got three things that you can ask yourself if you have been wondering if this type of business is for you. So I wanted to start with that as my sort of headline, three takeaways.
(04:46):
So my first thing is if you don't really like sales and marketing or technology, then don't do this type of business because I think a lot of people want to focus on the technical side and creating and documenting all of their intellectual property that's in their genius zone and building their programme or their course or resource. But actually in terms of your day-to-day work over the life of your business, that turns out to be a pretty small part of running the business. And that's actually the beauty of these types of businesses because once you do the work to create your intellectual property and turn it into a resource available for others to consume, you get the ongoing reward for doing that. You do it once and then it is there as an asset that keeps generating income for you. So then what you actually end up doing is spending most of your time selling the damn thing, if that makes sense.
(05:57):
I mean, of course that's not entirely true. We update our precedents all the time. I update our online course all the time. I stay on top of the cutting edge of the legal developments in estate planning, which is my absolute joy and pleasure and passion, and I would do that no matter what. And then obviously we feed that back into our resources. But most of what I do day to day is actually focused on improving our systems and our automation, and especially trying to make our customer experience as incredible as possible as new developments, particularly since AI has come on the scene, there's so many new technological developments and improvements that we can keep incorporating, trying to improve the customer experience and also the backend systems and automation to make things run more smoothly and faster from our side. So I'm spending a lot of time on that technology side.
(06:57):
I'm spending a lot of time on sales and marketing because what you've actually got is a product that you need to sell. And it doesn't matter how incredible your product is, if nobody knows about it, they're not going to buy it. So if you hate the idea of having to learn about digital marketing and having sales conversations and showing up and continually telling people about yourself and that they need to buy your amazing product, then you actually may not find this business is a good fit for you. The next headline thing to ask yourself about whether this is the right business for you is if you don't want to work hard, this business is not right for you. And I say that because I think a lot of people, and I definitely did this when I first learned about this part of the industry, I was thinking, oh, so you make your course and then you just go on holidays forever.
(07:55):
You can sit on the beach drinking pina coladas and you are cool. And I can tell you seven years in that has not been the case. It is actually an amazing lifestyle business for sure. I've had two children over the span of that. My eldest is at the time of recording five and a half. So I've pretty much been pregnant or having a baby or postpartum the entire time of the business. And I can tell you that I've earned more money, far more money from the business each year than I ever earned as a lawyer. So it is incredible. And I've only worked 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week, been on maternity leave and had others doing most of the work in the business. So it has been amazing as a lifestyle business, but it has also been a lot of hard work.
(08:52):
And what I love about this business is you do the work and then all the effort that you put in is to creating an asset that you continue to reap the rewards of year on year compared to when I was a estate planning lawyer in the more traditional sense and I would prepare a client's estate plan, get paid handsomely to do it, but at the end I then had to do all the work all over again for another client. And each month I might meet my target, but then each month I had to get a new client in and start at zero. So I didn't have recurring revenue and I had to continually show up and have that personal exertion, whereas creating my online course testamentary trust, the essential Guide for Australian Lawyers was a huge amount of work. It took months and months to create it, to get everything down to workshop, what people needed to know to try and find simple ways to explain those complex topics, to record it, to bundle it up, to sell it.
(10:00):
All of that took months and months of work, but now I don't have to do anything else and people will just come and buy it while I'm sleeping and I'm getting the return. So now I have an asset that just generates income from me and I don't have to show up and do that work all over again. But you do have to do the work. And in some sense, once you've created the asset, it is easy money. You make sales while you're sleeping. If I'm playing with I have every Friday off, if I'm playing with my littlest on that day, money still rolls in because I'm making sales. But when you're running a business like this, firstly, no one else is doing it. So you have problems that are totally unique and no one knows how to answer it, and you're constantly trying to come up with innovative problem solving and solutions and fixing things that go wrong and trying to think of things that are better and stealing from other industries to adapt it to your scenario.
(11:04):
And really just a lot of out of the box thinking where there's no one telling you exactly how to do it. And so that is hard and that can be stressful. You've got clients who have problems that need solving and you are the only who know you are the only one thinking about how to solve them. And you've got to come up with a unique way. There's all kinds of things where if you don't like having that challenge and you are not prepared to do the less glamorous work behind the scenes from time to time to actually create the asset, then this business might not be for you. So it's not just pina coladas on the beach, there is hard work involved, but if you are a hard worker, if you like a challenge, then I think you will love this business because it is so exciting and different and innovative and you are setting the tone and creating solutions for problems that no one else is.
(11:59):
So if that appeals to you, then I think you will love being in this industry. And then lastly, if you don't like customer service and community building, then I don't know that if this is going to be the right fit for you either because a huge part, particularly if you have a membership, but then even if you just have a sort of digital product resource or a course that people buy with no ongoing support from you, your ideal customer is still a person who's come to you with a problem that they need you to fix. And so when people are doing that, they're vulnerable. They are asking for help, and they need your empathy and compassion and understanding. And also if you are going down the community path, then you are going to be holding a lot of hands all the time and people will see you as their mentor.
(12:58):
And so if you don't like that part of it, it might be that this is, you are just swapping one kind of work for another type of work that you don't enjoy. I personally love it. It's just the most immense privilege to be able to support people on their journey with testamentary trust and estate planning. I learned so much from my community, I feel so connected. I only lament that I didn't have access to a community like this when I was a junior lawyer. I think my career path would have been totally transformed in a positive way that, and I wouldn't have experienced some of the challenges that I did, but so I love that side of it. So yeah, those are my three things. If you don't like marketing, sales or technology, if you are not prepared to be challenged and thinking outside of the box in an area where you won't really have anyone telling you what to do or any support with answers, and if you don't like customer service and community building, then this may not be the right area for you.
(14:06):
But if everything I've said sounds really cool, then I would really encourage you to explore this type of business. So I'm going, I think to do an episode about my story and my journey and how I ended up doing this type of business. But just very briefly, so I've been a lawyer at the time of recording about 17 years. I was admitted in 2008 and about, I'm just trying to think maybe like, well, I know it was in 2016, 2014, I sort of hit a point where I was experiencing a lot of burnout. I was in a toxic work environment. I'd become a partner of a law firm before I was even 30, which I thought was the goal I had been aiming towards my entire career and I achieved it. And then I very quickly realised that it really wasn't in alignment with how I wanted my life to be.
(15:16):
I was a workaholic eating every meal at my desk, never outside. I lived in the city. I don't think I touched grass ever because I lived in an apartment. I would go to yoga every morning, but I got in my car, drove there, did it in the studio, would grab a coffee on the way home in the concrete jungle, get back in my house, and I'd just stay in there. And I never touched grass and I really was unhappy. I felt something was lacking. My stress levels were just getting so high to the point where I was experiencing a lot of anxiety that I'd never really experienced. And I started to make a few changes, including I moved to the Gold Coast and started living beside the beach, which was just such a remedy for my soul. I actually ended up going on stress leave from my law firm that I was working at.
(16:15):
I'd retired as a partner, just was a consultant through that law firm. And then I just sort of quit all together and I literally spent six months lying on the beach listening to True Crime podcasts and colouring in back when those colouring in mental health books were all the rage. And I also took up surfing lessons and I met an incredible woman there. You will have probably recognised her actually in a lot of my photos. She's a good friend of mine now, Em Pescott, who is the founder of Promotable You, which is a career accelerator programme for women in business and in their career and leaders in firms. And she got me onto the idea at our surfing lesson about making my intellectual property and experience a digital product. And it was so funny because she was like, okay, so you're on a career break, what are you going to do?
(17:15):
And I was like, I guess I'll just get better and go back to being a lawyer. I don't know. And she's like, well, why don't you do something different or create a programme? And I was like, well, lawyers don't do that. We get paid by the hour. We get paid a really good hourly rate. Why would I look at anything like that? And she gave me a workshop to go and look at. And it changed my life because I started to realise that there was a way that my experience, I have a very niche area of estate planning experience, particularly focusing on testamentary trust. I have never been a litigator. I've only ever been to court to move admissions and my own admission. I wouldn't know the first thing to do if I had to stand up in front of the magistrate's court, which is pretty crazy.
(18:10):
So I just have this deep niche level area of experience. And I went, well, maybe actually there's others who can benefit from that. And at the same time, I had started building my social media really just as a creative outlet and something to do, and it was just area that was kind of new back then about people sharing ideas on social media. And I was getting a lot of traction and people interested in what I had to say about testamentary trust. And then that sort of sparked my first idea, which was actually not to help lawyers, but to create a course for financial advisors and accountants about how they can help facilitate estate planning for their clients. One of the jobs I was doing before I left the law firm was actually running the online platform at a firm where financial advisors and accountants could submit their instructions to us through a wholesale model on behalf of their clients.
(19:07):
And then we would leverage the role of the financial advisor and accountant to deliver a lower cost but high quality estate planning solution. So not like a safe wheel on online automated product. We were still having lawyers talking to clients and giving tailored customised solutions, but we were leveraging technology and a lot of the information that the existing trusted advisor already had. So I could see firsthand through that experience, who of the advisors were doing an incredible job, what they were doing, where people needed more improvement, the areas they were lacking knowledge or confidence. And I built a course around that. Eventually, my business, as you know now has evolved into helping lawyers because I think two things. Firstly, that was around the time of the Financial Services Commission. I think I've said that right. It's so long ago now I've forgotten the terminology. But a lot of the financial advisors had to go off and do further study to maintain their qualification.
(20:15):
So I was competing as a nice to have programme with something that they all needed to do that was very challenging for them in order to maintain their qualification and registration for their livelihoods. So it was a really hard sell competing against that regime. And also lawyers just kept approaching me saying, I love what you're saying about testamentary trust. How do I do it myself? Where do I learn? What's a good precedent? So I naturally sort of went, I followed where the work was coming from and started to create resources for lawyers as well. And now eventually I've just sort of niched further into focusing solely on lawyers. So that's my story. I guess I want to share a few ideas about how to actually get started if you are thinking that this is the right thing for you. So firstly I want to share, I think you will really do yourself a service if you just immerse yourself in the digital marketing and product field.
(21:27):
So the way that I did that was through podcasts. I particularly liked the Amy Porterfield podcast and I actually ended up doing her digital course academy, which taught me the step-by-step approach to developing an online course. But she has years and years of podcast episodes and so much value in those free episodes. There's a lot of other people in that space. So I think find someone who resonates with you. I prefer learning from women, my husband likes, there's some men out there who he likes to learn from. So I think dabble with all of them and see an Australian woman who is really good is Grace Lever. She was actually her workshop all those years ago, which got my brain ticking over and thinking about joining this field. So I think go and have a look at their programmes, get in their digital funnels, just listen to their podcasts or whatever their free things are and just start learning and learning as much as you can.
(22:32):
I think the shortcut is obviously to invest in a online course that teaches you about how to make digital products. It's a bit meta, an online course that teaches you how to make an online course, but it is the shortcut to doing it, and they'll have so much knowledge and approach that they can share with you to get there the fast way. But here's my sort of high level steps that I would take if I was starting from scratch to do this. Firstly, I would start building up my personal brand. You can of course do this without a personal brand in the sense that it can be like a faceless organisation that builds up a brand like a product. And some people may actually prefer that you don't want to be attached to you, especially if your plan is to retire or build something that you can sell and retire.
(23:29):
I started with just my personal brand because I feel like to show up online authentically as myself is the easiest way for me to do marketing compared to sort of faceless marketing, but there's plenty of approaches to do it. So make a decision. I guess that's the first thing. Make a decision. Is it going to be your personal brand attached to a business brand or is it going to be like a faceless business brand? And then start building up your personal brand, however you want to do that. But I do think a key is to show up consistently and authentically online so that people start to build trust that know, like, and trust factor. And I just want to make a little side note, you don't need a huge amount of followers or a huge viral moment for this to be successful. I have less than 5,000.
(24:28):
Oh, let me check. I'm pretty sure less than 4,000 followers. Yeah, I've got like 3,900 at the time of recording this. And my husband has got 84,000. That's right, 84,000 followers. He's pretty famous online in his little niche actually. But the art of estate planning at the moment makes way more money than the shoulder physio business. And that will change. I'm sure my husband has been working on his PhD the last seven years, and his shoulder physio business is incredible. It's replaced all of the income that he used to do in clinic as a physiotherapist and more, and it just runs on the smell of an oily rag at the moment while he had to give all his attention to his PhD. Whereas I get to spend and contribute all my energy to the business. So I'm not putting shade on his business. And I actually think his business has got huge potential because firstly, yeah, he is famous online, and secondly, his audience is an international audience, whereas mine is just Australian. But I can still, I'm the breadwinner for our family.
(25:48):
We make high six figures every year, including when I'm on maternity leave and I've got 4,000 followers on Instagram and more on LinkedIn, but it doesn't really matter. You don't have to be that famous. But the people who do follow me on Instagram, maybe that some of you listening, I think you probably might feel that you do know me reasonably well. And when we meet in person, I would hope that there's not a huge difference between the Tara that you see online and the Tara that you see in person. But I do want to say you have to get the people who are connecting with you online off the socials and into your CRM. So you need a database of customer relationship management. I think that's what CRM stands for, where you have a list of people and their names and their email addresses, and maybe any other segmented information like people who come on my mailing list, I need to know if they're an accountant, financial advisor or a lawyer.
(27:00):
So you need to get your followers off your socials into an email list. And that is because you don't own your social accounts, but you do own your email list. And I had it happen to me a few years ago. My Instagram account was cancelled, I got locked out, I never got access to it again, and I had to start from scratch. And it wasn't the worst thing ever because I wasn't making sales from my social media. I was making sales from my email account, my email, CRM. So yeah, it was paid and my ego didn't like having to start from zero again, but it wasn't the worst thing in the world. So we don't control what Facebook does. People get cranky that the algorithm isn't showing their account. If you can get people from your socials onto your email account, then you don't really care what happens on those platforms.
(28:01):
So you need to have some kind of free lead magnet or something that gets people to take the next step from following you to actually give you your name and email address so they can get into your address book or CRM, and usually that happens by a free exchange, a mutual advantageous exchange of you give them something free. It's usually called a lead magnet where it's like a free download, a free list, a free training, a free resource of some type, and they give you your name and email address and then they get on your email list. And then what you should do once you've got an email list is nurture them so that they get used to hearing from you so that they know what you are all about and give them more free things so that they are really interested in what you're doing and can work out that they can trust what you provide and eventually get to know you well enough that they realise that you can solve a problem that they have and that they will be happy to pay you to solve that problem.
(29:10):
So another aspect of it is working out who your customer avatar is. And this is the kind of thing I'm using terminology like lead magnet and customer avatar. This is the kind of thing that you'll learn through following an actual digital marketing and digital course specialists like Amy Porterfield or someone else like that because explain it all to you. They'll definitely explain it in their paid programme, but also they should have podcast episodes on it as well. But the customer avatar is just to work out who your ideal client is. If you've listened to this podcast before, especially when we're talking about the online will providers, you will have hopefully remember me talking about that because it is really important to know who is your perfect client, and it can be a real person that you think of or it can be a made up person with a bunch of features.
(30:05):
What's their age? What's their gender? Where do they live? What is their budget? What are their likes, dislikes? What's their problem? What's their experience? What's their qualification or what field or industry they're in? And that might be very niche or it might be very broad, like someone selling a hair straightener might just be, well, we want women who are between 16 and 50 who live in Australia, and that's it. Whereas my customer avatar is, I also like working with women. Now, it doesn't mean that I don't sell my products to men, but I love working and supporting women. Women I think seem to enjoy my content the most, and that's who I talk to and imagine, especially when I'm even recording this podcast episode or creating a social media post. So mine is a law firm owner who has a boutique law firm or a sole practitioner law firm.
(31:15):
They are reasonably experienced with their post admission experience. They love estate planning, they want to get more confident and help their clients with estate planning. They want to make more money, they want more time to spend with their kids, and they are willing to invest in themselves and learn. So that's kind of my customer avatar. And so whenever I am creating a resource, whether it's a free or paid resource, I think about what does this person need from me? And then the next step, which you cannot skip, is you have to talk to people who meet your client avatar and get their feedback. So a lot of people go, okay, I've come up with an idea, I'm just going to go and make it. And I say, no, no, no, do not spend all those months or years and all those hours and money creating your resource before you get feedback from people who match your customer avatar.
(32:19):
Because you might find that even though you think it's incredible, no one is going to buy it or they won't. They might think it's a good idea, but they won't tell you. They might tell you it's a good idea, but they actually don't want it enough to part with their money, so they're not excited to get up and walk over to wherever their purse is and get out their credit card. So you won't know that unless you talk to people who are in your customer avatar over and over, do not skip this step. You've got to keep doing it and getting that input from them. And so I think that also feeds into another tip, which is when I made my programme, I just made it. I did talk to my customer avatars for sure, but then I just went and made the course and I went, here it is.
(33:12):
Who wants to buy it? And I think in this day and age, unless you know that you have a reliable clientele who will buy from you and who really need this, you are actually far better off by pre-selling the course or the resource before it's finished and ideally before you've spent too much time on it so that you know that people will buy it because you don't want to go to all of that effort and then no one actually buys it. Whereas if you know that you've got 10 people who've bought this programme, firstly, you know how much money you're going to get at least. So they're paying you to create it. And then you've also got people who you know exactly what they need and you can then say, look, pre-buy it now, it's going to be available in four weeks, and then we'll do it together and maybe run it live, get their feedback, and then create it into an evergreen, automatic non-live product.
(34:12):
But a lot of people just think, I'm just going to make it and then try and sell it. And it is really challenging to do that in this day and age. And if you are too scared to actually ask for the feedback and have those conversations, then that is probably a sign of the challenges to come, because that's actually just what you have to keep doing in this type of business. You have to keep being on the sales journey, have to keep telling people it's vulnerable. You have to show up, you put your heart on your sleeve and potentially getting rejected all the time, but you have to do that. So anyway, I know I'm labouring that point, but I feel like a lot of us shy away from it, and that's a huge part of running this type of business. A few other things in terms of the type of resource that or product that you, so from my experience, so I started with just an online course, then I did a membership for that.
(35:17):
I've got precedents. I've got a number of precedent packs for different estate planning solutions and services. I've got our TT precedents club membership, which has over 250 Australian lawyers in it. My husband has just an online course, and he's currently making a new membership and updating his online course now that he's finished his PhD. From what I've learned about all of this, oh, and I should just say I'm in a lot of networking groups or accountability like buddy groups with, I've got six or seven other girlfriends who run similar businesses in all different areas. One of them is in equestrian. The other is a GP selling a weight loss product. One of them is a educator selling resources for teachers. So you kind of get the idea. It's across a variety of fields and in terms of watching the growth of those businesses and the sales challenges, because that's all we're talking about, sales.
(36:21):
Every fortnight we get together and talk about sales and marketing. What I've learned is having a done for you resource is probably the easiest thing to sell because people really want everything on a platter. They're coming to you for a shortcut and a resource. So for me, my precedents are like a no-brainer to sell because they're incredible. We update them, they're cutting edge. But also it's really hard for a lawyer who's never really prepared a testamentary trust will to make their own testamentary trust precedent. They've got no idea where to start. And of course, how could you, and it's a really easy transformation because before you bought, you had no precedent. You couldn't deliver a testamentary trust to a client after you bought. You do have a precedent and you can prepare a testamentary trust for your clients. So the transformation is really clear. The next thing I think that's easy to sell is the membership.
(37:24):
It's not as easy as the resource like the precedents, but I think this day and age, people like having someone hold their hand and being in a community with accountability. They don't like committing to an ongoing subscription, especially people who worry about paying for things they're not using. But generally speaking, if we're looking at just a course that is self-paced and you have to do it on your own, a lot of people buy thinking that being really ambitious and thinking they'll work through it and then they just are lacking. Whether it's discipline, I think that's probably an unfair thing. But not everybody will prioritise and work through something on their own. They need the community and the appointment in their calendar, where as a group, we're working through it in a membership style in order to actually do the work and get the transformation. So if you're just selling a course and you're relying on people to do the work by themselves in order to get a transformation, the only way that we're getting a mutual exchange of value is by your customers going through a transformation.
(38:44):
It's really hard for them for you to guarantee that they're going to get a transformation if you're relying on them to do it on their own. It's lonely. They have to log in, and a lot of people, life just takes over, whereas a membership does really help. So I want to just mention when you're thinking about, I won't say online courses are dead, but back when I started seven years ago, people were just selling do it yourself, self-paced online courses. Now it's really merged to memberships, digital resources, and yes, there might be an online course as well, but it probably can't be the flagship of your business. So another couple of things in terms of resources, there's so many resources out there. Now, the one that I use, all my friends in my accountability groups use, my husband use, we are diehard friends, is Kajabi.
(39:39):
I'll put my Kajabi link in the show notes for anyone who wants to go and have a look. But it's incredible. It's like a one in all package where it has my contact customer relationship management system. I do my billing through it. It hosts my courses and my training. All my emails go there, all the automation. So the reason these businesses are so great for a lifestyle business is everything's automated. From the moment that somebody downloads one of my freebies as a lead magnet, they put their email address in, then they get automatic email with the freebie, and then three days later for a year, they get an email from me about all of the other free information that we have on estate planning. Here's a blog post, here's a video, here's a podcast episode, here's a free training. Here's a tip. Just building that trust.
(40:42):
I'm not sitting here writing those emails every day. I wrote them once or I've written them once. I've put them in my automation software in Kajabi, and then people just get sent the email that they're up to on their own timeline. Then when they decide to invest in the precedents or the resources, it sends them the link all the time. They buy, they get their resource, they get a nurture sequence saying, great, you've got the precedents. Do you know how to find help a week later? Are you using this a week later? Did you know there's a video library with FAQ videos? All of that is automatic. They get their receipt automatically. They get told what the, are you having trouble using your precedents? Maybe it's time to invest in my online course Symmetry Trust, the essential guide for Australian Lawyers to help you feel more confident that you understand the law behind the precedents.
(41:41):
All of that's automatic while I'm sitting. People are getting sent emails right now while I'm sitting here recording this podcast episode. I'm not doing it, and Kajabi does all of that for me. It even hosts and publish the podcast. It's got the website, it's got everything. So the only kind of add-ons I use are a particular webinar software, and I use a programme called cordo at the moment, which sends a compliant tax invoice with the GST component because my clients are businesses and they need that. If you've a B2C business, then your clients may not need a GST compliant tax invoice, and the Kajabi receipt and Stripe receipt is fine. So yeah, if you are thinking of it, have it check out Kajabi because it is an incredible platform. I've been with it for years. I love it. It's sort of everything we need where you can build the whole sort of funnel in there, and it's a really good to have that all in one integrated tool with the automation built in.
(42:50):
So look, this has gone on for a long time. I think I could talk about this all day. I hope that this has been helpful. I guess my tips are, or my final comments, it does take a long time to be an overnight success with a business like this. So if you're curious and thinking it is the right fit for you, just start now. Start building up your profile, building up your mailing list. It can't hurt to start creating one or two lead magnets. Get onto a mailing list and start nurturing those customers so that when you are ready to sell or pre-sell a solution to them, you've got them there. At least start with that. It might take you a while to build up that audience if you're not sure if this is right for you, but you are doing something pretty unique in your field.
(43:45):
You find that people are copying you or you wrote a book and they're buying your book and then trying to do what you are doing. If they are stealing your IP or just trying to emulate, you don't get, I mean, that sucks for sure, but there's actually a way that you can commodify that. And it might be that the message is these people are begging to be your clients. They really need what you know, and they might be your ideal client. So you can get really shitty about it, or you can actually say, there's a market here that needs to be served, and I'm the best person to serve it, and it might be different, especially if you're doing what I'm doing. So I started out helping mom and dad clients, you can only help so many at a time. Now I help other lawyers help their mom and dad clients with testamentary trust, and so my reach and impact is amplified.
(44:54):
We've got 600 law firms around the country using our testamentary trust precedents. There's no way I could reach that amount of end user families to get testamentary trusts in place. So by helping other lawyers deliver that solution instead, I don't care about competition. There's no competition. We're all working towards a common goal of every Australian family. Having a testamentary trust will. If you are feeling booked out, busy, stressed, overreached, and you want to leave a legacy or an impact with the knowledge that you have and you feel like you can't because there's only one of you, then maybe this type of business is going to be perfect for you because you can really amplify and expand your reach and build a community around it of everyone who's passionate and interested about the same thing that you are. So I hope that helps. Best of luck.
(45:53):
There's no right or wrong way to do it. Those are my tips. I think. Just be hungry, be curious. Learn as much as you can from the experts, and obviously you'll put your own stamp on things and do things your own way, and I wish you all the best. Thank you for listening.
