The Best High-ROI Business Activities with Dallas Travers

We just had part one , seconds ago for us , maybe days or weeks ago for you , but that previous episode where we got to know each other and the segment's just called Before we Hit Record , that's in the show notes below and I'm happy to have her back , or I'm happy that she didn't run away after the first episode that we recorded three minutes ago .

But Dallas is a pretty cool lady , worth your time to get to know her and get to know kind of where she came from , what she stands for and really cool tidbits about her husband , who she's been married to since 2003 .

But as we get into this episode again , if my voice is new to you which is still weird to me , but maybe you don't listen to all the episodes Hi , I'm Quajo and I'm the new host of the Art of Online Business podcast and I got links in the show notes for you below to where you can see where one the former host , rick , went to and what he's doing , and

then also you can listen to another episode where he interviewed me . Speaking of interview , we have a cool person here , dallas . I had your bio right here , but basically , if you're a coach and listening to Dallas , you'll want to get to know her better and head over to her podcast .

She is the host of a podcast called Coaches on a Mission and that's the podcast to listen to if you're a values-driven coach and you want the freedom and confidence and the impact that comes with a prosperous coaching business and , might I add , purposeful coaching business . I feel , like those two go together .

But , Dallas , you're also the founder of the Hive , which is a one-stop membership program for coaches who want to turn this I like how you wrote , turn this coaching thing into the life they love . So thank you for being back here again .

One is you lean into your values and you teach online business owners how to really I'm just going to say from what I've gathered magnify their values and let those values guide their online businesses and how they approach them and how they relate to people . But then you also have these let's just call them insanely workable and useful ROI tricks .

But you mentioned that it's the unscalable things that have the biggest impact and get you incredibly high ROI . Not to mention that when we were talking in the DMs , when I first met you , you shared what was that ? A 21 21 day email nurture sequence .

Right , I want to have options and I want to be the person who's in charge of picking the options and I love owning whatever results come from my choices . So belonging , agency ambition . I used to say for people in my community who hear this , they might have some grieving to do .

I used to say how one of my core values was spark , which I would describe as that moment when the way you see yourself changes because of that accomplishment . That just happened , like my daughter , when she taught herself to ride a bicycle . She was a different kid that day when she went to bed than she was when she woke up in the morning .

Okay , so my daughter , she changed how she saw herself . That wasn't by accident . That was a full day of working hard to accomplish something . So I've realized for me , spark is a result of ambition and I think over the last couple of years I have shied away from really claiming values , in particular belonging .

I make marketing decisions that Carrie Perry would call them unscalable . Right , I'm going to put in some effort to help . You know that I see you and I hear you , and the result of that often is you enroll in my program or you recommend me to a friend or , at the very least , you're going to trust me a lot .

So for me , these unscalable when I look at my values , I can sift through all of the possible launch strategies and pick the actions that most align with my values , and those , for me , happen to be unscalable because I value that person to person connection and that feeling of belonging .

So unscalable marketing are things like am I talking too much or can I keep going ? Here Is this helpful .

We're in the middle of a launch right now and our webinars had a 57% attendance rate and it's really good .

For me , a big action is where can I make things unscalable ? Because that is more satisfying to me and I've seen the ROI , especially for someone like me with a small list right , I'm just really leaning into belonging to get the most mileage out of that , out of that list .

Right Then , when I reply to them with a video , so they submit their question just typing it in I reply to them with a video . So they submit their question just typing it in , then I reply with a video .

It was so interesting to see how many of them replied back with a video , so I was just seeing in real time in front of my eyeballs that experience of belonging increasing dramatically for folks . It was a really fun experiment to witness .

I think that's the latest version , okay , but I've been coaching since then , so I've put in a lot of hours coaching , and coaching is really just listening right and reflecting back what you hear and staying really curious .

Coaching , on the other hand , is metaphorically sitting beside the client and asking deep , empowering questions to help the client uncover their best path forward . So that's like if you talk to a coach , that's the distinction they're going to give . So now I'm going to get controversial . I think that coaching purists are making a mistake by never consulting .

I think if you're really a good coach , you know when to ask questions and you actually know when to , with consent , give advice . Think about it . Let's just pretend that I'm a coach , like I'm a sleep coach for new parents , right ? Remember those days ?

And you can put that on my tombstone . That is something I will argue , because there are a lot of coaches in the world who shy away from that and they will tell you you're not coaching if you're ever giving advice , and that's just a disservice to folks .

Well , I would agree , like , I feel like , with good coaching , you can , yes , reflect back , you can help somebody , like , figure out what is best for them , but , like , ultimately , I believe , like at that point where they figure out what direction , like , they want to go and they need to go and why , so to speak , it's like you can also do them , like you

said , the good service of showing them what that path looks like further down the road .

Like imagine you're this Facebook ads expert . Imagine if you never , if you only ever , coached your clients .

Just kind of imagining the day when she's not going to be interested in sleeping next to me so yeah , yeah , cool cool she's still like she's an early riser . I was an early riser as a kid too , so I can't get mad .

But it's like 4 55 in the morning and she's awake , so I will go and climb in bed with her and we'll just like have a morning chit chat together , and it's just my favorite time of the whole day .

But it also brings up so much emotion for me too , because she do you know how much happened when we got stuck out of China ?

Let's call those the same , unless you have a hot take about how morals are not values , but I want to know , because those usually mean that you have to take a stand and sometimes they bring you into hard times because you want to speak with your values .

Before we get there , though , you made me tear up because we took a vacation from China , where I had lived for 12 years , to Mexico where I'm stuck now , but I like it here right before the pandemic broke out , and so the reason thinking about my daughter learning how to ride a bike and when you talked about that spark where your daughter , when she learned to

ride a bike , you could tell she just was not the same person Like that brings up so much emotion for me , because my daughter was three and change at the time , so she spoke fluent mandarin .

Because she grew up in china , she was going to like chinese preschool and everything , and we had like a chinese-speaking nanny who was chinese , all she spoke was mandarin .

so when she was learning to ride a bike , those videos that I have because , like one of my values is communication in other languages I guess maybe just communication with people who are different and all the videos are in Mandarin because that was the language that me and her spoke .

Because at the time it was like we're just going to go back to China , because we're only here for a bit of vacation and then , because of the pandemic , stuck outside of China , but still going back soon at least we thought and so like I remember that and it made me kind of tear up inside because oh my gosh times

Like , the doctor advised that since she stuttered so much , it could benefit her just to focus on two languages rather than , yeah , acquiring three and a half year old , four year old , right , acquiring more and more vocabulary in in different languages , because that already is a mental feat and , yeah , it takes energy , right .

And so we had to make what was for me a very hard decision to like no longer speak mandarin with her , yeah

I do want to know that question , Like what happens when you are sticking with your values and it takes you to hard times or you have to make a hard decision , Like how do you get through it ? And like what do you do , how do you process that ?

Hello , business owners , yeah , right , but when you let your values lead , you don't have to second guess yourself . And I'm it is not making . The decision is clear , but it isn't easy . But at least there isn't . Oh , is this the right choice ? And we've got our pro and con list . Like , there's none of that .

We know what it is we want or need to do , and then it's just a matter of doing it . So let's just say you have a program and people lose access after 90 days , right ? Someone could ask for an extension on that , and your answer being no isn't unfortunate for them . It's intentional . Right .

When we make decisions according to our values , there is a rhyme and a reason and a rootedness into everything we do , and therefore we don't have to second guess ourselves , nor do we need to apologize . Does it make things easy ? Hell , no , but it does make things clear . I'll give you an example .

I'm going to make numbers clear , so these aren't going to be accurate , but it's going to help me get the point across . So let's just say so . I was working with a mentor at the time who suggested that and I take ownership of this .

This was my choice , not hers , but she advised me to tell people there were only 50 spots in the program , but really anyone could get in right , so we're creating scarcity . As a motivator , I had no idea that so many people would want the program . But so there I am on Maestro Conference telling everybody you better act now , because there are only 50 spots .

Fast forward to the first Q&A call . We had 100 people in that program and someone counted the number of people who were there and emailed me the next day to say , like you said , it was going to be 50 people and there were way more than 50 people . What are you going to do about it ? And I was so . It was interesting because this was a long time ago .

And I was so . It was interesting because this was a long time ago , but my first reaction and luckily it only lasted a couple of seconds , was to be mad at this person for calling me out . Yeah Right , like , why is she counting ? Doesn't she have better things to do ? Well , no , actually liar . You need to own this .

Well , one of my core values is integrity . So I made it right , I owned up to it , I explained it to everyone . We divided the program in half , so I had two groups of 50 , meant twice the work for me , all of the things , but it was the values aligned thing to do and therefore the decision was easy . It was painful to admit that I made a mistake .

Maybe that includes the online course creator , just the person who's listening right now , who's going through like a challenging time in their business , like how how can they kind of lean in , maybe rediscover their values , but lean into those to get staying power to get through the hard time ?

Like we're separate from those things , we're not authentic , it's not how it works right . But you can have staying power when you live and lead by your adjust . Because it wasn't just some listening to a podcast , some lady talking about video ask and now I'm going to go and add video ask to my launch right Without intentionality behind it .

So she talked about video . Ask how does that align with my values ? How now do I want to implement it so that it is really values driven ? So everything's just like a little , a little more rooted and it's those roots that allow the tree to go , to grow and stick around .

So I definitely don't want the listener to feel like , okay , we're talking about values , but I want some tactics , even though , yes , there's tons of strategy and tactics out there in the online business world . I feel like having the values does separate you , but separate you from everyone else .

But I'm just really curious and I know the listener is too how are you getting like that 50% 57 , I think you said before like 60% show up rate to your , to your webinars ? Like what's do you want to share ? A little bit around that and like a couple of reasons how you do that .

Some of us we're just so busy launching that we just don't even have the energy to think about that gap of time . But if we can build a show up strategy to help the person maintain their excitement between the day they registered and the day of the webinar , more people will come . If more people come , you're going to sell more of your things , right ?

So there's three tangible things that I do . The first we talked about it , it's video ask , Carve out time to have that personal connection with people . Number two I created a quiz , right ?

So if you're going to come to and I know you did an episode analyzing my quiz , so it's inspired by that , but it's a quick , like six question quiz based on the content you're going to teach in the webinar .

We'll talk about list building about 20 minutes into the webinar , so please make sure you come and here's your list building checklist of things to listen for during class .

This is a first for me A lot of online business models , especially managing ads Wow , so that's cool and so , if you think about it , if it's a free webinar , people don't .

I'm not spending time in those reminder emails reminding people to come and spending time in those reminder emails addressing their concerns so that they show up already planning on buying , which is another incentive to come , right , yeah , so those are the three things and they're unscalable in a lot of ways .

They take more time , but the launch we're in right now , like I said , we've dropped . We were at 62 in the last launch , but we're at what ? A 57% attendance . My live webinar is converting at 20% , so that's a huge difference in revenue if there are more butts in the seats at your actual launch event .

So people like people sign up because they already know they want to be there and not just because they saw an ad or got an email right . So there's like a deeper level of investment , even before we're launching , and that loops back to knowing your values and communicating them .