Episode 70 Transcript

Heather (00:04.834)

Hello you guys, welcome back. We're in episode 70. I think it's time for a case study. What do you think? Reason why I wanna do this is because two things. I find that people that come to me to work with my business, Website Love, oftentimes are in a extreme case of stress or overwhelm or frustration because they desperately want their website or their web presence to be a certain way and they cannot get it there. Or number two, they come to us because they're excited and hopeful. But I want to give you a case study for the former, somebody that was stressed and frustrated and just was ready to throw her hands up. So this is a business that came to us earlier this year and they said, Heather, we have been working with a developer overseas.

 

And it's taken us two years to not have a website that works. It still doesn't work. And we have reached our wits end. So this is for a business that is a training company. They're actually is a celebrity hairdresser and she has trainings all over the world, but she really wanted to have an online portal to train everything from students to, so individual students to having you know, an owner of a hair salon, buy seats for people, hairdressers in the team to even having, you know, universities or trade schools. Like there's a trade school here in Australia called TAFE, and she wanted the ability for TAFE to be able to buy seats for students to go through hairdressing courses. So she needed a really robust training platform. And where she was left after two years was having this development site still didn't work, the team was saying to them, hey, it has to be all manual. People can sign up on your site, but then you have to manually give them access to a course area. And it just was frustrating. Can you relate? Have you ever been there? Have you ever had like a dream for your business online and you're just like, I envision it. I can see it happening, but why? Why can't I get somebody to help me make it happen? So here's what we did.

 

Heather (02:28.202)

So basically we said to them, okay, we've got to start from scratch because everything you have been told is a lie. It can be fully automated online. Absolutely. People can buy, they can come onto your website, they can get access to the course, all of it. So what we did is we came up with a really nice design. We built out two different membership levels. So basically what happens is people come onto the site as they can do like a...

 

essentially I'll start with level one or membership level one. What this is this incredible library of videos and how it works. It's very simple. You sign up, it's a subscription, and you come on into the site. You have your members homepage that has, you know, update your credit card, update your account details, et cetera, et cetera. Then you have your access your resources area. Now, this is just a library and an amazing library with amazing filters. So people can go like, I want to take a bridal hair updo mini course, or I want to search via this particular trend. So you can search by topic or keyword or mini course. And then all these amazing videos come up. It's so user friendly, so easy. The person pays a subscription fee. But what's more you guys is it is global. She is a global trainer. So there is translation on the site in multiple languages and multiple currencies are been able to be taken as well. So if I sign up in Brazil, I see Portuguese and I can pay with my local currency. Pretty cool. So there's that level of membership but then there's another level where you get access to a boot camp. Now this is a structured course with step-by-step modules and for this, this is another membership level. So you can buy just the video library or you can buy both.

 

So you have another like sort of top level membership where you can get the library and the course. Now the course has been built out in, and I'll tell you the tools we've used in a second too, just so you know, so it's not hard. This is not custom stuff by the way. So you have the bootcamp in there as well. And we've also enabled the ability on both for what's called a team leader. So this team member can go in and buy assigned seats to their staff, as I mentioned before.

 

Heather (04:51.598)

Again,whole site, all global, multiple currencies, coupon codes available, trial offers for TAFE. What happens is that we have auto generated coupons for all the students. So they, the students show up, they, um, TAFE invoices that the, my client, um, or my client invoices TAFE, I should say it's paid by an invoice. And then basically the, um, TAFE school's given a spreadsheet with

 

100 auto-generated coupon codes. They give a coupon code to each student and then the student comes to the site, goes through the signup process, puts the coupon code in. Because they're using a coupon code, they don't get asked for a credit card or address or any of that. And they assign their username and password and then they can log in and they get one year access because we've set it up where it's only one year access and then it expires. So now we have that that's been built on top.

 

And there's more, there's more now because it's working so well. She has active subscriptions all over the world. People are excited. They're like, what about this? What about this? So now she's going to start a barbering course like for barber hair. Um, so much more is in the works because she has this platform that works is making her money has provided hope and is amazing. Um, I'm really proud of the team for what they built. I'm actually quite blown away at how amazing it is. I mean.

 

I'm not blown away because I have an amazing team, but you know what I mean. And all this to say, you guys, this was built in a few months, okay? Like from two years to having an inoperable site and paying a lot of money. And just get this, this developer wanted a cut, you guys, a cut of all sales. So he somehow negotiated his way in, like we'll build the site and we want a cut of anything that comes in through the door.

 

And unfortunately, my client said yes to that, you know, and was taking advantage of. She never be paying a developer a cut for stuff. My goodness. Unless it's some sort of, you know, proprietary system that you're working on together as sort of a USP or something like that, but no. So, um, that, yeah, all was taken away within a few months. We built this entire platform. She was making money. It's global and she has complete control over it. So what did we use?

 

Heather (07:08.562)

Well, we simply used WordPress. No, not Kajabi, not some of the, these other platforms that exist. We need something very robust, very customizable. Uh, so, and I'm not bagging Kajabi. It's great for, for those of you just selling a course, maybe a couple of courses, it's good. Um, but we've done WordPress. We've added in WooCommerce to, uh, take sales and payments and subscriptions and free trials, automated coupon codes for TAFE and all that sort of stuff. We've added in some plugins on top of that to do translations, automatic translations on all pages, as well as automated currency conversions. So we have that, we have the subscription add-on. We've added on LearnDash for the course, the actual step-by-step modular course that people go through. And for the video library, that's just, it's called a custom post type.

 

So it's just a real simple way for the client to go in and, you know, put Vimeo links in for videos and do, you know, categorize the videos with tick boxes and all of that. And we've just built that out kind of custom and it just means, and, and by the way, there's no crazy plugins or anything like that. Like it's easy to manage an update and anyone can come in as any developer and go, yeah, cool, I can just make a tweak because it's built in a way that's transparent. So yeah, all that stuff's been done on WordPress, WooCommerce, LearnDash.

 

It's amazing. So now she's sending traffic to it. We have landing pages in there that are where people go to see the different, um, price points, the two different, um, uh, course levels, or I should say membership levels and on those pages, also the currency changes based on where the person's coming from and their IP address. So I think I wanted to paint this picture for those of you that have big dreams for the year ahead, that most things are possible.

 

You just have to find the right platform and team and solution to make it happen. We're not talking about anything proprietary here, nothing crazy. These are tools that exist to all of us. It's just how they've been set up. You know, you're always, if you think about hiring experts, you're paying for their expertise and their wisdom over the years, and you kind of get what you pay for. I mean, I really do believe that when I look for my own mentors.

 

Heather (09:28.67)

I'm always looking at their experience and I'm willing to pay more because I know I'm paying for experience. Yeah, you can go easily get advice online now, ask chat GPT, but how do you know where that advice has come from? How do you know if it's any good? So I guess that's why I wanted to leave you guys with is just to make sure that you're surrounding yourself with great people that are working on your projects. And if somebody says, oh, that can't be done, or if it just sounds ridiculous, like, Oh, that's going to take two years and we still can't do it. Then you just don't have the right solution or the right team. And you can absolutely go and ask for help and advice from other people. If you guys want my advice, by the way, I'm here to help. I love helping business owners that are stuck with their platforms and have a dream and don't know how to get there with it. So yeah, head on over hustle rebellion calm. And you'll see there is a contact button at the top of our website or you can just go to website love.com.au, hit the contact button and you just fill out the form and say, I heard your podcast about the membership site for the hairdresser and I want one or I'm stuck or whatever it is, I'm here to support you guys, my amazing listeners all over the world because you are all over the world now and I'm very, very grateful for that. So hopefully this kind of shows A, a little bit about my work and B, maybe give you some ideas to help your dreams and what you want to accomplish on your business online coming up next year. Thanks as always you guys for tuning in and I will talk to you very soon.