Hey, welcome back to another bonus episode of Cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful entrepreneurs, the business questions you can't google. I'm your host, Ellen Yin, and I am super excited that we have reached this milestone of 10 Bonus episodes together. This was an idea that we implemented at the beginning of 2023, bringing you these short and sweet mini episodes with just me every Wednesday as a double dose of our show. And it's been so much fun just sitting behind the mic and riffing with you guys, on what's going on inside of our own company, my thought processes as a CEO, and just what I'm learning and consuming that I want to share with you all. So thank you, for those of you who have upped your dosage of people who are the CEO to twice a week and are now listening every single Monday and every single Wednesday, when I get your messages, sharing what you're taking away from each episode, it just lights me up. So thank you, thank you to those of you who have done that. And if you are enjoying this bonus content, and you want this to continue throughout the rest of the year, please send me a DM today. And let me know that because it does help affirm that this is worthwhile to continue. So my Instagram is @MissEllenYin, if you want to shoot me a note or you can shoot a message over to our team @cubicletoCEO. Now today, I want to take you behind the scenes of our most recent team off site, my full time team, which comprises of me, and my two employees, Sabrina and Andi. We typically work full time virtually so we all live in Oregon, but we work from home. But three to four times a year we try to get together stay at either at an Airbnb together, or in a hotel. And we get to spend quality time together over the course of two to three days and do a lot of collaborative thinking and brainstorming and work together. But we also get to have so much fun and do team bonding activities. And we've done all sorts of things. Over the years, we've gone to Sonoma together on a road trip, we've gone to the coast, this past team off site, we actually went and visited Oregon's wine country. So we had the pleasure of staying at the dandy hotel in Dundee, Oregon, which is also where I'm getting married this summer. So I'm very excited. It's a beautiful, charming little town right smack dab in the middle of Oregon's wine country. And we have an amazing partnership with the staff at the Dundee hotel and their sister hotel at the independence hotel. And we're just so lucky that we get to continue to collaborate with both of those hotels, and very, very thankful that they graciously chose to host us for our most recent team retreat. So at this team off site, we had one primary goal, which was to vision cast the rest of our 2023. So to map out exactly what projects we're going to be working on from March through the end of the year. And I will say as a pre frame to my conversation with you today. I think it would be helpful if you listened into bonus episode number three on our podcast if you haven't yet, because in bonus episode number three, I share our company's big three goals for this year. So our big three each year is basically like our North Star. It really guides us on filtering what is priority or what can be tabled for a different season, in terms of what we're deciding to pursue as a team and what projects we're putting on our calendar. So if you haven't listened into that episode yet, I will link it below for you in the show notes. So go click over it's very short. But having the context of what our big three is, I think will definitely help make this episode make more sense. So at this team off site, as I said, we vision casted are 2023. And I just want to quickly run you through what's on the docket for the remainder of the year and give you a little bit of insight as to why we chose the things that we did. So let's just dive in with March. So we're currently in the month of March as you're listening to this. And in March, our big project that we have been working on behind the scenes for months now is the soft launch of our brand new membership. This is going to become our signature offer. I have never created anything like this membership before. And to be quite honest, I have never really seen anything quite like what we're creating in the marketplace in our industry before. So I'm very, very anticipatory of like actually getting to hear your feedback once you're in it, because it's just unlike anything that I think you will have experienced before. I'm not going to give too much away. What I will tell you is that this is not a coaching program. This is not a curriculum based membership. I'm not here to teach you to do XYZ to get At a certain outcome, it's nothing like that. This membership is all about getting you an instant ROI, literally the second that you join, and giving you the best deals and discounts and gifts in the industry for the brands that you already love, and use and the ones that you're interested in bringing into your business to help you continue to grow and thrive. So that's all I'm gonna say for now. But we are soft launching this just to current cubicle to CEO students, which are the students in my 12 month mentorship program that I retired last August. So that program has not been open for enrollment for over six months now. But we still have about 150 amazing students inside that program that we are taking through with us until the beginning of August when the program sunsets for good. But during their final year with us, you know, they get special perks such as getting the first invite, and the best deal on this brand new membership. So we're rolling that out at the end of this week. And I'm so so excited for our first founding members to get inside this membership. So that's the big project in March. Another project that we've been working on quietly behind the scenes is building our first quiz, our first personality quiz. And what I can tell you right now is the title of our quiz is what's your SEO style. There are four distinct SEO styles. And I have been working on this personality quiz funnel with my dear friend Linda Sidhu, who is the quiz queen. And if you are, you know part of our community, you're definitely no stranger to Linda. In fact, her episode on our podcast was in the top 10 most listened to episodes last year, it's a really fascinating case study all about how personality quizzes can help you auto segment your audience by by our personality type, and how it's a lightning way to grow your email list in a way that is fun in a way that is non salesy. And it's just such a different lead magnet than you know your typical PDF download or webinar or opt in or whatever it is. So if you're curious about the strategy behind the quiz, I'll link Linda's episode for you below in the show notes as well. And you can catch up on that. But we have been working hard on getting this quiz up and running. And it will be launched, I want to say the end of this month. That's what we're shooting for. So as soon as the CEO style quiz is available for you to take, you know, you'll be the first to hear about it. So I can't wait to share that with you and see what type of CEO you are. I know the type I am. And I'm very, very curious to know how many of you listening are like me? Because I mean, you know, when you live in your own world and your own thoughts, you always kind of think everyone has a similar perception as you or approaches life the same way that you do through the same lens. But obviously, that's not true. So I'm I'm just so so curious what makeup of CEO types we have within our community. So keep your eye out for that as well. Now, I know some of you listening, going back real quick to the membership might be wondering, wait a second, okay, so you're doing that soft launch this month, when do the rest of us get to, you know, have an opportunity to join this membership.
So for the soft launch, we're actually only opening 100 spots for our current cubicle to CEO students like I mentioned. And then the second wave of invitations, we're going to open up the next 400 spots. So we'll fill our first 100. And then we're opening up 400 more invitations. And that is going to be going out to friends and family and most likely current customer. So people who have bought something from us at any point in the past, whether it was a small ticket item, like hashtag hacks, or a perfect podcast pitch template, or whether they had joined a paid to create challenge in the past or attended a workshop or event, just anyone in our ecosystem who has invested in us before we want to return that and invest in them first. So that will probably be who the next set of invitations go out to. And then once we hit around 500 members, that's probably when we will open the doors to the public. So I don't know exactly what that timeline is going to look like. We just want to make sure we give our very best service and have a lot of time to gather feedback and fine tune and iterate and really build just this beautiful membership and offer with you all so again, all the dates are TBD. But just know that it's it's happening. So keep your eye out if you're on our email list if you're part of our weekly newsletter. That is where you'll see it first most likely when when the invitation goes public. So I would highly recommend if you're not on our email newsletter To get your name added to the list, you can just go to cubicle to ceo.co. And right there on our homepage, just add your name and email. And you'll be in the loop, you'll get our weekly case studies that we send out. And it's, it's a really awesome product. Actually, we treat our newsletter, even though it's free to you, we treat it as an actual product. And we spend so much time making it the best possible publication in the business media space to get transparent financial insights for real life. Business owners who are bootstrapping, six, seven and eight figure businesses. So if you want access to that content in that data, you definitely want to make sure that you are signed up for our newsletter. Okay? Again, that link will also be in the show notes. Basically, any link I mentioned will be below in the show notes. So if you're lazy like me, and you're like, I can't remember to type that in just just scroll below. And you'll see it all there. Alright, so that's March, as you can tell what a lot going on in March that we've been building on for months and months and months. In April, the focus of that month is if you have ever come to one of my free master classes before free webinars, I used to teach a webinar on how to make your first $10,000 month using our consistent clients cash flow system. And that was a free webinar that led into our 12 month mentorship program. As I already mentioned, our program has you know, been retired, it's no longer open for enrollment, we have no plans to bring it back. It is permanently retired. That said though the content in that free masterclass, for our final launch last year, in August, I actually expanded the content. And I changed the master class to 10 simple strategy shifts to make your first $10,000 month and this is specifically for service based businesses. So service providers, coaches and consultants. And I got such amazing feedback from people who attended that masterclass, so many people asking, Can this be a permanent resource? Can we bring that back? And, you know, for a long time, I wasn't sure, you know, how I was going to bring that back into our offers or our resources even as a free resource, because ultimately, the original version of it led to a paid program, and we're not selling that pay program anymore. So I wanted to make sure that if I brought it back that I brought it back with intention, and that it didn't leave people hanging right at the end of the class thinking, Okay, what do I do next? Now, now I have the start to my 10k month, but I want to see it through right. So I was thinking about how I could make this work. And I think what we're going to do is we're going to go back to the free version of this masterclass and work on adding a lot more depth and examples and actionable like here's, you know, ABC that you can do for each shift today. And we're just going to make it a lot more instructional like a lot more workshop style. And then I think we're going to repackage that up and offer it as a standalone resource for under $100. So it's not going to be trying to replace the year long mentorship program that we retired, it's not going to be a course or anything like that. I just want this to be a workshop a masterclass that someone can sit in on for 60 minutes and really feel like they actually have 10 simple action steps that they can take to get closer to their first $10,000 month as a one on one service provider coach or consultant. So I just need to add a lot more depth to it. And I think this is going to be an evergreen resource. But I think for the first I guess for the creation of it, I am going to teach it live and most likely I will be inviting the people who have at some point in the last six months, downloaded our 10k month roadmap, which is a freebie that is available right now. It essentially walks you through three money math equations, where you can reverse engineer your own path to a 10k month if you sell a one on one service based on your unique business number. So it's not copy pasting someone else's path to a 10k month it's based on your own services and your own goals. So if you haven't done that worksheet before, and you are a service provider or a coach or consultant, selling a one on one service and wanting to scale to your first 10k month with a one on one service, then take a moment and fill out that worksheet. I literally walk you through how to do it with a five minute tutorial. You can just follow along. It's a free resource. Again, I'll link that below in the show notes. But the link if you're listening and want to type it out is Ellen yin.com/roadmap. Anyways, that will just probably be the first group that gets access to actually come watch this live and then I'll take that recording and turn it into an accessible evergreen resource that will go In our digital shop, this is something that I have not quite figured out how I'm going to execute from a platform perspective. You know, me, I like to keep my tech, super simple and most of our business is hosted on Kajabi. That's my favorite all in one marketing course membership community platform. And I'm just trying to figure out with their cart system, if I'm able to create a digital shop, experience in the way that I want it to where people can easily add multiple products to cart and checkout that we can create gift cards and bundle discounts and all these things, so TBD, on how we're going to actually deliver that. But I do know that I have all these amazing resources that we have created over the years. And ever since transitioning to a media business model. You know, our focus in terms of our sales has been really focused on our brand partnerships. And our mission is to create the best free content possible for you all through the podcast and newsletter every single week. And then most of our work is funded by our brand partners who believe in this mission who believe in this community, I believe that this content is necessary and valuable. So it's a totally different business model than we had before. And as such, I have really no interest in, you know, creating a high ticket coaching program, or mastermind or anything like that, not to say I would never do that. But it's just not on the docket for me, in my opinion in the next three to five years. And so we're just really focused on giving you the best quality, free content, and then any resources, any paid resources we have, I just want to make sure it's super accessible. So literally nothing over $500. But in our digital shop, specifically, I want everything to be ideally $200 and under. So that's kind of the direction we're going in with the digital shop. And I'm not going to go through every single product that we have in mind for the digital shop. But I just kind of want you to know that's on our roadmap for this year. Okay, now we're moving into May. So May, is the month where we are potentially going to bring back the paid to create challenge, if you are new here paid to create is an amazing three day course creation challenge for aspiring course creators, where we help you turn the idea in your head the knowledge that already exists in your brain into a profitable online course that you actually pre sell before it's even created. So you actually get paid to create your course in real time with your founding students. This presale model is such an amazing way to dip your toes into digital products, and into the course creation world with literally zero risk upfront zero money risk, zero time risk, it's, in my opinion, the best way to launch an online course. And we have now successfully run. If I'm remembering correctly, eight cohorts of this challenge, and we've had so much demand to bring it back the waitlist weekly, we still get signups for the waitlist. So if we do bring it back this year, it's dependent on an important behind the scenes conversation I'm having right now that I cannot reveal details on yet. But as soon as I'm able to one way or the other, I will of course loopy while in. But until we know that decision, I can't definitively say whether or not we're going to be hosting this pay to create challenge. But if we do, the first one will be in May. And then we will have a second one in the fall. And I'll get there as we're kind of going through our vision cast for this year. So that would be the main focus of may, if we chose to go forward with that challenge.
The other thing that I would want to spend my time in May doing is turning our perfect podcast pitch template, which is a word for word line by line, literal email pitch that I have written for you that you just plug and play your own information into and it is, in my opinion, the best email pitch out there on the market for submitting yourself to be a guest on other people's podcast shows. You will skyrocket your response rates skyrocket your booking rates if you use our perfect podcast pitch template. And we've already gotten so many amazing results from the people who have purchased it just because they heard about it on our podcast or they've seen it through a newsletter. Since creating this. I can't remember when we officially started offering it it was sometime last year. We haven't put any intentional efforts into marketing it outside of just you know, including it in our weekly newsletters and one of our podcast episodes where I share one easy thing you can do No matter whether you buy this template or not just one easy thing you can add to your pitch to get your emails actually read and responded to. So if you haven't listened to the episode, I will again link that in the show notes. I'm giving you so much homework in this episode. But anyways, I'll link that below in the show notes. If you want to give that a listen. But since I guess, launching, I'm putting that in air quotes. Since launching that we haven't actually put any marketing intention or strategy behind this. But the perfect podcast pitch template, I feel like would pair really well with a few other complementary products, that we could have put together a full suite of products to give you everything you need to be successful with pitching yourself or podcast. So not just the email template, but also providing you a directory of the shows to pitch the exact email context. But more importantly, not just putting together like a cold database of emails that we just, you know, pulled from the internet, because that's what a lot of podcasts pitch directories are. It's just like, someone went out there and sourced a bunch of show contact information and put it into a spreadsheet, which don't get me wrong, it's valuable because it saves you time from having to do the research yourself. But I don't think it's as valuable as me taking my own established relationships with podcast hosts within my network, and actually putting together a vetted directory where every single show listed is actually a show that wants to receive pitches, and knows that they're going to be getting pitches from our perfect podcast pitch students, and is eagerly waiting for your pitches, right, like wants to hear from you. I think that level of, I guess for lack of a better word added credibility, because it's like a warm introduction, right? It's not just like, here's a bunch of cold emails, like Have at it, although our pitch does work well, for that purpose. But taking it that extra step to say, hey, here are like my friends, my podcast hosts that I know, want guests and that want you to pitch them and have already been looped in and are aware of the situation. And here's this curated list of podcast hosts in different niches that you can send your pitch to, and it will be well received. Like I just think that adds a whole other layer to helping you in your success of being a podcast guest. So anyways, that's kind of my idea behind that. And I want to turn it into an automated SLO funnel, a self liquidating Offer Funnel, which I haven't created a slow funnel since early 2020, when we launched hashtag hacks, which was one of our most popular products ever, until we retired in 2021. And I'm, I'm kind of excited to funnel built. Again, I don't do it often. But it is kind of a creative exercise. So that's probably what I'll be working on in May, if paid to create doesn't happen. Or Honestly, even if it does, just because we've really dialed in the processes. So well at this point for the challenge. It'll be our ninth time hosting it. So I'll probably still have the creative space and room on my calendar to work on expanding perfect podcast pitch into a full suite of products for this funnel. Okay, so that brings us into the summer months now. So now we're going to June right. And in June and July. I'm combining those two months together, because really, the focus of those two months in our vision cast for 2023 is one to successfully close out cubicle to CEO. So like I mentioned, the students and our 12 month mentorship program. We retired selling the program last August so no one new has joined the program since the beginning of August 2022. But the students who joined in that final cohort, they have 12 months with us, right? So the last students 12 months don't expire until August 5 of this year, August 5 2023. So in June and July, we just want to make sure that we close out this program in the best way possible that we make sure our students are set up for success beyond us if they continue to want coaching support and mentorship support that we placed them in great containers with people that we trust. And I already have an amazing person and program in mind that I'll be helping to transition some members over to once we get to that point. And then of course, the other big focus in summer is directly targeted to one of our big three goals, which is to grow our email list or newsletter readership to 100,000 subscribers. And one of the things we want to roll out is a newsletter referral program so that we can really empower you, our most loyal community members to share the content that you're already enjoying and reading and consuming to your friends, to your network to your peers, and get rewarded for it, we want to reward you with awesome experiences and swag and, you know, credits to free products or our membership or whatever it is and, and really make sure that it's it's this collaborative effort. So that's kind of what we have in mind for June and July. Now in August, I'm actually planning to take that full month off. I am getting married in August. And I just really want to soak in this time to be with my soon to be husband, Dustin, and enjoy our wedding and our honeymoon and just take that month off. So my team will be continuing to work on some of these projects that I've outlined in that month. But I personally will be checked out. So that brings us now to fall and winter. So in September, we in granted, I'm not telling you every single nitty gritty thing that our team is doing this entire year, like there are events dispersed throughout this calendar year, there are other smaller things and bigger things, right like behind the scenes campaigns that we're running for brand partners that are happening all in parallel with what I'm sharing here, but I'm kind of just sharing more from a new project basis, here are the big things that we're working on for the rest of the year. In September, the project will be taking years and I mean literally years of content. From the mentorship program that I've had since 2019, we have all of our CEO calls, which are our coaching calls that we have with our students, we have so many hours of gold stored in three plus years of that vault, and we're going to be doing something exciting with that content. We're not using all of it, but we're taking the best of those three to four years of coaching calls and turning it into a brand new resource for you guys. So I don't know yet if I want to tell you exactly what it is. Again, nothing we're creating is like a high ticket program, we're not creating any new coaching programs, nothing like that any resource we create for you will either be free, or like I said, under $500, ideally under $200. So I think I'm actually going to leave this one a little bit of a mystery for now. But it's a product type that we have not created before. So that's all I'm gonna say for now. And then in October, again, depending on the decision that is being made behind the scenes, if we do decide to do the pay to create challenge, and May, then we'll also be doing one other round of it this year in October, so may would be our spring round. And then October would be our fall round. And then finally to close out the year in November and December, those two months will really just be focused on continuing to scale our new membership, bringing it to the public, if we haven't already opened it to the public by that point. And specifically, also bringing in holiday promotions for our members. So I can't really explain what that means without going way more in depth into what the membership actually is.
So I'll save that for another episode. But that kind of gives you a pretty detailed preview of what the rest of our 2023 looks like. And I gotta say, it feels so good just to be able to look at these projects on an actual calendar and know exactly what I'm focusing my time on over the next you know, 10 months. So I highly recommend if you haven't vision casted the rest of your 2023 maybe take a moment to really think about what you want to be spending your next 10 months doing and lay out your own version of a roadmap like this for your business your company. Okay, thank you for joining me for another bonus episode. I would love to know which one of these projects that I shared with you in our vision cast are you most excited to participate in? Please send me a DM on Instagram at Miss Ellen Yin or send our whole team a DM at cubicle to CEO and tell us which project are you most excited about? All right, I'll catch you guys in next week's episode. If you are enjoying two doses of cubicle to CEO and your podcast feed every week, will you help support our efforts and continuing to bring you more quality free content by going to ratethispodcast.com/cubicletoCEO and sharing a review for our podcast if you go to rate this podcast.com/cubicle Two The audio, it will allow you to choose which podcast player you want to leave us a review or rating on. It's super easy. It takes less than 30 seconds. You can even leave just a reading without having to write a review. So it's literally as simple as one click but it goes so far and helping us continue to pour into these resources for you. So thank you so much if you choose to do that to support our show, again, the link is ratethispodcast.com/cubicletoCEO. We'll also link it below in the show notes.
