How to Simplify Your Health Practitioner Business Technology Stack With the Website Sherpa

LMScast with Chris Badgett

In this LMScast episode, Sally Crewe shares her journey and the evolution of NurtureDash, an all-in-one business solution based around a WordPress website. She also discussed about Health Practitioner Business.

Sally Crewe a background in graphic and online design and is an accomplished designer and entrepreneur. She is well knowledgeable about WordPress and its features. When Sally saw that practitioners, especially those in the field of nutrition therapy, needed more straightforward answers, she decided to venture into the internet business arena.

Sally set out to establish NurtureDash, an all-in-one business platform centered around a WordPress website, motivated by her love of technology and design. She wants to give practitioners a streamlined and integrated way to handle their online presence, courses, and client interactions using NurtureDash.

Sally takes a customer-centric approach to business, concentrating on comprehending and resolving the particular difficulties encountered by practitioners. In addition to being a computer specialist, she views herself as a helpful mentor who assists practitioners in navigating the intricacies of WordPress and online business tools.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m rejoined by a special guest. Her name is Sally crew. She’s from nurture dash. com. This is going to be a really exciting episode. We’re going to talk about basically taking all the power of WordPress and removing all the hassle and providing a solution for heart centered entrepreneurs and particularly practitioners.

Which is what Sally has been working on and working in that industry for a long time. But first welcome to the show, Sally.

Sally Crewe: Thank you. It’s great to be back. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s fun to have you back. And I love seeing like one of our company values is continuous improvement and you embodied that, like you’re just iterating and iterating.

For those of you. Unfamiliar with the term WAAS, that stands for website as a service. So that’s where you basically provide a full website solution. Sally’s even gone further than just the website with marketing and all kinds of stuff. So we’re going to dive into it today at a high level. Can you describe for us what nurtured dash is?

And. You out there listening, go check out nurturedash. com. But Sally, what’s NurtureDash?

Sally Crewe: So NurtureDash is an all in one business in a box with a, based around a WordPress website. So I’m a designer at heart. I started with graphic design that turned into web design that turned into how the heck do I get this thing online, which turned into learning about web hosting, which turned into running a hosting company.

We’re talking like back in the late nineties. So I’ve been at this a while that turned into a I was a, nutrition therapy practitioner for a while, and I saw that a lot of my colleagues We’re interested in doing, creating online courses for their clients. So I helped them. I taught them how to do that.

I had a training course that taught them how to do that. When we got to the module about setting up the tech and the website, which was actually the best part for me, that was the most exciting part for me. A lot of them just like froze. So it, it became apparent to me that was what they needed to help with.

So I, I developed that into a bonus for my course called the practitioner platform, which was an all in one website. And I basically cloned my course website, which was running lifter and gave that to my Colleagues, my students for them to fill in the blanks and put their own nutrition courses, et cetera, into it.

And fast forward to today, like that, that, that platform, which is what we talked about on the previous time I was on a few years ago. What happened there was I found that. Okay. Everybody loved what they had. They had a website, They had the ability to sell courses. They had the ability to book.

Calls. But because it was all built on WordPress and back then things weren’t quite as evolved and cohesive as they are now with the word WordPress ecosystem. I was finding I was potentially, I was basically spending a lot of time playing whack a mole with plugins. And as an earlier entrepreneur, I was still struck with the syndrome of, trying to please everybody.

And when you have WordPress as your main tool you can please everybody. Someone would come and say, Hey can you I have a podcast. Can we make this a podcast streaming site instead of course? And I’d be like, the true answer is yes, we can. We could, we always can if we’re using WordPress.

And I loved that part of it as a pseudo developer at heart. Yeah. So I, got a little bit off tangent with that and we ended up building a bit of a sort of a homer car. I don’t know if you remember that Simpsons episode, but it had a little bit of everybody’s input and, got further and further away from being a platform, which is supposed to be everybody has the same thing.

So we’ve briefly partnered up with go high level to provide so that we could stick with a true WordPress website and then just hook into go high level for the CRM and the email marketing and all the other tools that people were using. They were using different tools for those. So instead of me having to try and learn how to integrate ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, all these other things into WordPress.

I now just had one place to send them and integrated with that. It worked for a little while, but we ended up then with two platforms. We had what we were calling Nurture Dash, which was a white labeled LMS. And then we had Nurture Sites, which was the WordPress hosting platform. So I gathered all the kittens together late last year and decided, Having taken another look in the WordPress ecosystem and seeing how far things had come.

I’ve always loved working on WordPress. I’ve never gone away from it myself. But for a while it didn’t seem like the best choice for running like. Email marketing, funnel building, CRM suite, or even booking. But that changed with a lot of the newer plugins. And I tested out a lot of the fluent suite plugins like fluency or influent booking.

And found out, yeah, not only were these. Good enough to where they were actually simpler and doing a better job at what my clients needed than the everything, all singing, all dancing, and often all breaking bigger platform that we were trying to plug into. So yeah, late last year, I rethought it, decided to put both of the parts of the nurture brand, the dash and the sites back together.

And it coincided with. Being reintroduced to the guys at wild cloud who I know you’ve had Roger on here, but they, do a fantastic multi tenancy WordPress platform. So now we are true. We are basically, we’ve basically finally created what I was trying to create seven years ago, which is you go to a website, you click a button, you give them the domain name that you want for your website.

Five minutes later in your email is a link to log straight into your website. And it’s all set up as a CRM, there’s a booking calendar, there’s a bunch of different templates to choose. It’s a really easy page builder. So that’s, yeah, that’s the little winding story of NurtureDash and how it came to be, how it is now.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I love how customer centric you are, cause you have this practitioner that is trying to basically build the online interface for their business and there’s all these different things they need and tell us a little more about what their current reality is like without nurture dash.

And let’s say they’re not working with you. What are they doing to run their business and trying to get clients and nurture clients? Their

Sally Crewe: current reality until they. Cross paths with me is a lot of moving parts. They probably have a WordPress website that is either half built or out of date or is precariously teetering with an unupdated plugins that they’re scared to push the update button on.

They probably don’t know where their domain. Where their website is hosted. They probably don’t know the difference between a domain and a website. And this is also with, a lot of love for these people. It’s just, that’s not there. That’s not their world. And they’ve come into this world as a necessity at various points in the business journey.

And so they’ve got. A domain name over here on this platform, they’ve got a membership site over here on this platform and they’ve tried to hook them up together. They’ve joined a training program by a marketer who’s recommended another platform. A lot of them are paying multiple subscriptions for multiple tools that overlap and do a lot of the same stuff, but are not talking to each other.

So they come to me and I, my, my joke is like, it, a lot of people. When they come to me and we I have what I call tech audits for my discovery calls. And I come in, I’m like, basically just open up your bag, put everything out on the table. Let’s see what we’ve got. And a lot of the time it, looks like a raccoon just got into your fridge.

Like it’s just like all kinds of dead ends and funnels that don’t work and affiliate links. And it’s just, and I totally, I, this is my world. I love this stuff, but it makes me overwhelmed. So I can totally understand how a lot of practitioners and coaches will say, I hate tech. I’m not good with tech.

So my job that I’ve given myself and I’ve, I have a website called the website Sherpa. com, which is where I do my blog and my free training. And that, name came about from somebody calling me that. It’s my, my, I feel like my job here is to guide them through this the, dusty trail of like tech, WordPress, where does WordPress end?

Where does your website end? Where do these other platforms begin? What are you actually paying these subscriptions for? There’s a lot of unraveling. To be done. And, to be fair, we’ve, a lot of us in this world have been have grown up with tech, so we’ve got older versions of, features that were locked into because we’ve got a lot of content on there and then we’ve got newer versions.

And if somebody is coming in today, straight out of the gate and starting an online business, they’re not going to probably have this problem because there’s so many all in one tools now that keep things More organized, but a lot of people have come at this over the years and have gathered a a bit of a mixed bag of tools with various incompatibilities.

So I’m basically in the service. So we, talked about last time we taught you, you’d mentioned the phrase friction removal business. Yeah. That’s still very much true. And I also, I think of myself as a tech therapist as well, because there’s a huge, Mindset component to this, especially with a lot of my clients and customers are, first of all they’re first and foremost, health coaches, practitioners.

They don’t even want to be in an online business, but it’s 2024. They have to be online. Second of all they, have a bit of like tech trauma and WordPress trauma. I’ll see them if I’m on calls with them and they’re sharing the screen and I’m telling them where to click, they will get what I call button blindness, I’d be like, click the button.

And there’ll be like,

Chris Badgett: yeah

Sally Crewe: or they won’t see there’s maybe there’s just one they won’t see. And it’s, that’s I’ve done a little bit of, trauma work and it’s it’s a fight or flight state that people get into an anxiety state and they can’t see, they can’t see where to click because they’re, Their bodies in a sort of panic.

And it it sounds a little funny, but it’s, I bet if you put probes on someone and measured their heart rate and stuff, while they were trying to look around the backend of the WordPress site that hadn’t been updated in two years. It would probably be not a healthy state for them to be in.

So I’ve like I’ve said I’ve, started saying it’s, like tech therapy. I’m trying to be like, first of all, let them know that I’m here to help them that they’re not stupid forgetting themselves in this situation. Much like an accountant for somebody who’s behind on their taxes or bookkeeping.

The first thing you need to do is to say, no shame. You’re here now. Let me help you. And so that’s where I come, at things. I, have a lot of calls with people who will get into that state where you can see their kind of clouding over with the tech talk. And they will say, I want to, I’ve not, I’ve no idea what, you do, but I want to work with you.

I basically, I feel. I feel like you’re going to be the person who’s going to save me from this big tech dragon.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

I love that. It’s, not just providing a solution. It’s being a guide and even a therapist, like you say on there. I love the Sherpa analogy as a guy myself, I’ve actually spent some time in Nepal and hung out with some Sherpas.

And part of that whole thing is a, Connection to the earth and navigating the landscape. And you have a kind of environmental component to your platform. Can you tell us about that?

Sally Crewe: Yeah I’m, from the UK. I’m from Sherwood forest. I do some volunteer work for the pagan Federation. So I identify as, a Druid.

I’m a lover of animals, I’m a lover of nature. I’m an animist, which means I feel like everything has energy. I’ve always felt that way since I was just a small child. That’s just how. Okay. I perceive the world as, someone who feels energy. So I had stuffed that side of me down.

Until I’m in my late forties now, and you start to find yourself again. And that kind of came back around and I realized how important it was to me and with the with the climate crisis and everything. So we partnered with One Tree Planted and there’s another similar.

Company that do this internationally. And basically we just for every, subscription payment that comes in a certain portion of that goes to towards planting trees. So when somebody signs up for if they sign up for a year for, with a platform, we will send them a certificate to say, Hey, congratulations.

You have planted 12 trees.

Chris Badgett: Nice.

Sally Crewe: And people love it. And it’s not I’m not literally out there with a shovel and a bag of acorns we’re just partnering with this company, this initiative that does it, but people really I’ve got a lot of feedback from people being like, Oh, that’s it makes me feel so good.

And it, and because we’re, all internet friends. We don’t often actually meet people in real life. So to know that this business decision that they made, The dollars that they could have spent on Kajabi or Teachable or Thinkific or just another, or just a WordPress site on their own, they choose to use it with us.

It doesn’t cost them any extra. They’re helping offset carbon emissions and everything.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. I love it when values are baked into a brand and backed up with action and that sort of thing.

Sally Crewe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it and, also through the, sort of the political climate that we’ve just.

Been through and are still in. It, personally to me felt like a, my way of saying, Hey, this is what I stand for. And for some people that they’re like, Oh, I’m you’re not the right platform for me. And that’s fine. But a lot of them have come over to me rather than give their money to like the big tech bros because they want to support a female independently owned business who supports the climate and who, donates to trees.

I think it’s more than ever people can vote with their wallets and with their business tool choices.

Chris Badgett: So a hundred percent and people are hungry to do business with people, like real people behind the screens and all that.

Sally Crewe: Yeah. We, have a blurb on our site. That’s about basically we support LGBTQ plus rights.

We support a woman’s right to choose. We support this, and this. And I know it’s a, it’s for some people, it’s be like, Nope, getting out of here. That’s fine. I wouldn’t want to work with that person anyway. So it’s it’s I’m a musician. So my, former life was, as a musician and I still do that for fun.

And it feels the most punk rock thing I’ve ever done. Put that on my webpage of here’s what we believe if you don’t. Okay, fine. But we’re not the choice for you.

Chris Badgett: That’s there’s that saying in marketing that great marketing should be polarizing and really attract the your, vibe attracts your tribe.

Yeah.

Sally Crewe: And I’m a I’m a peacekeeper. I’ve, always thought of a people pleaser and wanted everybody to get along, but this was something I felt strongly enough. It’s about to actually be like, yeah, this isn’t just a marketing shtick. This isn’t just to try and put my brand somewhere.

This is actually, you get to work with me as a person. Things are going to go a lot smoother if we are aligned on the sort of fundamentals of moral standings on things.

Chris Badgett: You’re, also a tech wizard. So I wanted to dig a little bit on the on the tech stack here. And you’ve mentioned a couple of things, so let me just cue it up.

Use wild cloud, which is like hosting multi tenancy. It handles the payment element of people signing up and getting started with the site WordPress site. It has a front end on it so that people aren’t just dropped into the WordPress admin with a million options. And you’re using certain tools to deliver solutions to different business challenges, like fluency RM for the, email marketing, the broadcast emails, the marketing automation.

You’ve got fluent bookings, which is very important for a service based business to have automated bookings. That’s a, I don’t know how many times I deal with a service industry and. I can’t, I have to end up in this email chain to get something on the calendar. I just want to link to book.

So that’s awesome. And then you’ve got Lifter LMS for if they want to do the education piece. Which I want to dig in on specifically in a little bit of how they use it, but could you tell us any more just nuance or detail of what’s in the tech stack that brings this website kind of online platform as a solution to that?

Sally Crewe: So the big difference with this I’m talking at first more to the other sort of WASP type of providers or other web developers, but we’re using wild cloud, as you said which is a multi tenancy deployment platform, which essentially allows you to have your own like Squarespace or Wix or something.

Chris Badgett: Which is a huge idea. That’s a huge idea right there. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s that’s just the hugest thing.

Sally Crewe: And that’s just like what The first part of the first ingredient in this recipe we’re using a UI press pro, which is an admin theme plugin. And I was lucky enough to have gotten on the lifetime deal for unlimited sites.

So that was, and I did that with a couple of the fluent plugins as well. So I’m cashing in on my. My earlier futurism we doing that. And, that’s really enabled me to, when you log into this. It looks like it doesn’t look like WordPress. We don’t even have a menu bar down the side.

I took the decision after a bunch of research of users that having a menu across the top your, computer’s this shape, I know you can use things on your phone, but for the most part, my practitioner clients are, you are on their laptop. It’s postcard shaped and I took the decision to rather than have a menu down to have it along the top.

So it’s always in view and you’ve got that much more real estate to play with. And one thing I’d noticed from my previous onboarding calls, when we did have the menu down the side, was that a lot of people didn’t understand how to scroll. So I I’m on a, I’m on a huge website person monitor, but if you’re on a smaller laptop and you’ve got 15 things down the side on the menu, and I’m saying, okay, go down to settings.

And they’re not actually understanding that this stuff that’s beyond the page. And this was it’s another thing that sounds a little silly, but for people who aren’t in WordPress or in tech or in websites all day long, like we are, it isn’t something that’s, that goes completely intuitive.

So I wanted to remove as many of those friction points that give every time there’s a bit of friction, it makes people. It makes people stressed, It makes people feel like an idiot. It just makes people like clench up and, not be as comfortable. And we talked last time about me trying to make my website templates, be a spa like experience that when you go to the website, even if you don’t understand the basics of design, you can.

On a subconscious level tell this is a nicer place to be than that place because it’s organized and there’s white space to breathe. I tried to take that to the back end of WordPress as well. So when they log in, it’s a nice place to be. It’s like going to a spa or back to your house when someone has been there and tidied it up and cleaned it all up and put new plants up.

And and there’s a little button there that you can take a break and it takes you to an embedded video of the ocean for five minutes. And just things I’ve learned from my own journey of, working too much. Being a workaholic, working too, late, not taking breaks because I was really enjoying what I was doing.

So I’ve tried to pull all of that experience, not only as a creator of a website or somebody who knows how to help people sell courses and book, discovery calls, but as somebody who’s an online business owner who’s who’s realized the perils of, looking at a screen all day long. And I I, I also build, I use it for my own business.

I think they call it is, I think it’s called dog food. I was like, did I make that up? Yeah, I do it because it’s got all the tools that I need and I don’t see a better way for me as the creator of this thing to be really on top of what’s needed and where the problems are. And, to know how to tell people how to do stuff than to actually be using it for my own business.

Yeah, I couldn’t

Chris Badgett: agree with you more. We’ve learned so much just having our literature on this academy and a quick start course. We use our own tool. No

Sally Crewe: I think really you’re doing a massive disservice to people if you’re not like it’s, and especially if it’s A curated collection of WordPress plugins.

Like I’ve said to my folks yeah, we, this is a curation of the best plugins for the job, as far as I’m aware. And I’ve been at this for 20 plus years. I’m a research hound. If something isn’t right, if something isn’t doing what we want it to do, or if something comes along that does that thing better or adds a new feature that we haven’t even conceived of yet, I will go and find us.

And you plug in a notion, notice the word as not you this is the platform. And so I’ve got this mama bear thing going on. I’m going to look after them. They’re sharing that we’re all using the same tools. I’m keeping ahead of the curve. That’s a whole other bunch of stuff that they don’t have to have in their brain.

What plugin should I use, what platform should I use? What this, do I need to be doing this on social media? Do I need to be doing that? I’m just basically saying,

How to Simplify Your Health Practitioner Business Technology Stack With the Website Sherpa: shush,

Sally Crewe: shush. Don’t worry about that. I will trust me to to be the guide for that part of the business. And, part of that is not just showing them the tools that they should be using.

It’s part, of it is saying, don’t need to worry about that. You don’t need, you don’t need to do that. You don’t need this particular bell or whistle that, some other guru was telling you that you need. And because it’s all on WordPress now they can really sense the the integrity behind that because I am choosing other, I’m sure I’m, piggybacking on your talents and your team’s talents by using Lifter.

And I’m telling them I’m not saying this is Nurture LMS, I’m saying this is Lifter. It’s what is the best, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve tried them all. This is the best one for you guys. And here’s how to use it. And I, will support my clients but they do know what these tools are. I’m not hiding that fact.

I’m not pretending that I developed everything myself. So I would warn anybody doing this, not to do that as well, because the ego gets in the way and the ego wants to take the credit, but the flip side of that is. If something breaks with that plugin, you’re the, you’re now the, yeah.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about how your users use Lifter LMS, like in their practitioner use case or in whatever they’re doing what, brings them to need an LMS, how do they use it?

Sally Crewe: There’s, that’s a good question. There’s a few different levels of it. So you would typically think of it just as for people who want to. Sell courses as a starting point on memberships. What I actually do is I have recommended to people the idea of, so everyone’s familiar with the idea of you, you have an, a landing page, you have an email, a magnet, a list, building magnet.

Nobody wants a to think that someone will sign up to the list, get sent a PDF and then that thing gets downloaded. Never to be seen again, never to even be looked at or printed or anything. And also trees, we shouldn’t be printing as much as we do. So what I’ve started telling people is a great idea is for everybody.

Even if you don’t have a membership or a course yet, have a members section. When somebody joins their list, your list, it will send you into the membership section and here will be your download. It will also be a very exclusive. Feeling you feel if you give them the keys to somewhere, you feel like you must have either been a really special client or that you’ve paid money for that experience.

And they haven’t, they’ve just joined your list, but it just really elevates and then people can come in and they can also see. Maybe they’ll see some other things that are, Oh, I might go buy that. I might go download this other freebie. Maybe you’ll have a community there. So I’m just trying to, everyone’s trying to get people off Facebook.

I think this is a really good way to do it. And also if you want to. Rather than just emailing your list, another link to another landing page, you can be like, Hey, I’ve just loaded this into your, into the membership portal and have tiered membership. So yeah, people are using it as basically a a content vault for free content.

For, subscribers to feel like they are kind of part of your world, and then they’re using it for traditional courses, memberships. And the other side of things, I’ve got practitioners who have courses and memberships where they’re at the level now that they have other people instructing using their material.

So another thing we’re working on this year is the ability for the, these people to have their own. Platforms. So they will have their they, will have a version of what Notre dash is on wild cloud. They will have a website with the ability for other practitioners, other coaches to say, Hey I want to, teach your material.

I want to, take people through your course. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, I don’t want to rip you off. And I don’t want to some people are really good at creating content and teaching. And they really don’t enjoy. Supporting individual clients through that process. And then you’ve got a bunch of people on the other side who really enjoy the coaching and the one on one handholding, but they’re not necessarily interested or very good at creating a course or.

Material for that. So I’m trying to put these two sides of people together. What they both lack usually is the desire or inclination to, to figure out all the tech. So I’m it’s not exactly a marketplace. It’s more of an individual. One practitioner has something, they have other practitioners who are interested in instructing.

In that particular modality and just putting those guys together with, this fantastic new tech that’s available and basically giving give your instructors a business in the box. Everyone wins. The instructor can hit the ground running with their own. Course platform CRM, everything already to go can be preloaded with email sequences that sell the product.

There’s any number of ways to spin it, but the ingredients are all the same. It’s the same plugins. It’s the same tech idea, It’s just moving it up.

Chris Badgett: It’s like a fractal. It just keeps going. And I totally get it because the there’s like an individual startup practitioner, but then they have team.

Sally Crewe: We’re calling it a digital franchise.

Chris Badgett: There you go.

Sally Crewe: Cause I do have clients that I’m. That I’ve built, or I’m in the process of building custom websites for custom membership sites. And they are at the stage where they’re like, okay, we’ve realized our demographic isn’t actually health conscious parents.

It’s actually other practitioners or other nutritionists. And they want to be able to guide their clients through my material. How do we do it? And here’s how, and we could also give them a CRM and a booking link and.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Yeah. Very cool. I also love that that idea for a lead magnet to just become a member and now you just have one login.

Yeah. And then if you want other, resources become available and it’s, more like building community. Exactly. Yeah. And you can bring a download.

Sally Crewe: You can build community without even actually having a traditional. Community chat area. You can have communities like here’s everyone gets the email.

They all get in there and see see the new material. And it just really when I’ve mentioned this to, to customers as a way of doing it, they, everyone’s, everyone likes up. Like they love the idea of, cause they can visualize that experience from their side. We’ve all got a hard drive full of things we’ve downloaded that we haven’t seen before.

Looked out, I can’t find. And this way you can keep the material updated. You can give, you can leave little cookies for them. You can be like, okay, rather than just bug somebody who’s on your list to go do something, you can say, Hey, I left you a, I left you a little treat or check out the members area

Chris Badgett: I love that.

And if you’re out there watching and you’re new to LFTR LMS, some people don’t realize it. So I’ll say it real quick here. LMSs are used for courses, but LFTR LMS is also has a membership component. So which can control access to other parts of the website or even pieces of pages and things like that.

So that’s such a cool innovation you’ve done there, Sally. I love that one. Can you tell us a little more about like for if someone’s feeling inspired and they’re watching this, and let’s say they’re in some niche and they’re, they want to really double down and build a platform for that niche.

And I really just let me side note and say, it takes entrepreneurs like you to do that because the software providers, as an example They’re really focused on like their slice of the tech pie. So we need these platform entrepreneurs to assemble the tools. Mama Barrett, as you say, to make sure it’s the right thing and adjust over time and protect your community and really provide the perfect solution for those people with that stack.

But once you, my question is, once you have. You’re kind of niche and the problem you want to solve for them with a platform or collection of problems. How do you get clients? Like, how do you get known in a niche? Like you’ve gotten known in the practitioner niche.

Sally Crewe: In my case, it’s been a very organic word of mouth thing.

I’ve, got like I’ve said I’ve got practitioners who now teach other practitioners. So that’s a ripple effect of other Potential clients. And I get really good recommendations from people because I’ve got the technology, but I’ve got the knowledge of their business model and they just know from their experience that the end of the day, yeah, not everything’s going to work perfectly all the time at the end of the day.

I’m here and I will do them right. So I think that’s it’s, weird at the one, side, my business is scaling and getting more automated, but that’s freeing up time for me to be more boots on the ground available for people. Versus in a few years ago it was less automated, but that meant I was having to do a lot of the manual setup and everything, and this sort of frees Much more available at a higher level for people.

So yeah, what the, but to answer your question as I started this with, education, so I’m bringing that back to the forefront and I have a, course that we call unblock your tech chakras that is and I did it, I did a little bit of as a free training last year as well as a list building exercise.

And we have a quiz and it’s it’s cute and fun, but it’s actually. Brings together. The the, line that I’ve been talking about is like the tech trauma and the mindset and seeing your, business holistically, especially as a solopreneur seeing that, yeah, there’s elements to do with the different energy levels of the body that relates your business and how you show up and what you’ll get out of that part of the business.

So I take them through Unblocking their tech chakras. And those, levels are tied to certain parts of the platform. So it’s a, it’s quite a high level overview of what the tool does. But there’s two ways you can get it. You can either sign up for the platform and you get access to the course, or you can purchase the course and you get access to the platform for a year.

So whichever, feels more value loaded for you. Cause it really depends. Some people. Our tool first and they, feel like spending money on a tool, but not on a course and other people are the other way around. So

Chris Badgett: that’s wonderful. Marketing like getting your target audience, like around the problem before they’re a perfect fit for your, solution or whatever, and educating.

And I love that. That’s cool.

Sally Crewe: And it helps just bring everybody to the same place and everybody realize get rid of that kind of icky. It’s only me like embarrassment, shame element and saying, look, this is difficult. I’ve been at it for 27 years. I still have things that don’t work, I still have things that go wrong.

I have, I still have things that I don’t do perfectly. We’re human. Here’s what we can learn from it. Here’s the best way to look at it. And it’s, yeah, it’s turned like into a much more of a sort of mentorship coaching mindset type thing than I would ever have realized or imagined would be the case.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Yeah, there’s tactics and strategies and tools, but there’s the human element has the, mind and the emotional component. One thing I want to highlight, you mentioned, which I think is really cool. I’ve heard of this idea of where you actually have two audiences. There’s, and you mentioned it with your practitioners.

There’s like the clients that come in for help, but then there’s the people who are in their industry. Mostly not as far along and like both groups are watching. So that’s really neat. How for you. You’re getting word of mouth growth through that kind of second, less obvious audience of other practitioners of the practitioner you’re helping.

That’s really, Yeah.

Sally Crewe: And I’ve, grown with them. Like I started, my default was to start with people who were. Didn’t they like the idea of an online course, but they didn’t know what to do next. And this was back in 2015 when online courses were a little bit less known.

And, but those, a lot of those guys have succeeded. Gone on to grow and gone on to become instructor platforms for others. So it, they they’re literally, I know it’s a cliche, but their success has been my success. Cause they’ve brought people back to Hey, this is, she helped me out.

Or they’ve moved off my original platform and gone to one of the big guys and then come back and being like why, did I think that this was like, I think they, because I helped them in the beginning, a lot of them thought that was like, I was the kindergarten teacher and they didn’t realize that I was also teaching college classes.

Excuse me. So they came back. A lot of them did that, came back around and I was like, yeah, I can help you with all that.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. I noticed on your pricing, there’s a couple months free, which there you go. Again, is removing some friction, help people like try it out what’s your advice there on creating something where.

People get, can get into it and develop the trust. And how’d you come up with that strategy? I’m not asking you a clear question, but just tell us. No, I get it. It, I

Sally Crewe: think it comes from, so my original businesses were hosting businesses, so it was very much paying by the month for me was something that was just always, there was never a switch to a subscription model for me.

That’s what it was always there. And it was often if it’s 50 bucks a month. Then 500 a year. It’s just the two months discount for the bulk purchase. And I just think it’s, a nice, easy calculation and it’s something people have come to expect. And I I can, I also now tying in the There’s various offers that run at the moment, it’s the, courses comes if you sign it for the year.

There’s other times when it’ll be we’ll do a one on one setup. We’ll do wire everything up for you versus you just following the instructions. So it depends. And I’ve, road tested a few different ways of doing it and they’re all they all work for different audiences. So I tend to rotate them.

So some people like love the idea of what we have, but they’re terrified of the setup as easy as we make it. There’s still like on the edge of the diving board like this. So once a year we’ll, often do a promotion where it’s okay, sign up for you, we’ll do the setup for you. And that’ll a certain sector of, the audience will, go crazy for that.

But for others, it’s more of waiting for we don’t, we’re not doing any kind of price reduction discounts anymore. It’s usually just value, added. Services or bundles of things. And like I said, it’s the automation side of things. It’s not giving me that much more room to spread my wings as an educator.

And I come back to, Realizing that I’m actually really good at that. And I do really like it.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And last question for you, you mentioned it in passing earlier. So I want to come back to it cause it’s it’s valuable for really any entrepreneur. You mentioned there’s a thing you do on your discovery call.

Some people call it a sales call strategy call. What’s the choreography of that? And what’s, I know you have a ton of wisdom here of like how to sell ethically and gracefully and make it a great experience. So take us to school, Sally.

Sally Crewe: Yeah, we call them tech audits. They, are it’s nothing like it sounds like an IRS thing.

It’s basically people like the person I’ve described that has a lot of, Bits and pieces of their business or various iterations of their business spread out over lots of platforms. And we just say, Hey, come in, no shame, dump it out on the table. And we go through and the, it tends to be a rhythmic cadence to the conversations and it ends up being like this, they say, I’m using this.

Can I cancel that? Yes. Can I, do I still need this? And we go through and it’s not designed as a money, a monetization type of exercise, but it always ends up coming back to, yeah. So all the benefits of working with somebody, you see the stress drain from them when they realize that somebody’s Oh, I’m going to take these.

Issues off their plate. And then they look around and they’ve Oh, and this is either going to cost me the same as I’m paying now, or it’s going to save me 30 bucks a month. And I get all this. So it really takes it into that sort of, it sells itself territory. And the exercise itself gives them a really good experience of what it is to work with, me, who’s someone who’s going to help them.

With the tech and make decisions for them. And I, can’t be anyone else other than I am. I’m just, I am who I am as Popeye said. People a lot of people, the right people do, gravitate towards that, they pick up on my energy and they, know that I love what I do and that I’m really interested in helping them fix these issues and streamlining, you It all for them.

And they usually can’t wait to pass that over to me. Like I said, a lot of them will just write after the call and be like, Oh, you’ve no idea how long I’ve been waiting to find you. Cause they’re just, they didn’t realize how stressed. All of this stuff was making them.

Chris Badgett: I love that.

And that’s really the ultimate goal of sales is collect connecting a problem with a solution and making, and like, why not make that fun and like trauma relieving experience? Oh yeah. It’s like a little

Sally Crewe: bit of a game. And I I love, I’m like a problem solver. So I, But actually genuinely okay, what else do you have?

Any of this? And I do I have had more money to save. Yeah. And the end of the day it’s, guaranteed. It’s either the same or it’s less because they’ve often got multiple tools doing different things or they’re not using with, I’ve got, what is this? What’s this? I don’t like they’ve signed up for something.

They don’t even know they’re not using it. Do I still need this? So it’s great. I can be like whack a mole and just get their bills down by, but also relieve stress and and get them on the platform, which at the end of the day, I’m running a business. So

Chris Badgett: that’s awesome, Sally. Thanks for coming back on the show, go check out nurture dash.

com and see what Sally’s done there and how she’s solving platform level challenges, which is no small feat. Thank you for being a shining example of an education entrepreneur and somebody who continuously improves and iterates and cares about your customer, cares about learning and technology and innovation and the planet at the same time.

Sally Crewe: Takes one to know one. Just like

Chris Badgett: we’ll keep up the great work and thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m really excited to do another one in four years and see where we’re at.

Sally Crewe: Hopefully, Yeah. Hopefully we’ll both still be around and we won’t have been replaced by robots.

Chris Badgett: A hundred percent.

All right. Thank you, Sally.

Sally Crewe: Bye, Chris. Thank you.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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