Building 6-Figure Recurring Revenue with Low-Ticket Communities with Carol Tice

Carol Tice built a low-ticket paid community that generated $6 million in lifetime revenue and became a sellable asset that transformed her family's life. In this episode, she shares why she rejected high-ticket coaching when everyone else was chasing it, how she served 14,000 members at $25/month, and why low-ticket communities can create more impact and income than expensive coaching programs.

Key Learning Points

• Rejecting High-Ticket Pressure - Why the "$10,000 offer" advice doesn't work for every audience or business model
• Serving Your Actual People - Carol's audience was "broke freelance writers" who needed help but couldn't afford high-ticket
• Mass Adoption Power - Low-ticket pricing enables reaching thousands vs. coaching a few dozen people annually
• Industry-Wide Impact - You can't change an entire industry by coaching 15 people per year
• Trust Recession Reality - People are more hesitant to invest in high-ticket offers, making communities attractive
• Recurring Revenue Benefits - $25/month creates predictable income streams and long-term relationships
• Community vs. Coaching - Different models serve different goals and audiences
• Starting at 65 - Carol launched Community Growth Academy in her mid-60s, proving it's never too late

Guest Information

Carol Tice built a low-ticket paid community for freelance writers that generated $6 million in lifetime revenue, served 14,000 members, and became a sellable asset. She's now 65 and running Community Growth Academy, teaching others how to build profitable communities. Carol proves that low-ticket models can create massive impact and income.

Connect with Carol:

Website: skool.com/community-growth-academy

Free Case Study showing how she built her $6M community - available at skool.com/community-growth-academy/about

Book your Wealth Alignment Call to look at your income streams, scalability, and long-term wealth strategy so you can build a business that supports your life.

Resources Mentioned

• Community Growth Academy
• Free Wealth Alignment Call with Lisa Marie
• Cash and Sass™ Podcast Newsletter
• Transcendent Wealth Co services
• The Seven Money Pitfalls email series

Follow Lisa Marie on your favorite social platform:

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Transcendent Wealth Co. LLC
https://www.transcendentwealthco.com   

Transcript

Lisa: Welcome back to Cash and SaaS, the podcast where we ditch the shame, talk real number numbers, and build bold bankable wealth without sacrificing who we are. I'm your host, Lisa Marie Fractional CFO Wealth Mentor and the Sassy Wealth Queen behind Transcendent Wealth Company. Today's episode is for the woman who's tired of chasing business models that don't feel right and ready to build wealth her way.

My guest, Carol Tyson. Built a low ticket paid community that generated 6 million in lifetime revenue, replaced her husband's income, and eventually became a sellable asset that allowed them to redesign their entire life. We're talking reoccurring revenue, rejecting hustle, culture, building businesses that don't own you.

Hello, and what real financial freedom looks, looks like when you stop following the crowd. And I'm all for not following the crowd. So as I say, let's get into it. Carol, welcome, welcome, welcome to our show. And I hope I [00:01:00] pronounced your last name correctly, and I apologize if I did not. I always, normally ask and I totally forgot to

Carol: It is. Just ties the easy

Lisa: Oh, yes. Okay. Um, you said that you rejected, uh, big ticket coaching when everyone else was chasing it. Now I'm not putting down big ticket coaching because I'm a fractional CFO and I have one-on-one high end. Clients and, and it's considered a big ticket. So I'm, I'm no way, shape or form, I'm gonna have to say this for my listeners.

I am not in any way, shape or form putting that down. What I want you to realize is there's more than one way. Okay? And who knows? I might learn something. That I can add to my high ticket, right? And someone else may say, oh, but I don't like this high ticket and therefore I can't make money. And guess what this episode is gonna be for you.

Okay? So that's the whole point of this. So I just [00:02:00] wanna put that disclaimer in there before someone comes beaten down me. But you charge high ticket. I am not putting down high ticket. Okay. I'm telling you that there's

Carol: have an audience

Lisa: high ticket, there's low ticket. I'm actually looking at ways to do a low ticket in there for the ones who may not be ready for my high ticket.

Okay. So that's, that's where I'm going. But you rejected high ticket coaching and I remember the time when everybody was chasing it. This is actually right when I started and I

Carol: I feel like

Lisa: ticket coaching.

Carol: I feel like it's still around. It's, um,

Lisa: it, well, I

Carol: still, you need a $10,000 offer if you're a coach, you know, you need to have that $10,000 offer. I feel like the drumbeat is still going a decade later. And, you know, I'll say, yeah, if you, I actually just went to a training where there was a $10,000 offer at the end of it.

And if you have the kind of audience who will buy that, and you want to work intensively with a few people each year, and that's your mode. Go you. It wasn't for me for [00:03:00] a lot of reasons. Um, first off, my audience was broke. Freelance writers, you know, one of the, um, sort of golden rules of starting a business is don't sell to broke people, but they were my people and the people I knew and knew I could help and a lot of 'em are really broy broke.

So I kind of knew I, I would go to these things and be like, you need a 10,000 offer? And I'd just be like. That's not gonna work with this audience. That is just not gonna fly. And also just being a sort of a lower middle class kid, I don't know, I just, it did not feel comfortable to me to ask people for that level of money and.

The amount of offer you have to build into a $10,000 offer. I was also not psyched for, you know, it's always got 83 different bonuses and I'm gonna do all this one-on-one with you and on and on. And I kind of didn't wanna build [00:04:00] something like that either. And. I just, uh, I had joined a paid community that was, I think, 10 bucks a month for blogging because I was building my audience through blogging back in 2010.

And I loved it. And I immediately thought, there's not some, there needs to be something like this for freelance writers and there isn't, and. What I was in love with was the power of low ticket to drive mass adoption, and I am 100% confident that I made more money. Charging $25 a month, no obligation leave anytime than I ever would have made trying to sell high ticket coaching to this audience.

So it's like, who are you people and what are you trying to accomplish in life? What? What is your why? And I kind of got into the business of helping writers because I wanted not just to help some writers I met, but to change the [00:05:00] industry. Really to bring a lot of awareness about scams that were, uh, targeting writers, to bring awareness of what professional rates were and what you should charge and how to get a raise and to really elevate the whole industry.

So you can't do that. Coaching 15 people this year. You are not going to have any industry-wide impact doing paid community. I reached 14,000 people over the life of this, so that was more what I had in mind, was getting the word out to lots and lots of folks.

Lisa: Well, and yeah, and I mean, I, I have, I, I've got a mentor who normally has high ticket, and she's even said that she went back to low ticket. Because we're in a trust recession and because we're in a trust recession, people are not going to so easily go into the high ticket. And she's right. I've noticed it.

I mean, all of us have noticed it. And she started doing a community, okay, what, how [00:06:00] can I help? How can, and and she's done, she's done a low ticket and she is. She has seven different businesses. This was her seventh business, uh, stream, and y'all, she's bringing that one to six figures off of $59 a month. So again, it's how can I help the masses, one, not be stuck? Two, be able to, um, grow and do the things, avoid the scams, and use the things at work, right? And be able to make an impact massively. And still make money. And so having a membership or having a low ticket offer can so totally help. I mean, it's one of the things that I'm even looking at, right? Of how, how can I do that?

What, what would that look like? Um, and so I

Carol: you a story about.

Lisa: it, I think it's just something that we don't need to, to squash. But let me ask you this. What you, you explained what felt off about the conventional business advice early on because I also didn't like it. It was like, oh, [00:07:00] if you don't charge $10,000 for three months, and I'm like. What? Yeah. Now you see people doing even more than that, but then you're supposed to be, have a cookie cutter for those $10,000. And I point blank tell people, okay, my high end is not a cookie cutter, it's one-on-one. It's based off of where you're at, where, and we start where you're at. And there is none of my one-on-one clients that are exactly the same of, of, we have some similarities of what we do, but it's still individual and that is.

The way I've always been. I don't, I don't pertain to, oh, it needs to be all the same and cookie cutter. And you just chart what, no. Um, but how did you realize the low ticket community for you could outperform, um, high ticket offers, and you kind of went into that, but as you were going, what kind of,

Carol: I didn't know that it would, I didn't. I didn't know that it would, and when I started, I thought if I got 500 members that would [00:08:00] like fulfill all my financial dreams. Because I didn't know what the backend cost was going to be back then when there weren't platforms like school like I'm on now, and you had to have this whole IT team in the background making plugins talk to each other.

Um, I. I, I had no idea, you know, how big it could go, what would happen with it. I just felt pulled in this direction from, I, I think I always thought of this like umbilical cord coming out of me of like, go this way. Um, like it, I just felt like seriously a calling not to be religious, but.

Lisa: It was what you were

Carol: But it, it just felt like what I should be doing with my time.

I literally was tugging in my then a couple of toddlers and older kid, um, at 7 45 at night, running upstairs and working on this business from eight until midnight, like six nights a week. And I didn't see a TV [00:09:00] show. I didn't see a play. I didn't hold dinner parties. I didn't know what was going on in popular culture, you know, for about 18 months at least.

Just building it, doing the blog, and then learning about how to monetize it. Finding a paid community and going, I want, this is the model I like, and I could apply it to my industry. And I had no idea how big it could get. Um, it completely exceeded, you know what? If you had told me I was gonna make, you know, 600 grand in a year gross, like I would never have believed it.

I was a reporter. I was like a journalist earning one 10th of that, you know, as a well-paid reporter. And it, I really had no vision of how much need there was going to be for it and how much driving it down to that level would make it blow up.

Lisa: right.

Carol: I can take that one step further because in [00:10:00] my new community where I teach people how to do this model, um, I just opened up a free level after and I was a hater of free.

I have been a hater for free, for of free all my life. Every mentor I ever had don't do free. They don't open their wallet. They are not buyers. It is bad. You just get tire kickers and. I could only watch big communities on school earn 2 million a year off their free communities for so long before I went.

Something has changed. And it's back to that trust crisis that you were talking about.

Lisa: a trust. It's we're, we are in y'all, we are in a trust recession period. And let me tell you, it has affected, I know it's affected my business. It has affected, and I, and you know me, I, I tell you like it is, I don't sugarcoat anything. Yes. I'm a fractional CFO. Yes. I'm a wealth mentor and the trust recession has affected everybody's [00:11:00] business one way or the other.

Carol: Uh, when I launched this new

Lisa: And I don't see

Carol: Growth

Lisa: I don't see it changing just yet. I, we've got to tweak to be able to build their trust.

Carol: When I launched Community Growth Academy, we did six grand of Facebook ads. With a team that had sold 15 million of courses, we followed the exact template they've always used, and it could, maybe I got one person out of it because those people didn't know me. They came in on an ad, they got my case study all about how I built my first community freelance writers, and, and they did not buy, um, they, you know, they knew, I knew a lot about this topic.

They knew that I could guide them to launch a community that would make money. But there was still a gap where that they didn't jump over. And when you.

Lisa: How do I know I can trust you?

Carol: Yeah. And when you open up a free community and people can just start hanging out and seeing the conversations and seeing the help you're giving people they can get to know you for as however long they need.

[00:12:00] It's, you know, people have said, why free level in not just seven day free trial? Why is that not enough? But I did the seven day free trial. Why wasn't enough? Uh, this is fantastic. And the quality of people I've gotten in as my team members has amazed me. 'cause you think it's gonna be a lot of whatever randos. It's serious coaches, people with programs, they wanna wrap community around,

Lisa: Well, and they're also, they're also. Right. There're all, there is serious people who are like, okay, we're in a trust recession. I need to be able to tweak. What does that look like? I'm not sure what that looks like. Okay. Well, we are in a trust recession, but I don't know if I can trust her. I don't know if I can trust him.

Oh. She's got a free community and I can go in there and I can learn some stuff and see and learn to like and trust her. Right? And that's the other thing of why I'm so big on referrals. And I'm not talking about referrals from your other clients. I'm talking about referral partners. Right? That's the reason why I.

I'm [00:13:00] building a referral partner list and it's so, like, for example, Carol's gonna be gonna be, I'm gonna ask her. I you don't have be, be on there because here's the thing, the more she and I get to know each other, and the more I trust her, if I have someone that trusts me, they're going to ask me, who would I recommend for something?

They're nine outta 10 times going to go and try her community and may not be on the free one for as long because someone they already know and trust. Knows her and trusts her and recommended her. Whereas if they found her just through the podcast or through something and I didn't say, I highly recommend her, then they would be, eh.

But they would go, they might still join the free, but they might be there longer. You see what I'm saying? So it's, it's. You have to realize that that trust recession has affected all area, all businesses online. It's affected all the businesses I've, and at first I thought, oh, it's just affecting my business, or [00:14:00] it's just affecting, no, it's affecting everybody.

I've seen it, I've heard it. Um, and, and. Being able to do, uh, different things and be able, and, and y'all, I wanna make an impact. I wanna make an impact on more than just five people. I wanna make a massive impact. So being able to have a low ticket or see the low ticket, those things are gonna come into play.

And so that's what I wanna ask you. What do. A lot of people, especially business owners, entrepreneurs, misunderstand about low ticket offers, BEC or low ticket models, because I think there's some misunderstanding on them. I.

Carol: Well, I think they think they're gonna be broke 'cause they're not charging enough. You know that. I mean, that's the thing is like, and there's a feeling of like, why should I give away so much expertise for $25 for a whole month of all, you can eat everything and you really have to kind of go through a mental shift in how you think about [00:15:00] your expertise and what you're doing. To hand it out for cheap to each person. Um. If you don't love that model, you know, if you don't love that idea of offering, basically insane value is what you're offering. It's like, yeah, if you did this one-on-one with, with that would be a 10 grand offer and I'm giving it to you for 25 bucks for a whole month.

Stay on if you want. Leave it, you want. I don't care. Um, it feels so generous and it feels so giving and welcoming and everything. And, um. You know, I think it has to be your flavor that. You have to trust that enough people will be attracted to your offer, that this is gonna pencil out better than the $10,000 offer was going to.

And the way you do that is by surveying your people and building the community they tell you they need. So that the launch [00:16:00] is just that thing we've been talking about that I, that you said you needed and I, I built it and now you can join it So it. It's sort of already their community before they get in the door, they're already invested in it.

You've been being like, what do you think of these brand colors? This logo, here's my free, uh, useful, you know, PDF thing. What do you think of that? What do you think of these cover ideas for it? You know, um, take this member survey and tell me what. You would most need in a community? How often do you want us to have live events?

Do you want text-based lessons, videos? You know, what is it you want me to build for you? What are the top, your top pain point topics that I should have guests come on about and you just design it with them so that it's kind of engineered for success? It's not you sitting in a corner guessing about, oh, I'm gonna open a community about this.

There's way too much of that going around, but that's what I teach in Community Growth [00:17:00] Academy. The community I

Lisa: I love that. I love that

Carol: go step by step with your audience, build in public, involve them, and then that you will make the thing that there is demand for. When you sit in your corner saying, oh, I know I know about this.

I'll make a course and I'll open a community, run it. It might work or it might not. 'cause you haven't been talking to anybody, so you have no market research. And I try and

Lisa: research is really important. Yeah.

Carol: Yes, it's important and everybody wants to skip it. 'cause their idea is in a magical, precious bubble and they love it and they don't want it to beat the light of day and pop and die, you know, it's true.

And I get that. But the thing is, the pivots that you will get from, from going out and talking to your people, we'll save your business. We'll make your business happen. We'll give you the money. The income that you're looking for, that is how you get it. It's everyone. Everyone says to me, Carol, should I charge this or that?

[00:18:00] And I'm like, no, I am not the person to ask. You have to poll your community and ask them, if I provided this list of benefits, what would you find an appropriate, you know, membership fee for

Lisa: You can give, you can give 'em

Carol: I don't have a crystal ball.

Lisa: Right. Well, and one of the things I love about one of my mentors, she started off at a low price and they did it slowly. It's like $59 a month. Then they went, after they built that, then they went and did one slightly higher. They call it like a VIP or they don't call it VIP, they call it gold tier.

And that was now, I don't know, 1 59 a month or whatever it was. Still, it's still a little higher, but a little more to, and you'd be surprised how many people jumped. To

Carol: wouldn't,

Lisa: I didn't. I didn't. But you'd still be surprised because there was a lot of people who already built trust and they're going, oh, with this, I'll also get some one-on-one time to help with my marketing and my business.

Okay, I could pay. I [00:19:00] can pay that. Oh, you'll let me pay yearly at $99 a month and lock me in. Okay. I want the goal. Do you see what I'm saying? Yes. It

Carol: I'm, yeah, you're, what you're saying is. What you're saying is lower ticket has gotten a little higher over

Lisa: Well, what it, well, no, what it is, she still has the low ticket. She still has her low ticket 'cause I'm in it. So she still has that and we still get boom coons of, of, of stuff. I mean, and no doubt I abso and we get weekly group call. I mean, the amount of stuff we get has blown me away for $59 a month.

Awesome. To goodness. I haven't even used everything at, at that price point.

Carol: Exactly what what I'm saying is like when I joined a community, it was 10 and then I ran, that was 25. The minute I sold it, they raised it to 40. I started my new community at 47, and now it's at 97. Is the pre, is the, there's the free level and then the premium. And yeah. The thing that's magical about community is every meeting you have, [00:20:00] every training you post, you're building more and more value into the community.

So then you hit a point where it's worth more. Also, the number of people in the community. I have one, um, student who launched early on, got to 500 members, pretty quickly raised his price because the interactions also pr are providing more value in the community. And yeah. Now

Lisa: have a, I have a

Carol: at like 600.

Lisa: has, she's in school too. And so she has the free offer and then she has two tiers and she has one tier and then this tier, and the, she added the second tier when she got to a certain number of members. And, and so there was a pricing point where, oh, okay, it makes sense to, and now she's growing it even more.

And again, she's bringing, it's able to sell now. You can, and I still wanna say that you can still have your high ticket

Carol: I was just about to say that.

Lisa: your community who nine outta 10 times maybe a year from now or two years from now that's been paying this 25, 35, 90 $7 a month is [00:21:00] going to then say, wait, you've got this mid ticket. You've got this retreat day. Okay, I want that retreat weekend. I want that in that one-on-one intensive day. Where do I sign up? And they're still keeping that monthly and now they're doing

Carol: exactly. You've got that free audience or that $59 audience and yeah, this isn't an either or. You've gotta give up that $10,000 offer this. This is how you, this is how you find the people to sell that offer to without having to do 80 tons of marketing.

Lisa: Right. Right. And I love that. And I think, I think that we have to, we have to come, we have to realize that we don't have to do it the way it's always been done. That this way, the building, this trust, doing it this way is a good way to do it. Now you don't have to do it on school.

There's Kajabi, there's all kinds of platforms. Um, it, it, it [00:22:00] again, it's gotta be the one that you're most comfortable with. Okay. It has to be, um.

Carol: a tear down on the top platforms and

Lisa: Yeah, you, it has to be. Um, and, and I have several that are on school. I have one that's on con two are on Kajabi. Two, that's on Kajabi. I know a couple people that are on another

Carol: get around the

Lisa: Listen, listen, and I'm not sure which one the, I ha I have the, the things as long as I can easily get onto it when I want to on my phone. That's, that's my, that's my big thing is like, is is there an app for this or do I have to log onto it only on my computer? If that, you know, as much as I don't like being on my phone all the time, I have two kids, I'm traveling.

If I can't get to the community easily, I will say I'm not. Gung-ho about circle as much as some of the other ones. Again, that's my opinion. I'm not putting anyone down. I just, I was part of a community that's just one that I'm not gung-ho about as far [00:23:00] as how it works and, and being able to navigate it.

Um, but there's just, there's so many of 'em. And again, you just need to choose the one that works for you. Right.

Carol: and that is the other thing that's crazy is that the barrier to entry to do a community, when I started a decade ago, 15 years

Lisa: had. You had, you didn't have five five, you didn't have 10 choices or 25 choices.

Carol: It was costly. It wasn't like running a blog where you could kind of do it yourself. You needed a technical team, and now I pay $97 a month to school and everything works, and they introduce new features all the time.

The barrier is so low. It's like if you have an idea. Learn the steps to launching this the right way and give it a whirl, you know? And yes, see if it's a place to put your courses, which you could upsell to people, your coaching, you could upsell people, your retreat you wanna hold. Um, I just think anyone who's doing online business now, if you're not wrapping a community around what you're doing, like [00:24:00] you said, you're hitting your head against the trust crisis so hard.

I went to a two hour pitch meeting the other day for one of these 10 K offers, and I, I just felt sorry for this guy because it's, it's just so much work doing, selling that way. And having to kind of grind people down into your offer. And I, and the thing is, I didn't come out of marketing. I came out of journalism.

A lot of people who operate in the digital business space have a digital marketing background. That's what they did before they started this business. And that wasn't me. And I didn't wanna sit around doing two hour webinars all week. That wasn't for me. I wanted to spend time helping my people make more money doing my coaching.

Lisa: right, right. And then, then see, that's what I'm all about is making the impact. I love that. Um, you've said that many entrepreneurs are just building jobs, and I want, I wanna know if you can explain that, because I think that people need to realize that. When you're building your business, you need [00:25:00] to make sure that the business is working for you, not you working for another job.

And it's one of the things that I've stress over countless times. Yes, there are going to be times you're going to work more than you ever worked before. Listen, being an entrepreneur, being a business owner is not for the faint of heart. So I am not saying, oh, you're only gonna have to work 10 hours a week.

I don't go, I do not jive into all that.

Carol: Well, especially when you're launching it,

Lisa: I, I just don't, I just don't believe that you're gonna start your business and you're only gonna ever have to work 10 hours a week. I don't believe that once you launch it, you're gonna always only have to work 10 hours a week, I believe, on average, maybe 15 hours a week or 10 hours, maybe some for 10 hours a week.

However, there are gonna be times to where it'll be more. Sometimes it's gonna be a lot less. I can tell you there during the summer. I work maybe 15, 10, 15 hours into two and a half days, and I'm outside the rest of the time. I have [00:26:00] that set for me during the winter. If you include my podcast recordings, I probably work more about, we'll say 2025, and for me, 25 is full time.

That's so funny because when I worked corporate full-time was. 40 technically, but I never worked less than 45, 50 hours. Okay. I was always dog tired. Now, if I work more than 25, 30 hours, I'm like, I don't wanna talk to somebody else. I wanna go to bed. I don't wanna talk to my kids. I want nothing to do with nobody.

Okay.

Carol: Yeah, you've, you've re-envisioned how much full-time

Lisa: Right.

Carol: take in your life. Well, so let me blow your mind with this, because community is the model where you can dial it down to zero hours if you feel like it. Um, the thing is, community is a model where you can work in this business as much or little as you feel like I have.

Um. That guy who launched a five and he's got 500 members, he's 80, he travels all the time [00:27:00] and he, when he is on the road, he doesn't go in the community at all and he outsources every job. He is not involved. So he can just take a month off, do nothing. He can come back in if he feels like getting in the forums talking.

'cause he loves to talk about investing money 'cause that's his topic. Maybe he'll spend some time, but, um. This also gets into that whole making it a saleable asset. And this is what sucked me back into the world of community and wanting to found Community Growth Academy is I just kept meeting so many coaches and I'd go to their website and the name of their business would be their name.com, and my heart would just kind of die a little inside because that is the, you bought yourself a job because.

Lisa: I have never made my business my name.

Carol: I know I've never done it either. Um, except when I was a freelance writer, when it, the

Lisa: Well, I take that back. When I first started, it was Lisa Maria Accounting. It was because it was accounting and, and, but I wouldn't keep put my last name in there. And then we, we rebranded [00:28:00] and we changed it and then we changed it one last time and it, and that, and to Transcendent Wealth. 'cause I was like, this is more than about me.

I want it to make an impact. And that's where Transcend when Transcendent Wealth was born.

Carol: So, yeah, the thing is, when your name.com coaching is your business. Yeah. You don't get paid the week you're on vacation. If you don't work, you're not getting paid. You are it. And when you want to retire, you close the doors, get no exit, have no nest egg to build that retirement around and. You just have to work till you drop, basically.

And that the state of people's planning for what their retirement is gonna be like in this country is appalling. Just people are like, I dunno, I'll figure it out sometime. You know, just no one has a plan. No one has a pension. The average social security pout is like 1700 bucks a month. Who can live on that?

And people are not thinking about how they are going to live a nice lifestyle in [00:29:00] retirement. How they're gonna go on those European, I just was in Europe for a month. Um, you know, how are you going to, and we all live so long now, and I come from a long lived family too. What's your exit strategy here? How are you getting out of this and.

The first thing any business buyer's gonna ask you is, how many hours a week do you spend on this business? And they want the answer to be like three hours. You know, because that's how much work they're gonna be doing. And if you can dial it down to no, you know, you can have guest experts come do things, you can, I had volunteer moderators, moderating forums.

I didn't do it. You know, you should be able to sub yourself out in every single role. Skin community and you're, you're basically making a product out of all of your knowledge. You're putting up courses, you're doing live events. That is all becoming product. That's a saleable asset. It all, I actually put my upsell, my, um, mid-career coaching thing that was [00:30:00] 1500 bucks.

Um, into a box and it became a product that was part of the sale of that business. So, I mean, I know people who love one-on-one and they, that's what they wanna do, and that's great if that's you. But if you find yourself saying the same things over, over, over, over in all this one-on-ones and it's kind of driving you crazy.

It's time to think about community where you could do some basic courses that would run and then they get into your coaching and you can start kind of down the road from it, from the 1 0 1 level stuff, and you can get more, you can reach more people. You know, it's, it's a big mindset shift from like, I have a coaching business, yay.

Go me, or I have a little online business. You know, I have a blog based business and, um, this is a business that's, that's a real business Someone else could take over and operate and you

Lisa: Yeah. And,

Carol: add out.

Lisa: well, I mean, and even if you never wanna do that, the, the point I think is I know I want to make a big impact. I [00:31:00] know that I wanna change in my lifetime how many millions of lives I wanna change as far as how they look at and think about money. I love, I am one of the people who love my one-on-ones.

Okay. And I know there's many of us out there and. I'm also not willing to work 55, 60, 65, 70 hours a week anymore. I did that. I'm not doing it anymore. And so I think it's important to realize you can have that and. Okay. How can you, because this is something I've been asking myself for a year now. Okay. I want my one-on-ones however I want, I don't want to take on 20 one-on-ones in order to make more money and make a bigger impact because, oh, I, I won't have time to do nothing and I like my summers and I like my time and hello.

I'm not going back to corporate. That to me is. That's just too close to it. So [00:32:00] being able to have a community is a way to be able to do that, which I absolutely love, because again, it's giving us a thing and saying, okay, huh, maybe there is a way we can do this. Maybe there is something that can be done to where we can start reaching the masses.

More revenue's gonna come in and. Making a bigger impact because I'm reaching more people now. You are a woman after my own heart. Okay. And you're gonna find out why in just a minute. 'cause I know you, you don't know this yet, you started your business at 45. I started my, the first one. Okay. At 45. I started my business at 43. So we're considered late bloomers in starting our businesses, but I was in corporate for 20 something,

Carol: hard data. There's hard data around this that the vast majority of people have their big ideas. It's in their twenties and thirties, and I'm glad I didn't know that when I was starting my

Lisa: big [00:33:00] idea. I, I, I want, look, my bus, my business was gonna be a boutique store. Okay. I was gonna have my own boutique store. I, and I'm determined one, before I die, I will have my own boutique store. Okay? I was gonna have my own boutique store and I was gonna run it, and then I knew what it was gonna look like, and I, I still have this vision in my head.

How I started my business was I was let go from my corporate job in 2016. I was tired of the migraines. I was tired of the headaches. I was tired of the, the attention headaches and I kept hearing a voice that was now or never and you're needed to hump. That was in 2016. I was 43 years old. I literally had my vehicle repossessed, was already barely making some meat to be, to begin with.

Had I cashed in, had to cash in what little bit of 4 0 1 KI had so I could. Provide for my kids. So when I say I started it with nothing, I started it with nothing and I've not looked back. Okay. I am now, I've entered into my 10th year and, um, [00:34:00] I think it's really, um, uh, pretty amazing. Um, but my question is, is um, what would you say to women who think it's too late?

Carol: Well, I just started Community Growth Academy at 65, so, um,

Lisa: There you go. It's never too late. I've been saying it. It's never too late. If I thought it was too

Carol: is. Not.

Lisa: come on. I'm fi I'm now 52 in my in. Just entered into my 10th year. It's never too late. And I'm looking at, okay, still wanting the boutique business. Hello. That's the second business.

Okay. And I'm looking at how can I do a community? That's gonna be another stream of income. And Lord and behold, I am on TikTok and I'm doing lives, which is, by the way, another stream of income. Okay. So there's, there's, it's never too late. And please explain to them, I mean, again, you're 65 and you're starting, what is this, your third or fourth,[00:35:00] 

Carol: No, this is my second. Well, I mean, if you count freelance writing, then this would be my third. Okay.

Lisa: I see. I, and

Carol: that, you know, the thing to know if you are older is that there's a large population in America that is older and underserved and ignored in mainstream, you know, business, uh, where nobody look at the movies that are out.

Where is the movie for someone who's over 50? You know, it's so rare. Um, we're, we're just considered not not valuable customers by so many people, even though. We have all the money. So it's crazy and there's so much opportunity in this sort of golden, uh, year demographic. And I know lots of people who are starting things, you know, aimed at postmenopausal women and there's so many segments of older Americans not being well served.

There's so much opportunity in the community format for that and in coaching and all around.

Lisa: in, yeah, there's just the, [00:36:00] the, the availability. My last question, 'cause I think this is really important because it's something that sometimes, um, I'll even find myself, you know, going Okay. But it's how do you give yourself permission to evolve your goals? Because they're gonna evolve, they're going to grow, they're gonna change.

So how I, I want my listeners to understand that it's okay to make shifts and tweaks. Again, we're in a trust recession, so I'm, please make some tweaks and so that you can continue to grow, and how do you give yourself permission to evolve your goals? What are some of the things that you look at, right, money-wise or whatever it is to say, okay, this is my next goal, and, and, and to go for it.

Carol: I don't know that I ever. Thought about, like, I don't feel like I can change my, I I, I have the good luck to have been a business reporter covering a lot of startups for a about a decade before I [00:37:00] got laid off and started my freelance writing life with a $10,000 severance check and. I look at what's going on in the marketplace.

I mean, like we talked about with the free level. I was like, oh, well I'm never doing that. And then I looked at what was going on in the marketplace and people were making a lot of money off free community and upselling them, and I went. Maybe I need to reconsider this. You know, when I started this I thought, oh, I'll scale it really big like I did with Freelance Writers stand, and now I'm thinking I'm gonna run it as a limit 100 community and just keep raising the price of it and getting, kicking out unengaged people and getting more hot to do it.

People, because I am sort of, kind of flunking retirement, but I am semi sort of retired and you know, you may notice out the window we're here in Arizona, uh, you know, we we're full-time in our rv. We're, we're trying to enjoy life and I don't necessarily need to earn [00:38:00] 600 grand a year anymore. I've had that exit and put away that money and I'm thinking it's maybe it's 150 K model, you know.

And the overhead is so low on it that maybe I could just work intensively with a hundred people. That's sounding better to me. I did a year of beta testing this and you know, I think the problem, it's not permission, it's that we get stuck with the idea we have in our head and we then we don't wanna take in new information.

It's that confirmation bias where you want to look at things that confirm your theory of how it should be, instead of looking at what is really going on out there. And when you do that. Your model might start to evolve when you keep an open mind and like I'm an old bag here and I got on school. I hadn't been on one of these big platforms, and it gives you a chance to look around at a lot of other communities.

What are they doing? How are they getting engagement? How are they upselling people? [00:39:00] What is their model and. It changed my mind about how I wanted to do it, you know? But you have to have an open mind. That's so you can change it is, is really the thing.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I'm very much open mind, Carol. This conversation has been such a breath of fresh air, especially for women who are wanting income and freedom and, you know, and, and they're saying, okay, I'm having this issue with trust recession, and you know, and. What, how can I make the money and, and, uh, build freedom and wealth and be able to do the things and maybe not work as hard.

So when, where can listeners, uh, learn more about your work and grab your free case study as well as please tell, share the school, uh, link y'all, it will be in the notes, but, um, if you'll share that so that they know where to find you.

Carol: Yeah, go. Uh, you wanna go to the about page school@school.com and if you don't know it, it's SKOO [00:40:00] l.com/community growth academy slash about. And you can get the free K study off of there and you'll see a bunch of videos about the opportunity in paid community, about what, uh, we have in the community.

You'll see some testimonials, all the things. It's all really on the one page. You can

Lisa: Oh, awesome. And it'll be in the show notes for you. Of course. And for all of my listeners, if this episode has you realizing that your business feels more like a job than an asset, then it is time for us to look at your numbers. And your structure, book a wealth alignment call with me so that we can look at your income streams, your, your scalability and long-term wealth strategy, okay?

And so that we can, you can have a business that supports your life, not you working like it's a job, right? So not the other way around. And again, that link is also gonna be in the show notes. And please remember, until next time, confidence and cash are the ultimate power duo. Go check in with your money [00:41:00] and as always, have a fantastic and wealthy day.

Until next time.