Celebrating Two Years For TCC: Reflecting Back and Looking Ahead
Episode 118: Show Notes
Happy Birthday to us (cue birthday song). Did you know Think Creative Collective just turned two? We are worried now, because the you know the terrible two’s, does that happen in business too? We certainly hope not! We want to tell you everything we’ve worked on, everything that’s kinda worked for us, some stats to get you familiar with how things have been going and talk a little bit about the future of TCC.
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Also, we have opened and started and closed seven businesses together, so this ain’t our first rodeo, babes. It might be our first rodeo together and our most successful business, but we have been in so many other businesses and we have been through all the ups and downs. So we get it, we get it all. Want to find out how we have made this business work?
Throwing It Back
We’re throwing it back to the end of last year, which led into this year. Emylee actually moved for this job. We met in a Facebook group, worked together and grew TCC for about a year and then Emylee decided she needed to be closer. At that time we were still doing client work so it was easier for Emylee to be here so she could shoot photos for the clients and be a part of the meetings. Shortly after that we stopped working with clients and even though we have a 100% online business it’s still easier having us both together. We thought we might want to have an office together but soon realized we both enjoy our own space when working so despite what you all might think, no, we don’t sit in an office together and drink coffee and chat all day. Emylee heard she was going to be a mama soon after moving so that was her main focus. We launched a new website, hosted a webinar and started a podcast the same week Emylee’s baby was due. Who does that? It might sound crazy but we pulled it off!
Our Flagship Program
Another big epic thing that happened this year was figuring out what our flagship program should be and it did really well. If you haven’t heard of it, well it’s no other than the Strategy Academy and it’s amazing, but there’s more to it behind just creating it and doing it. Some of you have heard our story of how we first met and we were talking about our hopes and our dreams and we literally wanted to create the same type of program for the same type of people. It was a big bucket of items and we let it simmer. We wanted to fill this program with more than just one tech thing, more than just one strategy. It took time for us to create that but it was so freeing and so rewarding when we realized we were ready to finally create it. We 100% believe in the order that we’ve created things. The intention behind it was there and the building of the revenue was all there.
Building Community All Over The World
It’s taken us two years to have 2311 paid students. 2082 of them have taken Trello for Business - it’s not called the gateway drug to TCC for nothing. If you would have told us a few years ago that all of these people would be in our community and in our tribe, we would have struggled to believe it. We literally have students from all over the world and those are our boundaries, the world. That’s so incredible and that leads us to empower our students to grow and change or think outside of the box in their business, that’s why we’re so adamant about creating some sort of income stream that’s based in the online world. The online world doesn't have any boundaries, it doesn’t matter what your business is, you can have some portion of it growing in the online space. We’ve been able to cross boundaries into every English-speaking country but also the countries where the primary language is most definitely not English. We haven’t translated any of our programs into other languages, we haven’t had the time, energy or desire to do that. One thing we do want to do at some point is to be able to translate everything into transcripts.
Behind The Scenes
Let’s talk about all the cool people that help us make it all happen. A really cool thing is that as our business continues to age, time passes, what has remained true is that we have two VA’s that have been on from the very beginning and we love that. They were the first hires we’ve ever had. We’ve also grown the core team to six other positions - so a total of eight other contractors and outside of that we’ll occasionally have anything from three to five flex contractors. We might hire someone for a specific copywriting, or editing, or systems somethings. They might hang out for a month or two months and then move on. We never expected to be working with other people. Part of it really stemmed from our desire to continue growing. To continue to scale and grow we 100% need support in other areas. We love them, they help out with a lot of key pieces which enables us to focus on what we need to in order to grow the business.
Throwing Stats Around
Just to give you an idea, that first year we spent at least half of it with just us. We then hired two people the rest of that year. The first year we went from making $60,000 individually to together making $190,000+. So, we tripled our business in year one, based on old stats, and this year we’re on track to double it again. That means that we’re going to end December this year with well over $375,000 in sales. We wouldn’t be surprised if we get over the $400k mark. It’s hard to know exactly right now, as we have one major launch left for the year and we have a ton of payment plans (which is new for us) going through every month so it will be interesting to see what that final figure ends up being. We’re pretty confident that it’s going to be pretty epic.
Looking Ahead
Something we talked about last year is the fact that we wanted to launch less, we wanted to shift our business from launching every two weeks and having micro launches to spending more time and energy on one particular launch and making more but doing it less. There’s a little bit of a fear there, there’s a lot of hesitation of diving into that because when we were micro launching it was a guaranteed five figure month. It’s also exhausting and it doesn't lead to any other time to look at any other aspects of the rest of the business. Something we’re definitely going to be doing next year is that we’re taking the whole month of December off. We’re super excited about that. Also, we’re not blogging, we’re having old content re-worked and posted for you guys. Another thing we’re doing is starting a Youtube channel so you babes better get excited. We’re also hoping to increase our evergreen sales and focus on the funnel.
Quote This
We can make this world seem so much smaller by bringing people together.
Highlights
We’re throwing it back to the end of last year, which led into this year. [0:04:00.0]
Another big epic thing that happened this year was figuring out what our flagship program should be, creating it and it did really well. [0:12:10.0]
How we’ve been able to build our community all over the world, literally. [0:16:00.0]
Let’s talk about all the cool people that help us make it all happen, we’re going behind the scenes. [0:19:43.0]
We’re throwing some stats around for you to see how the business has grown. [0:25:30.0]
We’re ahead ofthe rest of the year and what we have planned for the new year. [0:26:46.0]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Throwing it back, Our flagship program, Building community, all over the world, Behind the scenes, Throwing stats around, Looking ahead
