All Systems Go! Podcast – Episode 62

Achieving Hockey Stick Growth with Kronda Adair

All Systems Go! Marketing Automation and Systems Building with Chris L. Davis
All Systems Go! Marketing Automation and Systems Building with Chris L. Davis
Achieving Hockey Stick Growth with Kronda Adair
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Episode Description

Ep. 62 – Join Chris in this week’s special episode where he speaks with Kronda Adair, an alumni of his Mentorship Program, about success by way of mentorship.  Discover when and how Kronda found exponential growth in her business as she details her journey before and throughout the program.

  • The unique approach Kronda used to get past the common initial hesitancy of investing in yourself and how she turned that into a way to get ahead faster
  • The 2 most influential “aha moments” she took away from Chris’ program and the single thing alone that she says made it worth her investment
  • What the main strategy was that took her business from single entrepreneur to a team of 7 people in less than 6 months
  • The little known way to deepen your automations by using ClickUp that both Kronda and Chris utilize in their businesses
  • Why having functional systems in place is imperative and how this can save your business when unpredictable events, such as Covid-19, pop up

ASG 062 – Achieving Hockey Stick Growth with Kronda Adair

Chris L. Davis: [00:00:01] All right, and we’re live. So, everyone, I am excited for the first installment of a well, this is two firsts. It’s the first guest speaker and then it’s the first introduction of video in with the podcast. So if you’re attending for the first time, you know that what you don’t know. But this is usually just audio. We are now adding a video element to it. So it gives you even more reason to subscribe on YouTube or just to watch us. Some of you have never seen what this looks like. So with that being said, let’s jump right into it, Koranda. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

Kronda Adair: [00:00:45] I’m doing so well. I’m so happy to be here. And, you know, it’s quid pro quo because you recently were the first guest on my podcast, which launches in just under a week. So I’m delighted.

Chris L. Davis: [00:01:00] Yes. In a great podcast, by the way, we’re going to make sure you drop the link to that at the end of this one. And what I want to do is I want to I want you to introduce yourself to our audience and then we’re going to go through three areas. Right.

Chris L. Davis: [00:01:15] You are one of the most polished individuals that I have seen come through my curriculum in the in the respect that you’ve got every resource laid out within the festival and you have the battle wounds for the Web development side to serving people at such a capacity. So the thing that stands out to me the most about you is your resourcefulness, how intentional you are with just making sure everything is organized and easily accessible.

Chris L. Davis: [00:01:50] But before we jump into that, I’ll let you introduce yourself, let everybody know who you are, your business, and just give them some some preliminary background.

Kronda Adair: [00:01:59] All right. Well, I’m Kronda Adair and I am a recovering web developer from Portland, Oregon. And yeah, like I said, I came in on the web development side. I really was literally, you know, working at a job as a project manager and had a meeting with our web developer and I knew nothing. So for those of you who come to this from like a non technical, I remember asking someone to explain success, which is how how controls presentation on the Web. And I got the explanation and I was like, I still don’t get it. So that that is where I come from. And I really decided after that meeting like that looks like the way to go that I really wanted to work for myself. I wanted to be location independent, even though, you know, we have a house and cats and a dog. So how useful that is now. But and once I decided that I just went like it, like everything, I just kind of went full force and got my degree and, you know, worked for a company for a little while and then got fired for culture fit, quote unquote, culture fit and decided that was the time to hang out my shingle and start making five hundred dollars WordPress sites like like you do when you start out.

Kronda Adair: [00:03:18] And those were my humble beginnings back in twenty thirteen. So you know, I went from that to making more expensive websites to go to studying marketing and realizing like the websites, just the front door. So what, what happens after that. Like how do you get someone to come to your website and build a relationship. And so I’ve just gotten more and more into the automated marketing space. And so now my primary my primary offers are I teach people how to be people online. So I teach service based business owners, you know, how to use content marketing so that their content can sell their service, take some of the pressure off that that sales for them. And and then I have it done for you side, which is where you have been so, so helpful in really tightening up my processes for doing things for people and taking those technical headaches, you know, connecting those services together and giving them true automated marketing.

Chris L. Davis: [00:04:18] Yes. Yes. In and I will say it has been a joy just to see you navigate through it all from the light bulbs to even the things that you’ve taught me, which I have to give you a shout out. My operations manager, Rachel, recommended clicker and we’re using click up.

Chris L. Davis: [00:04:41] And I’m like, Oh, this is great. And immediately I had to upgrade because it had automation. How can I not? I felt like fundamentally, even if I wasn’t using it, it would be off brand, are you not to.

Chris L. Davis: [00:04:56] Yeah.

Chris L. Davis: [00:04:59] So I started to. Just think about it before I even really knew how to use the tools, I said, Chris, don’t don’t break your own rule and start just of without having a plan and purpose for it at all.

Chris L. Davis: [00:05:11] So as we start to use it, I say it is a reason why I need to automate, because I need to automatically change the assigning based on the status. Haha, right. So now the automation list grows. They start out with ten I think on the light plan, and you exceeded that within the first two weeks. And so I feel like I’ve got a pretty good hold on, click up like OK, this is how you do it. And then Koranda I think it was last week in our monthly that I took over your night.

Chris L. Davis: [00:05:38] Yeah.

Chris L. Davis: [00:05:40] Deronda makes this statement and says yeah we’ve really been using the docs and click up more. And I was like, oh, tell me about that. She said, yeah, because when you’re taking notes and you have bullet points, you could just. Right. Click and create a task from the document. And at that point, my entire night shift derailed. I was going to watch some shows on Netflix, you know, kind of just chill and sit back and write. When you mention I said, oh, I’ve got to explore this. I mean, this is going to add another level of efficiency to the business if we can have notes that we’re taking and just start clicking and adding them as tasks and then have automation depending on the list assigned to certain people, blah, blah, blah. So anyways, yeah, that to say that’s the beauty, that’s really the beauty of the community.

Chris L. Davis: [00:06:30] And that really is the vision that I had in mind when I set forth and said, who needs to be a part of this? Who would who would get the best, who would get the most from this training, apply it, find it valuable, and then, like, continually nerd out, right.

Kronda Adair: [00:06:45] Yeah, well, and I’ve gone deeper into the click up docs because now I’m like, you know, all these all these marketing plans that I’m writing for people. I have like three different Google Docs. Right, for these plans. I’m writing proposals right now. I have like five, you know, five proposals to do it. I’m like, you know, if I wrote these and click up, then I could take all the, you know, just and not only that, but instead of being like a bunch of different documents, I can just have a book for whatever stage you’re in because you can make pages in your click up docs and then you can make sub pages. So I can have a page that’s like, here’s your scope, you know, that you get for like here’s what’s going to get here’s a here’s a page for here’s the the curriculum that we’re going to go through because I take them through your six systems. That’s all we do is we go through and we said, OK, where’s your traffic coming from? You know, what’s your what’s your closed system? What’s your offer? Like all those things I just go through and I say, where are you? Where do you need to be? Right. So we going to that could be a page. And then there’s a page for like, OK, here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s the actual marketing plan. And then that could just link to templates of onboarding tests. And I’m down the rabbit hole.

Chris L. Davis: [00:08:01] Oh, I love it. And that’s that’s that’s a good segue way actually, into the first question that I wanted to ask you. The first phase that I wanted to talk about, we just finished up our our live workshop, the first automation bridge workshop via Facebook ever. And last year was great. We had great engagement. People were learning, are still learning. I did some breakdowns of landing pages, automation’s check out pages. It was great. It really was the content and the people. Amazing. I just didn’t care so much for the platform with Facebook just because it’s so busy and hard to find things, even though I think mine is fairly organized where we’re using units and everything else. But anyways, so in this group we have people who may or may not have invested in coaching before, who may or may not have ever enrolled in a a more I would say heavy. I’ll call that heavy course in my definition of heavy is specialized knowledge. Right. Like specific to a particular thing. It’s not something that you could just go easily get everywhere else. So there’s considerations that I’m aware of. You know, there’s there’s this this hesitancy at times there’s this nervousness. There’s this. Should I. Oh, wait a minute. Am I ready? Right. So speak to that that I want you to speak to two things. One is speak to that position that you were in prior and looped that into your approach to coaching because you had your open with your approach to coaching and how you can use it to get ahead fast. So I’ll give you the Florida to just speak about that place.

Kronda Adair: [00:09:44] Ok, I think I want to I want to go back, like, way further, because I remember the first sort of significant investment that I made in coaching where it was like it was uncomfortable, you know, like it like, oh, you buy a course here. Of course they. There you sign up for a workshop like that’s you know, that’s low, low friction, low investment. And I, I distinctly remember because it was about this time of year, it was like a Cyber Monday, you know, get in now for this price or whatever. And and the discount price was still uncomfortable. It was still like, oh, I don’t I don’t know. And like I just remember, like, hitting the button and like putting in my credit card and been like, well, OK, whatever it is, like I’m all in I have to make this happen because now I’ve spent this money and now I have to go make it worth it. And that’s kind of always been my philosophy and my stance because. You can’t I can’t I literally can’t afford to take the long way, you know, like there’s so much opportunity cost in flailing around on your own. And so I really remember that feeling. And it’s a muscle that you build because, you know, almost every mentor that I’ve had after that, there’s still been that discomfort. And what I do in those situations when I’m like, OK, I know I need this, but I can’t quote unquote can’t afford it. Right. I never really say that to myself. I just figure out, OK, what do I need to do to go get this money? And usually there is enough free resources. There’s enough free trainings from that person that I mean, I just finished listening to today’s episode of your podcast this morning, and I was like, you know, let me go back and take notes.

Kronda Adair: [00:11:34] Just, you know, there is and you literally say you’re like, you know, I’m in a mood. Let me let me give you the actual actionable. Right. There’s no excuse. So.

Kronda Adair: [00:11:46] You have the road map to go do the things and implement to make the money that you need to invest, and then when you get in, there’s just orders of magnitude, like more depth and more. And that was my experience, too. I was like, this podcast is like you. You should be charging for it. And then when and then when I actually got into the program, not even the main not even the main mentorship content like I went in. And the point that I was at, I was like, let me go in and do campaigns that convert. Yeah. And that was the that was the one I dove into first. And that was just so useful to just put all the pieces together, put everything in order, like go through everything. It just leveled up. I think one of the things I did was and I don’t know if this is in there, but just having, like the unsubscribe page, the way you the way you do unsubscribes and having that automation that says so what I’m talking about is when people unsubscribe, you have an unsubscribe page and you put a form on there and you let them choose the messaging that they want to get. So they are unsubscribed. You did what they asked, but then they’re like, oh, wait, I can just get messages for customers. OK, let me do that. And then they go right back on your list. So you say like these are the things like people are just not going to think of that stuff on their own. And the other thing was I was bugging you about and this is probably what got me and I was like, I need that spreadsheet, that er table base about segment and tag number was I hadn’t been there five minutes.

Kronda Adair: [00:13:22] I was up in your DMS and I was like, can I get this er table base. I need to figure out these segments and I think I feel like that alone was sort of worth the price of admission because I had just created my done for you model.

Kronda Adair: [00:13:39] Mm. You know, I didn’t want to go back to just oh let me do a bunch of custom proposals and spend ten hours on it and maybe they say yes, you know, and I had created this retainer model where I get paid up front to do the discovery and the, and the you know, the research and the intensive and make the plan. And then if they want to implement, it’s just a retainer model. They pay a certain amount per month. And getting that that base and getting those planning documents just seriously up leveled what I was able to deliver, because it was the first client that I signed on to do that. And so and what was really great was that this client had nothing previously. So there was nothing to undo the few contacts to move over from MailChimp, no big deal. And then I was able to just build this beautiful thing from scratch. And to this day, not for much longer, but like her stuff looks better than my stuff internally because I got to undo all the mess that I created. So, yeah, I don’t know that that that hit all the points that did.

Chris L. Davis: [00:14:41] I want to I wanted to mention a few things or highlight a few things that you that you mentioned with the the discomfort. Right. Of investing. And one of the things that that I often I often see people do is they say I can’t afford it. So I I heard you catch yourself when you said it. If I can’t afford it, actually, I don’t tell myself I can’t afford it. So that was a that was a level of growth. At some point you realize, well, you know what everybody pays for what they value, whether it’s a house, whether it is a computer. If you really want something and you see the value in it, you make time and money for it. That’s just that’s just what it is right now. People are. Yeah, that’s just how we are. So a lot of times when I hear people say I can’t afford it are X, Y, Z, and I’m not the pushy type of person to say, go get your credit card and just, you know, listen, we’re all grown. If you really are not in a financial position to make this move, don’t do it. But a lot of times I see people shrink. And here’s what I mean by Shrink Koranda. They shrink their vision to fit their comfort level. Right. So instead of truly saying, you know what, I am going to go for that thirty K a month, they’ll say, well, right now in my business I’m, I’m really just trying to do three three thousand, you know, I’m trying to do something that’s safe and gets them off the hook. But the problem with that is you’re you’ll see that pattern across the board, right.

Chris L. Davis: [00:16:16] When you start to look and, you know, really assess multiple areas of their life, they take the same approach. And for me, my approach was similar to yours. What I did is I said, you know what I saw what my mentor was was offering, and I was sold on the offer. It was no question at all. And I was sold on him. I said, no, it’s him I want to learn from. And I said, I’ve got to get this money. I’ve got a family can’t dip into the dip into that pot, but. And with the free keyword that you mentioned, Koranda was free with the free resources available specifically from him, along with what I had, I was able to piece together, of course, and start selling it and get enough money to get started. I did not have enough money to cover it all. I jumped on. Oh, yeah. And even the monthly was a stretch. But the power is within that first month, you’re going to find that nugget. You’re going to find that thing that’s like that changes the game for you. You’re like, oh, I see it. And from that point on, you’re off and you’re chasing a vision that was bigger than what you even thought you could do when you started. And before you know it, you’re looking back like I am so glad I did not let what seemed to be so much prevent me from learning everything that I just learned. And that was my first time truly investing. And since it worked so well is all it took was one time. Oh yeah.

Kronda Adair: [00:17:47] If I want to I want to say something about that. Right.

Kronda Adair: [00:17:51] Because your first time worked well, but a lot of people, their first time does not go well. Yeah. And that was true for me to like that program that I stretched to get in. In a sense it worked because it got me what I thought I wanted, which was, oh, I have this big project, but then that big project was out of my depth. And so that brought a whole host of other problems. So, you know, I’ve had ones that went well, I’ve had ones that went not as well. But my philosophy about that is that you win or you learn. So it’s never wasted unless you don’t mind the lessons from the mistakes or the things that don’t go as you want. And I want to say something about the vision piece as well. So this is something I got from one of my mentors a few years ago. He has this this framework. And I always have to, like, think hard about the acronym. It’s. See, VCR choices, validate vision and create reality. So what that means is when you come to the choice point where you’re like, am I going to invest in this thing? You know, it’s uncomfortable. It’s a stretch. I’m going to go figure out how to get the money. And you make a choice based on your current reality, which is why I can’t afford this. So I’m not going to do it. End of story. Or you make a choice based on your vision, which is this is where I want to go and this is what I need to do to get there. So let me figure out how to make this happen. And I see once you understand that framework, you can see it really clearly in the way people make decisions. It’s like, is this decision validating the reality that you want or the reality that you have?

Chris L. Davis: [00:19:34] And yet, you know what? I just read something today about vision and how we need to think bigger. And it said the minute you settle for a 50 percent increase in revenue, you say no to a five hundred percent increase. I said, well, right on that side of me, I said, whoa. And when you think about that, it’s just like naturally you’re just how your brain works. Not to get too deep into how your brain is wired into psychology, but if your brain wants to be right, so what it knows it wants to be. It wants to be. It looks for confirmation for what it knows. When you when your vision goes beyond what you know, you’re proving your whole existence wrong. You know, everything that you do. But that’s that discomfort. That’s that vision. That’s that’s that that’s the requirement to get to the next level. So what we find is that when it does go right. Right.

Chris L. Davis: [00:20:43] Because I guess we could flip this podcast and talk about it because nobody is going to join your mentorship program and be like, this is crap like that’s not going to happen. So.

Chris L. Davis: [00:20:52] Right. So for you, when you think about it, I’ve learned that this is a loaded question. So if you could just whatever comes to mind first, how about that? That’ll make it easier to answer. When you think back on your experience from logging to completion, what would you say were a couple AHA’s? Let’s do this. Let’s do one ahar that you were actually looking for and then one that that that got you by surprise? I didn’t realize that that would be so valuable. I don’t even think of it, you know.

Kronda Adair: [00:21:26] Yeah. OK, so the things that I was looking for was kind of what I already talked about, about just the planning. Right. And this is because so many people are so bad at planning and it takes when you’re new to it, it takes so long. You know, you’re just like, I just want to get in there and, like, do stuff. And I’m I’m still I’m still, like, walking back from that. You know, those urges mean, like, if I was in I was in klick up today and I was like, OK, it’s not this is a phrase now that is my catch phrase for the business is not done until it’s documented, you know, because we have we’re having to go back and do some things. And so I’m like, OK, you sent that email, but is it inevitable, you know? And so that was sort of something I was looking for was more instruction and resources around planning.

Kronda Adair: [00:22:15] And I know, like the maps were another thing I was bugging you for. I was like, oh, well, you know, I would see, like, these shots of these maps that you put together, I’d be like, what tool is that? Do you have templates? Can you get there?

Kronda Adair: [00:22:27] Oh, now, you know, me and Lucid Chart are good friends in mapping out. I actually enjoy it. Yeah. And then let’s see some things that were surprising. You know, it just there’s all these you had a podcast episode that was like the unsexy parts of automation. And I think just having, like, all of those things laid out. So here’s something that I probably should be embarrassed that I’ve just really started paying attention to this. But using UTM like your URL parameters, so that crack like, OK, where did this lead come from? Where did this sale come from? Like where did you know? And so I just probably in the past two weeks have really gotten serious about that. And then like, OK, let’s put a let me let me go sign up for a rebranding, which you mentioned in a podcast. And so now I have I have a marketing table and it’s really cool. It actually automatically creates the utmost based on the other fields that you filled out. So, of course, what the you know. So now I have this thing. I have this that I’m training my admin this afternoon. I’m like, here’s how you make these links and here’s where we use them and all that kind of stuff. So like that that’s an example of like the nitty gritty things that just make a huge difference, because then you can go back and be like, OK, you. Yeah, the people that come from this source, you know, sign up twice as fast as the people who come from this other source here. And so the tracking piece, that’s always been one of my weaker areas. And so that’s I’m trying to shore that up and all the resources are there to to make it happen.

Chris L. Davis: [00:24:12] Yeah. Yeah. That is it’s one of those things where people people often overcomplicate tracking and then the simples and because some of the simple things are complicated and some of the harder things are made simple when it comes to metrics and analytics. Right. So you can easily pay three hundred dollars a month for a platform that generates all of these charts and graphs for you that you don’t know anything to do with. You don’t know you don’t know how to configure it because analytics is just that thing. Or you can like your mentioning leverage UTM parameters in storeman sources. So when Ali comes in, you know what it is and you can start to track back to the source. Now, that seems simple, but it’s a little complex, right? Like putting it up there and knowing how to put it into a hidden, hidden field so that people aren’t seeing these strange values captured. But once you’re exposed to it, it’s funny. Every time I teach somebody that they start seeing how long these URLs are, when they click click on this other stuff, they’re like, oh, my gosh, all of that information in the Yahoo! So it’s a standard practice that everybody’s doing is just analytics, because the technology hasn’t evolved to make it more simple, complex to do that simple thing.

Chris L. Davis: [00:25:29] But but yeah, I, I, I enjoyed watching you go through the program, so I don’t you know, my none of my programs are, it’s like mass mass production. Hey everybody come in. So it allows me to be a little more personal with you. Always his journey even if I’m not saying anything about it. And you made a substantial leap. I remember on our first call what your target was. And I will share it only if you want to feel free. But you had a target and then as you were going through the program, you hit an inflection point. And then I remember you sending me a message and you were like, this is about to be my first X, Y, Z. And I was like, I was so happy because I saw you doing the work. I literally saw you in there reverse engineering, picking this thing apart, putting it back together for your business. Hey, do you have this like you were you were focused, you were locked in. So what would you say was that was that point where you saw that that that hockey stick, exponential growth happened in the business?

Kronda Adair: [00:26:39] Well, there’s so many factors that play right. It’s twenty twenty. So we can’t we can’t ignore the the holistic scope of of everything that’s happening. And I think I think a bunch of things came to a head. Right. My skills were leveling up. My my offers became more clear. You know, I have I have a lot of digital products that people can access, but I didn’t really have you know, I had my boot camp. And then at some point during the coaching process, people were like, oh, to our tech sucks. And I’m like, OK, well, how can I how can I address this? Right. It’s a real need, but not but leave behind all the parts that that, you know, we’re not great. So those things were happening right in the spring that the the offers were happening. And then then you have covid where suddenly now everybody can’t. Go to the meet up, and that was their whole marketing strategy, right? And so and you have me out here who’s been saying I teach people how to be people online and suddenly everybody’s got to be online. So. So and then you have you know, you have George Floyds murder, which now suddenly white people like.

Kronda Adair: [00:27:51] Racism is a thing I need to go support a black business. All of those things are happening. And so so I’m going to say the numbers. But but I have a whole retrospective that I wrote because, you know, one thing I hate is you say these numbers and it’s like overnight success. Yeah. Based on the last five years. Right. The last five years of the hustle and the pain and the mistakes and the whatever.

Kronda Adair: [00:28:16] So in July, there’s a there’s a few cool things that happen. I have another mentor and she challenged us to do a 10K in ten days. And at the beginning of this challenge for her whole community, I was going on vacation and I was like, oh, all right. Well, you know, I’m an automation specialist, so what do we do about this? And I had started hiring teams. I had two team members. I was like, all right, I’m going on vacation. We’re doing this challenge. Here’s what we’re going to sell. Here’s the content. We’re going to go out. Here’s a call to action. And so I passed out for five days and I went to a ranch and they pretty much ran things. And during my vacation, I mean, I think fifteen thousand just over fifteen thousand dollars during the whole ten days, I made just over twenty K and then things started to get to where like this. You know, if I get this many more customers, I could be, I could have a 50 K month.

Kronda Adair: [00:29:11] Let’s do that.

Kronda Adair: [00:29:13] So so then I got real intentional and I went to my community. I was like, hey, y’all, I’m really close to this goal. Like, if you were thinking about signing up, now would be a great time. And it was really became a push. And so I didn’t I didn’t hit 50. I was like fifteen hundred dollars short of fifty K but potato, potato, whatever. Right. So, so that happened and that was like my hockey stick. And then the next month we did just over forty K. But here’s the here’s the important thing about that is that we didn’t we didn’t really work that hard, we were just kind of doing what we were doing and that just happened. And so that’s based on, you know, it’s a process and you’re building out systems and then the systems continue to work for you. And so a lot of people came back, you know, because I was doing like marketing push, you know, in the spring, I was doing a marketing push for just one of my basic courses that I made three years ago. But the fact that I was visible and I was out there was like, oh, I sold a bunch of marketing intensives for five K each. So these processes and your content and your systems start to work for you. And then that’s a beautiful thing because I don’t really work that hard at now. Like just people pop up on my calendar.

Chris L. Davis: [00:30:29] Yes. Koranda, I have I have a potential t shirt saying. I said, you know how I when I’m, when I’m moving and talk and stuff comes out and I’m like, hey, wait a minute, that was actually good. But I had this slide that I gave a presentation on recently and it said Systems saved me. Oh, it right. The context was you realize like the time to put your systems in place is now because what’s inopportune for some becomes our opportunity. Right. Like you knew so many people that war. And I sympathize. I truly do sympathize with people who fell on hard times with covid family members of mine, friends. So it’s hit everybody. But it it had a different effect on me because I had systems in place. Now, I had and said I need systems in place for one day. There’s going to be a pandemic where everybody’s going to have to be at home wearing masks. You can’t leave the house. You’d never know. That’s the thing. And I think that a lot of people do themselves a disservice thinking that I’ll build it when I need it. When you really need it, you cannot.

Kronda Adair: [00:31:46] Right. OK, so I have a really good story about that, actually, because that first client that signed up for insource, we had actually been working together for a year. She came in a boot camp and then we revamped our website, you know, saved her from Squarespace like she had been with me for a year and had all this foundation in place. And she is in the wellness space she was doing and seeing clients in person. And so when covid hit, you know, she had been on the road to sort of like, I I can’t reach my goals with this one on one model and I’m kind of going towards burnout. So she was already on the path of, like, what can I do to pivot and shift? But we had done that year of work. And then she also participated in that ten 10K challenge. She created a product, so she created a product to help people with their own wellness. That’s like physical and ship it. And so in our weekly meetings, she’s like, OK, I have the product. We we created a product on Thrive card for people to buy it. What needs to happen on the back end? And so we were able to map out, OK, if they buy it for themselves, this needs to happen. If they buy it for someone else, this needs to happen. They need these messages. They need to go to this, you know, if they buy it for someone else. And we need to know, like, we need to get the information of the people where to ship it here. And so we mapped out that whole thing and then my team built it out in two days. Mm. So you can’t do that without systems. Yes, yes, or if you do, it’s going to come back on you later.

Chris L. Davis: [00:33:22] It really is where we’re at the point now in business where you truly can’t afford. I would say you couldn’t afford it beforehand, but if you had access to capital, if you desire to grow a big team of with humans that you’re training and just go the traditional route, you could. But now it’s more of a you would be foolish to do it that way, you know, like knowing that remote has been mandated in society now. And it’s going to always be at some level, like like I mentioned, somewhere Microsoft is going full remote for some of their positions. A lot of companies are going remote for time throughout twenty twenty one. So this is the thing. No, we can’t unlearn this.

Kronda Adair: [00:34:12] Yeah. A lot of people a lot of companies that were like, oh, we can’t make work at home. Work is like, oh yes, you can. Turns out you can because you have to. And now the people are home and they’re like, no, we don’t want to go back.

Chris L. Davis: [00:34:26] And the skill, the skill set of implementing systems for your business and others is one of the most highly sought after skill sets right now. I, I, I’ve always felt like I was on to something when I was at Lee Pages when I was an active campaign and everything in between, you know, running my mentorship program for over five years now. And I always knew I was on to something and I said, just keep working at it, just keep working at it. And I’m glad I stuck with it. And I have to give credit. Somebody who planted the seed was Brendan Bouchard. He he’s a motivational speaker. I was that on reports first user conferences called Entrepot Palooza. I went there and I remember him being on the stage. And I mean, this this man, he had controlled the entire audience. There were people crying. There are people who could dance like that, everybody out of their element at that time. I’m broke. This is broke. Chris so broke. Chris is skeptical of everybody. I’m mad that you won’t be quiet. Stop shouting. I need to learn and figure out how to make money. Will you stop, you know, running around, talking about. Yeah, like everybody just let the man speak. So I guess that’s what I was I was in a different mode. But he comes down and he speaks with this somber tone and he said, everybody in here, you all who are learning how to do this, you’re the future.

Chris L. Davis: [00:35:52] Every business is going to need somebody like you that knows how to build this stuff in Entrepreneur Report is the tool. Of course, he was an entrepreneur, but I never that never left my mind. Said, I wonder what future that is like, how far you know in the future that is. And since I couldn’t see it, it just kind of like stayed in the back. And as I’m working and, you know, building building my brand and my expertise, it came to the forefront. I it now is the top. This is this was the times. And right now it is right now. So I’m more passionate than ever to get as many people who are willing to invest and learn and really deployed themselves, the better the next version of themselves out in the marketplace so that they can deploy these systems. Which brings me to the final question for you or about the final stages. Where are you at now and where are you going? You know, you’ve got systems in place. You’ve got teams you’ve you’re working on your stuff now, not just all of your clients. You’re tidying up your back in making your system strong as well as streamlining for for future growth. What what is the future for Koranda?

Kronda Adair: [00:37:05] That’s a great question. I’m very excited about it. So right now what’s happening is, you know, and I said this before we went live is, you know, when you clean out your closet and you pull everything out and then it’s just like a heap of stuff on the floor and you’re like, what did I do? Yeah. And that’s that’s a little bit what my business is like right now. I went from basically just me in May of this year to we have seven, seven people like six people on the team. And and then our podcast producer, who’s also in your program. Amazing, too. So that is that is fast, you know, to go from. And I’m not someone who has a business background. So, you know, like a lot of entrepreneurs, I’m making that CEO shift, you know, not just in my I’ve had the mindset for many years, but now it’s like, oh, now I have actual people. I have to figure out how to leave them, how to tighten up. You know, I’ve always been well, maybe not always, but since I read Work the system a few few years ago, it’s funny you talked about system saved you. And when I read that book, I literally went around sort of proselytizing to business owners and I was like, have you accepted systems and documentation?

Kronda Adair: [00:38:24] That’s your first guess. It’s true, you know, because a lot of people are like, oh, that’s boring.

Kronda Adair: [00:38:34] I’m like, yeah, it’s boring until you get ready to save your time and your sanity and your. And so we’re just sort of like we’re just like building this runway as the plane is landing where like I’m just every day trying to get stuff out of my head and trying to get in. So I have someone specifically on the team who the main part of her job is to write the recipes, to write those processes. And so everybody else is responsible for like making those loon videos, getting that stuff out of out of their head so that, you know, those soaps can be written and and then, you know, linked, linked and click up. So so that’s happening behind the scenes. And then, you know, clients like I have I’m in this this dichotomy where it’s like I’m, you know, doing that. And I have to be the one to, in some respects, to get it so that they’re doing things the way that I want them done. Yeah, but then I also have I have like five proposals that I’m working on right now. And then I had a new client come in. We’re going to start their marketing intensive. You talked about systems. I had a call this week with a I’ll just say a very, very large company based in Oregon.

Kronda Adair: [00:39:54] Because there’s a section of their team that, like they’re trying to manage these things internally and they’re all doing it through email, people like how do I do this? How do I do this? And they need to create a website so that they can house these assets, make it searchable and people can go. And and so, you know, every business needs systems like everyone. And I was astonished, like a company of that size was like, wait, you’re doing what you know? And and that’s out of my you know, I really like working with, like small business owners. And so I took the call and I was like, well, you know, they need a website. I don’t really like to do websites, like just to make a website. But then they were like, yeah, we need to wrangle all our data and make it available. So I was like, oh, now you’re speaking my language. OK, yeah, let’s do that. So, you know, the future for me is just really getting my team to gel and getting everybody sort of pointed in the right direction and making sure everybody feels empowered to to do their best work so that we can start producing these projects because these projects are going to start coming through.

Kronda Adair: [00:41:05] And like just having those, because I tell you what, like, I have an amazing team and they are fast and so like to be able to hand them and er table and be like, here are the segments, the sequences and the steps. Like once we get that all dialed, like it can be produced so quickly. And so getting those processes in place for, for planning, for implementation. And my, my goal is to hit a million dollar run rate by my fiftieth birthday which is next May, so May twenty twenty one. So I believe that can be done with the offers that I currently have and the team that I currently have, we’re bringing on. I’m looking at bringing on a developer just so I have someone in-house. You know, I have a lot of partners who do amazing work for me, but yeah.

Kronda Adair: [00:41:59] So it’s just like it’s just a very, very rapid zero to 60 feeling right now.

Chris L. Davis: [00:42:05] Yeah, I love its growth, its growth.

Chris L. Davis: [00:42:07] And and one thing that I will commend you for is you kind of mentioned it, but the CEO shift, right. Like your every warranted everybody, you you have to make money to be in business, to stay in business. You have to be generating revenue. But once you figure that out for your business and you put systems in place that keeps the revenue in you, you have the opportunity to polish up that CEO, be that visionary to hit, like you said, that million, that million mark in a lot of people can’t see beyond what’s just right in front of them there to make twenty five hundred this month. And I need twenty five more. What how do I get to ten. How do I get to ten thousand. They just can’t see it. And somebody like yourself, I’ve seen you change your target over time and get further and further and bigger and bigger. So it has been an absolute joy and won one of the closing. The last thing is I appreciate your resourcefulness, not just from a giving perspective. You know, like you have so many resources that you’ve created for people to go through, which saves you time, but also your resourcefulness in the community, like you leverage the other mines that are in the group.

Chris L. Davis: [00:43:23] And it makes sense. We’re all learning the same thing. So why wouldn’t we be able to help each other faster to get. Exactly. So I just love that approach about you. You embody, you know, what I had envisioned for a community. You know, you tinker, you know, you’re still playing around with tools. You bring tools to my attention that I didn’t know about. I could talk about tools and you’d be like, yeah, that doesn’t make sense. I agree there. So it’s just fun. And nerds and automation specialists like us, we need that space where our expertise are you and we can connect and speak on nerd terms without having to explain. OK, hold on. Util parameters.

Kronda Adair: [00:44:07] Glaze in people’s eyes, when you’re like, OK, now this is the wrong venue, let me go in there and talk about this.

Chris L. Davis: [00:44:17] Right. Let me go back to so Karen, I want to thank you.

Chris L. Davis: [00:44:20] Thank you for doing this, jumping on and let everybody know where they can get connected with you and get in the launch list for the for the for the pocket or for your vest so you can find me at Carvelle Digital pretty much everywhere. Carvelle Digital Dotcom on Instagram, on Facebook. And if you are specifically interested in the podcast and getting on our VIP pod people list right now, if you go to. Harvell digital dot com slash podcast that will take you to the launch list, everybody on their got early access to the first three episodes, which includes the interview with Chris, which was just so fun. And so, yeah, that’s coming out October 20th. And it’s it’s going to be it’s going to be lit.

Chris L. Davis: [00:45:13] We’re having a podcast birthday party, and I just got a DJ and then we’re karveldigital.com/podcast, right? Yep, yep, yep. Go ahead. Yeah. So we’re going to we’re going to have a party. We’re going to have a podcast party and we’re going have a deejay and we’re going to write reviews so people can submit reviews for my podcast. And then we can review our other favorite podcast because, you know, it’s like you’re listening, you’re in the car and you’re like, oh, I’m going to do that. And then, you know, it took me so long to to review your podcast. And I was like I was like, what? What am I doing this? So we’re going we’re going to do that. We’re going to spread some love.

Chris L. Davis: [00:45:52] I love it. I’m excited. And I’m on the list, everybody. So I’m not just like, hey, go tell people what to do. No, I’m I’m on the list and on the podcast. I’m going to join the party again. Kronda, thank you. Thank you so much for joining. I hope this was helpful for you all. I like to talk to people who aren’t like ten, ten million steps ahead of you. Right. Kronda is tangible. She is somebody else. She mentioned she didn’t start out taking on all all of this stuff, but she committed she committed first to her business and she committed to the process.

Kronda Adair: [00:46:29] And and I’ve only been with your program. It’s just this year.

Chris L. Davis: [00:46:33] Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little under a year.

Kronda Adair: [00:46:35] It’s growing. So it can happen quick.

Chris L. Davis: [00:46:38] Yes. So I love it. I love it. Again, thank you for your resourcefulness, your commitment to your your business, which which had a direct impact on how you showed up in the program and how you continue to do so. So I am greatly appreciative. Everybody that link right.

Chris L. Davis: [00:46:55] There it is. There it is.

Chris L. Davis: [00:47:00] karveldigital.com/podcast again. Thank you so much, Kronda. And I’ll see you in the in the group.

Kronda Adair: [00:47:04] All right.

 

ASG 062 – Achieving Hockey Stick Growth with Kronda Adair

Chris L. Davis: [00:00:01] All right, and we’re live. So, everyone, I am excited for the first installment of a well, this is two firsts. It’s the first guest speaker and then it’s the first introduction of video in with the podcast. So if you’re attending for the first time, you know that what you don’t know. But this is usually just audio. We are now adding a video element to it. So it gives you even more reason to subscribe on YouTube or just to watch us. Some of you have never seen what this looks like. So with that being said, let’s jump right into it, Koranda. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

Kronda Adair: [00:00:45] I’m doing so well. I’m so happy to be here. And, you know, it’s quid pro quo because you recently were the first guest on my podcast, which launches in just under a week. So I’m delighted.

Chris L. Davis: [00:01:00] Yes. In a great podcast, by the way, we’re going to make sure you drop the link to that at the end of this one. And what I want to do is I want to I want you to introduce yourself to our audience and then we’re going to go through three areas. Right.

Chris L. Davis: [00:01:15] You are one of the most polished individuals that I have seen come through my curriculum in the in the respect that you’ve got every resource laid out within the festival and you have the battle wounds for the Web development side to serving people at such a capacity. So the thing that stands out to me the most about you is your resourcefulness, how intentional you are with just making sure everything is organized and easily accessible.

Chris L. Davis: [00:01:50] But before we jump into that, I’ll let you introduce yourself, let everybody know who you are, your business, and just give them some some preliminary background.

Kronda Adair: [00:01:59] All right. Well, I’m Kronda Adair and I am a recovering web developer from Portland, Oregon. And yeah, like I said, I came in on the web development side. I really was literally, you know, working at a job as a project manager and had a meeting with our web developer and I knew nothing. So for those of you who come to this from like a non technical, I remember asking someone to explain success, which is how how controls presentation on the Web. And I got the explanation and I was like, I still don’t get it. So that that is where I come from. And I really decided after that meeting like that looks like the way to go that I really wanted to work for myself. I wanted to be location independent, even though, you know, we have a house and cats and a dog. So how useful that is now. But and once I decided that I just went like it, like everything, I just kind of went full force and got my degree and, you know, worked for a company for a little while and then got fired for culture fit, quote unquote, culture fit and decided that was the time to hang out my shingle and start making five hundred dollars WordPress sites like like you do when you start out.

Kronda Adair: [00:03:18] And those were my humble beginnings back in twenty thirteen. So you know, I went from that to making more expensive websites to go to studying marketing and realizing like the websites, just the front door. So what, what happens after that. Like how do you get someone to come to your website and build a relationship. And so I’ve just gotten more and more into the automated marketing space. And so now my primary my primary offers are I teach people how to be people online. So I teach service based business owners, you know, how to use content marketing so that their content can sell their service, take some of the pressure off that that sales for them. And and then I have it done for you side, which is where you have been so, so helpful in really tightening up my processes for doing things for people and taking those technical headaches, you know, connecting those services together and giving them true automated marketing.

Chris L. Davis: [00:04:18] Yes. Yes. In and I will say it has been a joy just to see you navigate through it all from the light bulbs to even the things that you’ve taught me, which I have to give you a shout out. My operations manager, Rachel, recommended clicker and we’re using click up.

Chris L. Davis: [00:04:41] And I’m like, Oh, this is great. And immediately I had to upgrade because it had automation. How can I not? I felt like fundamentally, even if I wasn’t using it, it would be off brand, are you not to.

Chris L. Davis: [00:04:56] Yeah.

Chris L. Davis: [00:04:59] So I started to. Just think about it before I even really knew how to use the tools, I said, Chris, don’t don’t break your own rule and start just of without having a plan and purpose for it at all.

Chris L. Davis: [00:05:11] So as we start to use it, I say it is a reason why I need to automate, because I need to automatically change the assigning based on the status. Haha, right. So now the automation list grows. They start out with ten I think on the light plan, and you exceeded that within the first two weeks. And so I feel like I’ve got a pretty good hold on, click up like OK, this is how you do it. And then Koranda I think it was last week in our monthly that I took over your night.

Chris L. Davis: [00:05:38] Yeah.

Chris L. Davis: [00:05:40] Deronda makes this statement and says yeah we’ve really been using the docs and click up more. And I was like, oh, tell me about that. She said, yeah, because when you’re taking notes and you have bullet points, you could just. Right. Click and create a task from the document. And at that point, my entire night shift derailed. I was going to watch some shows on Netflix, you know, kind of just chill and sit back and write. When you mention I said, oh, I’ve got to explore this. I mean, this is going to add another level of efficiency to the business if we can have notes that we’re taking and just start clicking and adding them as tasks and then have automation depending on the list assigned to certain people, blah, blah, blah. So anyways, yeah, that to say that’s the beauty, that’s really the beauty of the community.

Chris L. Davis: [00:06:30] And that really is the vision that I had in mind when I set forth and said, who needs to be a part of this? Who would who would get the best, who would get the most from this training, apply it, find it valuable, and then, like, continually nerd out, right.

Kronda Adair: [00:06:45] Yeah, well, and I’ve gone deeper into the click up docs because now I’m like, you know, all these all these marketing plans that I’m writing for people. I have like three different Google Docs. Right, for these plans. I’m writing proposals right now. I have like five, you know, five proposals to do it. I’m like, you know, if I wrote these and click up, then I could take all the, you know, just and not only that, but instead of being like a bunch of different documents, I can just have a book for whatever stage you’re in because you can make pages in your click up docs and then you can make sub pages. So I can have a page that’s like, here’s your scope, you know, that you get for like here’s what’s going to get here’s a here’s a page for here’s the the curriculum that we’re going to go through because I take them through your six systems. That’s all we do is we go through and we said, OK, where’s your traffic coming from? You know, what’s your what’s your closed system? What’s your offer? Like all those things I just go through and I say, where are you? Where do you need to be? Right. So we going to that could be a page. And then there’s a page for like, OK, here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s the actual marketing plan. And then that could just link to templates of onboarding tests. And I’m down the rabbit hole.

Chris L. Davis: [00:08:01] Oh, I love it. And that’s that’s that’s a good segue way actually, into the first question that I wanted to ask you. The first phase that I wanted to talk about, we just finished up our our live workshop, the first automation bridge workshop via Facebook ever. And last year was great. We had great engagement. People were learning, are still learning. I did some breakdowns of landing pages, automation’s check out pages. It was great. It really was the content and the people. Amazing. I just didn’t care so much for the platform with Facebook just because it’s so busy and hard to find things, even though I think mine is fairly organized where we’re using units and everything else. But anyways, so in this group we have people who may or may not have invested in coaching before, who may or may not have ever enrolled in a a more I would say heavy. I’ll call that heavy course in my definition of heavy is specialized knowledge. Right. Like specific to a particular thing. It’s not something that you could just go easily get everywhere else. So there’s considerations that I’m aware of. You know, there’s there’s this this hesitancy at times there’s this nervousness. There’s this. Should I. Oh, wait a minute. Am I ready? Right. So speak to that that I want you to speak to two things. One is speak to that position that you were in prior and looped that into your approach to coaching because you had your open with your approach to coaching and how you can use it to get ahead fast. So I’ll give you the Florida to just speak about that place.

Kronda Adair: [00:09:44] Ok, I think I want to I want to go back, like, way further, because I remember the first sort of significant investment that I made in coaching where it was like it was uncomfortable, you know, like it like, oh, you buy a course here. Of course they. There you sign up for a workshop like that’s you know, that’s low, low friction, low investment. And I, I distinctly remember because it was about this time of year, it was like a Cyber Monday, you know, get in now for this price or whatever. And and the discount price was still uncomfortable. It was still like, oh, I don’t I don’t know. And like I just remember, like, hitting the button and like putting in my credit card and been like, well, OK, whatever it is, like I’m all in I have to make this happen because now I’ve spent this money and now I have to go make it worth it. And that’s kind of always been my philosophy and my stance because. You can’t I can’t I literally can’t afford to take the long way, you know, like there’s so much opportunity cost in flailing around on your own. And so I really remember that feeling. And it’s a muscle that you build because, you know, almost every mentor that I’ve had after that, there’s still been that discomfort. And what I do in those situations when I’m like, OK, I know I need this, but I can’t quote unquote can’t afford it. Right. I never really say that to myself. I just figure out, OK, what do I need to do to go get this money? And usually there is enough free resources. There’s enough free trainings from that person that I mean, I just finished listening to today’s episode of your podcast this morning, and I was like, you know, let me go back and take notes.

Kronda Adair: [00:11:34] Just, you know, there is and you literally say you’re like, you know, I’m in a mood. Let me let me give you the actual actionable. Right. There’s no excuse. So.

Kronda Adair: [00:11:46] You have the road map to go do the things and implement to make the money that you need to invest, and then when you get in, there’s just orders of magnitude, like more depth and more. And that was my experience, too. I was like, this podcast is like you. You should be charging for it. And then when and then when I actually got into the program, not even the main not even the main mentorship content like I went in. And the point that I was at, I was like, let me go in and do campaigns that convert. Yeah. And that was the that was the one I dove into first. And that was just so useful to just put all the pieces together, put everything in order, like go through everything. It just leveled up. I think one of the things I did was and I don’t know if this is in there, but just having, like the unsubscribe page, the way you the way you do unsubscribes and having that automation that says so what I’m talking about is when people unsubscribe, you have an unsubscribe page and you put a form on there and you let them choose the messaging that they want to get. So they are unsubscribed. You did what they asked, but then they’re like, oh, wait, I can just get messages for customers. OK, let me do that. And then they go right back on your list. So you say like these are the things like people are just not going to think of that stuff on their own. And the other thing was I was bugging you about and this is probably what got me and I was like, I need that spreadsheet, that er table base about segment and tag number was I hadn’t been there five minutes.

Kronda Adair: [00:13:22] I was up in your DMS and I was like, can I get this er table base. I need to figure out these segments and I think I feel like that alone was sort of worth the price of admission because I had just created my done for you model.

Kronda Adair: [00:13:39] Mm. You know, I didn’t want to go back to just oh let me do a bunch of custom proposals and spend ten hours on it and maybe they say yes, you know, and I had created this retainer model where I get paid up front to do the discovery and the, and the you know, the research and the intensive and make the plan. And then if they want to implement, it’s just a retainer model. They pay a certain amount per month. And getting that that base and getting those planning documents just seriously up leveled what I was able to deliver, because it was the first client that I signed on to do that. And so and what was really great was that this client had nothing previously. So there was nothing to undo the few contacts to move over from MailChimp, no big deal. And then I was able to just build this beautiful thing from scratch. And to this day, not for much longer, but like her stuff looks better than my stuff internally because I got to undo all the mess that I created. So, yeah, I don’t know that that that hit all the points that did.

Chris L. Davis: [00:14:41] I want to I wanted to mention a few things or highlight a few things that you that you mentioned with the the discomfort. Right. Of investing. And one of the things that that I often I often see people do is they say I can’t afford it. So I I heard you catch yourself when you said it. If I can’t afford it, actually, I don’t tell myself I can’t afford it. So that was a that was a level of growth. At some point you realize, well, you know what everybody pays for what they value, whether it’s a house, whether it is a computer. If you really want something and you see the value in it, you make time and money for it. That’s just that’s just what it is right now. People are. Yeah, that’s just how we are. So a lot of times when I hear people say I can’t afford it are X, Y, Z, and I’m not the pushy type of person to say, go get your credit card and just, you know, listen, we’re all grown. If you really are not in a financial position to make this move, don’t do it. But a lot of times I see people shrink. And here’s what I mean by Shrink Koranda. They shrink their vision to fit their comfort level. Right. So instead of truly saying, you know what, I am going to go for that thirty K a month, they’ll say, well, right now in my business I’m, I’m really just trying to do three three thousand, you know, I’m trying to do something that’s safe and gets them off the hook. But the problem with that is you’re you’ll see that pattern across the board, right.

Chris L. Davis: [00:16:16] When you start to look and, you know, really assess multiple areas of their life, they take the same approach. And for me, my approach was similar to yours. What I did is I said, you know what I saw what my mentor was was offering, and I was sold on the offer. It was no question at all. And I was sold on him. I said, no, it’s him I want to learn from. And I said, I’ve got to get this money. I’ve got a family can’t dip into the dip into that pot, but. And with the free keyword that you mentioned, Koranda was free with the free resources available specifically from him, along with what I had, I was able to piece together, of course, and start selling it and get enough money to get started. I did not have enough money to cover it all. I jumped on. Oh, yeah. And even the monthly was a stretch. But the power is within that first month, you’re going to find that nugget. You’re going to find that thing that’s like that changes the game for you. You’re like, oh, I see it. And from that point on, you’re off and you’re chasing a vision that was bigger than what you even thought you could do when you started. And before you know it, you’re looking back like I am so glad I did not let what seemed to be so much prevent me from learning everything that I just learned. And that was my first time truly investing. And since it worked so well is all it took was one time. Oh yeah.

Kronda Adair: [00:17:47] If I want to I want to say something about that. Right.

Kronda Adair: [00:17:51] Because your first time worked well, but a lot of people, their first time does not go well. Yeah. And that was true for me to like that program that I stretched to get in. In a sense it worked because it got me what I thought I wanted, which was, oh, I have this big project, but then that big project was out of my depth. And so that brought a whole host of other problems. So, you know, I’ve had ones that went well, I’ve had ones that went not as well. But my philosophy about that is that you win or you learn. So it’s never wasted unless you don’t mind the lessons from the mistakes or the things that don’t go as you want. And I want to say something about the vision piece as well. So this is something I got from one of my mentors a few years ago. He has this this framework. And I always have to, like, think hard about the acronym. It’s. See, VCR choices, validate vision and create reality. So what that means is when you come to the choice point where you’re like, am I going to invest in this thing? You know, it’s uncomfortable. It’s a stretch. I’m going to go figure out how to get the money. And you make a choice based on your current reality, which is why I can’t afford this. So I’m not going to do it. End of story. Or you make a choice based on your vision, which is this is where I want to go and this is what I need to do to get there. So let me figure out how to make this happen. And I see once you understand that framework, you can see it really clearly in the way people make decisions. It’s like, is this decision validating the reality that you want or the reality that you have?

Chris L. Davis: [00:19:34] And yet, you know what? I just read something today about vision and how we need to think bigger. And it said the minute you settle for a 50 percent increase in revenue, you say no to a five hundred percent increase. I said, well, right on that side of me, I said, whoa. And when you think about that, it’s just like naturally you’re just how your brain works. Not to get too deep into how your brain is wired into psychology, but if your brain wants to be right, so what it knows it wants to be. It wants to be. It looks for confirmation for what it knows. When you when your vision goes beyond what you know, you’re proving your whole existence wrong. You know, everything that you do. But that’s that discomfort. That’s that vision. That’s that’s that that’s the requirement to get to the next level. So what we find is that when it does go right. Right.

Chris L. Davis: [00:20:43] Because I guess we could flip this podcast and talk about it because nobody is going to join your mentorship program and be like, this is crap like that’s not going to happen. So.

Chris L. Davis: [00:20:52] Right. So for you, when you think about it, I’ve learned that this is a loaded question. So if you could just whatever comes to mind first, how about that? That’ll make it easier to answer. When you think back on your experience from logging to completion, what would you say were a couple AHA’s? Let’s do this. Let’s do one ahar that you were actually looking for and then one that that that got you by surprise? I didn’t realize that that would be so valuable. I don’t even think of it, you know.

Kronda Adair: [00:21:26] Yeah. OK, so the things that I was looking for was kind of what I already talked about, about just the planning. Right. And this is because so many people are so bad at planning and it takes when you’re new to it, it takes so long. You know, you’re just like, I just want to get in there and, like, do stuff. And I’m I’m still I’m still, like, walking back from that. You know, those urges mean, like, if I was in I was in klick up today and I was like, OK, it’s not this is a phrase now that is my catch phrase for the business is not done until it’s documented, you know, because we have we’re having to go back and do some things. And so I’m like, OK, you sent that email, but is it inevitable, you know? And so that was sort of something I was looking for was more instruction and resources around planning.

Kronda Adair: [00:22:15] And I know, like the maps were another thing I was bugging you for. I was like, oh, well, you know, I would see, like, these shots of these maps that you put together, I’d be like, what tool is that? Do you have templates? Can you get there?

Kronda Adair: [00:22:27] Oh, now, you know, me and Lucid Chart are good friends in mapping out. I actually enjoy it. Yeah. And then let’s see some things that were surprising. You know, it just there’s all these you had a podcast episode that was like the unsexy parts of automation. And I think just having, like, all of those things laid out. So here’s something that I probably should be embarrassed that I’ve just really started paying attention to this. But using UTM like your URL parameters, so that crack like, OK, where did this lead come from? Where did this sale come from? Like where did you know? And so I just probably in the past two weeks have really gotten serious about that. And then like, OK, let’s put a let me let me go sign up for a rebranding, which you mentioned in a podcast. And so now I have I have a marketing table and it’s really cool. It actually automatically creates the utmost based on the other fields that you filled out. So, of course, what the you know. So now I have this thing. I have this that I’m training my admin this afternoon. I’m like, here’s how you make these links and here’s where we use them and all that kind of stuff. So like that that’s an example of like the nitty gritty things that just make a huge difference, because then you can go back and be like, OK, you. Yeah, the people that come from this source, you know, sign up twice as fast as the people who come from this other source here. And so the tracking piece, that’s always been one of my weaker areas. And so that’s I’m trying to shore that up and all the resources are there to to make it happen.

Chris L. Davis: [00:24:12] Yeah. Yeah. That is it’s one of those things where people people often overcomplicate tracking and then the simples and because some of the simple things are complicated and some of the harder things are made simple when it comes to metrics and analytics. Right. So you can easily pay three hundred dollars a month for a platform that generates all of these charts and graphs for you that you don’t know anything to do with. You don’t know you don’t know how to configure it because analytics is just that thing. Or you can like your mentioning leverage UTM parameters in storeman sources. So when Ali comes in, you know what it is and you can start to track back to the source. Now, that seems simple, but it’s a little complex, right? Like putting it up there and knowing how to put it into a hidden, hidden field so that people aren’t seeing these strange values captured. But once you’re exposed to it, it’s funny. Every time I teach somebody that they start seeing how long these URLs are, when they click click on this other stuff, they’re like, oh, my gosh, all of that information in the Yahoo! So it’s a standard practice that everybody’s doing is just analytics, because the technology hasn’t evolved to make it more simple, complex to do that simple thing.

Chris L. Davis: [00:25:29] But but yeah, I, I, I enjoyed watching you go through the program, so I don’t you know, my none of my programs are, it’s like mass mass production. Hey everybody come in. So it allows me to be a little more personal with you. Always his journey even if I’m not saying anything about it. And you made a substantial leap. I remember on our first call what your target was. And I will share it only if you want to feel free. But you had a target and then as you were going through the program, you hit an inflection point. And then I remember you sending me a message and you were like, this is about to be my first X, Y, Z. And I was like, I was so happy because I saw you doing the work. I literally saw you in there reverse engineering, picking this thing apart, putting it back together for your business. Hey, do you have this like you were you were focused, you were locked in. So what would you say was that was that point where you saw that that that hockey stick, exponential growth happened in the business?

Kronda Adair: [00:26:39] Well, there’s so many factors that play right. It’s twenty twenty. So we can’t we can’t ignore the the holistic scope of of everything that’s happening. And I think I think a bunch of things came to a head. Right. My skills were leveling up. My my offers became more clear. You know, I have I have a lot of digital products that people can access, but I didn’t really have you know, I had my boot camp. And then at some point during the coaching process, people were like, oh, to our tech sucks. And I’m like, OK, well, how can I how can I address this? Right. It’s a real need, but not but leave behind all the parts that that, you know, we’re not great. So those things were happening right in the spring that the the offers were happening. And then then you have covid where suddenly now everybody can’t. Go to the meet up, and that was their whole marketing strategy, right? And so and you have me out here who’s been saying I teach people how to be people online and suddenly everybody’s got to be online. So. So and then you have you know, you have George Floyds murder, which now suddenly white people like.

Kronda Adair: [00:27:51] Racism is a thing I need to go support a black business. All of those things are happening. And so so I’m going to say the numbers. But but I have a whole retrospective that I wrote because, you know, one thing I hate is you say these numbers and it’s like overnight success. Yeah. Based on the last five years. Right. The last five years of the hustle and the pain and the mistakes and the whatever.

Kronda Adair: [00:28:16] So in July, there’s a there’s a few cool things that happen. I have another mentor and she challenged us to do a 10K in ten days. And at the beginning of this challenge for her whole community, I was going on vacation and I was like, oh, all right. Well, you know, I’m an automation specialist, so what do we do about this? And I had started hiring teams. I had two team members. I was like, all right, I’m going on vacation. We’re doing this challenge. Here’s what we’re going to sell. Here’s the content. We’re going to go out. Here’s a call to action. And so I passed out for five days and I went to a ranch and they pretty much ran things. And during my vacation, I mean, I think fifteen thousand just over fifteen thousand dollars during the whole ten days, I made just over twenty K and then things started to get to where like this. You know, if I get this many more customers, I could be, I could have a 50 K month.

Kronda Adair: [00:29:11] Let’s do that.

Kronda Adair: [00:29:13] So so then I got real intentional and I went to my community. I was like, hey, y’all, I’m really close to this goal. Like, if you were thinking about signing up, now would be a great time. And it was really became a push. And so I didn’t I didn’t hit 50. I was like fifteen hundred dollars short of fifty K but potato, potato, whatever. Right. So, so that happened and that was like my hockey stick. And then the next month we did just over forty K. But here’s the here’s the important thing about that is that we didn’t we didn’t really work that hard, we were just kind of doing what we were doing and that just happened. And so that’s based on, you know, it’s a process and you’re building out systems and then the systems continue to work for you. And so a lot of people came back, you know, because I was doing like marketing push, you know, in the spring, I was doing a marketing push for just one of my basic courses that I made three years ago. But the fact that I was visible and I was out there was like, oh, I sold a bunch of marketing intensives for five K each. So these processes and your content and your systems start to work for you. And then that’s a beautiful thing because I don’t really work that hard at now. Like just people pop up on my calendar.

Chris L. Davis: [00:30:29] Yes. Koranda, I have I have a potential t shirt saying. I said, you know how I when I’m, when I’m moving and talk and stuff comes out and I’m like, hey, wait a minute, that was actually good. But I had this slide that I gave a presentation on recently and it said Systems saved me. Oh, it right. The context was you realize like the time to put your systems in place is now because what’s inopportune for some becomes our opportunity. Right. Like you knew so many people that war. And I sympathize. I truly do sympathize with people who fell on hard times with covid family members of mine, friends. So it’s hit everybody. But it it had a different effect on me because I had systems in place. Now, I had and said I need systems in place for one day. There’s going to be a pandemic where everybody’s going to have to be at home wearing masks. You can’t leave the house. You’d never know. That’s the thing. And I think that a lot of people do themselves a disservice thinking that I’ll build it when I need it. When you really need it, you cannot.

Kronda Adair: [00:31:46] Right. OK, so I have a really good story about that, actually, because that first client that signed up for insource, we had actually been working together for a year. She came in a boot camp and then we revamped our website, you know, saved her from Squarespace like she had been with me for a year and had all this foundation in place. And she is in the wellness space she was doing and seeing clients in person. And so when covid hit, you know, she had been on the road to sort of like, I I can’t reach my goals with this one on one model and I’m kind of going towards burnout. So she was already on the path of, like, what can I do to pivot and shift? But we had done that year of work. And then she also participated in that ten 10K challenge. She created a product, so she created a product to help people with their own wellness. That’s like physical and ship it. And so in our weekly meetings, she’s like, OK, I have the product. We we created a product on Thrive card for people to buy it. What needs to happen on the back end? And so we were able to map out, OK, if they buy it for themselves, this needs to happen. If they buy it for someone else, this needs to happen. They need these messages. They need to go to this, you know, if they buy it for someone else. And we need to know, like, we need to get the information of the people where to ship it here. And so we mapped out that whole thing and then my team built it out in two days. Mm. So you can’t do that without systems. Yes, yes, or if you do, it’s going to come back on you later.

Chris L. Davis: [00:33:22] It really is where we’re at the point now in business where you truly can’t afford. I would say you couldn’t afford it beforehand, but if you had access to capital, if you desire to grow a big team of with humans that you’re training and just go the traditional route, you could. But now it’s more of a you would be foolish to do it that way, you know, like knowing that remote has been mandated in society now. And it’s going to always be at some level, like like I mentioned, somewhere Microsoft is going full remote for some of their positions. A lot of companies are going remote for time throughout twenty twenty one. So this is the thing. No, we can’t unlearn this.

Kronda Adair: [00:34:12] Yeah. A lot of people a lot of companies that were like, oh, we can’t make work at home. Work is like, oh yes, you can. Turns out you can because you have to. And now the people are home and they’re like, no, we don’t want to go back.

Chris L. Davis: [00:34:26] And the skill, the skill set of implementing systems for your business and others is one of the most highly sought after skill sets right now. I, I, I’ve always felt like I was on to something when I was at Lee Pages when I was an active campaign and everything in between, you know, running my mentorship program for over five years now. And I always knew I was on to something and I said, just keep working at it, just keep working at it. And I’m glad I stuck with it. And I have to give credit. Somebody who planted the seed was Brendan Bouchard. He he’s a motivational speaker. I was that on reports first user conferences called Entrepot Palooza. I went there and I remember him being on the stage. And I mean, this this man, he had controlled the entire audience. There were people crying. There are people who could dance like that, everybody out of their element at that time. I’m broke. This is broke. Chris so broke. Chris is skeptical of everybody. I’m mad that you won’t be quiet. Stop shouting. I need to learn and figure out how to make money. Will you stop, you know, running around, talking about. Yeah, like everybody just let the man speak. So I guess that’s what I was I was in a different mode. But he comes down and he speaks with this somber tone and he said, everybody in here, you all who are learning how to do this, you’re the future.

Chris L. Davis: [00:35:52] Every business is going to need somebody like you that knows how to build this stuff in Entrepreneur Report is the tool. Of course, he was an entrepreneur, but I never that never left my mind. Said, I wonder what future that is like, how far you know in the future that is. And since I couldn’t see it, it just kind of like stayed in the back. And as I’m working and, you know, building building my brand and my expertise, it came to the forefront. I it now is the top. This is this was the times. And right now it is right now. So I’m more passionate than ever to get as many people who are willing to invest and learn and really deployed themselves, the better the next version of themselves out in the marketplace so that they can deploy these systems. Which brings me to the final question for you or about the final stages. Where are you at now and where are you going? You know, you’ve got systems in place. You’ve got teams you’ve you’re working on your stuff now, not just all of your clients. You’re tidying up your back in making your system strong as well as streamlining for for future growth. What what is the future for Koranda?

Kronda Adair: [00:37:05] That’s a great question. I’m very excited about it. So right now what’s happening is, you know, and I said this before we went live is, you know, when you clean out your closet and you pull everything out and then it’s just like a heap of stuff on the floor and you’re like, what did I do? Yeah. And that’s that’s a little bit what my business is like right now. I went from basically just me in May of this year to we have seven, seven people like six people on the team. And and then our podcast producer, who’s also in your program. Amazing, too. So that is that is fast, you know, to go from. And I’m not someone who has a business background. So, you know, like a lot of entrepreneurs, I’m making that CEO shift, you know, not just in my I’ve had the mindset for many years, but now it’s like, oh, now I have actual people. I have to figure out how to leave them, how to tighten up. You know, I’ve always been well, maybe not always, but since I read Work the system a few few years ago, it’s funny you talked about system saved you. And when I read that book, I literally went around sort of proselytizing to business owners and I was like, have you accepted systems and documentation?

Kronda Adair: [00:38:24] That’s your first guess. It’s true, you know, because a lot of people are like, oh, that’s boring.

Kronda Adair: [00:38:34] I’m like, yeah, it’s boring until you get ready to save your time and your sanity and your. And so we’re just sort of like we’re just like building this runway as the plane is landing where like I’m just every day trying to get stuff out of my head and trying to get in. So I have someone specifically on the team who the main part of her job is to write the recipes, to write those processes. And so everybody else is responsible for like making those loon videos, getting that stuff out of out of their head so that, you know, those soaps can be written and and then, you know, linked, linked and click up. So so that’s happening behind the scenes. And then, you know, clients like I have I’m in this this dichotomy where it’s like I’m, you know, doing that. And I have to be the one to, in some respects, to get it so that they’re doing things the way that I want them done. Yeah, but then I also have I have like five proposals that I’m working on right now. And then I had a new client come in. We’re going to start their marketing intensive. You talked about systems. I had a call this week with a I’ll just say a very, very large company based in Oregon.

Kronda Adair: [00:39:54] Because there’s a section of their team that, like they’re trying to manage these things internally and they’re all doing it through email, people like how do I do this? How do I do this? And they need to create a website so that they can house these assets, make it searchable and people can go. And and so, you know, every business needs systems like everyone. And I was astonished, like a company of that size was like, wait, you’re doing what you know? And and that’s out of my you know, I really like working with, like small business owners. And so I took the call and I was like, well, you know, they need a website. I don’t really like to do websites, like just to make a website. But then they were like, yeah, we need to wrangle all our data and make it available. So I was like, oh, now you’re speaking my language. OK, yeah, let’s do that. So, you know, the future for me is just really getting my team to gel and getting everybody sort of pointed in the right direction and making sure everybody feels empowered to to do their best work so that we can start producing these projects because these projects are going to start coming through.

Kronda Adair: [00:41:05] And like just having those, because I tell you what, like, I have an amazing team and they are fast and so like to be able to hand them and er table and be like, here are the segments, the sequences and the steps. Like once we get that all dialed, like it can be produced so quickly. And so getting those processes in place for, for planning, for implementation. And my, my goal is to hit a million dollar run rate by my fiftieth birthday which is next May, so May twenty twenty one. So I believe that can be done with the offers that I currently have and the team that I currently have, we’re bringing on. I’m looking at bringing on a developer just so I have someone in-house. You know, I have a lot of partners who do amazing work for me, but yeah.

Kronda Adair: [00:41:59] So it’s just like it’s just a very, very rapid zero to 60 feeling right now.

Chris L. Davis: [00:42:05] Yeah, I love its growth, its growth.

Chris L. Davis: [00:42:07] And and one thing that I will commend you for is you kind of mentioned it, but the CEO shift, right. Like your every warranted everybody, you you have to make money to be in business, to stay in business. You have to be generating revenue. But once you figure that out for your business and you put systems in place that keeps the revenue in you, you have the opportunity to polish up that CEO, be that visionary to hit, like you said, that million, that million mark in a lot of people can’t see beyond what’s just right in front of them there to make twenty five hundred this month. And I need twenty five more. What how do I get to ten. How do I get to ten thousand. They just can’t see it. And somebody like yourself, I’ve seen you change your target over time and get further and further and bigger and bigger. So it has been an absolute joy and won one of the closing. The last thing is I appreciate your resourcefulness, not just from a giving perspective. You know, like you have so many resources that you’ve created for people to go through, which saves you time, but also your resourcefulness in the community, like you leverage the other mines that are in the group.

Chris L. Davis: [00:43:23] And it makes sense. We’re all learning the same thing. So why wouldn’t we be able to help each other faster to get. Exactly. So I just love that approach about you. You embody, you know, what I had envisioned for a community. You know, you tinker, you know, you’re still playing around with tools. You bring tools to my attention that I didn’t know about. I could talk about tools and you’d be like, yeah, that doesn’t make sense. I agree there. So it’s just fun. And nerds and automation specialists like us, we need that space where our expertise are you and we can connect and speak on nerd terms without having to explain. OK, hold on. Util parameters.

Kronda Adair: [00:44:07] Glaze in people’s eyes, when you’re like, OK, now this is the wrong venue, let me go in there and talk about this.

Chris L. Davis: [00:44:17] Right. Let me go back to so Karen, I want to thank you.

Chris L. Davis: [00:44:20] Thank you for doing this, jumping on and let everybody know where they can get connected with you and get in the launch list for the for the for the pocket or for your vest so you can find me at Carvelle Digital pretty much everywhere. Carvelle Digital Dotcom on Instagram, on Facebook. And if you are specifically interested in the podcast and getting on our VIP pod people list right now, if you go to. Harvell digital dot com slash podcast that will take you to the launch list, everybody on their got early access to the first three episodes, which includes the interview with Chris, which was just so fun. And so, yeah, that’s coming out October 20th. And it’s it’s going to be it’s going to be lit.

Chris L. Davis: [00:45:13] We’re having a podcast birthday party, and I just got a DJ and then we’re karveldigital.com/podcast, right? Yep, yep, yep. Go ahead. Yeah. So we’re going to we’re going to have a party. We’re going to have a podcast party and we’re going have a deejay and we’re going to write reviews so people can submit reviews for my podcast. And then we can review our other favorite podcast because, you know, it’s like you’re listening, you’re in the car and you’re like, oh, I’m going to do that. And then, you know, it took me so long to to review your podcast. And I was like I was like, what? What am I doing this? So we’re going we’re going to do that. We’re going to spread some love.

Chris L. Davis: [00:45:52] I love it. I’m excited. And I’m on the list, everybody. So I’m not just like, hey, go tell people what to do. No, I’m I’m on the list and on the podcast. I’m going to join the party again. Kronda, thank you. Thank you so much for joining. I hope this was helpful for you all. I like to talk to people who aren’t like ten, ten million steps ahead of you. Right. Kronda is tangible. She is somebody else. She mentioned she didn’t start out taking on all all of this stuff, but she committed she committed first to her business and she committed to the process.

Kronda Adair: [00:46:29] And and I’ve only been with your program. It’s just this year.

Chris L. Davis: [00:46:33] Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little under a year.

Kronda Adair: [00:46:35] It’s growing. So it can happen quick.

Chris L. Davis: [00:46:38] Yes. So I love it. I love it. Again, thank you for your resourcefulness, your commitment to your your business, which which had a direct impact on how you showed up in the program and how you continue to do so. So I am greatly appreciative. Everybody that link right.

Chris L. Davis: [00:46:55] There it is. There it is.

Chris L. Davis: [00:47:00] karveldigital.com/podcast again. Thank you so much, Kronda. And I’ll see you in the in the group.

Kronda Adair: [00:47:04] All right.

 

Today’s Guest

Kronda is the CEO of Karvel Digital where she helps entrepreneurs to stop spinning their wheels and get serious about creating an online marketing engine for their business. She is also the host of the Begin as you Mean to Go On podcast.

Resources Mentioned

Want to Be a Guest On the Podcast?

We’re currently accepting guests for the podcast that are SaaS owners, marketing automation consultants, and digital professionals that have produced high results with automation.
 
If that’s you, or you’d like to recommend someone, click here to apply to be a guest.

About the Show

On the show, Chris reveals all of his automated marketing strategies he has learned from working in fast growing marketing technology startups so you can put your business on autopilot quickly and without error.

Discover how to deploy automated marketing, sales, and delivery systems to scale your business without working long hours to do so.

Chris L. Davis - Chief Automation Officer

YOUR HOST

Chris L. Davis

Chris is an Electrical Engineer turned entrepreneur who is the Founder of Automation Bridge, an international speaker and facilitator, and startup consultant