Launch Lessons – Hiring Mastery Workshop

As you’re about to see, there are some pretty big lessons in here for me to improve my launches in future, so it’s already proven to be a useful exercise.

(The real big lesson is at the end today.)

Let me know if you enjoy this and I’ll do it every month.

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Sidenote…

If you missed the Hiring Mastery workshop, the recording is available for 50% off until Sunday night.

Price will double on Monday.

Click here to grab the offer

Background On The Workshops

So, this year, I’m running “deep-dive” workshops on specific topics relevant to online education entrepreneurs.

February was on finance.

March was on one-person businesses.

This week was on hiring.

I didn’t want to make courses, so I decided to try the live workshop format instead:

• specific topics / high utility
• high energy for me
• opportunity for live Q&A

Since “free” is often very expensive, I’m charging for the workshops, but it’s just a flat $100 to keep things simple.

Having a price tag means they get good attendance and great engagement.

I’m aiming to create 12 workshops in total. You can read about the rationale for this, and how it fits into my growth plans, in this article here.

Numbers From This Week’s Workshop

Here’s how Hiring Mastery did:

• Sales: 81
• Gross Revenue: $9,900
  • Main product: $8,100
  • Bump/OTO Revenue: $1,800 (18% of total)
• Audience segment: 15,583
• Conversion to list: 0.52%
• $ per email subscriber: $0.64
• Unsubscribes: 286
• $ per unsubscribe: $35

For comparison, here’s what my previous workshops did:

- 7-Figure Marketing Stack: $11,683
- Financial Zen: $9,500
- One-Person Empire: $16,300

(These were the live launch numbers. They've done a lot more on evergreen.)

Initial Thoughts

Here are some basic observations from this.

1) Conversion

Firstly, I’m not aiming for maximisation with these workshops. At all.

You can see from the numbers that the one beginner-focused workshop I ran (One-Person Empire) made far more money, which makes sense as any audience tends to skew to beginner.

But that’s not the core audience I’m trying to serve or build. (More on that here)

So, I’m consciously avoiding “cash cow” topics, in order to focus on my target audience, which is 6-7 figure entrepreneurs looking to scale, hence topics like finance and hiring.

I’m fine with making less money as a consequence, and with the dismal conversion to the list of 0.52%, too, because I’m more concerned with serving my hyper-targeted avatar.

2) Upsells

On the order bump and upsell, I’m simply offering previous workshops at 50% off.

For Hiring Mastery, 18% of revenue, or $1,800 came from the order bump and upsell.

If this was a marketing funnel, I’d be looking for much higher numbers here.

But even without any optimisation whatsoever, these upsells still contribute almost 20% of revenue – so just a good reminder of the importance of adding these elements in.

(Part of my goal of creating 12 workshops is to eventually be able to offer a “mega bundle” – e.g. all 12 workshops for $800 (30% off), which will make for a more powerful upsell. All in good time.)

3) Pricing

$100 is very cheap.

I’m pretty sure I could package the exact same information into a course, sell for $1,000 and make $50k+ from the launch.

But I don’t want to.

Even so…

If I was mentoring someone with this as their main business, I would make the obvious point that you could charge a lot more and instantly 2-3X your business.

Just sayin’…

4) Unsubscribes

I lost 2% of the list, or 286 people, to unsubscribes during this launch.

That’s great.

If people don’t want to learn the stuff I’m teaching, it’s better they’re not on the list anyway.

I calculate I made $35 for each person who unsubscribed – which is awesome!

Email, Angle and Copy

This is the meaty bit, because it’s all about “What makes people buy?”

Here are the emails that made sales.

(Ignoring first and last day, because that skews the analysis.)

Winning emails

• How I took 26 days off last month (and my biz grew) (12)
• Doing 5-10 jobs yourself? here’s how to fix it fast (10)
• Is your business “unhireable” for? (10)

Losing emails

• The secret to hiring without paying recruiter fees (6)
• My dream hire walked out on me (2)

(# of sales in brackets)

In the winning emails that made sales, what I see is that they play directly into the PAIN of working too much and not having any free time.

e.g. “I’m doing 10 people’s jobs… I can’t take a day off… I want to work 6 days a month!”

These are very real pain points.

The losing emails on the other hand are…

Meh.

Take it or leave it.

Yes… there’s curiosity in there, and the promise of “secrets”…

But it just doesn’t play into the pain people feel around being an overworked entrepreneur.

So the big lesson here is:

Keep all my emails focused on pain/problem > solution.

So then I look at the sales page, and what do I see?

Well, it’s focused on two things:

• Aspiration for working 6 days a month
• Why hiring goes wrong

So, while I have focused on problem > solution… it’s not the TRUE pain.

The true pain is: “I’m overwhelmed and burnt out”.

Remember – this is the angle that worked best on the emails.

So, although the sales page converted at 6.5%, which is good, do I think it probably underperformed by failing to hit the true, underlying pain point around hiring.

I might rewrite it to test the theory.

But the takeaway for me next time is:

Just like emails:

Keep the sales page focused on the deep, underlying pain or problem.

Mistakes

So many of the sales happened on the first and last day:

This is completely normal.

However, I did receive a few comments along the lines of:

“I didn’t even realise you were running a workshop!”

I had a look back over the emails and realised that I didn’t call out the workshop in any of the subject lines… or even in the intros to emails.

In fact, the first time I even mentioned the workshop in the subject line / email intro was on the second email on the last day!

This was a mistake.

I should have:

1. Done a “New Workshop!” email on day 1
2. Made the “DEADLINE” email earlier on the last day

Silly old Olly.

A good reminder of the importance of having SOPs and sticking to them.

Overall

All in all, pretty pleased.

Most of all, the workshop was fantastic, entirely thanks to Noel, my guest.

We had quite a few $1-3m businesses on the call, and some great discussion around:

• running interviews
• onboarding
• sourcing great candidates

And my personal favourite…

The “Greatest Job Post In The World!”

(This was knockout!)

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Anyway, was this useful?

Hit reply and let me know, or if you have any questions.

Lastly, if you’d like to grab a copy of the workshop, you can get it for 50% off until Sunday night:

ollyrichards.co/hiring

Meanwhile, in Hobbitshire…

Things be bootiful right now.

When the sun’s out, I really think this is one of the best places in the world to be.

Grateful that I’ve designed my business the way I have, so that I can actually be outside when the weather is as glorious as it is!

Yesterday evening was a special one…

I took my daughter out to practise riding her bike in the evening sun, and she finally cracked it!

That magical moment where her confidence in her balance passed the tipping point – she was off like a rocket!

So proud.

Anyway, that’s it for today.

Some changes coming to this newsletter in the weeks to come, but that’s a story for another day.