Ep. 43 | Creating Online Courses and High Ticket Offers with Larry Peacock

I share my story with my amazing student Larry Peacock on his new High Ticket Online Courses podcast where I started off as a gypsy girl. Where education was prohibited for young women. And have now gone on to become the record holder for being the youngest University Executive Director and Head of Campus in the whole of Australian history.

We talk about how I went from a millionaire to a million dollars in debt in one day and how that became an opportunity for me and my business to scale and become more profitable by going online. I share strategies on where to start as a Course Creator, content creation strategies that I use, and how to create systems in your business so that you can continually scale your business without getting overwhelmed.

Resources:

• High Ticket Online Courses (Podcast) by Larry Peacock
• sarahcordiner.com/starterkit

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Intro

My name is Larry peacock and I’m so excited to have Sarah Cordiner here with me today. How are you doing Sarah?

Hello, Larry! Hi, everyone listening. It’s wonderful to be here today.

Thank you so much. It’s quite an honour to have you Sarah. And as we were just talking a little bit before we started this podcast, I am in Sarah’s Concept to Course program. And I have been in this digital marketing game for a few years. Uh, more at a learning platform and, um, Sarah has a wealth of knowledge, a huge body of work, and is one of the most impressive Course Creating teachers that I’ve ever seen. So it’s a super honor to, uh, interview you, Sarah. And if you would go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about you.

Thanks, Larry. It has been wonderful working alongside you. Watching this empire that you’re creating. I must admit hats off to you. You have very rapidly built yourself, a community of people who are clearly interested in learning about how they can grow and get their message out to the world as well. So kudos to you. This whole field is about encouraging ourselves and encouraging other people to see that they have a whole wealth of knowledge and skills and life experiences inside of them, the other people would love to know about, would love to learn from, I would love to get your tips and advice on. And I think, I truly believe that every single person is capable of sharing something that could change somebody’s life. And so, yeah, that’s why we’re all here today listening. So my name is Sarah Cordiner, and I genuinely believe that everyone and anyone has the potential to change somebody else’s life.

My Story and Background

I started off as a gypsy girl, where education was prohibited for young women. And have now gone on to become the record holder for being the youngest University Executive Director and Head of Campus in the whole of Australian history. And as somebody who has gone from, you know, not being allowed to be educated at all, to giving them running a university in a country, they weren’t even born in. I can guarantee you that within us, there is all a set of skills that we can tap into. We can find that we can share with others in a way that not only change our lives, but those of others too. And so I started my business at the wise old age of 18. And I now have an online education empire. I like to it’s something I built myself, um, currently have, uh, we’ve just hit 80,000 enrollments in 168 countries right now, currently studying my programs. Um, and I do it all from my spare bedroom with two young children and a whole load of ambition.

How I Was Pushed Into My Online Business

That’s amazing. And again, maybe to talk briefly about the Edupreneur Academy, um, when you’re in that and you open it up, it’s just overwhelming, but could you talk a little bit about why you created that?

Yeah. So, um, I think within all of us, we all have heaps of different things that we can teach. And one of the things that I find as a Course Creation Specialist and Coach is that a lot of people come to me and their biggest thing is not, what do I create a course about? Their biggest thing is which one of my millions of ideas do I start with first, if we were an adult. We’ve got, we’ve probably done a heap of different things in our lives, and there’s so much stuff you could probably teach. It’s picking which one to go with first. And I was very much the same. I started my career. I’m, I’m a qualified teacher trainer. I’m a qualified training professional. Um, and so my business first began servicing corporate organizations and governments. So I was getting out there like, and I had staff. We were delivering everything from leadership training, to communication skills, to how to write a CV. Like you name it. We had one of these courses that we were delivering inside the business.

Um, so I took upon myself to be the writer of the content as a qualified curriculum developer and then hire trainers to go and deliver them to these organizations. Um, and basically my business is going really, really well. Seven figure business. Um, we were running multiple contracts, contracts with government and organizations and in, I think it was late 2014, um, all of a sudden the economy in Western Australia where I based crashed. And we lost $2.7 million in a single Tuesday morning. And I certainly realized that there were 23 employees that I wasn’t going to be able to continue paying any more as a result. And my business was facing administration. I literally went from a millionaire to a million dollars in debt in a day. And thought, well, what am I going to do?

And this is where I thought, well, look, we’re good at what we do. We’ve been making a lot of money from what we do. We’ve had nothing but five-star reviews from our clients from what we do. I just need to find a different way of doing it rather than giving up completely. And that’s where I realized here we’ve been focusing on a local economy in our state. And I went, well, how can we start doing this for people all over the world so that I’m not depending on one particular economy?

Well, why don’t I go online. And so well, what are these things? Am I going to pick? So, um, at first I just started putting all of our corporate training online. And as you, some of those remnants are left in the Edupreneur Academy to this day. There’s training on how to go and get employment. There’s training on leadership, and there’s training on, um, presentation skills for corporates and things like that in there. And so I started building up all these random programs that didn’t really target anyone in particular. So I just started throwing them all into my online school. And all of a sudden it grew the business by 60% instead of going into administration. Um, made a huge amount more money than I was making beforehand all because I went online. And to boot, I reduced my overheads dramatically because I no longer had staff to pay to run these training programs because it was just online.

And that’s when people started saying to me, you know, Sarah, you’re a qualified, um, education developer. You’ve created, I created over 60 programs within the space of 12 months because I had a baby deadline. Baby being born quick run, um, and summarizing how did you go from turning this face-to-face content into an online version. And boom, that’s when I went well, I need to create a program about how I create programs. Which is actually what I was qualified in funnily enough, a curriculum developer. It wasn’t leadership I was an expert in, it was creating programs. And so that’s where “How To Create Profitable Online Courses” was born. People came into that and said, right, well now we have a course. How do I market it? How do I create automated email sequences? Now I want to be an author. All these things that I’d done. And so I thought, well, why not just open up a whole Academy that now allows me to have the freedom to create anything that I want to create and allows other people, you know, like yourselves to jump in there and have access to all of that stuff that they might want to cherry pick as, as they go along.

Writing My Books: The Process

That’s incredible. And again, I’m, uh, you know, I get into there and it, it is a bit over, I mean, it’s just a lot, and I’ll also want to talk about the books. Um, you have, uh, so you know, quite a number of books that you’ve written. And can you talk a little bit about your process and doing that?

Yeah. So, um, not many, not many years ago. I think it was five or six years ago. I’d always had this dream to become a public published author, always loved to write in that tree and that passion was there. It’s yet another medium by which we can go and share our knowledge with the world and help people. And, um, I now have 12 published books and five of those have been international number one best-sellers. And the biggest tip I have for you guys is that it’s not as hard as you think. Um, in fact, all I simply did is, um, figured out what questions are people asking you when they go into Amazon and they go onto Google? What is it that they’re typing in there to get the answer to?

And you can use a lot of, a lot of different tools to find out what these questions are. And I simply just wrote down the questions on an A4 sheet of paper and answered them all. That’s it? Each subheading was just a question and I put the answer. Subheading was the question I put the answer and before I knew it, this was going to be, my first book was going to be a blog post. And so, you know, you may have seen these blog posts that like 10 ways to lose weight, 15 ways to be happier. Well, I just came up with like 25 questions and I wrote an answer to them where the answer was two pages each. 58 full pages. By the time you formatted that, it goes up to about 90 boom. I had a book. Yeah, and guys it really is as simple as saving it as a PDF, going to kdp.com, which is Kindle’s publishing platform and uploading the document. And within 24 hours you’re published. And if you get enough people buy that book within a one-hour period, which is how often Amazon updates its best-seller rankings, boom. You’re a best seller as well to do. And I know that sounds like a simplified way of putting it, but genuinely that is the process.

Yeah, and it can, I mean, obviously you’ve been able to do it. When I was in the course one thing that was one of the key takeaways or kind of aha moments. And I did that. I went onto YouTube. So I’m really interested in online courses and online course creation here I’m talking to the queen of it. And so I did what you told me to do. And I went to YouTube and I typed online courses and I looked at what was the tr the, uh, Keyword tail tail keywords. And I did that for a YouTube. I did it for Google.

I did it for answer the public. I printed off the spreadsheet and there you go. There’s my modules, my courses, my lessons, it’s all there. And what’s so unique about it is I’m literally, as you said, I’m answering the questions that people are asking. So you’re giving them what they want. And so for the course creators that are listening. That’s all you need to do, right? Uh, go into, uh, go into that. Google, YouTube, uh, answer the public.com. Write that down. If you don’t know what that is and check it out. It’s amazing. And that’s how you create an online course. It was literally giving them what they’re asking for. Uh, I just think it’s just, that was my, my key takeaway from that entire thing.

How Does My Work Day/Work Week Look Like As A Mum and Edupreneur

The other thing that I wanted to talk about. What I’m really interested. This is a selfish statement or a selfish question for me is what is your, how, how does your Workday, your, your Workday breakdown and also, how is your work week breakdown? I’m really curious about that.

Is a very commonly asked question. Um, a lot of people, like you mentioned, like look at the content I’ve created. I mean, you go on my blog and there are over 400 plus blog articles up there. And I don’t write short form. They are long-form blog articles with very good detailed step-by-step instructions. You know, YouTube, there’s a hundreds of my videos on YouTube. Um, you know, 12 published books I have over 60 plus online courses in the Academy. There’s a challenge running every single month. There’s a coaching program running every single month. I’m pumping out. Services and creating other people’s schools for them. And so a lot of people go, you know, I’m one person, I’m a mum.

I know often a single mom. I noticed I’m not a single mum. I often feel like a single mum because police officer, my husband is always at work. Um, and I have no family where I live. So people kind of go, how do you do it all? And the truth is it’s taken me 14 years. To do all of that stuff. So some people from the beginning, they kind of go, you know, they compare their day one to my year 14 and they kind of go, how do I have all of that now? The truth is you can’t have it now. Um, I’m just 14 years ahead of you. Um, if you keep doing the right things regularly, you will also have that amount of content and that legacy, um, that you’ve created as well in the world. Um, in 14 years time, too. But for me, it’s very much about batching your time and focusing predominantly on, um, what, you know, Jim Collins calls the big, hairy, audacious goal. What are your goals? What is it that you’re trying to achieve? And I get really specific about this. How many students do I want to have by the 31st of December this year? How much money do I want to have turned over by the 31st of December this year? How much of my stuff and how many numbers of items of my stuff at what price do I need to sell in order to make that amount of sales by the end of the year?

And so I calculate all of that up. And then I go, what will be the one focus I have this year? So for example, just to give an example, I have 60 plus different courses, all these books, all these services, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now I don’t have many different goals for those. I have one goal and I go this year, I’m going to focus on my Edupreneur Academy. So, but this year I want to have X number of customers in my Edupreneur Academy. Now, my whole then system I set up behind the scenes is this is all out flowing people in there. How many prospects will I need to get? If my conversion rate is X in order to then take them to getting that number of results. That’s the first thing I work on. And I revisit that every single month. Every single a month I go into my, um, my track progress tracking sheet and I go, how many students have we got right now? How much money are we making right now? What is the profit right now? Am I selling enough items of X to get X number of people in there. Every single month we check this. I go into the quoting system and I check the conversion rates. See I did. Are we hitting an X percent conversion rate or not? How far off are we from that?

So that’s the first thing we do, because that is then what guides what you have to do every day. Um, it guides whether you are creating content. You know, if you, if your goal is to create an Academy in the first place, well then your number, one thing you need to be working on right now is actually creating content for the Academy. You don’t have anything to sell if you don’t have the content. So then I would be spending my time in that situation going right. Well, 50% of my day, at least. You go look at that 80 20 rule, I would even say 80% of my day for the next four weeks would need to be spent on creating the actual course content. I need to be in the studio filming 80% of every single day. That’s what the calendar would look like. Um, if it’s the other way around, you’ve created your content, but you don’t have anyone in it… Well then 80% of your day needs to be spent on marketing activity.

How I Market My Products

And for me, marketing isn’t like randomly chucking everything everywhere and hoping something sticks. It’s about getting people into my email marketing database. How do I do that? One lead magnet, not a webinar over here. Facebook ads over there. A free ebook over here. Um, I dunno, uh, quick, let’s do a quick shotgun workshop over here. I create one lead magnet. And I focused on how can I make that lead magnet go everywhere so that I have one lead bunch of people coming in there and leading into the path I need them to go.

So for me, and the space that I’m at in my business that will obviously change each month as I go through more sales, more conversions, more growth then we have to go into more staff. So then it focuses on how do I create more systems? So that I can create more peoples that I can keep getting bigger. It’s a cycle, right? Um, For me, I’m focused very much on being extremely strict with my time. And I have even 15 minute increments blocked in my calendar for like a toilet break. Right. This is how strict I am. Right. So I make sure that I don’t do, um, I try not to do any more than three hours of client calls a day.

Because, um, when you’re on a client call, yet you might be getting paid for that hour or that three hours that you’re doing. You’re being taken away from the overall objective. Whether it’s creating the content and the marketing or the systems for the staff. Right. So, um, you know, it’s really, it’s not as important as all the other stuff, so I’m no more than three hours a day.

Time Management and Parkinson’s Law

If I can on client calls. And then from there it’s really, really blocked. So I’ll go this three hours. I’m going to be working on the next concept course group coaching program. Um, this block of time I’m going to be working on, um, the, the funnel for the next round of Facebook ads that go from the lead magnet through to the upsells and so on. And so that’s exactly how I do it. I also have a very strict rule of absolutely no clients on a Friday. Um, so normally Friday morning we’ll be, you know, just catching it with admin and closing the week. Um, any sort of emails that my team couldn’t deal with only I could do those kinds of things get done at the end of the week.

Why? Because that stuff is less important. I know it sounds crazy thing to say. It’s less important than the content that people are actually paying for and the systems and the structure that only you can do. Friday afternoons guys, a hundred percent rule. Fun fun. While my kids are still at school and daycare, those last few hours of a Friday afternoon is for me. And I’m not going to lie sometimes it’s literally just sitting outside and having a glass of wine by myself.

That’s awesome. I, um, you know, it was funny when we first came in. I don’t know if you remember this because you have thousands of students, but anyway, when you first came in, so I played basketball in Australia. I played, uh, against the SBL in Perth, uh, Perth, Australia, and then on the other side in Sydney, Australia, and this was like 20 years ago, but I’ll just never forget it. That’s when I first met you. But you’re from the United Kingdom. Is that correct?

Originally from the UK. Yeah. So I’ve been living in Australia for around, I think 11 years, 11 years.

Yeah, absolutely! So that’s great. Um, yeah, it’s super exciting. It’s just such an honor to, uh, to interview you and to learn about this process. And when you’re, now you’re talking about your structure, but. Right now, how many hours a day are you, are you putting in to doing this?

Uh, well, prior to recently, just like most entrepreneurs when I first began, I have to admit that I was doing the whole, you know, 16 plus hour day hustles. Um, it was hard. I was highly ambitious and, um, I just I loved it. And none of it ever felt hard to me. I literally always loved working. I get a huge buzz out of it and a huge sense of fulfillment from it. But I have two very small little children at the moment. One is four and one has literally just turned one at the time of recording this. Um, and so that makes things quite challenging. So at the moment, um, uh, to be honest, I barely work more than at tend to not go on past two, 3:00 PM in the afternoon. Uh, because obviously that’s when we have to go in and get children and things like that over here in Australia.

Um, so for me, that means that like, go back to that kind of Parkinson’s law, the less, the less time you have to do something, the more time you get done, because you become even more strict about what’s really necessary. And I think with entrepreneurs, you know, we’re so excited. We, you know, a lot of people, we see these shiny things and all that’s exciting, all this software we get like our attention gets distracted so easily with all of these cool things that yes, would be cool to do. But I’m like if it literally comes down to whether you’re going to eat tomorrow or not, do I really need to do this task right now? Do I really need to play with this thing right now? Do I need to fiddle with this tool right now? And really. You know, you, you see what becomes important, what is it that’s going to make the difference between your eating next week or not. And usually it comes down to have I created the content. Have I put that content that’s available for people to buy in front of enough people? That’s it? That is it. That’s the 90% of our business.

That’s impressive. I, you know, uh, Sarah, I have a two-year-old and a five-year-old. So we’re in kind of the same boat. Yeah. And, um, right now I’m in the Podcast Profit Lab, uh, by a fellow named Jamie Atkinson. And so I’m really focused on right now, just in particular, you know, launching this podcast and having a great launch on February 15th.

So I’m really excited about it. Um, but, um, and then moving forward, I’m going to go back to Concept to Course, and re reworked that. And the things that I’ve learned and kind of move forward with that. So, anyway, I, uh, again, I just asked that cause, um, I have two small children. So I’m just, I was always just wondering like, man, how’s she getting this stuff done? So, um…

Content Creation is the Most Important Part of Your Business

It’s pretty funny, we have, as well know, Wednesday afternoon, we have set for cook for Content Creation time, you know, and we have this rule, I’ve got people smashing down my door going like, I’ll pay you triple your rate if I can squeeze in on Wednesday. I’m like, Nope, sorry, busy. Like that time is allocated for content. Why? Because, you know, 90% of my business comes in from content. Blog posts I wrote seven years ago are still coming up to people’s Google search results and leading them into my business and not getting them, spend their money with me. So I’m like, you know, there is no call, even if that person paid me $20,000 for that one hour call, you know, I know I could spend that, that few hours instead creating 10 pieces of content that are going to make me hundreds of thousands of dollars down the line. Right. So yeah, this is the thing we have to kind of weigh up. Are you spending your money your time? Sorry. You’re spending your time on the right things. And we can we get distracted very easily by this all, but someone’s happy to pay me a hundred bucks for an hour call. Is it really worth a hundred dollars? Really? Do this thing instead.

Yeah, absolutely. And I was gonna say, you know, you, you dial down to 15 minute increments, so does Jeff Bezos and, and so there’s a Mark Zuckerberg. Uh, they, they dialed their, their timeline, their calendar. I mean, it’s time is very crucial. So it’s kind of funny that you say that because that’s what some of these top CEOs are doing as well. Yeah, absolutely so.

I just had a quick question for learning. Um, do you recommend on beta for a beta program? Do you recommend teaching with the people. Right away with them. And then, and then, boom, there’s the content rather than going back, you know, or pre-recording the content and then giving it to the beta people. Do you see what I’m saying?

That’s a really good question. And I always say it depends on the actual course, creators, personal preference themselves. Some people get so completely overwhelmed and sucked into perfection freeze when they’re trying to pre-record content. Like, you know, like they, I have to get a script. I have to read it perfectly. It has to be the right kind of content. And they ended up not creating their courses at all because they just get stuck in this never ending cycle of have I done it right? Is it perfect? So those kinds of people I’m like, Hey, how about you just put on a zoom room and you answer questions in a zoom room once a week or two times a week record it, and chuck that up in an online academy. Because if you’ve answered the questions now you’ve done it. You’ve got it done. So perfection later on, you can go back and go, wow! That answer came out really, really well because it was on the fly, you know, um. You can go and then refilm that in all the perfect style if you want to afterwards. But for the sake of getting version one of something out there, going live with people in the room and just recording, it is a really good first step.

Outro

Thank you so much for coming on the show, Sarah. And where can they learn more about you?

Uh, yeah, if you want to just, um, go to SarahCordiner.com. There’s a whole range of information in there. Everything from my Course Creators podcast to, um, hundreds of blogs and my free Course Creation Starter Kit at sarahcordiner.com/starterkit, which takes you through the 10 major steps of creating your own online courses, programs, or academies. And I guess if I could just leave everyone with one thing is, you know, you can’t create something perfect tomorrow, but you do have to start with version one.

Um, you know, so go out there, create something, anything. You have to get your first people through it to work out whether it’s the right thing or not. And the truth is your courses are constantly being updated. I’m just in the process of literally refilming heaps of my online courses because the world changes, new techniques come along, you get different questions and different audiences come through. And that’s the whole fun of the creative journey. Um, there is a system, there is a step-by-step process to follow if you want to create an amazing program. Um, but more importantly, remember that it, people are coming to you of all of the other options out there because of your personality, your style, your unique character, your way of seeing it, your way of explaining it. And the only way you’re going to start bringing people to you is if you just start putting it out there. So just be brave, have some courage, um, because you know, you’re not going to change anyone else’s life at all if it all stays locked up in your brain.

That’s great! That’s, that’s phenomenal. Again, thank you so much for coming Sarah. I really appreciate it. To my Course Creators and listeners that are here on the podcast, go to SarahCordiner.com and get that free Starter Kit for Course Creation. And that will get you going. Thank you so much,  Sarah. Appreciate it.

Pleasure Larry. Bye for now.