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Class Introduction

Lesson 1 from: Create a Product Plan & Grow Your Standout Business

Tara McMullin

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Lesson Info

1. Class Introduction

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

I want to talk to your about a problem that I see plaguing hundreds, thousands of business owners, the people that I talk to on a daily basis, probably you yourselves, and that is what I call the what else problem. In other words, what else can I sell? What else can I do to market this thing? What else, what other idea can I capitalize on to hit my goal and finally get where I want to go? What else do I need to do just to make ends meet? And because you have this what else problem, because you're constantly asking yourself these questions, you end up with a business that basically looks like the junk drawer in your kitchen. Right, it's a sort of catch all for all the possible ways you could be making money with your business. But the thing is great businesses aren't built on what else, right. Great businesses are built from a strategy for creating value at its highest level. They're built from streamlined product plans, streamlined approaches to transforming their customer's lives. So ...

the question that I'm going to have for you today throughout the day and on into tomorrow as we go through the upcoming lessons that I have for you is what if you stopped thinking about how to make more money and started thinking about how to make your highest contribution? What if you stopped thinking about how to make more money? What else you needed to do to make ends meet, to get ahead, to finally hit those goals, and started thinking about how to make your highest contribution. Turning your business into a vehicle for your unique ability to create value and transform your customer's lives. Instead of having a junk drawer for a business, you'd have a finely honed ax, or whatever tool fits your fancy today. You wouldn't have to sift through all the different opportunities that you have to make money in that junk drawer of a business, instead you'd always know that when you picked up that tool, you were going to make a huge difference in people's lives, and because of that you're also going to make a huge difference in your bank account, does that sound good? Alright, you can either figure out how to make ends meet or you can decide how to make a lasting contribution. That is what we're going to be talking about over the next two days, over the next 10 lessons. Now this class is perfect for you if you've been in business for six months or more and you're experimenting with what to sell. Experimenting is a nicer way to say you're suffering from the what else problem. You're always thinking about what else to offer to reach your goals. You feel scattered or unfocused about what's really making your business money or creating an impact. This class is also perfect for you if you struggle with how to concisely and compellingly talk about what your business does. And finally, there we go, you feel like the market is too crowded to get noticed and succeed. You guys feel like the markets out there are pretty crowded, great, we are totally going to cover that. Now by the end of this class, you're going to identify your core offer and create a plan to build your business around it. So you're not going to be suffering from that what else problem anymore. You're going to have one thing that you're focused on, maybe a couple of other complimentary offers. You're going to communicate your value proposition in a clear, compelling, and meaningful way. So it's going stop sounding so cliche and or stop sounding like something that you invented in the 23rd century, and really say something meaningful every time you talk about your products. And you're going to decide on your next steps for improving your offer and growing your business. Because this class is all about growing your business. It's all about figuring out how you can build up to the business that you really want to have. Now before we go any farther, I do want to introduce myself if you're not familiar with me. My name's Tara, hi. And I've been at this whole online small business thing since 2009, so I'm sort of like your older, fun aunt when it comes to online business. I won't call myself the online business grandma, but you know the older, fun aunt. I'm the founder of CoCommercial, which is your small business Brain Trust, so we'll be talking about CoCommercial throughout the class as we kind of use it as a case study for exactly how you can create and innovate in a very, very, very crowded market. I'm also the host of Profit, Power, Pursuit, and we're celebrating our 100th episode today. Nuts, and just as a fun tidbit about me, so you don't think I'm sitting at home just thinking about business all the time, although that's a big piece of it. My partner and I have a goal of visiting all 59 national parks by 2027, so 10 years from now. Very excited, on Saturday we're going to be checking our fourth of the list, so we're really just getting started here, but I'm pretty excited about it. Now before we really dive into things, I want to talk to you about socks. Because socks are a market that you might think, well there's not a lot of room for innovation there. There's not a lot of room for something new. In fact there's not a lot of room for anything at all, right, you know the brands that make socks. You know the sizes they come in, the colors, the shapes they come in, and yet, and yet here comes this company Bombas. I'm going to talk a lot about Bombas over the next two days. That says we have something new to offer to the sock market. We have something different to say. We have something unique to offer you. We have a better sock. And what I want you to know is that no matter what market you're in, no matter what you sell, the same opportunities that Bombas had to create a streamlined, customer focused, innovation driven company just based on socks, that's the same opportunity you have. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, you don't have to create something out of the blue, but you do need to spot that opportunity to do something different, to do something unique, to carve out a space for yourself in your market, and you need the discipline to maintain a focused, streamlined business, so you don't end up with a junk drawer or a sock drawer of offers, but instead you've got that one way that you create your highest contribution to this world. Now I've said highest contribution a couple of times here and that concept kind of comes from the book Essentialism, and the author says, it's about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential. If you do only what is essential, if you put all of your focus on making your highest contribution and your company's highest contribution to the world, you can't have a what else problem. What else isn't a question that you ask when you're focused on what's essential and when you're focused on the highest good that you can create with your business. What else ceases to be something that you ask, and instead you put all of that focus on what you do best and on what you have to contribute. And that's exactly what we're going to do over the next 10 lessons. So let's take a look at our lesson plan for this class. First and foremost, we're going to create and identify your core offer. Then we're going to find the space for you to sell out, or whatever selling out looks like to you, in any market. We're going to identify your value proposition. It's a scary phrase, we're going to break it down step by step by step by step, and at the end you're going to have sort of like a little mad lib that you can put together to make it really easy to talk about exactly what you do with your core offer. We're going to make sure that you know how to find the product market, in other words, we're going to help you get as many easy yeses as possible. And we're going to plan for growth, in other words, we're going to start looking into the future and say what is this going to look like as your business grows? So you're not at risk of stalling out. And we're going to gather information to take the next step, in other words we're going to start surveying people and talking to people and figuring out what else they need alongside your core offer. So you can kind of feel things out, and actually enhance that highest contribution that you have to make, instead of detracting from it. From there, we're going to create your three pillar business model, we're going to price your offers for growth. So yes we are going to be talking about pricing in this class, very very important. Then we're going to do things that don't scale, so that we can do things that do scale. Make sense, that's where we're going to leave things off at the end of this class. So we're going to start with figuring out what that highest contribution is that you're going to make with your core offer, and we're going to go all the way through so that you at least have a vision for what your business is going to look like five years from now, three years from now, a year from now, so you can start taking the baby steps you need to take now to get you where you want to go then.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials

Product Plan -- Implementation Month

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Product Plan -- Workbook

Ratings and Reviews

Lindsey Warriner
 

Every time I thought the class had reached a point that I knew "enough" about, Tara dropped yet another game-changer that I'd never even considered. Great experience, great speaker, great class.

Alaia Williams
 

Once again, Tara has been extremely helpful in getting me to think through where I'm taking my business next. I'm excited about the opportunities that lie ahead!

Ate Myt
 

Although the course targets people who have already started a business, I found it very helpful for me as I start my own business. I particularly appreciate the step-by-step guide to developing a 3-pillar business model. Very practical. i highly recommend it.

Student Work

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