Nicole Laino (00:31)
Hello and welcome to Unshakable with Human Design. I’m your host, Nicole Laino, and I am so excited to talk about this today. Because I don’t think that enough entrepreneurs really get how to do this. So, what I want to talk about is being able to make the most out of the effort that you put into your business. Because especially when you are working with a small team, when you are working, maybe it’s just you.

Everything you do has to produce. You are the revenue producer, you are the client delivery person, you are the marketing specialist, you are everything. That’s a lot of pressure. And when you’re not sure how everything should work, when you’re not quite sure how to make it rain when you need to, and you’re not sure how you’re gonna get all the client work done, or sometimes people hide in the client work.

Sometimes something makes us feel insecure, so we avoid it. That’s humans, that’s what it’s like. But sometimes that thing that we avoid that makes us feel insecure is the thing that makes us money. So, how can we, in this episode, what I’m gonna explore is how can we bring more of us to our business? But also, I’m gonna share like my secret to making sales with just two pieces of content a week. How do we do this? How do we make money

from

Our thoughts. How do we put our thought leadership out there? How do we actually create opportunities every time we open our mouths, but specifically without having to be omnipresent on Instagram where you’re a slave to the short form content machine of post, post, post, post, post, new idea, new hook, which is often really exhausting for people.

What I’ve managed to create in this business is we do about $300,000 plus a year in revenue. I have a team of just me and one other person, and I have figured out how with just two pieces of content a week to make sales. And to do that on repeat. That we are constantly filling our sales funnel and moving people through it, nurturing them and converting them in our business.

Without me having to be constantly creating. Now, if I want to create more, yeah, I can turn the gas up. I can add more stuff, and I do. But it all starts with this foundation of being able to, and it comes down to a couple of things, and I’m gonna break them down in this episode.

What does the framework look like? We’re going to talk about what the framework looks like. We’re going to talk about how within that framework can we make the content effective, where it actually draws buyers to us. And then what do we need to do to actually bring them to a sale? Okay. And how can we maximize this effort that we’re taking so that we get even more out of it? And I will break this all down for you in this episode.

Before I get started, I want you to know about something though. I want you to know that I’m actually hosting a 10-day challenge coming up in November called Known and Paid by Design. This is all about how do we become known? What are the important ways that we need to be known? We need to know ourselves, we need to know our value, we need to know our audience, we need to know how to be seen. We need to know all of that. We want to be known in the outside world, but we want to bring a lot of ourselves to it as well.

And then we also want to get paid from being known. We don’t just want to be an influencer. We don’t just want to be out there getting views. We want to get we want to get paid, but we also want to be of use. We want to make an impact. And that requires different things than just being seen. So this is not a masterclass. This is an actual challenge where you will be doing the work. We will give you bite-sized things to do every day, ways of creating from your unique design, from showing up that way.

And we’re gonna teach you what I’m talking about in this episode too, which is how do we make the content effective where it actually sells for us? We’re going to do all of that work together over 10 days. It’s gonna be really exciting. If you want in on that, just DM me the word known on Instagram. I’m at Nicole Laino official, or go to Nicole Laino.com forward slash known and you can register on the website. Okay, so let’s talk about this. So this all started because I had hired eight figure coaches.

when I was just starting out, because we see these people who have these massive businesses and we’re like, I want that too. So I need to hire them, get their playbook, get their blueprint, and I need to implement everything that they’re doing. And they tell you that. They’re like, here, you need to do all of these things or you’re not coachable. So if you start saying that, that doesn’t really work for me or that doesn’t really feel good, they’re like, well then I can’t help you. You’re not coachable.

And so it ends up getting people to fall in line. It ends up getting people copying what other people are doing, whether it really suits them or not. And then there’s another problem. A lot of times if you have a really big coach who has a massive business, like eight figures, a lot of times they have a massive team to go with that. And if you’re just starting out like I was, what that ends up doing is driving you into the ground, like where you want to die.

I still have PTSD from my time when I started almost as much as I do from my corporate job when I was burned out there. I created this other thing by trying to do it just like all of these big coaches that I hired. That it drives you into the ground and you are so burnt out trying to keep up with somebody else’s framework that doesn’t really suit the model of business that you have. And the other thing that it does is a lot of times we are not built like the person who’s giving us that playbook.

So you have your own unique design. You have your own unique way of drawing people to you. And when we copy other people, what we get is we get usually not the results that were promised because they’re not, it’s not our way. And everybody is trying to sell us the way, their way. But there is no the way. There’s only your way. And that’s what human design teaches us. And that’s what opened me up to all of this.

Human design opened my eyes. And then me being the five-one that I am, I had a problem and I saw a way to solve it. So I was like, okay, I need to solve this problem of having needing this massive team in order to do what I’m being asked to do by these coaches. So I had to develop my own sort of plan for this. Like, how can I do this as one person? Cause I didn’t even have a team member at the time. It was just me. And I’d hire contractors here and there, but I didn’t have someone working with me.

So I was like, well, how can I do this? Can I even do it? And I wouldn’t accept that I couldn’t. So I had to develop something. And what it really came down to, there were a couple of problems that I had. Short form content like Instagram and Facebook really required just a constant presence on there. You needed to be on there every day. You needed to be on there all day in some cases. There was a time where, you know, it was about posting more every day and being on stories every day. And it just felt really

You know, like you were glued to the platform. And I didn’t particularly care for that. I also am not great at condensing myself into these tiny little fragmented messages. I’m much better with long form. So I had to come at this from a different perspective. And I had to come at it from instead of saying, like, how do I get more followers or how do I post more or how do I make more content?

I started to say, well, what’s the problem that I’m trying to solve for? And what would be the solution? The problem I wanted to solve for was I wanted to actually make money from the posts that I was making, and I wanted to do less of them. I I I didn’t want it to take up more of my time because I literally did not have it. So I started to work backwards from there. And I realized that my podcast was the place that I felt the most expanded. It was the place I felt most me.

It was the place where I felt like I was my best self. So I didn’t want to lose that. But it wasn’t making me money. So I had to learn how to create content that would sell. So we have to learn to look at the episodes that we create or the pieces of content that we create as little advertisements, educational advertisements, sort of for what we do.

We have to demonstrate the value of the things that we want people to pay us for. So this is how it all starts: starting to think differently. Yes, you can post content that just is fun and entertaining and gets people to listen to you and like you, but like does not necessarily mean paid.

I want people to start with the paid part. Because if you can get the paid part down, then getting people to like you and posting the other things in between is not a big deal. But here’s the other thing. My podcast was not where I made my money first. My podcast, I was having trouble getting people to listen to it. So how could I still make the podcast my number one priority, but still make money? Still make money the priority. Because I needed to eat.

If you’re in survival mode all the time and you don’t have clients coming in and you don’t have money coming in, it doesn’t matter how aligned you feel, you’re going to feel misaligned because you’re gonna be ungrounded, because your world is unstable. And that’s very difficult for anybody to navigate. So we want to have a foundation of stability of finances underneath us. So we need clients coming in. We need the lifeblood of our business to be clients and leads that could lead to clients, right?

So we have to learn how to create that content so that it becomes an advertisement for what we do. But then if podcasting was my priority where I wanted people to see me, how could I then make money if people weren’t finding the podcast yet? Well, I had to use short form content in order to get some of that, you know, juice up some of that visibility. So what I developed was a system to turn my podcast episodes, because that’s where I’m at my best.

And then repurpose them into shorter form content. Now I know that this doesn’t sound revolutionary, but I don’t think a lot of people are doing it well. When we repurpose a crap podcast episode, or one that’s just entertaining, or one just where we interview our friends, then we don’t necessarily get the best repurposed content. Now we have repurposed content that’s not drawing in our buyers. That’s not what we want. We want content that is actually going to

Deliver results for us. So I don’t create podcast episodes just to deliver this podcast to my listeners. I develop podcast episodes to work out my best ideas that advertise the work that I do, that deliver value to my audience, but at the same time get them understanding what I do with my clients. So if they’re thinking about hiring somebody,

And they wanted they they’re looking for somebody who does something similar to what I do, where they’re like, I want a coach who is going to value me as a human, help me understand what my value is, what my unique gifts are, but also help me build a business that is profitable. If somebody’s in the market for that, I want them to at least be thinking of me. And I want my work to reflect that. My free content should reflect that, to help them make that decision. But also

For those that aren’t looking, it still should still serve the community. And I hope that we achieve that here. But these episodes, what they do when I create them, I’m always thinking about, well, what’s the episode that serves as the big long-form piece that I could then turn into smaller pieces? What’s the big idea? And then can I either condense that one big idea into something smaller, or can I break it up into a couple of different smaller ideas?

Which can become shorter form pieces of content. I don’t think in short form, I think in long form. So this happens to be a really great medium for me and process for me. Now most of my clients don’t think in short form either. We get better at that, but it’s usually through the big exploration of the big idea that we find the smaller ideas. And I find that most people have way more success with long forming something out and then

finding the gold within it for the smaller ideas than working the other way around. So that is the process. That is how we do it. And with AI now you can repurpose that without you actually having to even do any or much of the work. AI can handle that for you, which is amazing. So now what that turns into is your ability to create one piece of content, or two pieces of content a week for me.

And I can then turn it into content for the entire week for Substack and Instagram in addition. So now I’m visible on three platforms, four actually, if you count YouTube, which we should count YouTube because we get clients from YouTube. But now I’m visible on four platforms with me only doing two pieces of work. That’s pretty amazing. That’s how I multiplied myself with the content.

That is the magic. So if this sounds like something you want to learn, if this is something that you want to actually learn and put into action, because that is what the known and paid challenge is all about, and we’re doing it by design. I am not just giving you some by rote kind of actions to take. There will be some very static actions, but it is all about approaching it from your unique human design, from your unique perspective. And you do not need to have a podcast to be part of this challenge.

You just have to have a willingness to write a piece of content. We’re going to write things together. I’m going to give you all of the frameworks to follow. We’re even going to be doing some deconditioning to get you out of your own way. So it is a really comprehensive challenge. I’m super excited about it. It’s basically like the every masterclass that I’ve ever taught, but giving you action items every day to walk through so you actually walk out with results. Okay? Very exciting. So if you want to be part of that,

just go to Nicole Laino.com forward slash known. You can sign up there on the website or DM me the word known on Instagram and we will sign you up in the DMs. I hope you found this valuable. I hope you join us for the challenge because it’s going to so fun. I appreciate you for being here. And remember, in order to have an unshakable business, you must first become an unshakable human. So thanks for letting us help you become unshakable with human design. We’ll see you next time.