Episode 228 – Lauren Tickner

[00:00:00] Oh, Welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews, and today I have live on the line. Lauren Tickner. Lauren, are you there?

Yes, I’m here.

Awesome. So glad to have you here. Lauren, where are you calling in from right now? I know you are a fellow world traveler, so your location changes frequently.

Yeah, just currently in South America right now, gonna be traveling around Central America as well. We’re just in El Salvador, which was really, really cool. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so awesome, but one of my favorite new places.

Yeah, that’s really cool for my audience. We always let them know where we’re at cause we are in different places. Every time we get on a podcast, we’re currently in central Florida.

And we’re looking forward to shifting from just traveling in the US. To traveling more internationally over the course of the next year. So I’m excited to start doing that with my family.

Yeah, that’s great. We went to 15 countries in the last year, so if you need any tips, let me know.

I mean, I will absolutely need tips. We did like 15 states in the last year, but they were all in the US, which is, [00:01:00] they’re fairly homogenous.

Well, if you include all the different states, I probably also could add 10 more to that. Yeah. So I love it as well, like traveling around is such an amazing freedom to be able to have, because I think so many times we get into business with freedom, but then we end up creating ourselves this job that is constraining us from really living our lives.

So one of the most important things for me was, okay, how can I actually optimize my life for my core values? But many people don’t even figure out what their core values are, so they can’t create that life. Cause if you don’t know, then you have a massive blind spot.

Yeah. I completely agree with you, right? I’ve got some of my friends who make significantly more money than I do in their companies, and they’re like, I’m jealous of you, because, you know, I average four hours a day, four days a week kind of thing, and we travel full-time, and they’re like, my business doesn’t let me do that.

And I’m like, because you didn’t build it to do that. And I did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah..

That’s really cool. So what I wanna do real quick is just go through just a the brief buy you got from my audience so they know who you are, and then we’ll just dive right [00:02:00] into the podcast. So Lauren Tickner became a millionaire at the age of 23 and has spoken on some of the same stages as Alex from Rosie, Gary Vee thanks to her social media and sales skills.

Some know for her large podcast impact school, where she’s interviewed the likes of Grant Cardone. And how’d she get here? She made her first million through building a highly engaged audience on social media, using an audience to launch highly profitable online health coaching platform called Strength Feed.

After helping a few of her friends do the same, she realized there was a huge opportunity in making monetizing social media, her business focus, and that’s how Impact School was born, which is your current company. A few years later Impact Schools helped more than 1200 business owners implement social media sales systems to enroll more premium clients organically.

So that sounds like quite the story. But what I want to get into is like is what you’re known for now, right? What’s your business like? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

Yeah, so we’re really known for installing super profitable sales systems into businesses, usually entrepreneurial companies. And so we tend to mainly work. I always see there’s like three kind of segments. [00:03:00] There’s B2C, so business to consumer, we don’t really, we don’t work there at all.

Business to entrepreneur, that’s our sweet spot. So our clients are entrepreneurs, and then there’s B2C. Business to, you know oh, sorry. B2B, Business to Business, which we have some clients like that, but most of our clients don’t see themselves as business because we tend to work with the entrepreneur who is the one that obviously runs the company and it’s less corporate.

It’s more fun for us, and we like to work with the entrepreneurial type. So it’s a fun time. And that’s, I’d say, what I’m probably the most known for. And then I do a bunch of other stuff like investing in companies, but it’s not something that I’ve necessarily speak about a lot publicly right now, at least.

That’s really cool. I know, we’re probably gonna have to talk more. We’re just hitting that sort of upward growth curve with our agency and I’m definitely in that you know, entrepreneur category and our clients are all. Fellow entrepreneurs as well for what we do. So we might have to chat more about what it is that you guys teach over at Impact School.

So before we [00:04:00] got on here that your origin story is not particularly exciting and I was asked to skip it. So just for my audience who regularly hears that one, we’re gonna skip past origin story and just dive right into your superpowers and we talk on this show, every iconic hero has a superpower.

Whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect, the ability to call down thunder from the sky, or you know, their super strength in the real world. Heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or that you develop over the course of time that really help you to set you apart in your world.

Right? And the way I like to frame it for my guests is if you were to look at all the skills that you’ve developed over the course of your career, there’s probably a common thread that ties all of those core strengths together, and that common thread is where you find your superpower. With that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower is as an entrepreneur?

The first thing that comes to my mind is I will do an activity until it’s done so. Literally, even if it’s gonna take me like five, I don’t time block. I don’t like try and run my calendar like that. If there is something that needs to be done and it’s [00:05:00] important, I just won’t stop. Like I’m just gonna keep focused on that, even if it’s taking me like 10 hours. I was like that when I was in school as well, doing my homework.

And so I think the ability to be able to. Like force myself through something, even if it’s really, really painful. And torturous is a superpower because I always see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m very much a visionary and so I can see the outcome of getting this thing done, and I don’t really mind if the inputs are a little painful to get there.

But because I’ve actually build my business in a way, cause as entrepreneurs we are creators. We get to create ultimately how things run. Cause I’ve created it in a way where I’m mainly focusing in on my zone of genius, which for me, I really, really love marketing.

So I’m spending most of my time there because of that, it’s never really that bad, but if I have some lawyer thing that I need to do, and send these documents to them and it could take me 10 minutes or 10 hours, like, I’m just gonna get it done until it’s done, then I can move on. And so I would say that ability to focus [00:06:00] on seeing the task through to completion is something which is, has very been beneficial to me.

Yeah, that’s a really good superpower too. I don’t quite have the same thing. Because I’m more of like, once I’ve figured out the problem actually getting it finished, I’m no longer interested in. So I have to like, get other people to do it. So what the concept that I follow in my life, and this goes right back to what you were talking about earlier about designing your business the way that you want it to be is I follow a concept I call microcom completions.

So I’ll pick things that I’m like, what can I take from start all the way to finish in the amount of time that I want to give to my business right now. And so instead of, like you were mentioning is like if it takes 10 hours, it takes 10 hours. What I’ll do instead is be like, Hey, I’ve got the next like 45 minutes that I’m willing to put towards my business.

What’s something that I can start and finish in that period of time. So it’s the same sort of idea that things have to get finished because finishing stacks and it snowballs. And it’s the kind of thing that snowballs really, really quickly for someone who, if you’ve never been in that position where you’re finishing things regularly, [00:07:00] even if you take small things and you finish them over and over and over again, it stacks into really big wins over short periods of time.

A hundred percent. And I give you, when you finish a task, it gives you so much more confidence that then pushes you to want to continue on with that thing. So how can you build your lifestyle in a way so that you are the one that always ticking off those boxe’s, cause that literally forces you to wanna keep moving forward.

I love what you said. I do a similar thing honestly. I think I’m just more like, I’m so much in this place now where like the things that I’m spending time on, I’ve already delegated a stuff away that I hate so much that I like to continue the thing until it’s done. Cause I often find that if I’m in flow, then I wanna keep going.

Yeah, and say all that’s left is stuff that you love.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

That’s a good place to be. I’m not quite there yet. I still have some things on my plate that I don’t like doing that I have to do, like payroll and HR and other things, but I’m working on that. Eventually we’ll get those things off my.

Yeah, yeah, totally. It’s life changing [00:08:00] when you have that finance person on your team because that stuff is not fine.

I am so looking forward to that. And I think it’s probably gonna be my next hire actually. So like we’ve got, almost all of our deliverables are all taken care of. And like the last like three weeks in my business has been really interesting cause we’ve got, we’ve just sort of hit that point where like everything the business needs to do, it does itself without me and I’m like, I don’t know what to do next, which is, you know.

For those of you who are in the entrepreneurial world and you’re wondering if those of us who are like farther along, if we know what we’re doing, none of us know what we’re doing. We’re all just flying by the seat of our, we go along.

There’s always something that comes up. That’s for sure.

Yeah, you’re always learning new things and going, oh, okay, so here’s what I do when I get to this point. And then talking to people who are further along the path and being like, Hey, I got here. What do I do?

That’s right. A hundred percent.

Yeah, that’s how this game works.

So what I wanna talk about then is the flip side of your superpower. So if your superpower is one side of the coin, generally the other side is the fatal flaw. And just like every Superman has a kryptonite or wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory [00:09:00] without going mad, you probably have a flaw that’s held you back in your business, something that you struggled with.

For me it was a lot of things. I struggled with perfectionism for a long time. Which kept me from shipping product. And I also struggled with a lack of self-care, which for me, led itself to like letting clients walk all over me and not having good boundaries, stuff like that.

But I think more important than what the flaw is how have you worked to overcome it so that you can continue to grow and do what you do in your business. Hopefully, sharing will help our listeners learn a little bit from your experience.

Yeah, so the opposite of getting something done until it’s done is, you know, not having that time freedom, if that’s something that I really wanted in that moment. But, in the past, for example, I would’ve canceled all my plans. I wouldn’t have gone and done a different activity, even if I was really wanting or needing to do that, like going to the gym or taking a walk outside, I just would’ve sat there and just got it done for a long time.

And how I overcame that is things like, okay, waking up and immediately doing some type of movement, having a standing desk so that I’m not sitting down all the time, which ended up hurting my body. And [00:10:00] then also just. Making sure that every single two weeks I do this, I actually do a two week revenue review where I’m looking at my time and I literally write down every 30 minutes, what am I doing at that moment.

And then I put a plus next to it. If it’s something that gives me energy and I put a minus next to it, if it’s taken away my energy and I put a money sign next to it, if it’s making me money. Or I just put nothing next to it when it comes to the money sign, if it’s not making me money, and so then I can actually look at all the things that I’m doing and if it’s taking away my energy, at the end of that two weeks, I then have a conversation with my operations manager and I tell her like, this is what I’m doing right now.

I’m spending a lot of time on this, and it’s taking my energy away and it’s not making money. I need to delegate this right now. Who can we delegate it to? And if there’s nobody, then she goes ahead and makes a job description and she goes out and hires somebody for me if it’s making me money, but taking away my energy.

What we then do is we look at the next 90 days and think, are you okay to do this for the next 90 days? Right, because if it’s making a lot and it makes sense for me to keep [00:11:00] doing it cause it’s so profitable, then sometimes I’ll just stick to it for the next 90 days. But by the end of that 90 days it has to go cause I can’t stay in this area, whereas taking away my energy over the long run.

So it’s also about making sure that I can be aware about the short term versus the long term because if it makes sense for the company, unfortunately, sometimes it just needs to be done. So another thing that I would say that is like a negative. Trait, which is also one of the things that probably made me the most successful is that I can just make really fast decisions and just go for it.

Like I will literally just like go for it. But when you start hiring the team, you can come across as like abrasive or like things are always chaotic, all in moving it around in the different direction. And so how I’ve been able to overcome that one is something that I’m still working on, but I really made sure to install.

An operational structure into my business, which has been like life changing and have an operator actually running that for me. So I’m not the one that’s like holding the team accountable, making sure that [00:12:00] they’re hitting deadlines, etc. Cause if I have to do that, then I’ll change the deadline or I’ll change the direction that we’re going in.

So now we set a 90 day target and we put it all onto a waterfall. And so whatever’s on the waterfall, that’s what we’re doing over the next 90 days. And then we split that first. We commit to what we’re doing for the next 30 days and we cannot change it. Like it’s just not allowed. It’s banned. It’s not a hundred percent banned.

And so that’s how I was able to take myself out of being so all over the place and chaotic cause when it was just me by myself, that was fine. But as I needed to scale my business, that causes really, really extreme discomfort and a lot of lack of certainty in the mind of the team members. Right? And so I had to make sure that I was no longer acting that way because it wasn’t fair on them. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s huge. And like, we’re getting to that point. I say just hired. Well, she’s been with us for like six months now. My operations manager who’s gonna listen to this episode, by the way, cause we’re actually hiring someone and using this episode as a test task for some people.

But the so she’ll be excited to hear this changing. Having an operations manager [00:13:00] sort of like manage the deadlines and manage all those things has been such a game changer for me too. So it’s cool to hear like someone who’s quite a bit further along than we are. It’s such a big move to get all the operations and get all those sort of decisions off of your plate and onto someone else’s.

And it had the same impact for me where I was like, I can’t change gears all the time because I have people who are expecting to do these things. So it has to go through I think, what did you call it? An operational structure first.

Yeah, I was just gonna say real quick is like, sorry to talk over you by the way. I didn’t mean to go ahead.

You’re good, you’re good. Go, go on.

Okay. So I had an operations manager for years. Different people, obviously, but like really for years and years, because I knew that I am, I just don’t wanna be running the day-to-day.

But what I didn’t have was the structure. And so I thought I had a structure, but really it wasn’t a structure because it kept changing so it wasn’t robust and solid. So it was like this very loose [00:14:00] framework that sometimes we did it and sometimes we didn’t. And so because of that, that’s what caused the mayhem.

So, the operations person is cool, but what I found to be even better was having like a very fixed structure that you don’t go outside of. And to me that’s hell. As an entrepreneurial person, I wanna have freedom. I don’t wanna stick to a structure. I wanna do what I want when I wanna do it, but. I found that that created the actual robustness that allowed my team to have confidence.

And they weren’t scared anymore because they were worried about doing something. But then what would end up happening three weeks later is I would change the plan and they just wasted all this time. And yeah, for sure they got paid for the work, obviously, but they didn’t feel valued and it made them really, really stressed all the time.

And so then they stopped showing off and putting that all in cause they thought, oh well Lauren’s just gonna change her mind in three weeks.

Yeah, yeah, that’s a definitely a major shift. And I think what my comment on that is that we have the operational manager, but we sort of my, if we were to [00:15:00] talk, you know, we were flip this interview around, talk about my superpower. My superpower is operational structure and so I’m really into building systems and so we have really solid structural systems for, you know, our client onboardings and for our deliverables and one another that we have for our clients and our agency.

And getting all of that stuff nailed down and then getting it off to someone else who’s managing it was. Was just such a huge change in like, Hey, how can I actually grow the business? Cause then I get into doing the stuff that I like doing, which is speaking on stage or doing interviews like this or, you know, other things that lead to actually like business growth.

That’s where I spend most of my time. And yeah, it’s just a huge shift for your business to get your operation structure down. I actually have a good friend of mine that’s all he does is he helps companies double in the seven figure area by just implementing operational structure.

Wow.

Yeah

So cool.

Which is crazy. I didn’t would’ve thought that until, you know, you meet someone who’s like, yeah, that’s all I do.

Yep. It doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s definitely important.

Yeah. It’s certainly important. [00:16:00] So the other thing you mentioned when you’re talking about the fatal flaw was this idea that, you know, that things sort of move all the time. And you know, I had a thought that I was gonna go for there and I forgot what it was, so I might just have to confirm of it.

Happens to me too, especially when I’m hungry.

Absolutely. So, since that train left the station, I can’t remember where my thought was there. I’m gonna just move on to my other question for you, which is about your common enemy, right? And I like to put this in the context of your clients, like the people that hire you at Impact School, right?

Who are coming to become members. So, you know, every superhero has an arch nemesis. It’s a thing that they constantly fight against in their world. So in a world of business it takes on a lot of forms, but generally speaking context to your clients, it’s a mindset or a flaw that you’re constantly have to fight to overcome so that you can actually get them the result that they come to you for.

What is that arch nemesis for you guys at Impact School?

Enrolling the wrong clients to be. I think sales is very easy. Like literally sales is like super. This is probably the most simplest thing in the world. Getting [00:17:00] leads is also super easy, but the hard thing is turning down the clients that are not gonna be dream clients to work with. Because if you bring on these clients that are not dream, they can come in and like a rotten apple can destroy the whole community.

They can start talking to people. I had this once a few years ago, had this client come in, messaged every single person on our client Slack, saying bad things about us. They had only been with us for a couple of weeks, right? And so that caused so much mayhem. We had to give out more than six figures in refunds.

Okay. This was a huge loss to the business and it was just because this one person came in and started saying all these bad things and making up all these rumors, and then we had a fleet of clients come to us, gang up on us, and essentially wanna take the refund. Right? And it wasn’t even done properly. It would be dispute.

So the benefit to that, I guess, was that it made us realize we need to be even more [00:18:00] selective about who we bring on as clients. Because if they’re not, if we can’t showcase to them how we’re gonna be able to get them results really early days, then this could happen to us again. And so the person that this issue was he was actually a personal trainer.

In person in the gym, and he wasn’t gonna be able to get results within the first two weeks. It’s just not gonna happen with our system because he didn’t have the infrastructure there. And so we realized at that point, okay, if they’re not already in business doing something in business, we are not working with these new people.

It’s just not who we serve in this particular product that we were selling. So it was a good lesson in the end, but it was painful as hell. And that’s cause we were selling to people who wanted to buy from us. It’s like, okay, you wanna buy? Cool. Let’s work together, let’s do this. And unfortunately, very much learned the hard way.

This was actually when the lockdowns first began. That was when it was. Yeah, had to learn the hard way that it’s just not worth it. It is just not worth sacrificing what your reputation that you’ve been building for so many years. [00:19:00] Yeah. It, oh, it was really bad. It was really, really bad.

And it meant that we, the PayPal well, not PayPal, Stripe started holding 25% of our money every single money.

Oh man.

Of the disputes. Yeah, that’s really bad.

That’s crazy. So, does that trickle down into what you teach to your clients as well? Cause what you mentioned earlier one of the things you teach at Impact School is actually setting up social media sales systems. So I assume this is a lesson that you have to pass down to your clients that do say yes, that you do say yes to, that they need to do the same thing in their business.

So how, does happen now with your clients?

Yeah, so when we get a new client, we do a seven areas of impact analysis. So this is where we literally will look at seven key areas of the business from lead generation, to lead nurture, to sales, to product, to client delivery, client loyalty, etc. And operations. And what’s interesting is that like, we used to try and be everything to everybody.

So a client would come in and we would try and consult and give them systems everywhere, [00:20:00] like everything. But what we realized is if we noticed that, for example, like their operations and team is really low ranked, whereas their sales is high or whatever, in the past, we would’ve started helping them with their operations, and then we would be trying to do way too much instead.

Now what we say is, okay, this is lacking. You don’t have very good operational structure here. This is not our zone of genius. You paid us to install our social media sales system into your business. So if you want, you don’t have to do this, but like you can go and check out these resources. It’s nothing to do with us, but go check this out.

Talk to this person. It could help you. And so this is one of the key things, the lessons, is that we stopped trying to be everything to everybody and we stick to our scope. Which really falls within that like lead generation, lead conversion, sales area. It’s not all about making sure that they have like, you know, the best products in the world.

We’re not gonna go in there and build this business for them. We stick to those areas and then the other four, we don’t focus on that. Okay. So [00:21:00] yes, we definitely had to make sure that our clients understand this lesson too. Because again, that’s how you get into this state where like a few years ago we found ourself trying to like serve to every client, serve them in everything.

And then it’s like exhausting for my team cause I don’t know what the hell to do all day because every client is coming in for a different thing.

I remember making that shift in our business, cause I used to do the same thing. I had a seven step process. I called the digital alchemy formula and we helped people build you know, their online presence and build everything, everything from their courses to their masterminds, to all their sales stuff.

We did, you know, I made several clients millionaires, which is fine. We had, I had a great time doing it, but I could only ever take like four clients at a time. And it was always different for different people, like what we were doing and how we were doing it. And when we shifted to what we do now at Push Button Podcast and we do, we do one thing, we do it very well and that’s it. All we do.

Yeah.

It’s like we do this thing and we can’t help you outside of that. And like one of the things that pops up regularly for us is operations as well. Cause people who have terrible operations don’t [00:22:00] tend to make great clients.

And so when they have operational issues, I’m like, here is our list of resources for how to improve your operations. They’re actually literally the ones that we hired to do our operations we’ll like, pass them directly on.

Same. Literally the same thing, like a hundred percent because it’s so freeing as well, knowing this is what I help people with and we don’t step outside of that. And it just allows you to actually have the business that you love, right? Because if you’re trying to do everything, then your team ends up just getting confused.

And it’s okay if it’s just you in the beginning and as you said, or you’re just having a small number of clients, but eventually as you wanna scale it’s totally unscalable. Cause you cannot train your team on all the business acumen that you just innately know that the only way I fit figure this out is cause I was trying to systematize everything and I just couldn’t, I could not systematize it because it was just stuff that was so obvious to me and I couldn’t make a very clear equation when this happens, you must do this, this, this, then this, then this.

And if this is also happening at the same time, [00:23:00] then it changes and you have to do that instead. And if there’s other things happening as well at the same time, then this part changes of that. I couldn’t come up with a formula cause everything was too unique.

Yeah, yeah. When you add too many inputs, you end up with like an infinite number of potential outputs. And, and you’re like, oh, I can’t actually build a system for that. So when you narrow it down to like, Hey, we’re gonna do this one thing and we’re gonna do it very well, you can limit the number of inputs.

So you limit the number of things you have to build systems for.

And it makes sales and marketing so much easier. And yeah, it’s just like everything is better and I wish that I knew this sooner.

I agree. I wish I knew it sooner. I would probably be 10 years further ahead if I learned this, you know, 15 years ago.

Yep, I’m with you.

Oh man, so I wanna talk then. If your common enemy, right, arch nemesis is a thing you fight against, then the flip side of that is you’re dragging force, right? You’re just like Spider-Man fights to save New York, or Batman fights to save Gotham, or, you know, Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information.

I wanna know, what is it that you fight for at Impact [00:24:00] School, your mission, so to speak.

Yeah, well there’s two things. Okay. So I want people to have a business they love. This for me is so important because as business owners, we can do things just for money. We can do things just because of our ego. We can do things just because our client is demanding it. But if you ask yourself the question, am I loving what I’m doing today?

And if you ask yourself that every single day, I truly believe that you can recalibrate what you are focusing on so that you can over time truly love your business. So I just want people to be able to build a business they love. And that makes them a lot of money. This is so important for me. And then it comes down to knowing your core values.

Because if you know, for example, that one of your core values is freedom, then you can make sure that the business allows you to have freedom. If you know that one of your core values is making an impact, then you can build your business around making sure that you are literally impacting [00:25:00] people’s lives.

And so. For me, it’s all about that. Like I genuinely, that motivates me. If I’m having a hard day, I just read client testimonials to be honest, because then I remember why I am doing what I’m doing. And it just allows you. Yeah, to like recalibrate, right? So it’s like read the client testimonials and ask yourself, am I loving this right now? Because if not, then what’s the point?

Yeah, absolutely. I actually do the same thing. I have a folder for full of client testimonials going back like 10 years, and if I’m ever having a bad day, I pull up and read through them.

I’m with you. I do it too. A hundred percent.

So the building the business that you love, it’s an interesting thing because and you, cause you mentioned this a couple of times, you have to know what your core values are and a lot of people don’t.

And even something like, I want Freedom is a, it’s not specific, right? And they don’t know when they’ve hit it. So for me, one of the things that I did in my business, and this happened, you know it was [00:26:00] about 13 years ago now cause my son’s 13 was when we were pregnant with my son. I told my wife and I was like, I wanna build a business that lets me be home every single day for lunch with my kids, specifically lunch, not breakfast or dinner. Cause a lot of dads get to do that.

But I wanna be home every day for lunch with my kids. And that was the measure of success for my business. And my son, he just turned 13. He can count on one hand the number of times that I haven’t been home for lunch. In 13 years. And that is, for me, that’s an indication of freedom.

And like that’s what my encouragement for people is like, if you are trying to set your core values, pick something specific that means something to you. Cause freedom. Freedom is freedom. But what does freedom mean? What does that actually like look like in your life? And then build your business for that.

And then that’s like my guidepost for every decision I make in my business is, does this mean I can have. More time lunch with my kids or less time. And like every decision we do runs through that sort of like baseline to use your language, your core value filter.

And yeah, I find that really impactful and I wish more people would understand. I tell [00:27:00] people, you need to know the monster you’re building, right? Because if people do business, you’re building a monster, right? And, you know, you’re gonna have to feed it and take care of it and, and do all the things that this monster needs.

So what kind of monster are you gonna build? So, you know, it’s an interesting picture, but yeah. What is your take on that?

Wow. I mean, I remember when, like I thought that one of my goals was to make like a ton of money and have freedom and then I was making a ton of money and I had all the freedom in the world and I was totally miserable. So what I realized was values stacking. So you can have your core values, but they need to actually work together because I was forgetting to add.

I thought my core value was only freedom. Okay. And so what I realized was that freedom without fulfillment is quite miserable because while I had all the freedom in the world to do whatever I wanted, I was not feeling [00:28:00] fulfilled through the work that I was doing. So I’ll give you an example. I was selling thousands of low ticket products, and every time somebody was buying something, I didn’t feel anything cause I didn’t even know that they would buy it.

Cause I turned off on my, all my notifications and then yeah, I would see some like transformation posts on social media that these women were making. But cause I didn’t build a relationship with them, it wasn’t very rewarding for me. So I learned for me personally, that if I am optimizing my life around my core values and one of my core values is freedom, then the freedom must also have fulfillment with it at the same time.

Because otherwise I just don’t feel the impact. So that’s kind of how I learned that. Yeah, it’s all about like value stacking, I guess.

Yeah, I like that. Stacking the values. That’s where it’s like, hey, freedom is a core value for me. And then like for, you know, my impact is, know, being the parent, my kids kinda thing. That’s where it stacks in and I get the fulfillment is like, hey, my business is supporting this [00:29:00] lifestyle that I’m trying to build with my family.

So yeah. I completely agree. And I love that you have learned that lesson, especially as early as you did in your entrepreneurial career. Cause it took me like 15 years. So,

Yeah, yeah, it was interesting because I, you know, people always think, oh, well I’m gonna make a business, make tons of money, do whatever I want. But like, you can have that and still not enjoy it, you know? So, yeah.

Yeah. So I’m gonna skip a couple of my questions here and ask you a question that is entirely self-serving for myself. And that is you talk about specifically building a social media sales system. I have two questions for you related to that.

One, what do you mean by social media sales system and two, how would it apply to an agency business? Like what we run with Push Button Podcasts?

Yeah, so we work with a ton of agencies, coaching programs, consulting businesses, people that even sell services or even physical goods if they’re selling something that’s like a premium price point. So really, when I say social media [00:30:00] sales system, I actually optimize this around. If it’s an entrepreneur that I’m talking to, my first question is like, what do you love?

Like, what do you love? So I’ll ask you this, like, what do you love? What are you passionate about?

Oh man, what do I love? I mean, I love windsurfing and sailing and hanging out with my kids. Those are things that I love.

Okay, cool. So those are the things that you love to do. So then what do you love to talk about?

I love to talk about podcasting and strategic influence. Those are two of my favorite things. And then probably a third on that is lifestyle design. Cause I get lots of questions about that cause of, you know, the life we live.

Okay, so you literally just said, right then the three buckets that you should create content around, you literally just said it, podcasting, lifestyle design, and I forgot what the middle one was that you said.

Okay. Exactly. So, That’s essentially three buckets to make content around. So my aim is to always ensure that the entrepreneurs and the people that we’re working with are able to [00:31:00] post social media content that they love and know with certainty that it’s gonna convert into business for them.

So when you ask me like, this is how I will know that I’ve been successful with what we do at Impact School is that the clients and the members inside of our community are able to all the time post the content that they love, that they feel good about, that they’re aligned with, and it is turning into business.

So what does that look like? Well, I can talk about the exact social media strategy. But one of the more important things is that through the content that you’re posting, ensuring that there are clear call to actions. One for the top of the funnel, for someone to get a freebie, one for middle of the funnel, for someone to get a more, you know, direct freebie about, more about what you do for business and one for the bottom of the funnel to schedule a sales call or to say, Hey, I wanna be a client.

And then knowing that there’s gonna be automations on the back end of that, to actually convert that. Into either leads or sales. [00:32:00] So a lot of people are posting social media content right now for the sake of posting content to get interests and reviews and engagement, but there’s no strategic way to turn that into actual sales.

Or you send a few messages back and forth, book a sales call, there’s no follow up. So I’m really big on segmentation because if you segment your content that you’re actually posting, where the top of the funnel stuff is, like talking to the people who have no idea who you are. The middle of the funnel is talking to the people who know who you are, and they wanna see some tactics from you to know why exactly you’d be able to help them.

And then the bottom of the funnel’s really about giving people a reason to contact you to become a client of yours. Then on the back end of that, when those people opt into those specific, like if they see the top of the funnel content and they start getting put into your marketing, middle of the funnel, they’re put into your more warm and engaged marketing, and in the bottom of the funnel.

The marketing is pretty much just sales stuff, right? So you are just selling to them and [00:33:00] sending them offers. Then you are able to actually send the right message to the right person at the right time, which allows your efforts to go further and it’s way more automated.

Interesting. So you are essentially using social media as a way to drive sales funnel conversations at the different levels of the sales funnel instead of just posting content. We know Willy-nilly, so to speak, you’re very strategically posting different types of content for different parts of the funnel.

And there’s three things that we do depending on the stage. So if it’s top of the funnel, we wanna reach more people. If it’s the middle of the funnel, we wanna turn those lurkers into leads. An actual data that you own on your list, phone and email.

And then the third is to turn the contacts that you have in your ecosystem into clients and sales. So yes, there’s three purposes to reach more people, to get leads and to actually make sales.

That’s really potent and it’s a very strategic way to approach social media from a, you know, a lot [00:34:00] of the ways people talk about social media, that’s very different.

Yeah, yeah. Well the thing is, I’ve been doing this now for like more than eight years, right. And I had a business which was. Business to consumer where I was selling fitness. I had the entrepreneur business where I was selling personal branding programs, and then we did also have a lead generation agency.

And so I’ve done it across all different spectrums using this exact social media sales system, but I never really intended to kind of sell this as like a thing that we did. But the reason why we started doing it is because honestly, it just works really well. And I think a lot of people, they don’t try and automate anything cause they think it’s gonna come across like salesy and spammy and they think, oh, but my social media content strategy, like, I need to follow trans.

But the thing is, it can be really, really simple. I probably spend maximum 60 minutes a week making content. And our clients and members are the same because I truly believe in being, as you said, strategic rather than just kind of free balling. And [00:35:00] then that’s how you know it doesn’t need to have all these like, fancy videos and everything.

Like if people aren’t able to post one piece of content for top of the funnel, one for middle, and one for bottom of the funnel every single week, then. Don’t try and be more fancy than that in the beginning. Like be real simple in the beginning stage and then you can build on top of it and just copy and paste every content to every platform because it goes so much further and there’s so much more leverage then.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s one of the things that we teach too, is like, hey, they’re like, can we post this to more platforms? They’re like, we can post to all the platforms. It’s like, whatever you do, there’s so much technology available. Now we can post to everything, and you might as well because it doesn’t cost you anything extra.

Exactly. I’m so with and your question was about how to get agency clients. So for example,

We’re an agency, so how to get clients for our agency.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s the same whether it’s an agency or whether it’s a coaching program or whether it’s an online course. It’s the same again, people, it’s like, you know, I make [00:36:00] content and I’ll say like, how to scale your online coaching business or how to scale your agency. It’s mainly just for CEO, right?

It’s same principles still apply, so. The first thing is ensuring that every post has a call to action. So I don’t know why people don’t have call to actions in their content. It doesn’t make any sense because people are worried, oh, am I gonna look salesy and spammy? Yeah. If you are saying message me the word sale so that I can sell you something, then yeah, for sure you’re gonna seem salesy.

But the cool to action is like, message me the word info. To learn how we can install the system in your business or message me the word access, and I’ll send you a free training about how to build a million dollar audience or message me the word results to learn how you can get X, Y, Z results. So it’s really, or click the link in my bio to get whatever it’s, there’s always value added.

It’s not just [00:37:00] like super spammy. So that’s the first thing. Second thing is ensuring that then on the back end of that, there’s some type of automation. To actually turn, because otherwise it takes you so much time. So let’s just say for example, for your service, right? It’s like you said that lifestyle design is something that you love.

So you could make a top of the funnel piece of content. Like, I traveled to 15 states in the USA in 2022 alone and work less than, you know four hours a day in my business. Or maybe the better heading like my podcast allows me to have a seven figure business while working less than four hours a day.

And then in brackets, like I traveled to 15 countries last year alone with my wife and two kids. Here are the three things I did that makes my podcast so profitable, right? And the first point you would make a point like, okay, I make content about this, this, and this. The reason why is because it connects with my [00:38:00] audience and it’s really simple to do.

Okay? Second point is I have a very specific way of editing my content. It make sure that I can get leads from my podcast. DM me the word access, and I’ll send you a free training on how you can make your podcast hyper profitable. Because in the second point, you always want the call to action. And the third point is, and I make sure that in every podcast episode I do blah, blah, blah, and here’s why.

And then at the end you’d say, thank you so much for reading. If you wanna get that free training on how to have a successful podcast so you can have a million dollar lifestyle and travel and blah, blah, blah, then remember to DM me the word access and I’ll send it over to you. So that could be a really simple, like top of the funnel piece of content for you because you need to answer the question in people’s mind, which is like, why should I listen to this, dude.

That’s why in the beginning you said like, I have a million dollar business and work less than four hours a day, and it’s all thanks to my podcast. Here are the five things like three things I do of my podcast so that it makes me millions. [00:39:00] Right? So that was one thing. And we also kind of spoke about lifestyle design a bit.

So that’d be like top of the funnel, middle of the funnel would be like, okay, my client made it an additional 400k last year from his podcast. Here’s the exact five steps we did to make his podcast. So, profitable, and then you go through all those steps. Point two, you wanna have a call to action saying the word results.

Cause it’s a different call to action because you need to get them in for middle of the funnel so that you can track that in your CRM and everything. And then the third type of content for the bottom of the funnel could be like, we’ll run your entire podcast and repurpose all the content across every single platform so that you land five to 10 high paying clients every single month. DM me the word info to learn more. Something like that. I don’t know what your exact offer is, but I’m just.

That’s pretty close. So, for not knowing what we do, that was pretty spot on.

Okay, So yeah, so basically that’s exactly how you would do [00:40:00] it and until you can get down one of those posts, right? So the top, middle, and the bottom, every single week. Don’t try and like do more than that, but then from there you wanna have automations on the backend so that you’re actually able to either schedule appointments or close in the DM’s.

And you wanna have a different script. I say that with quotation marks because I don’t really like a script, I prefer a checklist. But if someone’s top of the funnel, you don’t wanna try and like close them right now. Whereas if they’re bottom of the funnel, you do because that’s what they came in for. They came in with intent to become your client.

Whereas if they’re the middle of the funnel, you need to do a bit of qualification to make sure that they’re actually serious. I’m ready to go right now. Or if they’re just trying to learn more and if they’re trying to learn more, you need to send them the right information that’s gonna actually get them to convert, for example, client case studies or more value.

And you’re actually doing that sales process in the DM’s on the different social platforms.

You can do it in the DM’s, you can do it on text. If it makes sense to just phone them up, you can phone them as well. We always capture their mobile number in case they [00:41:00] start ghosting us because if we have their phone number, we can just pick up the phone and dial like we’re not afraid to do that.

That’s really cool. So I’m definitely gonna want to hear more about that and I think our audience will as well. So we’ll talk a little bit more about that right at the end here. I mentioned I was gonna skip a few of my regular questions. I have one more question I do wanna ask you, and it’s your guiding principles.

One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a quote, for example, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview, I’m gonna talk about one top one, maybe two principles that you live your life by. Maybe something that you wish you’d known when you first started out as an entrepreneur eight years ago.

It really is to me, freedom plus fulfillment. I’m very freedom driven, but I also need to know that the things that I’m doing on a daily basis are actually helping people. And that probably could be like one of my downfalls as well, is that like I will sometimes do things to help people, even if it takes me a lot of time just because like I want to do that.

And so that’s one thing. Another thing would be I always [00:42:00] in the morning ask myself this question. Which is like, what am I gonna look back to on today and be proud of? And then in the evening, I always, I say to my boyfriend every day, like, what are you feeling grateful for every single day. And it’s just kind of become this, I guess, like routine.

And I really think that gratitude is like the antidote to anxiety or stress, and I’m pretty prone to anxiety, and so I always find that like if I’m feeling anxious or if I just do this every single day, then. The what are you actually genuinely grateful for? Like, not just, oh yeah, I’m grateful, you know, to breathe.

It’s like, no, like what are you actually super grateful for today? Like, I’m so grateful that just before I got on this podcast, or even a few hours ago now, I had like an amazing acai bowl. It was so good. It was so amazing, and like, I’m genuinely so grateful for that because before, a few weeks ago, I really wanted an acai bowl, but like I, they didn’t sell it anywhere, whereas this place is right next to where I live right now.

So that was really cool. That was [00:43:00] something super simple and small, you know, it doesn’t have to be something grandiose. And so yeah, I hope that that answer your question. But those are just the few things that I do all the time, which personally have allowed me to really just love what I’m doing every day.

I should probably spend more time. I like the evening routine of the grateful thing. And just, you were talking about the acai bowl. My thing from today, if I was gonna, you know, talk about that, was I’ve been doing martial arts with my son every morning with a new trainer that we hired about six weeks ago.

And this morning was the first time in the seated splits that I was able to like, reach over my toes. And I was like, oh, it was quite.

Awesome.

Yeah, quite an achievement for, you know, couple months worth of work. And I was like, oh man, we’re actually like making progress.

Yeah. That’s cool. Yeah.

That same vein. Cool. Well, I think that is a wrap on our interview, but I do finish every interview with a simple challenge. I call it the Heroes Challenge. And I do this to help get access to stories we might not otherwise find on our own. So the question is simple, right?

Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? [00:44:00] First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story with us here on the Hero Show? First person that comes to mind for you.

Yeah, probably nor from my team actually, she’s an operations manager. It might be interesting to hear from the perspective of an operator, what it’s actually like running an entrepreneurial company.

Yeah, that’d be really cool to have someone on like that, especially running a company of eyes of yours. So we’ll reach out after and see if we can maybe get her to come on and share her story as an entrepreneur. But in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people who are, you know, clapping for the acts of heroism and whatnot.

So as we close, our analogous to that is where can people find you if they want your help in the future? Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak and say, Hey, you know, Lauren, we’d love to get a social media sales system installed in our company. And I think more importantly than where or who are the types of people to reach out and actually ask for your help.

Yeah, so ImpactSchoolMethod.com. There’s gonna be a training, a free training there on the social media sales system that you can watch and run with it on your own if you want. And there. If you like what you see, of course you can schedule a meeting with us to learn more[00:45:00] about how we can install it in your business.

And the type of people are really people who are good at what they do. They also sell something and they want to use social media already selling something. But you wanna get more leads, regional people, and get more sales using social. That’s important cause if you don’t wanna use social media, then we’re probably not the best fit in working with you.

And the main clients that we work with are agencies, people that sell services people that have coaching or consulting programs or businesses. So yeah, that’s ImpactSchoolMethod.com. And personally, me, I’m on all socials as I’m sure you would imagine. Just my name, Lauren Tickner, that’s where you can find me.

Awesome. So one final question on that, for the people who are looking, cause I know this is a question that pops into my head. Social media. Do you have to have already been doing something with social media or you know, got a successful company, got revenue, got all those things coming in, got happy customers, got good case studies, zero social media presence, can they use your system?

Yeah, there’s either two buckets of people. Either you are [00:46:00] already on social media doing a lot, but you sell nothing or you sell a bunch of stuff, but nothing’s really working really well. That’s one type of client that we work with. The second type is someone that has a great business but not doing anything on social media.

So if you are one of those two groups, it’s cool. The people that we don’t work are the people that are no social media and no business. We cannot help you if that’s you. Cause if you’re like a total beginner to everything, we’re not the best place for you.

You probably don’t even need to hire someone right now. You can probably get some momentum from the instant stuff on the internet and then, yeah.

And then start working with something like you. So ImpactSchoolMethod.com or Lauren Tickner all over the social medias. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with us today, Lauren. Really appreciate it. And it was fascinating to get to hear your story. Do you have any final words of wisdom for audience for who hit this stop record button?

No. All good on my slide and thank you so much for having me.

Thank you, Lauren. Have a good day.