Austin L. Church With Balernum

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to BRXAmbassador to learn more. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a fun one today on the show, we have Austin Church with Bill Burnham. Welcome, Austin.

Austin Church: [00:00:42] Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:44] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Burnham. How are you serving, folks?

Austin Church: [00:00:49] So I serve folks in two different ways. On the consulting side, I help the typically e-commerce brands with a specific focus in outdoor brands with their brand strategy. That’s everything from mission. Vision values all the typical stuff to differentiation, target audience, all the stuff that helps them stand out. And then on the coaching side, I help freelance creatives most often, and that’s where we’re working on business levers. The areas of their business where with a little bit of effort, they can see outsized returns.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:29] So now what drew you to creatives as a focus?

Austin Church: [00:01:34] So my background is in literature. I went to grad school to get a master’s in creative writing and never really realized it until I got into the business world. But I was always entrepreneurial, and so I was that odd duck who loved the arts, loved poetry, loved fiction writing and yet liked money and wanted to make money. And then later, when I had a family needed to make more money and didn’t think I was that unusual. But after hundreds of conversations with writers and freelancers, I’ve realized that a lot of creatives really struggle with the business side, and I’m passionate about helping them work through some of those issues.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:26] So how did you kind of I don’t want to say pivot, because maybe it was just a natural evolution from, you know, kind of wearing the hat of, I’m a creative, I’m a writer. I’m going to write. And then now that you’ve written, then going, OK, when’s the money come from this? And how do I build a business around my writing? Did that just happen? Like, you just figured out a way to do it and said, Oh, I’m going to share this with everybody else. I know, and that’s how you got into coaching. Like, what was the path?

Austin Church: [00:02:56] I think I was like a lot of people in that I had the problem, and I think most people don’t change until it hurts worse to stay the same. And I was failing forward and had a number of experiences early on where I made a mistake undercharged or had a bad master service agreement. I just made some kind of mistake that caused me pain, and I’m like, Well, there’s got to be a better way to do this. You start looking around and then as time passed, you realized, Well, I’ve started to have some success. I changed the way I operated, developed some business acumen and wait a second. All the other people that I see that are making six figures as freelance creatives, well, they’re all doing the same things. They’re all pulling the same levers. And that was kind of my light bulb moment when I thought, Oh, there are, like I said, levers and there are principles at play. And I think a lot of those will be replicable or repeatable for most people. And so that’s when I put together my program and started sharing what I had learned through trial and error.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:15] So what are some of those main levers?

Austin Church: [00:04:18] So I think a lot of them will apply both to creatives and to coaches, the six that I talk about most often are positioning, packaging, pricing, pipeline psychology and process, and I can go as as deep as you want to go in any of those.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:37] So are they in order so you have to get your positioning right before you do anything else?

Austin Church: [00:04:43] I think that helps because positioning goes back to like your dream clients. Who’s the target audience you want to serve and your market? And it’s really easy to pick a bad market, a market where people don’t have money or a market where they don’t experience an appropriate degree of pain that would motivate them to make a change or they don’t or the market shrinking. Right. So I think positioning is the best place to start. And then once you see all the indicators you need to see in your market with the type of client that you want to serve well, then you can start thinking about the packages that you want to create what I would call your juicy offers. And then, you know, you start putting prices on your offers and your pricing can be strategic and premium, or it can be more knee jerk and reactive. You can probably tell by my wording which I prefer and which I recommend definitely strategic and premium, but start with positioning for sure.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:50] So now is this kind of gear to a business audience? Or is this geared to like, what if I’m a fan fiction writer?

Austin Church: [00:06:01] So some some things still apply, right? Robert Kiyosaki. I think it was a rich dad, poor dad where he’s passing on this interview he had with a journalist, and she was expressing frustration that her books weren’t selling. And he told her, You know, they called me a best selling writer, not a best writing writer. I recommend you take a class on sales. And so certainly fiction writers, other types of writers could benefit from looking for those levers, sales being one of them. But primarily, I’m working with creatives, writers. Yes, designers, illustrators, photographers, software developers. I’m looking for folks like that who are definitely in business. Definitely see their work as a business, not just a hobby. And, you know, look for the more ambitious ones that are looking to turn a profit.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:02] So it’s not artist to be art for art’s sake. This is artist for commerce that they’re helping other people leverage their art to for their business in some manner.

Austin Church: [00:07:13] Absolutely. And I love art for art’s sake. But art and commerce have always mixed, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that. And wanting or needing to sell your art and support yourself does not make you a sellout. There’s a lot more to talk about there, but yes, definitely focused on people who are art as business or creativity as business.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:41] So now what are some of the symptoms these folks are having that your team or you yourself is the right fit to help them kind of get to the to a new level? Is it just frustration or lack of sales or or can it be something more deeper than that?

Austin Church: [00:07:58] Good question. It’s certainly inconsistency. You have a great month and then the next month isn’t so great and you see that freelance feast or famine. Another thing that is pretty common is burnout. Once people get to consistently making around five thousand bucks a month, so they’re, you know, topping out at around 60 a year. They get tired and maybe they don’t enjoy the work as much as they used to or find themselves pretty getting frustrated with clients or not short tempered, but just annoyed or irritated easily. And so there’s some emotional signs as well. You find yourself not as excited to get out of bed in the morning, and every new request that comes from a client may meet with some eye rolling or size. Or you get what I’m saying, right? So you’ve either hit a wall with your earning or there’s something about your emotional life or even your work life balance or blend that just feels off, and that’s when people start looking for help.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:16] So now, if you’re a creative, should you have something that is. Almost a vehicle for passive income, whether it’s a course or a book or a series or some some something that is kind of making money for you, just with the without you doing much anymore, were you did the initial work to kind of build it, but it’s saying there in the background kind of working for you?

Austin Church: [00:09:41] I recommend it. I mean, when I look at a lot of my big gains, yes, I ratcheted up my prices with creative work over the years, but a lot of my big gains came from, like you said, packaging up something that I know as a course, as a workshop and finding a more leveraged business model. There are so many business models available to us online now, and it seems like even with something like ticktalk, new ones crop up every year. So yes, by all means create some kind of digital product and you’ll achieve some scale. That’s simply not possible when you’re trading time for money

Lee Kantor: [00:10:27] And then the beauty, or one of the benefits of doing this is that this is just kind of incrementally going to add income without you kind of fussing with it a lot.

Austin Church: [00:10:37] Oh, for sure. And I think I was explaining this to my daughter the other day I had earned an affiliate commission through a product that I linked to and one of my blog posts. She’s eight. I think she’s I think we’ve got a little entrepreneur on our hands. But I was explaining to her that I wrote this blog post once years ago, and to date, I’d say that it has earned me around fifteen hundred dollars in affiliate commissions. And no, it doesn’t generate a huge sum of money on any given month. But I mean, I look at my revenue as a mosaic. Some pieces are bigger, some pieces are smaller. But every piece I add well, the whole mosaic gets bigger. My my overall revenue gets bigger. So I’m just I’m amazed at how many different ways there are to piece together that mosaic.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:32] And then as part of your work as a coach is kind of manage the expectations of your clients because like you said, you do this blog post, you add this affiliate link and it’s generating, you know, over the course of like, say, five years say it generates even even if it’s just the $1500. Well, that’s three hundred dollars a year. And if you can do that times 10 times, 15 times, 20 times one hundred, then it becomes money that you’re paying attention to. Now it’s all like you said, it’s just sitting there working in the background. And if you can get enough of that mosaic going, then then that creates that security and that creates that kind of predictable revenue over time.

Austin Church: [00:12:18] That’s right. And I think one of the things I talk a lot about is both a plan and patience. I think one of the traps that creatives in particular fall into is what I would call the skills improvement trap, where if you have, let’s say, 20 units of time and effort that you could spend, you’re a lot more likely as a writer or another type of freelance creative to go spin those units of effort on becoming incrementally better as a writer. Even if you make a 20 percent gain in skill or quality over the course of a year with copywriting that doesn’t translate into a 20 percent gain in income, so you have to come up with a plan that is built around OK, if I have these 20 units of effort and I were to apply them over here in terms of prospecting or even in terms of like what you said, creating a digital product or finding more leverage somewhere else, will that 20 minutes of effort might not represent 20 percent gain in income, but more like a 60 percent gain in income? And so part of my program is helping freelance creatives find those fulcrum, those like points of leverage so that, yeah, you won’t. We all have limited time, but where you put your time really matters in terms of the results that you give.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:54] Now I’m a big believer in processes over goals, and I think to create the right systems and tweak the right systems is more beneficial than having a goal that you’re shooting for. And is there work that I can be doing or should be doing as a creative every day to just keep pumping that lever like you were talking about earlier? That’s going to generate some sort of return over time?

Austin Church: [00:14:19] Yes. The most common mistake I see freelance creatives making is they stop marketing when they get busy. They finally experience that sense of relief, of having plenty of work, maybe even too much work. You have that one month that maybe it even doubles your best month. To date, everything is going great. And so you take your foot off the gas with marketing, with lead generation with follow up, not fully realizing that each week you’re actually working on generating leads that you’ll need six months from now. And so the one habits that I advocate for and I love what you said about process over goals. Hey, listen, if you’re going to be constantly implementing one process, it should be business development, marketing, lead generation, even if it’s just 30 minutes a day. Forty five minutes a day, don’t become inconsistent with that.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:25] So now what are those activities? How do you recommend your clients like? What activities are they doing for those 30 minutes?

Austin Church: [00:15:32] It depends on what their market is and what their primary channels are going to be, but an easy answer is listen. Beyond LinkedIn, be posting on LinkedIn. Be proactively building your audience on LinkedIn by sending 10 to 15 connection requests a day to people in your target audience. Find posts from people and your target audience. Comment on those, whatever whatever your market is, you find the main channel or the watering hole where people in that market in that target audience are hanging out and then show up there often and you put in your statistically significant number of activities there. Again, like you said, trusting the process more than you trust even a specific goal or how you feel on a specific day.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:31] So if you invest the time in kind of building this prospecting machine properly and efficiently, then it is kind of a rinse and repeat every day.

Austin Church: [00:16:41] That’s right. And it takes the pressure off of needing one particular post to get all the attention because you know, you’re going to be showing up and making another one tomorrow. It’s I mean, we all know that consistency trumps everything in marketing. It’s just that consistency is hard.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:59] So all right, that’s the work part, people. That’s the part they don’t like.

Austin Church: [00:17:04] Well, and that’s the part that, you know, a lot of freelance creatives are really smart people and we’re always looking for hacks. We’re always looking for ways to like, maximize results with minimal effort. But there are some things that you cannot hack in. Consistency is one thing you cannot hide. You just you have to put in your ups. You have to show up. You have to get the basics every once in a while. Maybe you do hit a grand slam, but you know, show up every day. And sure enough, you’ll usually come out with more than enough leads.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:39] Good stuff. Well, if someone’s out there that wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team, maybe to get a hold of your program or just kind of learn more what you are up to. What’s the website?

Austin Church: [00:17:51] So it’s billion m b a l e r n UMD. I’m on LinkedIn a bunch. It’s my name Austin L as in Larry Church. Find me there. Send me a message.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:04] Good stuff, Austin. Thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Austin Church: [00:18:10] Thank you for having me on.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:12] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Coach the Coach radio.