I started my first business without any experience when I was still in university.
Clueless but courageous.
Hopeful yet helpless at times.
From earning just $600 per month…
To sales revenue of about $60k now…
It was a journey of ups and downs.
As I cross the 12th year in my music education business, I reflect on the important lessons I’ve learned.
If you’re just starting out as an entrepreneur/freelancer…
Or you’re looking to maximise the potential of your current business…
These 5 points will be helpful.
Double down on your winners
If you sell a range of products, you’d probably realise that only a few are really bringing the revenue in.
That was the case for me.
Our first business was a website where we matched private guitar teachers with students and earned a commission for it.
It’s still live here: https://www.guitarlessonsinsingapore.com/
We then grew to provide music lessons at corporate companies as a form of employee wellness.
In 2018, we had our own space and opened our music workshops to the public.
That was when I first embarked on digital marketing to acquire customers.
I learned how to write a landing page to sell our course, and ran Facebook ads to it and watched the sign ups ($$) come in.
If you read my eBook (Profitable Ads Secrets), you’d know my ROI was fantastic for my workshops. I made 10x return on my ad spend initially.
I started advertising our ukulele workshops, then our keyboard workshops, guitar workshops and percussion workshops.
But 1 year later, the data was clear.
Not all workshops could bring in the same ROI I initially enjoyed.
The 80/20 rule was very clear.
Only 20% of the workshops were bringing in 80% of the revenue.
Today, we focus mainly on 2 types of workshops, and completely stopped the others that weren’t profitable.
Once you find your “winner”, continue to develop it and scale it.
Which brings me to the next important lesson…
Customer lifetime value
There are many definitions of what that means.
But to me, it simply means the maximum amount of money you can earn from one customer.
This was something that I only learned about many years into the business.
When I started to do the maths for the return on my ad spend…
I realised I was sometimes spending too much to acquire one customer.
For example, I could spend up to $80 on ads to get someone paying $109 for the workshop.
And if I had nothing more to sell, the ROI was low.
I worked out the customer lifetime value for my customer and realised they couldn’t spend more money with me even if they wanted to…
Simply because I didn’t have enough products to offer.
That was when we extended the level of our classes…
We manufactured our own brand of instruments to sell to our students…
We recorded online lessons as digital products.
The whole idea was to maximise the amount a customer can spend with us.
This point was particularly important to me because in my business, my products are all pretty low ticket items.
A typical music workshop costs $100++…
If a customer signs up for a package, that’ll be $500++…
Let’s put it into perspective.
If I want to hit $2m/year in sales, I need 20000 students per year signing up for the $100 class.
If you are in a business where you are selling high ticket items ($2k above)…
To hit $2m/year, you just need 1000 paying customers.
See the difference?
I need 10x more customers than you to hit the same sales target.
The key takeaway here would be to know what numbers you want to hit, how much does a customer spend on average with you, and if you’re able to hit those numbers with the existing products you have.
Nail down your messaging
What is the outcome or benefit of your product?
Why is it unique from the rest in the market?
Well…
It was only in 2019 that I started to take copywriting seriously.
I bought books and courses on copywriting.
I rewrote my landing pages and saw the conversions increase.
I can tell you right now that copywriting has been, and will always be a superpower I want to have.
I don’t think I’m a master at it yet.
But I see myself honing this skill for life.
How to write persuasively.
How to convince people with just words.
Once I started to get good at copywriting, it was when I started nailing down the messaging for my products.
Let me give you an example.
My Flexi Piano Starter Kit helps you play piano on both hands in 1 hour, without any music experience required.
That’s the core messaging for that product.
Does that sound attractive to you if you’ve always wanted to learn the piano?
Took me a long time to get that messaging right.
If you have a product right now with no clear messaging..
It’s time to nail it down and put it across to your potential customers.
Scale with paid ads
This should come naturally once you have a proven product that has demand.
If you want to get more customers fast, you should run ads to get more customers.
I’m a strong believer in paid ads.
Particularly Facebook ads.
My business grew from 4 figures to 7 figures because of ads.
My eCommerce store selling music instruments just crossed $1m in sales.
I get 30-100 customers monthly now from my eCommerce store as well as my music workshops.
All because I run ads.
But the journey for me wasn’t easy.
I had workshops that flopped and lost me money.
I have products which are still stuck in my warehouse because I wasn’t able to sell them profitably.
Therefore, I repeat, if you want paid ads to work well, then you should only do it once you already have a product that has demand or proven to work.
But if I were to start a new business today, I’d still run ads.
Because it’s the fastest way for me to get new customers.
Even if I don’t get customers, it’s the fastest way for me to test my messaging and angle until it works.
If you are someone who doesn’t believe in running ads yet, let me tell you the next best strategy to constantly get sales for your business.
Your email list is your gold mine
If you run a business, and you have an email list of all your customers, and you email them regularly, congratulations.
You are doing something very right.
But if you don’t, it’s time to think about using email marketing as one of your customer acquisition strategies.
When Covid-19 hit, we were forced to stop our music workshops due to the lockdown.
When the lockdown was lifted, everyone was still scared to head out.
My music workshops took a big hit.
I stopped all my ads because it didn’t make sense to run them.
If you recall, there was a point where only 5 people were allowed to be in a class.
From a ROI point of view, it didn’t make sense to run ads too.
So what did we do?
We send emails weekly to get people to come to our class.
And we did that for 2 years.
I could fill my classes up without spending on ads.
Because I sent emails.
I had an email list of music lovers because of all the ads that I had been running a few years before covid hit.
My email list had about 8000 people back then.
These are people who either bought my products, or subscribed to our newsletter to learn more about us.
Since then, emailing my list regularly is part of my marketing strategy whenever I launch workshops or new products.
It’s a goldmine I will continue to build and utilise for more sales.
And let’s not forget, not all social media platforms will be here forever.
In the event that any of the social media platforms is gone…
Or if something unfortunate happens to any of my ad accounts (touch wood)…
I know I can still rely on my email database to get customers.
To summarise, if you want to play the long game and maximise your business growth…
Solidify your messaging.
Find your winners and double down on them.
Increase the amount of money your customer can spend with you.
Run paid ads to get more customers.
Use email marketing as a channel to get more sales.
