Pivoting From In-Person Services to Online Courses and a Membership with Melissa Fryer of Build a Better Bakery
Episode 513: Show Notes
Today on the podcast we have Melissa Fryer. She is a creative artist, who has been in the professional baking industry for sixteen years and she noticed that people needed to find out more information about building their own baking business. But this was not until after she moved to the middle of the desert, had to leave another business behind, and start all over again with the help of Strategy Academy. Melissa is one of our rockstar, OG Strategy Academy students who has truly taken the program to a T of how it was designed. We brought her on to not only get a peek behind the curtain of her business but to follow along with her thought processes and different strategies that she implemented in her business with how she was learning and what she was learning from the program.
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You’ll get a good glimpse today behind Melissa’s business that has succeeded and continues to thrive. She has taken pivots and made different decisions and tweaks based on not only what she is learning from our program but by knowing her audience and herself as her life has changed. This is exactly what we designed the program for – your life and not the other way round. So we are going to talk about the Strategy Academy a lot today but you are also going to get so many good tips about memberships, monetizing a Facebook group, how to grow an email list, and how to identify your offer depending on your lifestyle. Learn more about Strategy Academy here.
An Intro to Melissa and How She Found Her ‘Why’ Through Strategy Academy
It’s been two years since Melissa joined Strategy Academy and we wanted to get her backstory of what her life looked like before joining. Melissa is married to a military man which means she moves every two to three years. Before joining strategy Academy Melissa ran a painting class but this had to stop when she moved into the middle of the Mojave Desert. There was no community here to teach in-person painting to so Melissa knew she had to pivot. She was toying with the idea of creating some online courses and doing research online to find advice for how to do this. Many of the programs and thought leaders Melissa found were not a good fit for her but when she met Abagail and Emylee on a webinar of theirs, she knew she had found the right resource. After enrolling in the Strategy Academy one of the main teachings that appealed to Melissa was the focus on finding the ‘why’ behind your business. After going through this exercise Melissa asked herself what it is she truly enjoyed and decided to make a complete pivot into teaching baking. She had worked for many bakeries across the US so she could apply this experience to her new business. A big takeaway here is that it was not like Melissa just started over. Yes, she left her idea of teaching painting, but the fact is that she had a wealth of experience in baking and in running bakeries too, which she could apply to the new knowledge she was gaining about running an online business.
Setting Up An Online Offer and Developing Organic Partnerships
So now that we have the backstory, we are interested to see what moves Melissa made to grow her new business! For her, the move to doing things online was scary because of how different it was to teaching in real life, which was one of the main reasons why she joined Strategy Academy. Melissa joined in around October 2018 and by April 2019 she had already begun to implement many of the online strategies that help build and monetize an audience. She talks about growing an email list and starting a Facebook group which grew so quickly that she then had to start thinking about how to filter new prospects. She also had to set up some automation structures for responding to all of the inquiries she was receiving from her audience. This was when Melissa began to monetize her group too. She speaks about a ‘Thursday Think Session’ in which she goes live with her audience and offers free advice as a way of connecting to them. Melissa also realized that there were missing pieces in what she could offer clients but these organically got filled in when she developed friendships with two other military wives in the area. These two women had specialized skills, one in marketing and the other, photography and virtual organization, and Melissa incorporated them both into her offer as coaches. A big takeaway here is that many of the Strategy Academy students want to start partnering up immediately but forced partnerships are not ideal, whereas the best partnerships often develop organically. We also get into how to structure incentives for people when you bring them into your business so that they have a stake in your success and perform at their optimum!
How Melissa Structures Her Membership Offers and Sign Up Techniques
After hearing a bit about the evolution of Melissa’s online business, we ask her where she is at now and how she is structuring her memberships and sign-up strategies. Melissa has been disciplined about keeping things flexible for members and giving them many different membership and payment options as well as bundles of content they get at different tiers. Melissa recently got wind of the ‘value adder’ concept and since then has created a deluxe package that offers lifetime membership, one-on-one coaching, and more. Since creating this offer, 50% of her new sign-ups have been for this option. It makes sense as well because people who are looking for information and are serious tend to want to go in with everything they have. As far as how Melissa scaled her offer as she developed it, she weighs in on creating an initial barebones offer with beta pricing just to lock in an initial group of signups. She used this as a way of ironing out the kinks of her business. At the beginning of each month, she would open up the course for new members and push the price up slightly too. When she added her other expert coaches to her program this allowed her to scale up the pricing significantly as well. The deluxe offer was added about six or seven months ago, so a year and a half after she started! As she was scaling her offers and pricing she was also creating more resources for the courses and memberships to offer. Her plan going forward is to keep adding new members each month until December.
The drive behind this is Melissa’s dream to offer her husband the chance to retire. This aligns with Abagail’s dream and the two women talk about how fantastic it is to be able to offer one’s husband this freedom as a way of thanking him for the time he has put into supporting the household previously. We swing back to the topic of the three-day window period Melissa opens for new entries, and she talks about why she has chosen this method. She runs a challenge for prospects during this time which adds a lot of value on its own while also building connections with new prospects. Melissa speaks about how she has had to tweak how much she included in this challenge because it is free but requires a lot of work on the back end. So even though there might be ways to improve things still, a big takeaway here is that the way Melissa has been doing things is working well, so why change it!
Content Delivery and The Constant Tweaks of A Membership Offer
So now that we know how Melissa structures things, we are interested in how she delivers her content as she receives new members each month. In her paid program, she puts a banner up for enrolled participants to let them know that she is running a new challenge. If these people want to jump in and join too, they are welcome, and then they will get access to vault content as well as live sessions. For the live sessions, each coach does a 45-minute to hour-long seminar inside a private group. Melissa does a few of her own of these as well, one related to products that participants are working on and then another one about tools. Melissa has also started incorporating something called the ‘Bakers’ Roundtable’ where she and her coaches hang out with participants and shoot questions as well as build connections. An even further offer which Melissa has recently added is what she calls an accountability session, where she simply goes on Zoom and members get to hang out with her and get some help with their paperwork. While all this might seem like a lot of work, the truth is there is no evergreen strategy. Melissa sees more growth in her memberships when she is constantly adding new value. So there is an element of trading time for dollars but this is the nature of this kind of business. Don’t get us wrong, this does not mean that there are not some elements of your membership offer that you do once and see the dollars roll in forever though! But there are other things like rerecording and revising content that have to be maintained. At the end of the day though, makers enjoy making, so building and refining things is second nature!
Quote This
I knew that if I wanted to get to the price point that I knew was right for the content, hiring would bring that secret sauce on top of my secret sauce.
Highlights
An Intro to Melissa and How She Found Her ‘Why’ Through Strategy Academy. [0:04:34.1]
Setting Up An Online Offer and Developing Organic Partnerships. [0:14:34.1]
How Melissa Structures Her Membership Offers and Sign Up Techniques. [0:26:31.1]
Content Delivery and The Constant Tweaks of A Membership Offer. [0:42:15.1]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:46:44.6]
What you’ll gain by enrolling in the Strategy Academy:
Mentorship is a worthy investment, so use your mentors as much as possible.
There is a lot of content, but take it at your own pace.
After watching the content, start trying to implement it, and refer back to it.
Be consistent in your attempts at implementing the content.
Get proper evidence that an attempt is not working before scratching it.
Trust the process. Mistakes happen. Be kind to yourself, learn, and move on.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Melissa Fryer
Build a Better Bakery
Website | Instagram | Facebook
As a creative artist who has been in the professional bakery industry for over 16 years, I've noticed that many bakers who want to start their own baking businesses have a hard time finding reliable and well-rounded guidance with the business side of baking. Seeing this as a calling, I coupled my baking business knowledge and teaching skills into the baking business educational brand, Build a Better Bakery.
We focus on helping passionate bakers from all over the world build businesses that shrink the income gap, support their families and enrich their communities. Through value-driven courses, live workshops, our signature mentorship program. and our inclusive community group, we create a one-stop shop for baking business support. By working with thousands of bakers from all over the world, and creating strategic partnerships, we've been able to change lives through the Build a Better Bakery mission.
KEY TOPICS
Online courses, Strategy Academy, Audience, Memberships, Monetization, Content, Marketing, Groups, Live sessions
