Today in 10 minutes or less, you’ll learn:
✔️ Critical, essential, or enhancing?
✔️ Mixing the old with the new
✔️ How to sell subscriptions
✔️ Carve your own niche
Contrarian Framework: Critical, essential, or enhancing?
ONE NEW TOOL TO CIVILIZE YOUR MIND BEFORE WE BUILD YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.
All needs are not equal. When you run your own business, you realize this quickly. Everyone wants more money, more hires, more stuff.
Unfortunately, money is not unlimited. Therein lies the need for a framework…
My husband taught me the framework he used when he was in the SEALs, where everything seemed critical and lives were potentially on the line. It’s called the CEE Frame.
Let’s say you are on a road trip and your goal is to reach a destination. Your driver comes to you and says they need something.
- Critical means we can’t operate without this. “We’re out of gas, and can’t move until we refuel.”
- Essential means we need this soon, but there is an interim approach. “We have a flat tire, but we put on a spare.”
- Enhancing means it would be good to have. “We would get there faster if we had a supercharger on our car.”
Gas = critical
Tire = essential
Supercharger = enhancing
Teach your people to prioritize, and it turns out most things they think are critical are just nice-to-haves. You’re welcome in advance for the hours this will save.
Mixing the old with the new
In 2017, Haley Ingram was an undergrad with no idea what she wanted out of life.
Until she fell in love with real estate during a marketing internship at a brokerage in Orlando. By 2018, Haley was fresh out of college, ready to make that real estate cha-ching on her own.
But passion alone doesn’t make a business float. Her first two years left her basically owing money to her brokerage. So she got a little desperate and took to Instagram to market for leads. It worked, kinda.
Week after week, she churned out posts about real estate in Tampa Bay.
After 60 days, the leads started to roll in.
Soon, agents all over Tampa Bay were reaching out, asking her to handle their social media. They wanted in.
But between her day job, crafting original content for multiple IG accounts, and managing the Etsy shop where she sold RE-specific Canva templates, she was drowning.
Luckily, it was at this point she learned about subscription-based businesses.
Which led to her light bulb moment…
How to sell subscriptions
COFFEE AND CONTRACTS
Instead of creating posts for each agent one by one, Haley joined Member Mouse and created a Facebook group. Members paid a flat monthly subscription fee to get fresh IG marketing material as editable Canva templates.
It doesn’t seem like much, but in its first 14 days, Coffee and Contracts went from 0 to 14 paying members.
In the next 30, that number had gone up to 92.
And by day 70, Haley had added 170 new members to her paid community.
Shifting focus from “Done-For-You” to “Done-With-You” allowed her to scale past a handful of clients without buckling under stress.
Besides, who can juggle 170 Instagram accounts without going insane?
RUNNING THE NUMBERS
When Coffee and Contracts launched in September 2019, it had three membership tiers: $9, $14, and $19/month.
Today, C&C has only one subscription plan, for $54/month. This now generates $165,000 MRR at a 95% profit margin, according to Haley.
As a digital-first business, Haley runs a lean operation with little overhead and a payroll made almost entirely of contractors.
SCALING TO 7 FIGURES
The other reason Haley’s model scales so well? She’s growing the product with the product. From paid ads to organic content, Haley has used her Instagram page to help 15,000+ real estate agents.
Then she converts the bottom of the funnel.
She’s also leveraged the fact that real estate is a social game. Everybody knows somebody.
By setting up an affiliate program with commissions and discounts, C&C members are incentivized to market the community. Agents can’t resist a good commission.
Carve your own niche
JUST START
As someone who’s started a few businesses and bought a whole lot more, take it from me…
That crippling “what if I fail” feeling? We all feel it, and it never goes away. The only difference between the winners and losers is that winners start their businesses anyway.
Take Haley, a fresh-faced rookie with almost zero RE experience. Do you think she didn’t get imposter syndrome selling to agents who’d been practicing for as long as she was alive?
You’re damn right, she did!
Did she let it stop her? Hell no.
THERE’S ALWAYS A BUYER
We all have that one skillset we take for granted. We assume everyone is good at it, but turns out they’re not.
Case in point:
Instagram management for real estate agents.
Narrow the lens to capture the intersection of what you love and what others hate. Your cross-section is where profit lies.
Doing taxes. Mowing the lawn. Even drawing the blinds (believe it).
These are tasks millions of Americans hate and would happily outsource. The gift of convenience commands a very high price. So what service are you good at that other people hate doing? That intersection might just be worth a million bucks.
BRING THE OLD INTO THE NEW
Hundreds of industries are stuck in the 20th century. Real estate is just one of them.
By merging an outdated industry with very low-brow tech, Haley was able to not only carve a niche for herself, but also charge top dollar.
Social marketing is just one of hundreds of digital services. Services like Zapier automation and Facebook ads are in high demand, with thousands of businesses in need of them. Zero in on an antiquated B2B vertical, and you could start selling subscriptions to these businesses.
Supply meets demand.
We do the work.
– Codie
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