What if you didn’t need to spend the time and effort scouring the internets for 3,000 leads to fill a group program with 30 people? What if instead, you replace the income those 30 group participants would bring with a single client, a contract worth $45,000? This is The Bold Money Revolution Podcast. I’m your host, Tara Newman. We are here today with Cassie Christopher who did just that. Welcome, Cassie.
Cassie Christopher: Wow. I’m amazed at my own intro. Thank you.
Tara Newman: This is super fun because Cassie has actually been on the podcast before. I checked, and the name of the podcast that Cassie was on before was How to Show Up For Your Business Through Action. It was probably about a year ago that we had you on the podcast because you’ve been in The Bold Profit Academy for probably about 14 months. I think you just celebrated your “Yay, I’ve been here for a year” anniversary, right?
Cassie Christopher: Totally, yeah. It seems both like a lot of time and not a lot of time at the same time.
Tara Newman: It’s funny I was going to ask you that. It’s only been a year. When I think of the progress that you made and what we’re going to talk about, one I’m really excited to follow it throughout the year, I’m excited that we actually have you not too long ago on the podcast to almost create this like full picture for people because I think we have a hard time visualizing what progress looks like for each of us and I think we’re really terrible at seeing our own progress. This is really, really exciting for me.
But the reason why I wanted to have you on the podcast the first time and as well the second time is because I feel like you display the mindset and competencies required for successful entrepreneurship better than most people; grit, tenacity, critical thinking, and resilience which is really what has gotten you here today with the results that we’re going to be celebrating in essence.
It’s funny that I use those words that I used because when I look back and I see your journey, those were some of the things you were almost struggling with when we first started working together. First of all, tell everybody what you do.
Cassie Christopher: Okay. Well, since it’s only like three minutes in and I’m starting to cry already, let me take a deep breath here, and when you find out what I do, you’ll understand why I’m okay with crying. I’m a registered dietitian and I help women in midlife and beyond to create a supportive relationship with food, their body, their health, and to eat with joy rather than eating to seek joy.
I am a reluctant weight loss expert, and I’m sure we’ll get into that. I love what I do. It’s all about embracing how we feel and caring for ourselves well. It’s amazing to me how well it ties in with what I am trying to do in my business as well. Thank you for those kind words about grit, tenacity, and resilience because yeah, those are areas I feel like I struggle with sometimes. To hear you say that I am exemplary before we started recording, you told me I had brass ovaries, those are all affirmations I’m taking with me so thank you.
Tara Newman: Yeah, for sure. Actually, I have the email. I went and read our email exchange from when you first joined The Bold Profit Academy. But if you can go back and remember, what was happening at that moment, what was the urgency for your joining The Bold Profit Academy? What was the impetus?
Cassie Christopher: Yeah, about a year before I joined The Bold Profit Academy, I decided to strike out on my own and set up my own practice as a registered dietitian. I still think of myself as new to business but I certainly was very new back then. Over that first year, I knew I didn’t want to sell insurance. I wanted it to find the clients other ways and get to do whatever I wanted, which meant not being in the bureaucracy of insurance.
I started following what I could call a web celeb in the health care practitioner online business world, went through her program, and I actually ended up having a traumatic divorce is how I could describe it from that person who I had felt like that program and that strategy was working for me. But it was working so well that my nervous system was through the roof. I felt like I was on a constant emotional roller coaster.
I didn’t know it at the time, hindsight 20/20, but I was like full-on hustling all the time. I did like 40 sales calls in a row without making a single sale. Oh my god. I believe the problem was me that I had to learn to say the right thing. I was at my sales coaching office hours every week going, “Okay, this is what happened. How do I make it better?” As I understand and have processed now and grown, I see that as actually a trauma response from childhood trauma and needing to hustle and do things right and be the perfectionist.
When I started working with you, I had this awful separation, it was not by my choice, I was basically told that I was not welcome in this community anymore because I provided feedback. Then after that awful separation, I was looking for support. I had heard you on a podcast and listening to you is like wearing a warm fuzzy blanket is how I remember feeling. I read through your website and it talked about, I think you even said the word trauma on there and I was like, “Oh my god, that’s what’s happening to me,” and reached out to you. That’s where I was.
I was having some success in business but it felt awful. While I liked my clients, I didn’t know if I liked what I was doing. When it feels that bad, how do you even know if you like what you’re doing? I needed help and that’s what brought me to your internet doorstep.
Tara Newman: Yeah. I remember a couple of things. I remember you having success which is awesome. We have to get those initial, I don’t even think you were in business a year when you started working with me, you were really early on. Listen, this is a messy process. You’re going to get beat up, you’re going to get banged around a bit. Like 40 sales calls and all nos, it happens. That’s the price you pay of starting something from scratch.
I remember a couple of things you said to me that really stood out, one, you felt like you were out of alignment with your values so you were making money but you were out of alignment with your values. I remember you saying to me that you felt like you needed to toughen up a little bit, you needed to get some resiliency under your belt and you needed to figure out what to do with the human emotions you were having in business. How do we do that thing? How do we be a human in business?
I remember you saying that you felt really subjected to groupthink, that you had lost your intuition, and you were looking to regain that. Those were some of the main points that I remember you showing up with, right?
Cassie Christopher: Oh my gosh, yes. You said groupthink and I’m pretty sure I involuntarily rolled my eyes.
Tara Newman: Those were your words exactly, not mine.
Cassie Christopher: I believe it. Since then, it’s so interesting, to learn more about online business marketing tactics, like with Duped, Michelle Mazur’s podcast, and the things you talk about and what doesn’t work, I can see so much of that in the system that I was a part of and yeah, I felt very much outside of my values. I didn’t trust myself because I believed this is the way it has to be done and I don’t know how to be in business.
Interestingly, I will insert in defense of myself, I actually have a business degree. My undergrad from the University of Washington in entrepreneurship. I took sales classes. How I wouldn’t believe and how I still struggle to identify myself as a businesswoman is just ridiculous, but yeah, that groupthink and feeling like I was out of alignment, that’s very uncomfortable. It’s a very uncomfortable place to be.
Tara Newman: Yeah. I think that these emotional challenges that you were having, I don’t even think you realize the functional challenges you were having, like the actual technical things that weren’t working so that you can gain better traction. It was just a real emotional situation for you. Just to back us up a bit, when you decided to start your own business, be self-employed, whatever you want to call that, what was the aspiration, what were you hoping this business would help you do?
Cassie Christopher: In words, I’ve heard you use, I am an ambitious sort. I really resonated with that when you said it once. I want to make money. I want to, I mean quite frankly, and this is going to the shadow side of my Enneagram 3, but I want to do better than all the other people I know who run private practices. I want to care for my family and be able to provide for them and be able to talk about something like—and I don’t know if I want to do this—but I’d like to have the option to go get in an RV and travel the country for a year and work from my hot spot.
I have a lot of dreams and ambitions. Having my own business was one way to reach those dreams. But the other piece of it is I was just burnt out, especially as a registered dietitian. I know so many health care practitioners get that compassion fatigue where you stop caring about people, which is not a good place to be because you just have to deal with so much sh*t that it’s not fun. When I worked for other people, I had to do things in the way they wanted me to do them, which I knew wasn’t the best way to do things. I had to work with people who, looking back, were clearly sociopaths, and that’s not fun as a practitioner.
I thought mistakenly that I didn’t like working with people one-on-one because of those factors. But since moving into my own business, doing things my own way—the right way obviously, and the way that works in relation to my clients and giving them systems and frameworks and tools that work for them and integrate all of the things that need to be integrated to have a healthy relationship with food—well, it’s a lot more fun.
I love the people I work with. I would love to sit down to dinner with every single one of my clients although they’d probably feel weird about that just because of our relationship. I had the ambition and that was a part of it but also I realized that working for other people, I just was never going to feel fully fulfilled there from that emotional perspective again.
Tara Newman: Right. This is really common, there are three reasons why people tend to choose entrepreneurship besides the fact that they’re a little unemployable, a little rebellious sort, is they’re looking for some level of financial independence, freedom, whatever you want to call it, they want to do their most meaningful work in the world. They want to really be like well, I say, in the pocket with their strengths and how they love to work and who they love to work with, and then there’s some personal freedom aspect typically for women around being able to spend more time with their family.
They’re typically leaving jobs because they don’t have enough child care or access to child care, or they’re burned out and have chronic illness, or their job is stressing them to the point of burnout. There’s this necessity for why they’re leaving their role. The women I work with who are experts like you, registered dietitian, these are people who have honed their craft over years who have qualifications in education and they make money right out of the gates because they are a credible expert.
There are people who are around them who aspire to work with you, be like you, something, and so there’s a lot of initial success but then trying to figure out how to keep that success going in a way that feels sustainable gets tricky, which is I think where you were at. You’re like, “I’ve experienced success. I know I can do it. It is not currently sustainable.”
Cassie Christopher: 100%.
Tara Newman: I want to catalog your journey so other people could see what it’s like to be in The Bold Profit Academy for a year because sometimes people are like, “Why is it a year-long program? Is it going to take me a year to get results?” The answer to that is no. I want to talk about some of these initial breakthroughs that you had. I remember what they are but I want to hear you share what these early breakthroughs inside The Bold Profit Academy looked like for you.
Cassie Christopher: Sure, yeah. From my perspective, I think some of the most helpful early tools and breakthroughs, two tools specifically, the EMS workbook and then CEO Debriefs, and they both gave me different insight and they are tools I still use today and will continue to use and conform.
Tara Newman: Me too. Shocking. Me too.
Cassie Christopher: That’s not hard to believe, they’re amazing tools. I’ll start with the CEO Debrief because that’s what I started with because again, I was coming from a place of success has to be hard, I have to hustle, I have to do more. There’s no time to stop and think. I was not valuing reflection on what was working or what felt good. I didn’t care about what felt good because I just had this belief that business doesn’t feel good and it’s supposed to feel like this.
The CEO Debrief helped me, gave me permission, showed me the value of stopping and looking back at what’s working, what feels hard, what needs to change. One of the questions that I frankly hate and hardly ever answer but occasionally do, and it’s always good when I do, is what do I need to take responsibility for? I’m like, “You don’t know me.”
Tara Newman: “Screw you, Tara.”
Cassie Christopher: I know. It usually has something to do with supporting my VA better, by the way, supporting my one person, part-time team member. Yes, doing this debrief and stopping and looking back at what’s working. It’s so interesting to me because this is also what I teach people when it comes to behavior change. Celebrating the wins, I know that’s hard for me but we do that with the debrief. We do it every week in The Bold Profit Academy and I try to commit to saying something because it’s important to celebrate our wins.
That was helpful for me to see what was working, what wasn’t working. Do more of what was working and less of what wasn’t working, so that when I put my tremendous hustle energy towards something, it was at, at least, something that could kick the can further along, move the needle.
Also in The Bold Profit Academy, we talk about sales activity and knowing and understanding what brings sales into our business. Debriefing is a big part of that. I love doing the sales debriefs and I probably do them once every couple months where I sit down and write down my favorite clients from the past little bit, where did they come from, how long did it take them to buy, and how what were the steps they went through, what do I need to do more of?
Again, it’s like building on the things that are working rather than continuously reinventing the wheel, which I know I’m not alone in that temptation of being like, “Screw it, none of it’s working. It doesn’t feel good. I’m going to go do Instagram Reels.” No, just kidding.
Tara Newman: No, but this is the truth.
Cassie Christopher: It’s a real thing. From the practical standpoint, the CEO Debrief and all of the various, there are so many debriefing tools in The Bold Profit Academy. I see how debriefing leads to dollars. We ought to get that on a cup.
Tara Newman: We do need to get that on a cup.
Cassie Christopher: Debriefing leads to dollars, people, so much so that actually, my next lead magnet for my clients is going to be something similar to a food debrief, like an eating incident debrief. It’s from behavior chain analysis. It comes from some theory but just seeing how wow, that is such a powerful tool both for me and, when it comes to food, with my clients, it’s powerful. Debriefing leads to dollars.
The second thing I mentioned was the EMS Framework (Energy, Mindset, Strategy). If you can’t tell already, I’m a hardcore S girl. I’ve got strategy literally as I fall asleep at night. I have to distract myself to not be strategizing about my business. Mindset even, I don’t know, that wasn’t so much the thing for me, it was energy. It was actually caring about how I’m feeling, valuing how I’m feeling during the day, noticing when I’m feeling good, when I’m not feeling good.
That’s accounted for a lot of the success, I guess, I’ve had over the past year because I’ve learned what makes me feel good; going for walks outside and listening to podcasts, sure, but also speaking. I love to speak. I was approached for an adjunct faculty position recently. I was like, “Ooh, this sounds fun because they want me to do lectures and I can just talk about whatever I want to talk about.”
But it turns out, 75% of the job was grading and giving people feedback about their thoughts and I’m like, “No way. I am not doing that. I would rather sit and talk to people.” That EMS, both learning how to manage my own energy and also understanding what makes me feel good has allowed me to move towards business opportunities even that make me feel good and has just continued building on itself I guess.
Tara Newman: Yeah. You’re a fighter, you just fight through things and I love that about you. That’s what I mean when I say you’re tenacious. We’re teaching you how to rest so you don’t quit, but because you’re a fighter, and what was so fun, I have a couple of testimonials from you and the one that I laughed so hard at was you actually articulated my entire vision for so much of my business without me ever telling you that.
With these debriefs, the purpose of these debriefs is to teach you how to coach yourself. I want you to be able to coach yourself. I don’t want you to need a coach because that is a weird power dynamic when we go into relationships where we feel like we need someone. Now that doesn’t mean you’re never going to have a coach but I want you to be clear on why you’re hiring them.
I want you to be coming from a place where there’s agency and autonomy in choosing to work with this person, and that when you get on a call with them or when you go out into social media land, that you’re not hijacked by these marketing messages, that you’re clear on where you are, what you’ve done, where you want to go, and that you can start to unpack some of your own problems so that you don’t get stuck in a place where you’re being told what your problem is by someone who might not be completely reputable. You leave me this testimonial, do you remember what you said?
Cassie Christopher: No. Do you have it? I’d love to hear it.
Tara Newman: I’ll have to include it with this episode. But you’re basically like, “I’m my own business coach now and I don’t know if that’s what Tara intended. Sorry, Tara.” I don’t need to have a business coach, it was so funny because you were like, “Sorry, Tara.” I’m like, “No, no. This is exactly my point is I want y’all to be able to fish for yourselves.” That is why we do those debriefs.
Few of the breakthroughs that I had documented for you was the reconnecting with your intuition, breaking away from the groupthink, like you were actually able to hear yourself, and not just from other groups but from your industry. Because the way to have a competitive advantage is to not do things the way your industry does them but to do things differently.
Then the other breakthrough for you was around slowing down, learning to walk before you run. I remember when you came to that call and you’re like, “I need to know the strategy and all the steps and this and that for this thing.” I’m like, “Cassie, you need to slow down.”
Cassie Christopher: You’re like, “Aren’t you just testing this new thing out to see if you like it?” I was like, “Oh, yeah. I don’t have to have a full funnel or whatever around this new strategy. I’m testing it out.” This comes up in my life all the time. I can’t remember if I told you this but I recently started taking a stand-up comedy class.
The fourth class, oh my god, there was so much pressure, it was like a real show that they sold tickets to and it was nerve-wracking. But I remember sitting and writing jokes and finding myself lamenting that I cannot write jokes as funnily as my coach who has been doing comedy for 15 years, and so what’s the point of even doing it? Because I’m not going to be a 15-year veteran for 15 more years and this isn’t even my profession.
I had to stop myself and be like, “Okay, this is probably really good for me.” Because learning to be a beginner and a learner, I love being an expert, it is very comfortable for me to give people advice, happy to, and so doing something where I’m a beginner is so uncomfortable and yet yes, that is a skill that this program has certainly helped me work with and I have to continually catch myself and go, “It’s okay that I’m learning this and testing something and not perfect at it.” That shows up, like in this example, in other areas of my life too.
Tara Newman: Yeah. I’m convinced that one of the core competencies required to be a business owner is the ability to learn and the ability to be a beginner. Inside The Bold Profit Academy, we have our learning agreements where I just remind everybody what it’s like to be in this space and learning. Nobody’s ever behind, come with a beginner mindset, all these pieces. I think that’s so important.
I think you actually do that well, that’s like that duking it out that I was talking about. You’re duking it out with the fact that you want to be somewhere that you’re not and you got to back up and you got to do the things. I do want to say, because there’s one breakthrough that I think happened, it’s probably around this time last year so probably a couple months in to when you started, and it’s going to earn me a chapter in your memoir.
Cassie Christopher: Yes, yes.
Tara Newman: Why don’t you tell the folks about it?
Cassie Christopher: Yeah, remind me how I phrased it because my brain is blanking right now.
Tara Newman: You said I’m going to get a chapter in your memoir because when we were going through the offer creation cycle last year, you wanted to create a down-sell. Why did you want to create a down-sell?
Cassie Christopher: Because that’s what my peers and groupthink were doing. Also the idea of the sunk cost of those 40 calls where people didn’t buy in my mind, I was like, “If I have a down sell, I can sell them something,” which is not even going into the actual issues with those 40 calls, but that was the thinking.
Tara Newman: Tara, should I make it $47, $97, $197. What did I say?
Cassie Christopher: You were like, “No. Not a down sell, an upsell,” which I know you like to call them up serving. Like I said, in my whole mind, I’d been planning, “Okay, offer curriculum is coming up. I’m going to do this down sell.” I’ve been planning it for months and then when we talked it out, it must have been in a call, you were like, “What about it? What about an upsell? What about an even bigger, more intensive, higher value offer?” which at that time I was still believing I didn’t like one on one so I had to think through what that could look like. That ended up being the right choice; actually listening to what my clients were asking me for, which was more of me.
I also want to say that was the right choice and I know that now, but it wasn’t easy to sell at first. I thought that I was going to create this one-on-one, high-priced offer with a lot of intensity. I sold it to like one person. I should have been excited about that but I thought I was going to sell it to like five. It was one person for several months and I’ll tell you, I just sold three of them last week and I have two more follow-up calls from my calls last week, a difference. It took a while to figure out how to sell it but I’m so glad I did.
Tara Newman: But I also remember last summer, everybody went off and got vaxxed and waxed and like peaced out. You’re like, “This is slow but this higher ticket offer is selling.”
Cassie Christopher: Yeah. That’s true. It was a slow time in general because nobody wanted to think about food. I think when I was like, “What’s going on?” I remember you being like, “I think people just want to eat hamburgers by the pool.”
Tara Newman: It could have just been the timing. We don’t know, but I think that was actually the precursor and this is the reason why I’m walking everybody down this path with you because we’re going to share a really big deal result that you got. I actually do not think this is an atypical result. I think that for me, and how we walked you through it, made sense and I think that anybody can do this so I don’t think it’s atypical. But I also don’t want to get people to get hooked on the number without hearing the journey.
We plant the seed that it doesn’t have to be cheap, that you can go higher, that you can go up serving, you can find a target market that is going to value what you have to offer, and you had gotten some success with that. Flash forward now, and what I really love about this is we’re starting to diversify your revenue streams just when the algorithm and Facebook ads start to take a dive. We always want to be creating other opportunities to earn income that aren’t reliant on the tech gods.
Cassie Christopher: Oh, 100%. My only lead source at that time was Facebook ads, and selling a moderate cost group program wasn’t cheap and it still isn’t, but it’s interesting how many calls I had. Part of it is figuring out who’s going to buy this higher priced offer, who’s going to value it. What I’ve learned since then is it’s not necessarily the women who are spending much of their day scrolling through Facebook with the opportunity to see my ads, actually the women who are buying from me now are women who are either trying to get off Facebook, maybe get off social media all together, they’re valuing their health, they’re seeing how these things are impacting them. It took some restructuring of my energy.
The point I want to make too about backing up is the energy piece is really important here because like you say, it’s not about the result necessarily, although the result is available to everyone, it’s not even about the strategy of how I got any given result, I really think for me, the beauty of this program has been in learning to value and care for my own energy so that I can do what needs to be done to show up.
One thing before we move on I want to move back to is you said one of my breakthroughs was around differentiating my message or my voice or my beliefs even from people in my own industry. I teased that back with the reluctant weight loss coach. I think this is important because, and this is really as I’ve been debriefing what’s been working for me this month, part of it is I’m actually talking about weight loss again.
I stopped for a while because it didn’t feel good and I didn’t like it. Diet culture is terrible. That’s all true, and yet, when I share my nuanced understanding of an anti-all or nothing approach and holding weight with an open hand and focusing on how people feel, it’s really been incredible to me, people are coming out of the woodwork wanting to buy my highest priced offer and spend time with me because they understand how what I’m doing is so different from everybody else. I’m only able to do that, right now I feel nauseous.
Tara Newman: Well, we had this conversation. We said you’ve figured out my strategy which is if it doesn’t make you want to barf, there’s no point in saying it or putting it out there, like you don’t want to be , you don’t want to fit in and that doesn’t mean you’re being aggressively polarizing or mean or anything but that you’re willing to say that thing that you know needs to be said but you’re scared to say.
Cassie Christopher: Yeah. My reasons I’m scared to say it, honestly, come back to people I really respect being anti-weight loss and my more nuanced view. That’s not enough of a risk for me to withhold what my people need to hear in order to be set free. It’s not about the strategy, I just want to go back to that, it’s really about the way that I use my business to both care for, nourish, and challenge me in order to live my best life.
Tara Newman: Yeah, to stretch you.
Cassie Christopher: Yeah, a lot of stretching.
Tara Newman: A lot of stretching. We’re just there to make sure you don’t snap.
Cassie Christopher: I want that on a shirt too.
Tara Newman: We’re here to make sure you don’t snap. Because that’s a thing, we want to find that place where you’re stretching but you haven’t gone to the panic zone where you’ve completely dysregulated your nervous system and then can’t go and actually do the thing that you wanted to do. There’s a line there.
I say the ROI in The Bold Profit Academy is one of three or all of three things. I’m either going to save you money so you can repurpose it and use it another way, I’m going to help you make more money, or I’m going to help you have a six-figure perspective shift that may not tangibly show up right now but over time, it will show up.
I am all about getting you all your money back, plus some. Let’s 10x this thing. The pricing is where it is intentionally, to do that. I can say that with confidence and know that what I deliver and when you show up for that, we’re going to partner and create those results, which brings me to this recent round of results for you.
We’re a year into the program, you’ve created an upsell, and I have been planting seeds in the program around go sell B2B. I think a lot of people are trying to sell to people who don’t have money. Let’s go sell to people who are going to value what you do and can afford to pay you and see that value and are willing to exchange dollars for that.
There was a podcast episode, Vox Conversations with a gentleman named Michael Lewis and it was all about how we don’t value experts. He said, “We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” We need to be selling to the people who understand the value of things and aren’t looking at the price from that perspective. Go, sell into businesses.
Here’s how you know if you’re a good fit for The Bold Profit Academy: you have a service that can be sold into a larger business, into a B2B situation. It doesn’t mean you have to. Cassie sells B2C and we’ve planted the seed. She’s gone and she’s like, “Well, I think I have contacts in this area and I’m going to go and I’m going to speak. I’m going to find these contacts,” and she does. She comes to us on an office hours call and she says, “I have this opportunity to present a proposal. How much do I charge for this?” Now, I want you to tell the rest of the story.
Cassie Christopher: Yeah. First, I want to back up because I think people need to understand nothing happens overnight. That seed is being planted, I’m looking for contacts, I’m reaching out to people. This is last October. I heard back from someone in like January, from a message in October which I didn’t follow up on—maybe I should have—and she says, “I have this speaking opportunity. Are you interested?” Yes, I’m interested. I get a speaking opportunity in March. I meet some people.
For me, again, speaking is fun to me so that’s following my energy. I got to talk about a topic they don’t hear a lot about. I had a blast at this engagement. Because of that, I met a lot of people who I enjoyed and they enjoyed me. I created these relationships. Those relationships ultimately led to somebody needing some worksite wellness services. I had just a coffee chat just to find out more about what she needed.
As she was talking, again, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was all on experiment. I was going into it with just wanting to hear about it and sharing my ideas for her. She loved my unique philosophy. Again, I do things differently. Then she wanted a proposal and so I found out a little bit more about the problem that she had and what she actually wanted from me and then came to the group. Again, just trying stuff out. I had no idea what I was doing. I never created a B2B proposal like that with a legitimate company, not just for a girlfriend doing some services.
Tara Newman: Did we tell you how much to charge?
Cassie Christopher: No. But what you did do is you reminded me how much value I am providing; that it’s not about the transactional “how much does it cost to create a meal plan for someone”, it’s about what is the value to the organization of creating a meal plan based on the needs and desires of those unique employees and then creating a plan to launch it. The value to them of my work is so much more than the cost to me of doing the work.
Tara Newman: We spent a good 20 minutes, at least, really giving you the questions to ask so that you could uncover the immense value, not undersell yourself, not sell yourself based on features or benefits or anything like that, but have a strong business case, a strong argument for the value of your work that then helped you craft a proposal. I had no idea what you were going to charge for this thing or anything like that. I think it was only like two weeks later that you came back and you said in the group, “I just signed a contract for $45,000.”
Cassie Christopher: Mic drop.
Tara Newman: Mic drop. Y’all, that takes some serious brass ovaries.
Cassie Christopher: My favorite new phrase.
Tara Newman: That’s a big contract. You have never done that before, like ever.
Cassie Christopher: Yeah. I never sold something that big to a business or really at all. One of the questions the group told me to ask, and I can’t remember if it was you or Jacquette Timmons, that said something about what’s their budget, or maybe it was Megan, what’s the budget? I was like, “Oh, I didn’t know I could ask that.” When I asked what the budget was, in my mind I was like, “Wow, she’s thinking this is going to cost a lot of money.”
Here’s where I’m proud of my brass ovaries is my proposal was still above their budget. I knew what they needed, I knew what the value of it was, and I said, “I know this is your budget. If we need to do that, here’s what we can subtract, it’s valuable and important but if that’s the number you have to hold, this is what we could do to get there. But this is ultimately the plan I have for you.” I’m just so astounded by my level of confidence.
I am confident I can deliver on this and get some amazing results but once I got into industry data on how impactful the work I am doing for the businesses, because that’s the point I had the blinders on about, I was in the weeds with calories and protein, and the group helped me zoom out and be like, “No, what is the value to the organization as a whole and how is the work you’re doing now going to even impact them into the future?”
I was able to build in things like a food policy so that even if they discontinue the exact menus that I have and they add other ones on, they will have some guidance going forward, so again, it’s making my work even more valuable, which creating a food policy is like, I mean I could sit here right now and create one.
Tara Newman: Right. They have no idea how to do it and it might be easy for you but it’s going to get them a tremendous amount of results and future results. You really came at this with the energy and confidence of an expert. But that’s not how the online business industry teaches you to show up. They teach you to show up to sell to the lowest common denominator, they teach you to sell on price, they teach you to sell to the masses, and that is the antithesis, in my opinion, of what will actually get you where you want to be as a micro business owner.
You and I sat down and we did the math and that’s why I started this episode the way I did. Because we identified that this contract would replace 30 group program members and in order to get those 30 group program members, you would need to generate 3,000 leads. You went and did a speaking gig that you absolutely loved, that was fun, that you had a lot of enthusiasm and energy around.
Cassie Christopher: I got paid for that too.
Tara Newman: You got paid for it, paid lead gen, love it, I’m a big fan of paying you to do the lead gen, not you paying for the lead gen. I got all my little tricks, y’all, but I love that, and then that led to this sale. You did the thing that was really scary, that was really stretchy, you succeeded, and the best time to go make sales is when you’re feeling confident and a badass. Here you are, now you’re feeling way better than you even were feeling before, and you’re showing up quite differently.
Cassie Christopher: Yeah. I wrote a guest blog post, this is my primary organic lead gen right now is guest blog posting. It was about weight loss and it was my nuanced understanding. It was all of the nuance and all of the compassion and also my knowledge of who the best person for me is, so directing towards the women who feel like they are accomplished or successful, the ones who are maybe still working, the ones who are working part-time.
Putting all my confident energy towards those people in this situation, I have never in the history of my business had people just book sales calls with me from reading one piece of content, but I’ve had several, maybe five very qualified sales calls being booked without going through my email list, without the rest of it, just from this brass ovaries level blog post. Oh, getting emotional again. It’s really amazing and also scary and fun and I’m tired. I bought myself a paddleboard. There’s the stream of consciousness.
Tara Newman: Amazing. Yeah, you have a lot of integration to do. This just came up. She just made this sale about a month ago I think and now she’s having the reverberations of this courageous moment, paying itself forward, and she’s gaining a lot of traction which is actually a little terrifying as a business owner, like, “Can I handle it? Can I receive this? Can it be this good?” all that stuff that’s coming in that I can’t wait to support you with. There’s some integration that needs to happen.
But I want to start to roll us out of here and here’s the question that I have. I know that there are a lot of women right now who are just like you were a year ago. They are confused, they’re feeling not in alignment with their values in their business, they are operating somebody else’s blueprint, they probably have a lot of groupthink and they’re not trusting their intuition because they’re in this washing machine effect of social media, they’re thinking it has to be this very narrow specific way of making money.
Some of them I know are even thinking about going back and finding a job because this just feels too demoralizing, too hard, too exhausting, too whatever. What advice do you have for these women who I think are pretty much like every day every woman at this point? What do you want to share with them?
Cassie Christopher: I think I want to share that it’s okay not to be good at business. It goes back to that walk before you can run. It’s okay to get taken in by a narcissistic cult leader on the internet; some of these people who sell things are. Tara didn’t say that, I did. When I say it’s okay, yeah, that sucks, but also can we have compassion for ourselves? Yeah, it’s okay to feel fearful. Over the course of the last six months, I’ve been dealing with a lot of anxiety and mental health issues.
The thing that has been so helpful for me about The Bold Profit Academy is all of the normalizing that goes on about how hard it is to run a business, how sometimes it’s so fun and sometimes you want to puke. Sometimes it feels worth it and sometimes it doesn’t. But you can get to a place where most of the time, you understand why you’re doing it and you’re committed to it. I guess the advice I would give would be that it’s okay if you’re struggling and you don’t have to stay there. You can get support.
For me, like I said, that support being from just the smartest, smartest people who’ve been in business for a long time and some for not a lot of time and leadership from you. I can’t imagine, I keep trying to get all of the people who used to be stuck in groupthink with me over here and it’s sad and amazing to me how powerful that groupthink is. Yeah, if you’re feeling a certain way and you want to do a last-ditch effort before you get a job, here it is, do this because we need the community, we need to know we’re not alone, we need to know we’re not freaks, that it is hard, and again, that’s okay.
Learn to get help for our weaknesses. For me, it’s that energy piece and the slowing down. Those were my weaknesses and this program helped address it. I know those aren’t everyone’s weaknesses. Maybe you need help with mindset, maybe you need help with strategy. That’s all here too. Shoot, let’s have a coffee day. I love to strategize. But that’s it. It’s okay. That would be my advice. It’s okay.
Tara Newman: I know in the beginning you came in and I remember having this conversation with you, you were probably one of the first people of many that started to share their experience in other programs and how that had had an impact on where they are today on their self-trust and really feeling very hesitant about making any additional investments. I had heard it before but I think you were probably the person who had said it the most directly to me at the time and it basically was like a tidal wave after that.
I remember saying to you, “That really sucks. I’m sorry you had that experience.” It’s unfortunately way more common than it’s not. Again, that is also a nuanced conversation that I’ll put aside for another day. But how were you able to start to move through those experiences and learn to trust yourself again? Because I think that this is an epidemic at this point.
Cassie Christopher: Yeah. That’s such a good point. Even getting help after feeling monumentally burned is a hard decision to make. Remembering back to that time, for me, it was about trusting myself actually. I think probably it was like the first step I took back to trusting myself. I am so fortunate to have people in my life who know me and know what I need. I remember talking it out with my husband, talking it out with my mom. They knew how devastated I was by the experience I had.
I was like, “Hey, I think this is what I need. I think this program, this person can provide it but I’m scared. Am I just jumping in out of the frying pan into the fire? Do I need to just go off on my own to learn to trust myself? What do I do here?” The people in my life were like, “No, yeah, your logic makes sense. It sounds like this is the support that you need.”
People that I trusted, my own self, it was like choosing to trust myself, that first step back to myself. It wasn’t an easy one to make, but just days after getting in that experience where I felt burned, I joined The Bold Profit Academy, I’m so glad I did.
Tara Newman: I think that you make an excellent point. What I love of what you did was Brené Brown’s concept around shining the spotlight on the dark stuff. I’m a big fan of that. We just had somebody last week who posted in my networks who was like, “I have to get on this sales call and I’m really freaked out.” I highlighted them on the weekly call and I said, “This is the point. This is what I want you all doing. I want you to show up here and say that and put a spotlight on that so we can talk about it and we can support each other and letting this stuff fester.” It’s not the way.
I think that’s really smart because you put the spotlight on it, you brought in people who you did trust. You came at it from like, “This is what I’m thinking.” Already, there was a certainty there. You weren’t asking them what you should do per se, you were laying out what you had thought you should do. It’s interesting because when you emailed me and we were going back and forth, you said, “I trust you.”
Cassie Christopher: That’s really interesting.
Tara Newman: You actually said, “You need to teach me how to market like this.”
Cassie Christopher: If anybody knows me at all, I don’t market. I’m just honest and transparent and I have people who get on calls with me and I’m like, “I’m not sure if this is really for you. But here’s how you’d know, here are the things you need to know, here are the things how you can make this decision,” just being honest and transparent. You’re a reluctant weight loss person, I’m a reluctant marketer, that’s the best thing that I could say I guess.
You said, “I trust you,” so I think that’s interesting because you were really grappling with trusting yourself and your process was to take it to the people who you did have in your trust circle and to share it with them. I think that’s something that everyone could really take away from this conversation. I’m going to wrap us up with a question. What are you really excited about right now in your business?
Cassie Christopher: Well, I’m really excited about paddle boarding, but that’s not in my business.
Tara Newman: Well, I think that’s important.
Cassie Christopher: I did buy my paddle board with profit so that’s related. I am so excited about these one-on-one clients that I’ve just signed who need a lot of help and I’m 100% confident that I can help them and change their lives. I’m excited to go on that journey with them. That’s what I’m excited about right now and more to come, I’m sure.
Tara Newman: Yeah. You’re in a real sweet spot with your target market.
Cassie Christopher: Yeah. It’s been so much like I could tell stories.
Tara Newman: I know we’re wrapping up but I do remember you posting probably six months ago and you’re like, “I am so angry and resentful.”
Cassie Christopher: Yes, because especially with Facebook ads, again, the women who are seeing these are the women who have time to be on Facebook so I was getting a lot of women who were booking even sales calls with me and taking up 45 minutes of my time who did not have the money to pay for my services.
Obviously, there’s a lot around that. There’s a lot of ways to solve that issue, intake forms, yadda-yadda. You were saying, you reflected to me, “Cassie, this is killing your confidence. Getting on all of these sales calls with people who don’t have money,” I was then believing nobody had money for my services–
Tara Newman: Yeah, you thought the objection to your services was money and pricing and I think that’s why you, even longer before that, were like, “I need a down sell,” but we just needed to correct your target market.
Cassie Christopher: Yeah. The thing that was so interesting too when you talked about that you don’t need a coach, but when you do need a coach, you’ll know what you need from them, we were working together and I was saying, “I’ve used all these tools. I’ve done all of the debriefing. I’ve done all the deep diving into my target market but I can’t figure out how to talk to them and not attract people who don’t have money.”
You were like, “Well then, that means you need some help.” I took that and went and worked with Michelle Mazur on my messaging because you helped me figure out how to know when I need help and I can’t do it on my own.
Tara Newman: Right. How to make wise growth decisions in your business.
Cassie Christopher: I’ll say investing in even that service was so scary. I ended up talking to my therapist and I was like, “Every time I get off the phone with this amazingly brilliant woman, I have a panic attack.” I was still struggling to trust that I was making the right investment. Again, it was another opportunity for me to choose. I trust myself, I am a wise business woman, get all those affirmations “I trust that I know how to make decisions for myself,” that was really a powerful experience.
Some of the success I’m having now with the nuance and my messaging comes from being able to speak more clearly to people because of that work we did. I could only have done that work had I had the reflection of “You need help with this.” Like, “Oh, that’s what that means. When I get to the end of the rope and the tools aren’t working, that’s when I need help from someone.”
Tara Newman: And the Profit First tools to let you know how much you have and where it’s coming from, and all of that. That’s how you start to make those wise money decisions. Listen, I appreciate your candor. I appreciate your energy. I appreciate your tenacity and your grit. I really appreciate you sharing your story, especially the part around the self-trust because that’s just coming up so much for people. Where can folks find you if they want to connect with you, Cassie?
Cassie Christopher: Yeah. My website cassiechristopher.net. I am on Facebook, Cassie Christopher, RD. I’m technically on Instagram at the same place. You can send me a DM. I’ll probably see it, but actually, Facebook is more where I am. I would love to connect with people, share my story, hear your war stories as well. But really what I love to do is inside The Bold Profit Academy, I love to have coffee chats with my fellow academy attendees. Why don’t you just join us?
Tara Newman: Cassie’s got a commercial going here. Just join us so you can–
Cassie Christopher: Yeah. Connect with me inside The Bold Profit Academy. Send me a DM.
Tara Newman: Thank you so much for coming on, Cassie.
Cassie Christopher: Yeah. Thank you. I just want to say to you, Tara, I’m so appreciative to you. The mindset and the viewpoint that you bring into my life, it has allowed me to make big sales. I’m so thankful for you.
Tara Newman: I’m excited to see where this goes. I’m like, “Let’s get the next B2B sale going. Let’s get that cooking.”
