SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Ethical Way To Build Membership Site with Tracy Matthews
27 Feb 2016
Chapter 1: What is the focus of The Top podcast?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. In the last episode, number 10, you met Ben Ueta, a creative who was using a $250,000 real estate investment to generate a $1.5 million return using not common but hyper-creative strategies. Okay, our guest today is Tracy Matthews.
Now, in her 20s, Tracy launched her first jewelry brand, which was sold in over 350 retail locations like Anthropologie and ABC Home, right Tracy? Right? Now today, today she designs custom fine jewelry for private clients.
Her passion for mentoring and emerging designers led her to found Flourish and Thrive Academy, an online business school for jewelry designers, which is what she's focused on now. So Tracy, are you ready to take us to the top? I am ready. Let's do it. Okay, cool.
Well, first things first, fill in any other things about your bio that I missed, and then we'll dive into what you're selling and how you're doing it. Okay, awesome. Well, yeah, I've been designing jewelry for a long time, over 20 years. That kind of dates me, I guess. But I've had several businesses over the course of my career. And my first business was awesome.
As you mentioned, we were selling in 350 stores. I had tons of celebrity clients. But because I didn't set my business up the right way from the beginning, and I was an artist, you know, at heart, just really good at sales, getting my work out there easily. some things happen internally with the business, which caused it to fail.
So even though I was nearly a million dollars in sales with that business, which was awesome, my business still failed because of the way it was set up on the inside. So I started a new business. Wait, wait, wait, Tracy, I have to stop you there because we have top tribe members listening right now and they are wondering what the heck went wrong? A million bucks in sales.
Let us learn a little bit. What went wrong in that business? Absolutely. Well, one of the things that we teach the designers at Flourish and Thrive Academy is that it's not enough just to be talented at what you do. So I was a very talented designer. I was very gregarious. I was able to figure things out as I went along. But what I did find...
as I was building my business, that there was no one really to teach me exactly the structures that needed to be set up on the inside. And as a creative person and someone who's always forward moving in my life, I am not the most organized person. Let's just put it that way. So Tracy, are you talking in terms of literal, like the founder's agreement, who owned what equity in that business?
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Chapter 2: Who is Tracy Matthews and what is her background?
So many variables. So there was all this sort of like internal structures of how a business needs to be set up or a product-based business needs to be set up in order for it to succeed and to be able to scale and grow when outside pressures sort of come in on it. Does that make sense? It does.
And, you know, we have people that listen, people that are part of the top tribe who also are doing physical products. And is there one lesson that you could give them from what you learned? Oh gosh, I have so many lessons. I would say the number one lesson is to be looking at your numbers all the time. I know that's a really scary thing.
And especially for creative people, they don't, a lot of them don't like to look at numbers. And it took me a long time to train myself to be excited to look at numbers. Because it's important. You know, your sales numbers are important. Your bottom line numbers are important.
Your costs of running your business are really important to understand where you are and how successful you truly are, because you could sell a million dollars, but still, you know, not really have a successful business if you're not profiting. So that's really the key. Such a valuable point. Thank you, by the way. You are the featured guest today. I'm going to keep the spotlight on you, Tracy.
Thanks for being so open. What would you recommend if there is someone listening right now who has a product business and they are creative? Maybe they have an Etsy shop or a Shopify or they're interactive on the CreativeLive community. Forcing someone that's creative to look at numbers is just a losing battle.
Is there somewhere they should look to find a partner or a resource they could go to for somebody that could handle the cash and the P&L and the balance sheet and all that kind of stuff? Absolutely. I mean, I don't know that there's like one specific place that I would recommend. You know, for jewelers, I love my heart-based bookkeeping, which is awesome.
And then also there's a great resource called Accounting for Jewelers. Both of those resources are really good and they work specifically with creative type businesses. But in general, I just think finding someone to help you advise you on the numbers is the best place to start, like finding some sort of bookkeeper or someone who can really help you decipher and identify it.
And there are a lot of them that are out there that aren't crazy expensive to hire, and they can teach you sort of the step-by-step. Tracy, is there a website where you can find those people? I mean, is there any resource you could give our audience where they could find those folks? Yeah, heartbasedbookkeeping.com and accountingforjewelers.com. Perfect. Thank you for that.
And flourishandthriveacademy.com or flourishthriveacademy.com because we do teach the numbers too. Oh, great. Well, that is pure gold. And so let's transition now. I want to get into that. Tell me more about this Flourish Thrive Academy thing. For people listening that have never heard about it, what does it do? And then break down what it is exactly that you're selling. Absolutely.
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Chapter 3: What lessons did Tracy learn from her first business failure?
So it sounds like you're using this early bird to create some urgency. Walk me through, if this is always live, so it's an evergreen product, how do you create urgency? Is it a cycle? Well, yes. I mean, for, you know, from a marketing perspective, you know, obviously we create opt-in offers where people can grab a free resource.
And then on the back end, we're automatically marketing towards them to get them in the program. We'll do like quarterly pushes where we'll teach a webinar and feature success stories from other designers who have participated in our community to see what it's all about, see their successes. So it depends. We're taking a multi-level strategy. And it sounds really smart.
So I want to understand how many people, walk us through the numbers last month. How many people took advantage of one of the free offers you put out there? Oh, geez, that's a tough question. You know, we probably get about a thousand people opting into our website a month. So it's usually through a free offer, I would say. And how do you get people to your website to learn about the free offer?
Great question. So we post videos on YouTube. We have a weekly blog that we post, but then we also do a lot with Facebook advertising. So that's really the main driver of traffic. How much do you spend, would you say, on Facebook ads per month? About $500. Okay, that's great. So not too much, right? Yeah, that's great. So 1,000 people take advantage of the free offer.
How many of the 1,000 take advantage of your early bird? Um, of the early bird. Well, we're launching it next week, so I can tell you. What about for instance, like I, you know, we also have our other courses. I would say that we typically get about 30% conversions like of sales off webinars.
Um, you know, our last, um, our main course that we sold last year, we had 245 people sign up, uh, the last round for $795. Got it. 795 one time. Yeah, one time payment. That's great. I mean, so that's easy. Like that's a 16 grand just right off that course, correct? For 795, it's a lot more than that. Oh, is it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sorry. It's 160,000. Sorry.
My mocha caffeine is getting to my brain this morning. That's amazing. I'm like, I hope it wasn't just 16,000. No, sorry. My fault. My fault. Well, that's great. So the future for you guys looks like continuity programs and launches using these free offers, Facebook ads, and YouTube videos to just grow your list and sell using webinars. Absolutely. Yes.
And then we also, we do a lot of free video training series, which have worked really, really well for us. Tracy is so smart and you're so great on camera. I mean, so this works, it works great for you guys.
If you are loving this episode, you will love episode number eight, where we talk to the head of strategy at GoPro responsible for taking them from $300,000 a year in sales to $300 million in sales. And to celebrate the top tribe, I am giving you guys the chance to win a GoPro and my top three favorite business books. In order to win, simply text the word NATHAN to 33444.
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Chapter 4: How important is understanding numbers for creative entrepreneurs?
Awesome. That's great. And where can people learn more about that? What's the link? It's actually a private mastermind. So I don't have anything planned for the next six months to go to another live in-person conference, but I will be in 2016. Great. I just don't know it yet. Well, guys, go check out Tracy's website.
Now that you know more about kind of her funnel, you can learn more about how she's doing this. And again, she's a great person to model. She's crushing it in the industry. So number three of the famous five. Here we go, Tracy. What is your favorite online tool? Like Evernote. Oh, I love it. Slack. Slack, you must use it. It has changed my life. We've been using it for about three months.
I have a team that's all over the world. So, you know, the communication piece with the email or just even a project management tool was all over the place. So now everyone's communicating through this app called Slack. It's amazing. And I highly recommend that everyone uses it who has more than two people on their team. Such good advice. We use that as well. Okay, number four.
When you need something outsourced, which website do you usually use? I would say typically Elance is my first go-to. Great. Okay, number five. And Tracy, this is near and true to my heart. This is my favorite. If you wish your 20-year-old self knew one thing, what would it be? Don't be afraid of failure, darling. It's the best thing that is probably going to happen to you ever.
Learn the lesson and rebuild because something so much better is on the other side. And guys, look, Tracy was so vulnerable today. She failed bigger than probably a lot of you guys have with a million dollar business that she shut down and moved on from. So Tracy, if people want to learn more about you, where can they connect with you online?
They can find me at tracymatthews.com or flourishthriveacademy.com. Awesome. Well, Tracy, I think you took us to the top today. People learned a lot. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Nathan. All right. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.
In the next episode, number 12, you'll meet Carrie Wilkerson and you'll learn exactly how she easily gets $17,000 per keynote by always being in demand using a very particular phrasing technique in her emails. This podcast is produced by Oration Recording and is sponsored by Eddy Communications and Roanoke, Virginia's Grandin CoLab, the premier workspace for entrepreneurs and growing companies.
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