Hey, gorgeous. And welcome back to another episode of Chill and Prosper. I hope that these episodes have been useful for you to make more money with less stress, because that's what I am here to do. So I want to talk today about a question I get asked all the time, literally I reckon everyday in some form, I get asked about this and it is about creating evergreen programs. Now, if you've never heard this term before, evergreen means always available. It's like with trees that are evergreen, they're green all year round, I have a course Money Bootcamp that is evergreen, meaning that, or can join at any time, not just during launches. People ask me about this all the time, because one they've seen how I've done it with thousands of people. They've got questions about logistically, how it works. And also sometimes people want to switch from doing launches to having a program that's open all year round.

                                So I want to talk all of the things and I'll be really honest about it as always, and maybe inspire you to do it as well. So you don't have to, but might inspire you. So just a bit of background on Money Bootcamp. So my first time that I did Money Bootcamp was in 2012 and it is a course. It was designed to be a six week course about uncovering your money blocks and releasing your money blocks. So I did it like a traditional program. It was going to be a group that was open for six weeks and we used Facebook for that. It was going to have calls every week for six weeks. And then that was kind of going to be the end. And I honestly thought it is going to be a one and done program and that would be it. So in that first cohort we had about 20 people who joined.

                                It wasn't my first ever program that I'd ever launched. And I've done other podcast episodes about that. I launched in 2009 with my first ever course, Raw Brides Transformation program. And my second course was in 2011 and it was, the inspired life formula about manifesting. So this new course that I was going to do Money Bootcamp. I didn't think it was going to be like ongoing forever and I just didn't even think about it. So if you are starting a course right now, I want to give you some things to think about. So you don't make those mistakes, but also to build longevity into your program. So what I realized is doing that six weeks was great, but it was actually a bit full. And so I was like, "Oh, maybe the next time I run it, it'll be like eight weeks." And I'll just leave the group open for people to explore it at their leisure.

                                And there was so much demand for the course that I ended up doing that four times a year. So you can imagine doing eight weeks of calls, four times a year, plus all of the stuff that goes into launching it, right? So of course, you've got to tell people about it. You've got to do a launch. You've got to have a sales event and then you've got to onboard those new people. And so really that whole process is more like 10 to 12 weeks. By the time you do all the cleanup up behind the scenes and all that kind of stuff, either side. So I was doing that four times a year. So we got to a point where I was so burnt out that I felt like I was in every trimester of pregnancy all at the same time. So I was gestating the new cohort, I was giving birth because I was probably usually in a launch at the time. I was feeding as in delivering the program to people. And I was like trying to be in fourth trimester and take some time off between launches, all at the same time.

                                So I was absolutely exhausted by that launch model. And not only that, I didn't even mention, instead of doing one call a week, I did two calls a week because I wanted it to fit around different time zones. So add those up. I was honestly just exhausted and there was so many calls that were happening. So when I had a baby, I was like, "I think I'm just going to have to just like ditch Money Bootcamp for a while, because I just don't know how to make this work." So when I was pregnant with my first baby, I decided to trial running Money Bootcamp as an evergreen program, allowing people to join at any time. And so that's how it started for me. Just pure exhaustion. Really. So if you're following a similar launch pathway, you just go, "Wow, people just want this all the time. Do I just launch it again and again, and again?"

                                Then an evergreen model might really work for you. So lets fast forward to now and I'll tell you how it works. And then I'll tell you how I made the transition. So now the way Money Bootcamp works is that we do a big launch in January every year. And this is just to give people the opportunity to join, have a longer payment plan, get some extra bonuses. And some people just like the start of the year as a symbolic kind of gesture of starting something new, right? So that works great. And then people can join throughout the year and we don't run it through a six week program, so people can join at any time. That means that in our group, people could be working on lesson one. They could be working on lesson 10. They could be working on lesson 18. All at the same time. So you might wonder how that works.

                                Instead of doing six week intensives, I do monthly calls now. So I still do the two different time zones, but I do them at the end of the month. And that's just a way of kind of connecting with everyone, giving them some motivation and energy, but it also means that people aren't reliant on me all the time for that. They go through the material and they're working at it at their own pace because I realized that even that six weeks is very arbitrary. And so you might have experienced that yourself as a customer, as a student. You might have joined a program and it's so packed full of staff that you can't even get it done in the six weeks anyway.

                                So you feel kind of a bit like a loser that you can't get it done and you have to create so much space in your calendar to go through a course. So I wanted it to be like this ongoing support that people in Money Bootcamp have, that they go through the lessons, they've got the support of the group. And then at the end of the month, they have that big motivation. And that meant for me that I actually had sustainability around how I delivered that program, because otherwise, honestly, going at that pace, I just would've quit. At some point. I would not have been able to do that at all. So now that's how Money Bootcamp runs, right? So we've got people who can join at any time and we do a couple of different launch events throughout the year, which I'll explain after the break actually. So make sure you stick around because there's some really cool little marketing things that we do to motivate people to join throughout the year.

                                So why would you even offer this? Right. So obviously I've said about the burnout thing for me, it was absolutely... The first thing was about burnout and sustainability, so I could have kids, so I could have babies, so I could have time off. So I could live without having to be in launch or delivery motor all the time. So that's enough of a reason, by the way, if you can't offer something because you're burnt out, then that doesn't benefit anyone. So it's totally okay to design your business around your needs and preferences. That's totally okay. And I'll probably make some more tweaks. I'm going to tweak one of the timings of one of the calls to work better For me. I've shortened the length of the calls to work better for me too.

                                Otherwise, again I might get burnt out, right? So you can only offer what you can offer and it's totally okay for you to design it, that works for you, first and foremost. That's the big lesson. The second thing is the reason why I wanted to offer it as evergreen is because I am an instant gratification person. And so when I want something, I want it now. And I thought that maybe there would be people in my community who would be the same, who didn't want to wait for me to launch something once or twice a year. They wanted it now because they've just read my book, Get Rich, Lucky Bitch and they went, "Wow, I really wanted to join Denise's program." I can say in that, in anything that I do, I can say, "Hey, go to Denise dt.com/bootcamp. And you can join now."

                                Not everybody will join because not everybody has that instant gratification. Some people will need to join during your launches. They will need to have extra incentives. And I'll tell you about that in a sec after the break, but that's a great reason to offer evergreen because some people just want it now and they want your stuff now. And you may as well, let them give you money. You may as well. So that's really, that's the first tip of evergreen is just make something available. Put it on your website. Like here it is. You can have it now. And that can be so beneficial for you too, right? Because, it can give you more recurring revenue throughout the year. Not just relying on those big launch events that might be scary. Or sometimes to be honest, sometimes people have an unexpectedly bad launch.

                                You know, I've seen someone they were launching on the US election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, their close cut day was the day after election because they probably just went, "Oh, it's no big deal." But it was such a big event. And it was so full on for... the whole world was really talking about it, that their launch was not as powerful as it could have been. And so I love having that evergreen revenue throughout the year. So then I don't have to put so much pressure on my launches. Okay. So you might have questions about, "Well then how do you incentivize people to join and how do you market it like that?" And all of those things. So I will talk about those things after the break. And I just want you to think about how already this could work for you. All right. See you in a sec.

Speaker 2:           Hi, my name's [JJ Jenison]. The company is called IndigoFlame.com. I live in London, I'm writing my memoirs called Walking Through Fire. I read Get Rich, Lucky Bitch. I found it online through a podcast when you did an interview with Dr. Nicky. The pop book that I really, really loved was chapter four because it made me reflect on my own money mindset and my belief. I really loved the about upgrading. That was my aha moment because I realized that I had done that because I've wrote the first draft of my book and it should be published by the end of this year. I Serve, I Deserve was a real good takeaway for me. And the good thing that has happened. Well, I read the book a couple of months ago, and after that I got a tax refund. That was great. And that's really good. Thank you.

Speaker 1:           All righty. Welcome back. We are talking about evergreen launches and I hope already it started to inspire you about how you could possibly make your course evergreen instead of going for that launch model. But I said, I was going to talk through some of the questions you might have about how you market it, how you incentivize people to join all of the things and how you would even make that transition. So what I find is that, if you're stuck in that launch model all the time, you might have a really strong opinion about how people consume your course and what I realized with my course, especially, yes, I designed it in a particular way, but really people could jump in at any point because they were all learning the same thing. They were all learning to uncover their money blocks and to connect it to how they're showing up in their business or their life today around money, and then create a pattern interrupter.

                                So I kind of created a bit of a framework that was the course, and then the actual topics were kind of irrelevant. Okay. So that might sound a bit complicated. So if you think about what you teach, what is the overall framework that is kind of, that's the crux of what you're teaching. And then you could kind of think about how people could jump in at that at any time. So the way I run calls now in Money Bootcamp is that we go through three things. What's the origin story of your money block? How does it connect to how it shows up for you today? And what's a pattern interrupter. Okay. And then that means that we can talk about so many different things in the calls. We can talk about pocket, money and allowance and how that shows up divorce, weddings, your family's money blocks. And then that way, if someone's brand new, they get just as much out of those calls as someone who has just joined.

                                So we don't go through the lessons of Money Bootcamp, the modules in Money Bootcamp, in those calls anymore, look for a more overarching kind of theme to the calls. So that it works, it works for someone who's literally brand new and it works for someone who's been there for 10 years, who needs a refresh and who wants to find new things out. Okay. So that's the first kind of big thing is to stop thinking of your course in a linear fashion, if you want it to be evergreen. The second thing that was so important for me was that I had to really tighten up the group. And so if you have a group attached to your course and there's new people joining in all the time, you have to get really clear on what the core of the group is about.

                                So pre evergreen, after people finish their six weeks of Money Bootcamp, they wanted to chat about all sorts of different things in the group. And so they would bring off topic things into the Facebook group because they were like, "Well, I'm done with that. Now I want help on this and this and this." And I kind of allowed it for a while because we're all kind of going through it together. Now that new people join every time I had to set boundaries, that that group is just for Money Bootcamp. We just talk about Money Bootcamp in here. It is not everything to everyone. It is not a catchall generic business group. It's not a generic marketing group. It's not a group where you can ask technical questions about what webinar software to use. It has to stay on topic. And that has helped enormously because again, it works for the person who needs a refresher. Who's been there for eight years and it works for the person who's just joined because then they know what that group is for.

                                That might mean that you have to set some boundaries, that you have to enforce those boundaries. It might mean that you have to set some rules about what's in and out of scope for your customer group, but it really, really helps for creating evergreen. Now, what I said about how do you incentivize people to join outside of the launch period? So I said that in January, we do this big launch. We have extra bonuses. We have a long term and payment plan. You know, we'd really throw everything at it, because it's a really big event, right? So during the year though, we create lots of different other incentives for people to join because some people are internally motivated. They have that instant gratification, they know that they need it and they want to jump.

                                Some people are on the fence and you need to create some incentives. So I'll tell you some of the things that we have tried. We never discount by the way, we never say, "Oh, there's a quick discount if you jump in now," because that creates so many problems for us, that people will go, "Well, I'll just wait for the next discount. I'll wait for the next sale." And I actually saw someone talk about this in a forum that I was in. I don't know if they knew I was there. They were like, "Oh, what I've noticed, Denise Thomas never discounts. So don't wait because it's never any cheaper and actually she increases the price and I'm like, "Yeah, that's totally true." So I never discount but I give other incentives.

                                So one thing that, and we've tried this very well, is that I charge in US dollars for Money Bootcamp, right? Which means that sometimes if you're not in America, then the currency might fluctuate. If you're on a payment plan and over the last couple of years, it's fluctuated quite a bit. And then people's banks charge them extra for buying in a different currency. So a couple of times a year we might offer a local currency deal. So we did an Australian one, paying Australian dollars. We did a Canadian one, paying Canadian dollars. We did a Euro one, a British pounds one, and it's the same price. It's not a discount, but it means that they can pay in their own currency. It saves them fees and it saves them possible currency fluctuations. Okay. So that could be one thing that you do and it has to be limited time, right? So it's like a little mini launch within your evergreen program. And it could be just two or three days and that's it.

                                We've also done limited payment plans. So again, they're not getting a discount, it's actually, they pay a little bit more, with the payment plan. But if you normally do a pay in full or a two payment payment plan, you could do a very limited, four or six, even 12 month payment plan. We even trialed something where it was, you could pay over, it sounded really strange, but it was like, you can pay a 100 dollars a week for however long it takes to pay off, right? And so it was actually more than a normal payment plan we did. But some people like it broken down into weekly payments. So it was cool. Well, you can do... I think it was 22 or 24 hundred dollar payments. And that was a really interesting limited thing too.

                                We have done extra bonuses. So sometimes people just need that little extra bonus. So we did a survey recently to say, "What would be the game to changer for you to joining Money Bootcamp? What bonuses would you like?" Some people said, "How to pay off debt," or "Doing Money Bootcamp with your partner." Some of those we already had, we just hadn't marketed them well. But for one of our launches, we created a whole bunch of just bonus stuff. And it was like, "Cool. If you join this week, you get this as a bonus." And the thing is you have to be in integrity. You have to take it away, but it could be just like a limited time for that month.

                                If you are someone who has one-on-one calls and you're happy to do that, it could be something like that. Now the thing is, what do you do for the people who've already bought? So if it is something easy, like an extra eCourse or a bonus, I would let everybody who's already purchased have that because then you're kind of training people like the earlier you join, the more bonuses you get. And it makes those people be so appreciative. And they're really appreciative of all that kind of stuff, but you will get people go, "But what about us? What about us?" We even started doing welcome cards for new people. And even that people were like, "But what about us? I joined eight years ago and I didn't get a welcome card," and you go, "Oh man."

                                So you have to just be mindful about those extra bonuses. And if it's going to annoy people or piss people off, or how can you make it fair for everyone. And that's why it's really tricky to do for things like one on one time or physical goods as extra bonuses, because then everyone will want it. So think about what value add you could have as digital things. For one of our last launches, we did an extra bonus call just for new people. And that was really fun too. It was an onboarding call just for people who joined on a webinar. So that was really cool too. You could do competitions. You could do like, anyone who joins in the month of October gets put into a draw to win, blah, blah, blah. It could just be a few little incentives for... Which would be enough to get people off the fence and get excited about working with you.

                                The other thing that we're trialing this year is doing a four week sales cycle because we have the live call at the end of the month and using that as an incentive to say, "Hey, look, we've got a live call next week. Now's the perfect time to join." They go, "Oh, I'll wait. You know, I'll wait until I join next year," and you go, "Yeah, cool. But you're going to miss out on three calls before then imagine what you could do." So it's the fact that you have something that's a limited time, like a call could be enough for you to just send out a couple of extra emails to say, "Hey, just to let you know, we've... the live members' calls next week. So if you're thinking of joining, join now don't wait until after the call."

                                Because it just might be enough for people to go, "Oh, I didn't even know you had a call. Oh, well I didn't want to miss out on that." And make sure you give people enough time to join. So we sometimes will say to people, "We've got a call 6:00 PM Eastern," and they join at 6:00 PM Eastern. And then it's just getting them on that call. And then they get annoyed if they didn't do it. So give them enough time and just send out those emails and those reminders ahead of time. All right, so hopefully that has given you some ideas, as I said, you do not need to make your program evergreen, if you don't want to, but I just wanted to give you some food for thought really and show you behind the scenes of how we do it in our business.

                                And of course, if you've listened to this and you're like, "Oh, I want to join Money Bootcamp." And you are an instant gratification person come over to denisedt.com/bootcamp and just come and join us. And you can see how it works for yourself. And I would love to hear ahas around this. So please send them to me or send me a message on social media. My handles are @DeniseDT everywhere. And we also have a lot of launch related content. So every article I've ever written about launching, I'm going to link to it at denisedt.com/launch. So come over there if you want any other tips. I talk about mindset stuff, logistics, behind the scenes of our launches, everything. All right, gorgeous. I will see you right after the break for my final thought.

Speaker 3:           Hello, my name is Emma Green and I joined Money Bootcamp just in January of 2021, so very recently. My business... I'm a physical therapist through COVID and lockdown I had to pivot my business from being an in clinic business to being 100% virtual. I have two kids and a dog. So my kids got sent home from school this time last year and have not been back yet. And they're not likely to go back into school until August at the earliest. So I am homeschooling kids, I'm virtually online with my business and you can probably tell from my accent, I'm from the UK originally, but I live in Southern California. So no family help around either.

                                So the reason that I joined Money Bootcamp, I started to uncover the fact that I had money blocks. I had no idea. I'd never even heard the term money blocks until probably within the last 12 months. And I started to uncover some of these issues and knew I needed help to get through these money blocks. Biggest aha, biggest shift I've had since joining Money Bootcamp. I was able to manifest $12,000 within the first month of being in Money Bootcamp. Absolutely fantastic. So I love it. I love being on the calls. I just love being surrounded by these amazingly successful women who all have the same mindset and we're all working through things, even though we're all over the world in so many different stages of businesses, so many different businesses, and yet we're all working through very similar things and just the support and the camaraderie in the group is fantastic. I'm just sorry I didn't join ages ago. So thanks so much Denise for everything and that you do. This is brilliant.

Speaker 1:           Hi and welcome back. Thanks again for being with me for this whole episode. My final thought is about the word boss and being the boss and how much it can make people feel really icky. And I've seen backlash around the term girl boss, and that's fine too. Not everyone wants to be a girl. Some people find it a bit condescending, but it's the boss word that I think can be really fascinating to look at. And I want you to ponder in times of your life, where you have been scared to be the boss. Maybe you are like me and you are told you a bossy at a really a young age, or like my little daughter Piper, who was told she was bossy from two years old. So let's just work with this affirmation for the next couple of days.

                                And it could be, it's safe for me to be the boss. Maybe you're having trouble asking for what you want. Maybe you're starting to build a team. Maybe you need to release your shame of being called bossy. And it could be it's safe for me to be a leader. I am a leader. It's safe for me to be the boss. I thrive on being the boss. And remember you don't have to be a horrible boss. There's a lot of negative connotations with that word of narcissistic, egotistical, horrible people. And I've had my fair share of those, but now it's totally okay to step into being the boss in a really great way, in a really beautiful way, in a way that works for you. So it's safe for you to be the boss. Alrighty, let me know what your ahas were around this episode. I love hearing from you, share this episode with your friends, with your groups. I'm @DeniseDT everywhere. So you can tag me and let me know what you thought, but otherwise I will see you next week for another edition of Chill and Prosper. Peace out from me.