Ep58: The Offer Redesign and Promotion That Generated $50,000 in 2.5 Weeks

When I stepped into the CEO role of an established business in late 2013, I inherited a very difficult financial situation.

Christmas was approaching.

The business was about to close for a few weeks.

And we needed to create a significant cash injection quickly.

What followed was an offer redesign and promotion that generated more than $50,000 in upfront revenue in under three weeks.

But this result did not come from one clever promotional tactic.

It came from reconsidering what we were offering, listening to what our customers wanted, connecting the promotion to a meaningful moment, and giving people a genuine reason to act.

There was also an important leadership lesson within this experience.

I was carrying so much pressure that thinking clearly and creatively had become difficult. The idea that shaped the promotion came from someone I trusted who could see an opportunity I could not see at the time.

Inside this episode, I explore:

✨ The story behind the promotion and why the business needed it.

✨ Why a stronger promotion can begin with reconsidering the offer itself.

✨ How timing and meaning can make an opportunity more relevant.

✨ The role a genuine deadline played in helping generate this upfront income..

✨ Why clear and consistent communication mattered.

✨ How pressure can affect our ability to find creative solutions.

✨ What this experience taught me about leadership and asking for support.

This promotion did not solve every challenge inside the business.

But it created the space we needed to keep moving forward.

If you are preparing an online launch, redesigning an offer, or considering your next business promotion, this episode will help you think more deeply about what needs to align before you begin promoting.

If you have a takeaway or "aha" from this episode and want to share it with your business besties and community, screenshot and share it on Instagram, tagging me at @jada.businessmentor.

💬 Let's connect!

Instagram: @jada.businessmentor
Email: jada@jadadegoey.co
Website: www.jadadegoey.co

If you're ready to grow your online business in a way that creates more profit and ease through aligned strategy, smarter systems and stronger leadership, I'd love to hear from you!

Transcript

Episode 58. Welcome to the Aligned and Thriving Podcast for ambitious female entrepreneurs. Where we align systems, strategies, structure, and self for sustainable success. My name's Jayda, I am your host, and today we're gonna have a little bit of story time that is going to hark us back to the end of 2013 in my entrepreneurial journey.

And I'm going to share with you some of the pieces, the pivotal pieces, and the behind the scenes of shifting an offer and creating a promotion that brought in over $50,000 within about two weeks, maybe about two and a half weeks, to a business that I had just recently stepped into in the CEO role

So to get started, let's go back a little bit in time, and I'm gonna paint a picture for you. Now, there's a whole bunch of things [00:01:00] I'd like you to take away from this episode, and maybe you'll take a whole bunch of things away that I haven't even thought of yet. 

I'm gonna break down some of the pieces that I found most pivotal and impactful to creating this outcome. Now, I'm not also speaking about $50,000 of upcoming revenue for the business. I'm talking about just over $50,000 of upfront payment that we were able to bring into the business within about a two to three-week period.

I actually had to go back in researching a little bit and remembering some of the details for this episode to look at the date, and I would say it was definitely under three weeks, maybe about two and a half weeks. And I want to paint a little bit of a bigger picture around this scenario for you, because I had very recently stepped into this business in the CEO role.

I had been a part of this business in many other roles, and then had not been a part of it or actively a part of it for a few years, [00:02:00] and I stepped back in as the CEO at a time that was very, very challenging, at a time when the business was not going well. Now, it was November of 2013, so right at the end of the year, and the business had quite literally under $1,000 in the bank and over $100,000 in debt and around 16 to 18 staff members.

A good number of those relied solely on the income from that business. That business was the sole income for my family, hence why I stepped in to support shifts in the business, and it was very, very stressful. Now, I did a whole bunch of things. I'm not gonna go into all of those things because what I wanna talk to you about is how we were able to bring a cash [00:03:00] injection into the business to help us get across the Christmas period, which was a period of time where the business actually closed down and had a few weeks of not functioning and serving our customers, and therefore not a really good time to be low on funds in the bank Obviously, lots of payroll, rent, all sorts of weekly costs for the business needing to be paid, and no cash to do it with.

So we needed to do something fast. Now, the way that we went about this was twofold, and there were a whole bunch of things that happened. The main twofold that I wanna really share with you are a redesign of the offerings and an events-based promotion that was significant to the specific period for that business and the time of year.

So first of all, let's talk about the offer [00:04:00] reimagining. So this was a big, big project that I worked on. It was one of the first big things that I shifted within the business right within the first kind of month of coming in. So that was to really shift around the offerings. What I did was I looked to move the class schedule From being three classes a night, an hour and a half per class, to having four classes per night, each of them one hour long.

This did a few things. It allowed us to have more classes, which meant more opportunities for more different people to wanna come to those classes or to do multiple classes. You can see where that's going. Also, what it meant was that we were able to split out some of the offerings that we had. Now, this is a dance studio, and we had some of our higher level classes that were combined together with a few [00:05:00] different dance styles.

So by doing this split out and allowing us to have more classes on our timetable, we were able to split apart some of the popular dance styles and therefore start to offer them individually, so that if somebody had a favorite dance style and they didn't really wanna be doing the two dance styles we used to have combined in a class, they were able to come along and do just that one dance style.

So it was reopening up to a section of an audience that may have stopped dancing with us, who might want to just specialize in just one dance style. Or it was allowing them to get more specialized in each dance style and potentially do two classes instead of one class to cover their two favorite dance styles.

So there were a variety of ways that this was supportive in bringing in more members and encouraging our members [00:06:00] to do multiple classes if they were wanting to do multiple dance styles, and also to be able to really specialize and go deep in each dance style and become more specialized. It allowed us to have more classes running, more options for people, and more people doing multiple classes

So this really diversified our offerings a lot. Now this was for our higher levels. Another big move that I did was I changed our introductory course from 12 weeks to six weeks. This meant a few different things. It lowered the barrier to entry for people so that it was a smaller commitment to get started and try it out, and also it allowed us to have intakes more frequently

Both of these moves also responded to feedback that we'd been having. The marketplace had changed over the years, and we were responding to there being more specialized dancers, [00:07:00] more dance academies around us offering different options, and people wanting to have a try and also wanting to get started with us previously right in the middle of a term where we had no option for them to get started.

So both of these changes were really answering desires and needs that had been voiced to us, as well as creating more opportunity to grow, offer more services, diversify, attract more people, and have our members do more multiple classes. So this was the offer update and diversification piece that I worked on From there, as from the picture I've painted, we needed a cash injection. And to be honest, I was under the pump, very stressed, very worried, and it was actually quite hard to think. So I gathered in some people that I trusted around me. One of my previous business partners, 

And did a lot of workshopping. [00:08:00] Now, I'm not gonna take credit for the initial idea for the promotion that I'm gonna share with you because it definitely came in from a very good friend of mine and a woman who had been my business partner previously and who had also been involved in this business for many, many years, Cath.

And she came up with the idea of doing a special that was related to the business turning 20. So we were running in terms at that time and the following year, because remember we're in November going into December by this time, it's kind of the beginning of December by the time we've done this redesign.

And in the following year, 2014, this business was turning 20, the 20th anniversary. So we wanted to make a big deal out of this. We wanted to do something that would let everybody know that we'd been going for 20 years. We wanted to encourage alumni to get involved and excited about the fact that we were [00:09:00] celebrating 20 years.

We wanted to create excitement around that as being an event. And her idea was to tie that into a promotion that we could run with the cutoff before Christmas 

From there, we got to work, and the promotion that we came up with was to make every single 12-week course, so not the new beginner starter course six-week courses, but every other course in our studio ran in terms of 12 weeks at the time. And we decided to make every single course $200 each when people paid in advance upfront in total for those courses by the 24th of December.

What this did is it gave them two weeks of free classes per course, saving them $40 per course. This was cheaper than any of the multi-course memberships that we had running

Which made it very, very appealing to all of our [00:10:00] current members and super enticing to a lot of our alumni. So we were able to tie a really big special and savings for them to the excitement around helping us to celebrate 20 years of dancing, to get back involved in the studio, to do more classes, dance more, and celebrate with us and the community

So we had a really irresistible offer price-wise. We had a very clear cutoff. We had everything tied to an event or two. It was the Christmas promotion celebrating 20 years of this business

Now, I really wanted to mention that the initial idea for this promotion of, hey, let's charge $200 per course and tie it to the 20th anniversary not being my idea. Because when we are feeling really stressed, [00:11:00] when we are under a lot of pressure, it is difficult to think clearly. It is difficult to think creatively.

And so it's difficult to come up with creative solutions, with clear ideas. And so I was really able to lean into people who were not feeling as heightened about the situation, and since then have also learnt how to help myself feel less heightened in those kinds of situations as well. So that, and because I know how much it affects or creates the inability to actually get myself out of the situation, right?

So if you're in a situation where you're feeling a lot of pressure, a lot of stress, it might be financial, it might be for other reasons, and at the same time you're trying to solve that problem, you're [00:12:00] trying to make sales, you're trying to get a cash injection, you're trying to get ahead, whatever it might be, it's so essential to look at how we can move ourselves out of that energy, that sense of constriction and pressure, to be able to get ourselves into a state, or at the very least help come into us who are not in that state, who know what they're doing and how to think about business too, so that we are able to have that creative thinking, to have the clarity and the foresight and the creativity.

This is really important, and I know for sure at that time that was something that I was struggling with, and that I've had to practice and improve and continue to improve over the years since then. So I will be forever grateful for the support that I received through that period of time, and that very awesome seed that was planted that went on to [00:13:00] be the basis, combined with our offering update, to create that cash injection which really saved the business over that Christmas period

The other piece is that once we created this promotion and we were all clear with it, we went to town sharing it everywhere. We had communication going out to alumni. We had communication going out into all the different Facebook groups around our city. We had social media posts going on. We had Facebook ads going on.

We had word of mouth campaigns with our current members going on. We were shouting it from the rooftops in as many places as possible

Because it was quite literally make or break for that business at that time

Now, the response was truly amazing, and nobody on the outside knew what was going on on the inside of the business. [00:14:00] All they saw is us being excited about the 20th anniversary and reimagined timetable that was serving them in a way they had been asking for, and updates that supported more dancing 

And a really, really great deal for them to nab classes at a cheaper price than they usually paid, so long as they got in and they paid up front before Christmas. Now, we must have sold around 250 units. I was working it out based on $200 per course, around $50,000. I don't have the exact amount. I just remember the $50,000, because it was a huge deal at the time.

I remember literally being in at the studio, so I learnt another lesson, I'll pass that on in a sec. In at the studio on Christmas Eve, on the 24th, and the phones were going off right up to the point where I was like, "Okay, we are calling it, [00:15:00] we are leaving because we are all going home to celebrate Christmas Eve with our families."

so the next time I did a promo, I did not have it go all the way up to Christmas Eve because it was manual. It wasn't just all online at the time. The only promotions that go up to Christmas Eve in my businesses are now completely automated. but yes, that was a learning because we all wanted to go home to our families, but people were still calling, the phones were ringing off the hook, to get the deal on the 24th because it was running out.

So this is a really good, example of a few really key pieces and triggers that help a promotion work. I want to let you know that a launch is a promotion and when we talk about live launching and launching, quote-unquote, in the digital space, we're not talking about, you know, the first time that we launch something, a new offer or something like that.

And [00:16:00] also what I think a lot of people forget about launches and live launching is the event part of it, and also tying them into something that is timely, either within the business or in the world or in the calendar. And when we can do that, it adds so much oomph to the promotion and so much more excitement when we can create a sense of being a part of something, create a sense of being part of an event.

So that piece worked so well for this promotion. I'm so glad that at that point we were moving into the 20th anniversary and we had such a big event to really lean into and pull on and highlight because that was a huge part of the success of this promotion. The other part was the redesign of the offerings.

Sometimes, and especially when we've been running a business for a long time, we can get really stuck in The [00:17:00] offers that we have, the way we've always done things, and that's just kind of like the way it is. Or when we're starting something new, we can look around and we can see how everybody else is doing it, and we try to emulate those things instead of pausing, listening to feedback, thinking about how can we serve our customers best, our clients, our students, our members best?

What kind of format would work best, and what kind of format is going to serve also the business? And we really have to look at all of those pieces when redesigning those offers. The other part was the very clear and very real cutoff before we literally went on Christmas break. So there was a very clear timeline, a very clear cutoff, which meant that we had the trigger.

People don't always like that word, but it is one of the mental triggers when we open and close or when we have a promotion that has an end date that [00:18:00] helps the human brain make a decision. That is really important. It's not marketing hype unless we do it on the dodgy side where we're making up the hype and the hype's not really real.

We want to have a true, real deadline for people, whether it is that a bonus goes away, a price changes, a promotion shifts, something actually closes and there's no longer access. When we do that, it helps people to make a decision. If we had just left that promotion open through Christmas, so they could just book online or into the new year, and we just said that all of the classes in the first term of the next year were gonna be that price and they could book any time, do you think that we would have made $50,000 in a couple of weeks?

I can guarantee no. If we had just said, "All classes, all of the 12-week courses in term one of 2014 are going to be $200 to celebrate the 20th anniversary," [00:19:00] and, you know, "Come on in. We're so excited. The classes are different. You can now do this, that, and the other thing. You've been asking us for this," I can guarantee you we would not have such a big cash injection before Christmas when we needed it.

That would have flowed into the following year. People would have left it for the new year. So the fact that we had a very clear deadline and period of time that people could do that in, it made them make the decision, it made them take action and get in on that offer

We also gave people a lot to talk about. We gave them the 20th anniversary to talk about. We gave them the new look timetable to talk about. We gave them an offer that was going to be there and gone, something that they needed to snatch up

And we gave them a something to be part of. So I really want you to take away aspects of this and see what you can learn from this and take from this to help you in creating your offers, creating your promotions, [00:20:00] creating your launches, creating your events, creating excitement around joining you for the amazing things that you have to offer.

We don't always wanna utilize these things, or in fact, I would say we don't wanna have to get to the point of utilizing these pieces when we're in dire straits or in a time of desperation, which really that time felt like that. We wanna use these things at all times

Now, also that business is still going strong. It has celebrated 35 years and a bit more now. And as you can see, that was a time when things were super tough. There were a lot of other shifts and changes that needed to happen. There were a lot of hard decisions, hard calls, hard conversations.

There was a lot of challenge for an extended period of time to really bring that business completely out of the state that it had gotten into. But the fact of the matter is [00:21:00] that sometimes that happens in business, and at the time I didn't realize how, not really easy it is to get into that kind of state in business, but how things just kind of happen over time, and I was not at all happy to be coming into a business in that state.

But I tell you what, I learnt a lot. So it's not the whole piece and everything wasn't rainbows and butterflies after this promotion, but it was a saving grace. It definitely made sure that we were still open in the new year, and it set us up to be able to keep taking the steps and making the decisions and the moves, the very big moves and very hard decisions that needed to happen to continue to get back into a good place, and we did.

So I would really love to hear if there's been an aha moment, something that you have taken from this, whether it is strategic or whether it is a sense of not being alone or whatever it [00:22:00] might be. I love having conversations about business growth, business journeys, entrepreneurship, obviously live launching, all of those different pieces.

But if this episode has sparked something in you, you've learned something from it, I would love to hear from you over on Instagram. My DMs are always open. Come say hi. I am @jada.businessmentor, or I would always love for you to leave a comment and a review for this podcast as well. I love hearing from you.

Thank you so much for joining this episode, and I look forward to sharing more with you on the podcast next week!