Episode 33: Scaling Up With Love: Mastering Seasonal Support for Your Business

See the show notes for this Episode here.

This transcript has been automatically generated.

Perhaps one of the most beneficial things that I could give you today is our exact process for how we reach out, what we say when we reach out to open up this application process and what our application actually looks like.

I'm Bonnie Christine, and this is where all things creativity, design, business, and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town,tucked right inside the Smokey Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. When I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today, I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

Something that is really unique in my business is that it balloons for about 12 weeks out of the year, which means that we have a short amount of time where we really need a lot of extra help in the business. And so it has taken me a little while to figure out the best way to bring extra people in for a short amount of time. And what we landed on is something that I'm so in love with and I can't wait to tell you all about it today.

Let's first start with the problem. There are a couple of things that are kind of unique to my business though I think they may be accurate for you as well. If you are an educator or you have a time in your business where things are just unusually busy, maybe it's the holidays for you or you know, summer shows, or it's during a class or a launch or something like that, there are some times where we just need extra help. And so for us, we had two main problems. Number one, business balloons for 12 weeks out of the year, and that's due to the Surface Design Immersion course. It's a live eight week course where we come in and support students. But the other part that is that the content is very unique and technical.

So we're teaching Adobe Illustrator, which just not everyone has the ability to support on that program. And so it's somewhat unique in that way. Now we also identified this other problem, which was support in our membership. We typically serve around 4,000 students a year in the Surface Design Immersion course, and then another around 4,000 members and our membership called Flourish year Round.

And so what we were finding is that we had one community manager and our community manager was really finding that she was answering the same questions over and over and over again, and it felt mundane, it felt stale, not only for her, but perhaps the members in our community as well, meaning they were really primarily only getting feedback and answers to their questions from one person.

And so the answer to both of these is something that we call the Love Squad. These are experts and guides that rotate in our support team and our community managers, and they're also all alumni of our course. But before we dive in, I have to tell you about the freebie that I'm giving you with this episode. When I was talking about this support team that we call The Love Squad, I thought the best gift that I could give you is our initial reach out and what we say and how we kind of open up applications for these positions for these seasonal positions. And then what we actually ask in the application. And then probably the most gold is the task list that we actually give to our love squad. So what actions, what tasks are we giving to them?

And I think that this will specifically be really helpful for you as well as you consider if your business could support some seasonal help as well. So you can download that on today's show [email protected] slash blog slash 33. Now let's get into it. So this is our third year hosting what we call the Love Squad. And with that have come a lot of processes and ways that we go about it.

And so that's what I wanna share with you today. So the Love Squad is made up of what we consider tiered support. We have 10 experts and 15 guides who come together for a total support team of 25 people. Yes, we need an extra 25 people for at least these 12 weeks out of the year, which has been so incredibly helpful so that students get their questions answered as quickly as humanly possible.

But not just from anyone. Someone who has been through the course, who has been in their shoes, who knows exactly how they feel and what feelings they might be working through, like overwhelm or feeling behind or getting stuck in, you know, a different section of the course, they can really, really come in and help because they've been there. So for instance, last year our support team of 25 answered 5,700 posts in the community and over 43,000 comments made on lessons and they were all done. So within 24 hours, which is a dream of a support team.

So what I'm sharing with you today, I'm hoping that you can take, even if you need to expand by one or two people for a little while out of the year, or with a lot of people like 25 like I do, I hope that you'll be able to take what I've learned and put into place and use for your own business as well. You know, one thing I think is a limiting factor here is that it feels scary to hire, right? It feels scary to bring someone into your business. You're not sure if you can afford it or maybe you're not sure if you can find the right person.

And one of the things that holds us back is that our businesses are typically so volatile, meaning they're so inconsistent, we have really busy times and then we have really slow times. And oftentimes we think there's no way there's someone on planet Earth who is gonna be okay with, you know, 20 hours one week and three hours the next week. But I'm here to tell you that that is simply not true.

There are people all over the world who want to have a highly flexible job, who want to be able to have busy weeks and some slower weeks. And so oftentimes these people are not highly reliant on the income, meaning the income they need, but it's not like the way that they pay their bills every month. So sometimes they have other income streams or maybe they have a spouse that's paying, you know, the most consistent bills and this person just wants some added income and it's okay if it's sporadic or it's okay if it fluctuates. Also, stay-at-home moms or teachers who have a schedule that fluctuates heavily throughout the year are amazing places to look as well. So don't let that hold you back. There are absolutely people who are willing and interested to come in for a specialized amount of time or fluctuating heavily to help support you in your business.

So let's look at the tiered support. So we have experts and guides. Now, experts are truly experts. They've come through as an alumni and truly found success on the other side. They're considered industry experts and they know our products, our information, our courses, and our membership like the back of their hands. They are absolutely experts and take the most difficult and more technical questions.

Now, a guide is still an alumni who has come through the program, but they are really there to do more like guide people along their journey. They know where to direct them for different questions or what lessons to send them to in order to get their questions answered. They know how the community works. They also are great at welcoming people and celebrating their big wins and cheering them on and just being a love squad.

They're also great at giving feedback on people's work and really making the whole experience feel like a family. So we consider all 25 of them together, the Love Squad. If you are on the Love Squad, you get multiple trainings with me leading up to the launch of our course so that everyone understands how to support students in exactly the way that we want them to.

They're also, of course invited into the product that they're supporting, so they have free access to the suite of products that we offer. And if you are an expert, we actually feature you as a part of our team on our course information page. So we'll talk about experts first. Experts are trained on all of our course material and they're available to answer all of the specific and technical questions related to what we teach.

Experts work together as a team and they find the best answers and get feedback from us if they can't answer the question. And so we have all of these master documents where we keep the most frequently asked questions with the best answer ready to go, because oftentimes students year after year have so many of the same questions. A side note is that this document is gold to me when I go to rerecord our course every other year because I can automatically address what the frequently asked questions that we're seeing on each lesson are.

Now, this position of experts for us is 12 weeks long and they're really not capped as far as hours go, meaning they work until the job is done. This is typically for the 10 of them between 25 and 40 hours a week. They are very familiar with all of our language, like we have this thing called the weeds and the seeds, right, that we reference all the time, something called the stages of a flourishing designer that we reference. And we also have multiple products and offerings in kind of the business. And so they are very much a direct extension of me. They are my eyes in the community, they can report big wins back to me. They can keep an eye out for anything that we may need to give attention to.

They bring back the most frequently asked questions. They are a direct extension of me and my voice and my brand and how I go about answering questions. Again, the key here is that they were already in our community as alumni. The way that we communicate with this expert team is through Slack. So we have a channel set up for them where we're constantly talking throughout the 12 weeks for daily updates and figuring out who needs what and where everyone is working.

We can also pull from these experts to come in and help us with our inbox when we need it or our documentation or things like processing replays or going on live chat. So all of these things like support on a live q and a are things that the experts are capable of as well, which means that we really just expand our team in such a grand way that when it feels like there's a lot going on, there's always enough people to come in and help us. Now a guide's role is to really encourage and point people in the right places to get help to support them and make sure that everyone feels welcome and seen. Their primary goal is guiding people through the experience. Their role is typically for eight weeks, whereas the experts are on for 12 weeks. The guides are here for eight weeks and they are capped at 10 hours a week.

And so we kind of did some math around how much we think we need support in our community. And so for 15 of them, we cap them at 10 hours a week. So they know coming in that they have a limit and that they can plan around that limit. The guides are also very familiar with our brand language. They know the weeds and seeds, they can help people identify where they're at on the stages and they can very much point people in the right direction. They're also amazing at providing feedback. So I train all of the guides how I give feedback on people's work, and so they're able to take that and apply the same lessons and philosophy to giving feedback on other people's work as well.

So as you can imagine, this has been a game changer, not only for me and the core team who work, you know, around the year, but also for students. The very first time I taught this course, we had about 350 students and I supported them all by myself. I was a one woman show for about 10 years. So I'm very familiar with everything that is required to support this many students and what kind of questions we get and how important it is from a student perspective to be able to get unstuck and get help quickly and know that there are people on standby to help.

Now, our experts and guides are also based all over the country and all over the world. And so we've got multiple time zones represented, we've got weakened coverage represented. And so students truly know that they're getting world class support at their fingertips. So the other way that I truly look at these experts and guides that we call the love squad are that students fall in love with them.

And so I very much bring them into the entire experience. Many of the experts will join me on one of the live q and as during the call, and I speak highly of them to students the entire time because they are incredible. And so one thing that happens is that students get attached to our love squad. And so last year at the end of the course, we invite students to come into our alumni only membership called Flourish. And so at around this time last year, we realized that we also had that problem from our community manager that things were just feeling a little bit stale and a little bit repetitive.

And so we had this idea, what if we extended the expert team and turned them into rotating community managers, which would not only let students stay in touch with the experts that they've grown to love and admire, but would also continually bring in fresh voices, fresh feedback, fresh answers to questions in the community, and then it would also break up the work for the experts as well. And so we invited the entire expert team last year there were 10 of them to come join us in what we call rotating community managers.

So there are four community managers assigned to any given month. And so if they come to join us, we ask them to sign up for three months over the following year. And that meant that we had coverage for the entire year and every single one of them said yes, which was so fun to be able to continue working with them, but in a much lesser capacity,right? So the membership is much slower paced than the course, and so it doesn't require nearly as much support. So at this point, the rotating community managers, remember there's only four now that roll into this membership. They're capped at six hours a week.

And so if you are an expert and you come into this, you'll know that for three months out of the year, you'll be dedicating six hours a week to the community. And that feels really achievable. It feels like it doesn't necessarily take away from, you know, your standard workflow, but it does really keep you in touch with the members inside our community. And so we are one year into rolling this out, and I think I can speak for my team, the experts and the community that it has been amazing.

So we announce the four experts at the beginning of every month. They are also very much involved in some of the content that we roll out. We have office hours on occasion that are, that's run by the experts and they're in the community and on the lessons answering questions, they're in the live calls and the comments and they're just like family at this point.

We also invite them to join the first team meeting of every month. So my core team, there's eight of us meet every Monday for our weekly meeting called the Momentum Meeting, which I've done an episode about before. And so at the beginning of every month, we invite that month's experts to our team meeting just so we can say hello and we do the question of the week together and then we go over what's planned for the membership.

So this has truly been an incredible way to stay in touch with these experts and also keep them in touch with students inside of our community, but also really break up how repetitive questions get inside the community and comments and also bring fresh perspective and and answers to questions inside the community as well. So you know that on any given month you can get feedback from different people on your work, which has been a really incredible way to just expand the knowledge base that we're working with.

So again, I imagine that you may have really busy seasons in your business as well, that you could just use a little extra help. And so I wanna encourage you to reach back into your own community and bring them into your business. Whether you are an educator and you have courses or a class or a membership, or you're a product-based business and you just have busier seasons where you're prepping for a show or you know shipping out a bunch of Christmas gifts that you can pull people in who already know you. I actually find that it's one of my biggest honors to be able to turn around and let alumni come in and work one of my biggest honors, to let them come and work for the brand and one of their biggest honors to be able to turn around and help incoming students and members.

It's part of what feeds this community and makes it feel like such a family. We all very much know each other, we love each other, we laugh together, and it's incredible. So you may be wondering how, and I thought perhaps one of the most beneficial things that I could give you today is our exact process for how we reach out, what we say when we reach out to open up this application process and what our application actually looks like.

So we typically open up applications for experts and guides. They might be called something different in your own business, and we open it up community-wide. So everyone who's ever been through our course are alumni are invited to apply for this. And then we ask some very specific questions in the application. Now, some of them are pretty unique to my business, but I think you'll be able to tweak them and really get an idea of what you should ask for your business as well.

Then it's pretty easy. All you have to do is accept the people that you want to accept, start to train them, and then start getting help in your business. So head on over to the show notes for today's episode, that's professional creative.com/blog/ 33 to get the download for today's episode, which again is our reach out communication as well as what we ask on the application for these positions.

And remember, there's absolutely times where people would love to come in and give you seasonal support in your business, and then reaching back into your own community is one of the best ways to find qualified people who are already familiar with your work and what you put out into the world. If you are a part of our love squad and you're listening to this, we love you so much, you are incredible. And if you are a student or a member, they'll give the next expert or guide you see in our community some love because they really do pour so much of themselves into what they do and they are there to support your success. You can get the show notes and the download for today's episode, as well as show notes for all other episodes over at professionalcreative.com.

Friends, remember to create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you.