Behind the Scenes of a Big Launch - May Review!

Also I traveled a lot. And ate too much. And FB tried to scam me for $50,000. So, I need a nap.

So… it’s June.

!!!!!

Holy return from oblivion Batman! So many things happened, I had to awkwardly dance it out. Live footage of me dancing:

Please heart this post if the above gif entertains you too :).

But anyway, April me was all, “things are chill. Just relax.”

And May me was like, “Hah hah hah hah!”

This past month I spent several weeks traveling. I left California to go everywhere from Washington, D.C. to Leesburg, and Winchester, Virginia, and Columbus, Georgia, and then Nashville, Tennessee.

I saw the South.

And drank a lot of sweet tea. Like… a lot.

I had a wedding to attend, a favorite Uncle to visit, and a business conference to bring my “A Game” to (it was at the end of my trip, so I stumbled into it with my “C+ Game” and some very wrinkled pants).

And, I’ve never been so happy to get home to California. There *is* such a thing as too many hotels.

And… behind the scenes of ALL of this - we did a brand new launch of the Build A REAL Business program.

So, this month let’s talk about that, shall we?

Because some weird bad and good things happened.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

🍰 First: I’ll take you behind the scenes of the launch execution.

🍰 Second: Then I’ll cover how we did and lessons learned, things that I think will be applicable to anyone launching this year.

🍰 Third: And finally I’ll cover some of the weirder things that happened!

Behind the scenes of a launch: The execution

If you are new to this Substack, Build a REAL Business (BARB) is our flagship Coach Pony program all about how to start, grow and scale your business as a coach.

You can catch yourself up on the program here.

BARB is an evergreen program, but roughly three times a year we do a “live” launch. Meaning, we offer a big bonus incentive to join the program, and have some live launch activities for people to learn more about us and BARB, and finally we have a deadline to join and get the bonuses.

People love a live experience, and people NEED a deadline. It’s human nature, so sometimes you just have to lean into it.

This May we decided the bonus - in addition to an extended payment plan - was going to be a “Fast Track” version of the program for the first and most important phase.

Phase 1 - which is all about how to start your coaching business, normally takes about 9 weeks to complete. We accelerated the training and are opening up the entire Phase over the course of a month.

🚨 I talk about why I decided to do that here.

It is a test. I wanted to test to see how it did on launch (more on that in a second) and also take a look at how it does on delivery (I’ll know more next month).

We launched it pretty simply.

I announced the Fast Track was open on May 16th, for two weeks, to the big email list, and then a few days later we started aggressively inviting folks to our live webinar all about how to build a coaching business and get a steady stream of paying clients. This webinar acted as our segmented interest list for the program. If folks were interested right now in building a coaching business, then they were the right candidates for BARB.

We did two rounds of the webinar on Tuesday, May 20th, and Wednesday, May 22nd, and that’s where I spent time at the end walking through the BARB program.

🚨You can see information about this webinar, the landing page, and how we filled it here.

Things were tricky, as the “shopping cart” for this offer was open over the Memorial Day weekend (a big holiday in the U.S. that is considered the official “start of the summer”), so that’s not *amazing* - but we had to work with that given the timing of the delivery.

We closed enrollment for the Fast Track on Thursday the 29th, to give us a working day in the office (Friday) to troubleshoot any issues, and most importantly, to give us enough time to run our new students through our three-day onboarding cycle ahead of the Monday, June 2nd start of the Fast Track.

During this time, we sent emails every day to everyone on the webinar list, with the exception of Saturday the 24th - I never think sales emails do well on a Saturday, and even worse on a holiday weekend Saturday. The last day we sent 4 emails, which I know is a lot, but also - without exception - if you don’t email enough you’ll get people asking the next day to join because they “didn’t know it was closing.”

Here are some of the emails we sent out, if you are curious:

Now to the good stuff…

How did this launch do?