Transcript – Podcast 71

Kris: Hello, and welcome to part two of the essential tech you need to uplevel your customer service and run your graphic design business in 2023. You’re listening to design and prosper episode 71.

[Intro Music]

Kris: Hello.

Don: Hey everybody. Okay, so part two, really it does not matter if you listen to this episode or episode 70 first there’s no run on other than, the two episodes include all of the things that we believe are really essential in running a graphic design business.

So let’s dive back in. Kris.

Kris: the first one for part two that we wanted to talk about was email marketing software.

So why you’d this, you need this to streamline your emails.

Don: make it simple. Have things on repeat, have consistency, have a sexy layout. Yeah, we like that. Include some beautiful graphics into the layout so that you can infuse your brand. So that it’s not so dry.

Kris: Yeah and create community. Yeah. With ease because if you are doing it old school and you’re just descending from Gmail or something like that, and you’re just like blind carbon copying everybody in, that’s, that’s how we used to do things.

Don: Back In the day,

Kris: A long time ago. But some of you might be thinking, well, I don’t really need to invest in email marketing software just yet because I don’t really have an audience that I’m speaking to. But this is the thing, we want you to create the community.

Because that positions you as the leader of that community.

Don: Yeah

Kris: Yeah. and you can start for free

Don: Yeah, absolutely. We really love Flodesk but it doesn’t have a free tier, so be mindful of that. You could try Mailer Light and Mail Chimp and there are so many more. So do your homework and find out which one will fit for you, especially if you are looking for something that is free at the moment.

Kris: And we found that Flodesk has covered all our needs. It’s beautiful, but be mindful also, this is just a little tech side note. That if your email is too image based, it’s likely to end up in spam. It’s more likely to, anyway. So what we find is we always need to start off with text, pure text at the top, just to try and get through those little spam filters with Flodesk. They have some beautiful typographic features, but what happens, just a little caveat. It converts the beautiful typography into image essentially.

Don: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kris: So that does throw the mail servers a little bit and it’s going to be flagged as spam. Yeah. We do not want spam, absolutely not. So just be mindful that.

But we love Flodesk for the backend ease of use. It’s been a few years since we’ve used MailChimp. And it used to be quite convoluted. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but give it a go. We have heard from some of our academy students that Mailer Light is better. Give it all a go sign up for a free trial.Take a look.

Don: Give it a little go and see how you go with it. It’s, it is really, really important for building community.

And um, once you get onto this, you will be really excited and you won’t stop. And like we said, having one of these platforms allows you to have that beautiful, consistent brand experience.

Kris: And start emailing your community consistently.

Don: Doesn’t have to be every week, but just stick, to some kind of regularity. Like every fortnight, every two weeks for those people in the United States, we discovered that fortnight is a more UK, Australian term. Yeah. But every two weeks every month even is, is absolutely ample. Just enough to say, Hey, this is what’s happening in the design industry space. This is what’s happening in the branding space. This is what’s happening in my studio. A lovely little know, love and trust exercise, and they get to know you, and it’s really, really beautiful.

Kris: All right. Next one, is automation software. So something like Zapier.

Don: Yeah, this is just like the biggest game changer for CEOs, solopreneurs, who are needing to get a lot of things done having automation software is so essential,

Kris: Yeah, so essential. Yeah. So a platform like Zapier, essentially, it zaps one task from one platform to another platform.

So an example would be you could set up a Zap so that every time you flag or star or favorite a particular email that’s coming through, it’s going to zap it, send it straight to a place of your choice. So you might send it to your client portal, you might send it to a to-do list.

So it makes it so easy. So essentially, any time your existing software that you’re using isn’t automating in a way that you want it to, chances are Zapier can do it for you.

Don: Yeah. Love it.

Love Zapier so much. It really is game changing. So another example would be as soon as a client pays an invoice. Yes, thank you very much. Mm-hmm. . And they, maybe pay it in Stripe, then that transaction is sent to a spreadsheet. Nice. It’s already done for you. Beautiful. Or you could send up a Zap to send out an automated thank you email to your clients, thank you. Payment received, that beautiful little touchpoint that assures them that their payment has been received. There’s nothing worse than when you don’t know whether your payment has landed, so that is a really. Beautiful, nurturing touchpoint to have, so that that could be a zap you set up.

Kris: Mm. Another example could be as soon as a client comes on board, it creates an event in your calendar, for example. So a reminder or a series of events in your calendar, so it’s just endless. Mm-hmm.

And Zapier has a free tier, so you can do quite a lot on the free plan. Especially if you don’t have a, a high volume of Zap, so it lets you have a certain amount per month on the free plan.

Plus, I think it’s 10. Don’t quote me on that, but I think you can have 10 individual zaps set up.

Don: beautiful. And once you get the hang of it, and once you sort of think, Ooh, that could be a zap, or that could be a zap, things can happen seamlessly, and you’re not relying on yourself to remember those little, little steps in a sequence. It really can be incredibly game changing like we’ve been saying. Game changing. Game changing. We’re going to harp on about that.

And Zapier is going to be even more important if you don’t have a CRM.

Yeah. We talked about CRMs in the first part of this series, so episode 70 and, yes. If you don’t have something that’s sort of already set up and automated where it sends your reminders and it’s got a workflow, it’s going to be really important so you stay on top of tasks. Yeah, absolutely. So CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, software.

Yes. So we talked about that in episode 70. Yeah. All right. The next thing, Google plugins. These are like right there for you to access and are a bit of a no-brainer and super exciting. It could be a little bit of a rabbit hole once you go down into the Google plugins options that are available to us.

Kris: Yeah. So we actually did an episode. Solely on this. It’s way back when it was episode 15. And it’s titled Five Essential Chrome Extensions for Graphic Designers. So, we just wanted to talk about a couple more that we’ve discovered, but definitely go back to listen to that episode because there’s five really good ones in there.

But in this episode, we wanted to specifically zero in on extensions that help with the customer service part things that will help you with the customer service journey. So a couple of ones that we found really helpful. There’s one called Mail Tracker. So if you’ve ever been ghosted, and apologies if this seems really creepy, but every single email marketing software out there has the ability to do this. So you’re being tracked all the time. Right? And it’s all kind of inbuilt.

Don: And people expect it now, really? So it’s less creepy

Kris: it’s less creepy. But if you install Mail Tracker, it allows you to see if people have actually opened an email you’ve sent them.

Especially important if you sent an invoice and it’s being ignored or, or not being paid attention to or not being actioned. Yeah. And you can see, oh, they’ve actually opened that, and you can actually see how many times they’ve opened it as well.

Don: Yeah. Yeah. It’s really powerful stuff. It’s really good intel. Or it might even be you are expecting, some copy from a client and you’ve sent them an, an email and it’s outside of your project management portal that you have, and it’s like a last ditch effort. I’m, I’m going to try you at every avenue to get this information from you. And you send an email and you’ll be able to see whether or not it’s landed. So it really is good to be able to see where everybody is at and keep clients accountable.

Kris: Yeah. another one is the Loom extension. Now we know a lot of you use Loom or something like Loom, so, if you aren’t using it, it just allows you to quickly and easily record videos for your clients. We love things like this for answering questions or where it’s just easier to talk something out rather than having to do a big long email.

Don: Yes, because, if you know us by now, you know that I particularly love my ums and ahs. And I like to have, think about things as I’m speaking about it. And the video experience allows you to answer questions in a really organic way and allows thoughts to drop in. Whereas when you articulate something in the written sense, you have to be really clear. It has precise. Comprehension is really important. So we have loom on the ready as an extension because it is a quick and easy way to allow really your rapid thought to happen without censoring yourself. You know? It really does level up your efficiencies

Kris: Yeah. You don’t have to think about grammar at the sentence structure and is this clear and yeah, and just talking it out. And Donna just said she likes to use her, um, and ahs and I was just about to say, well, you might not know that because our editor, cuts them out. There might be still a few in there. I do it too. I think we all do.

Don: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so here’s a couple, especially for our Trello users. So there is Trello card history. Now, this one has saved us quite a few times now actually, hasn’t it, Kris? That it essentially, if you accidentally delete text out of a card, you can go back and you can see exactly at what point that text disappeared. So who was on the card? Donna was there.

Donna was there and something dodgy happened and, and then the information is missing so we can track it back and we can work out exactly where it went missing and we can usually rectify it Oh yeah.

Kris: Yeah. It’s been amazing, yeah, because there’s been a bit of a panic, but with the Trello card history, you can see every single version of the changes.

Don: Yeah. In fact, the truth behind us knowing about this extension, let’s just go there. My hand is fully up, full ownership. I was the one who accidentally deleted out really critical information.

You know, I was on a roll, thought I was doing great work. Let’s just say, I am not the best admin assistant and I deleted it out and, and Kris was like, super calm under the pressure going, it’s okay. Let’s just find out if we can track this thing and there it was. Unbelievable. So that’s a really a go-to that we love now. Now it’s like there’s no pressure. Yeah. Like Donna can go rogue anytime because we’ll just track it down, and work out where she did that. Yeah. Lo and behold, there was a Google Chrome extension, for this and so we’re talking specifically Trello here. Which we’re sure by now, you know, we love, you would have similar things for the other major players. There would be, plugins and things just to help you out a little bit more.

Kris: Another one is you can send, it’s called Send to Trello plugin, and you can add it to your bookmarks bar and send any website page to a Trello board of your choice. So that’s really handy as well. So if you want to save something for later. Oh, I really love this. It just makes it go to a dedicated place. And we know there’s other ways of doing this with other extensions and things like that, but if you are working in something like Trello, really handy for it to go where it’s actually meant go.

Don: Yeah, and it’s time efficiencies again. And that’s what we want in this whole studio client management experience for everything to be seamless. So Google plugins, you know, chrome extensions, go and check it out. You will be lost for a little while, so make yourself a cup of tea. You’ll find lots of beautiful things in there that are going to make your life so much easier.

Kris: All right. The next one on our list of essential tech is to have a card payment facility.

Don: Mm. Essential. Mm-hmm. Capital E, it really is the one of the most important things that you need to do right now. If you don’t have it already.

Kris: Yeah,

Don: yeah. Go do it.

Kris: Yeah.

Don: do this one. Yeah.

Kris: So you need this, you need this to make it easy for clients to pay you. It needs to be the path of least resistance.

Make sure that they can pay with ease, whether it be through PayPal, stripe, or whatever it is. Gone are the days where it’s just cheque or direct deposit. You need to be able to give people this option. Businesses are always shuffling around funds as well, and they might just want to stick a whole bunch on their credit card and that might be for reasons that you haven’t even even considered, like it might be because they’re trying to rack up some frequent flyer points or, they might be, um, wanting to keep some of their funds in like a high interest, savings account or something.

So just going to put it on the credit card for 30 days and then do a little account swappy. So definitely, definitely if you want to get paid and you want to get paid quickly, you need to have a card payment facility.

Don: Yeah, absolutely. And remember that it is not for you to assume how clients can afford you, how they’re going pay their bills. Don’t assume anything. Like Kris said, you’ve got no idea what’s happening behind the scenes and so what we need to do is just make it as easy as possible for them to pay. Hence the card payment facility. So we use Dubsado, but you can set up payments and invoices directly within Stripe and PayPal. Yeah, just make that happen.

Kris: Don’t leave it to the last minute to set up, because, I think it’s for both Stripe and PayPal and I’m sure all the others, you need to, allow a couple of days for them to verify your account and they’ll do a little, you know, a little account transfer, a little bit of money will land in your account.

Don: Like a few cents. Yeah. It’s nominal. Yeah. And, then you confirm that little deposit and they make sure that it’s all up and running properly and that they are dealing with the right person and it’s working in and out.

Kris: So don’t be sending an invoice on Friday and think I’m going to set up my credit card facility on Friday.

Don: Don’t do that

Kris: And some of the pushback we get with designers on this is the percentage that is taken from the credit card company, and honestly, it’s just a cost of business. Try not to think about it as, oh, I’m losing you know, 1% or 3%, or whatever it is.

Just include it in your running costs. Include it in your proposals. It doesn’t have to be disclosed. You don’t have to say, here’s the 3% on top. It’s just part of your proposal cost. It’s part of your estimate. Just allow your business to absorb it. Your business can absorb that 2%-3% for the benefit of having quick payments and better cash flow.

All right, next one. We would love you to have a survey or a questionnaire software of some sort. So you need this, because as a designer, you need to get essential feedback from non-buyers, so people who haven’t purchased from you, and also clients who have recently finished a project with you.

Don: Yeah.

Kris: So the software that you can use for something like this, there’s Typeform, it’s free for the first 10 responses per month, and you can have a, a pretty extensive form with that. I think it’s 10 questions on the free plan. You could be as simple as Google Forms, that’s totally free, not as pretty.

Don: Yeah.

Kris: Not as aesthetically pleasing as we designers would like.

Don: Yes. Yep. That’s it. But It works. It, it works.

You know, Typeform is great because 10 questions is enough. I wouldn’t want to answer any more than 10 questions, so it’s enough and it’s pretty. So really do investigate that. But the why behind this one is really important for essential feedback, absolutely. But that feedback is such important intel into how you operate your business moving forward. So why didn’t somebody, have a full body yes experience and go with you? Why didn’t they? That’s a really good question. We want to know why. We want to know where we can address any gaps. We want to know if there’s anything we can tweak or we want to discover via this beautiful feedback form. That it’s okay. It’s just a no for now. But it’s not a no for always.

Kris: If you have any projects that you’ve quoted on and you’ve had a no or a ghosting and you have no idea why, absolutely one thing that you need to do as soon as possible is send out a survey request. Just see why. Find out why.

Don: We need that validation as well to check in and make sure that we don’t have any gaps in our process and the other side of it, really important why you need feedback after a project is to gather your beautiful testimonials and social proof. It’s imperative, especially in the landscape that of the business world today. Everybody wants to see a little bit of social proof.

They all want to know who have you worked with and was it successful for them? They want to know from the people that you’ve done the work for, that they were really happy. So there’s a priority list with this.

And the first on the priority list is a video testimonial. That video testimonial is, is everything because you can’t really mess with it. It’s really raw, it’s really honest. It shows integrity because you can’t really mess with that too much and you certainly can’t be making it up because the person is speaking into a camera. That can be transferred into audio that can also then be transferred into a written form. With a photograph.

Kris: But it all starts with the questionnaire.

Don: Yeah. All comes from there.

Kris: Yeah. So we always start with a questionnaire and then if somebody said some really interesting things, then we go further. We go one step further and say, hey, that was so beautiful what you said there could you send us a video with these kinds of things that you said? And Would you be able to hop on a call with us? that’s where it starts.

Don: Yeah. absolutely.

Kris: Okay, so the next one on the list is writing software. So why you need this, it’s to make writing easier, to have the smallest barrier of entry possible because we know how hard it is to create content. So we need to make it easy we need you people to be writing.

Don: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing is we want to be attracting premium prices, so we want to make sure that our communication, our messaging is on point. It’s clear, and it has a high level of comprehension, and we’ve got some tools, some tech that are going to help with that this tech has been game changing for Kris and I.

We use it and we love it and we check in with it. So the first one is Hemingway. Kris introduced our business to Hemingway, and boy, we haven’t looked back since that day. It was like a, what is this amazing tool, and it’s all about readability.

And I think in a, in a digital landscape where we’ve got but seconds to attract our clients, to get them to read more, to get past the fold on a website, we really need to have a high level of readability and Hemingway does that for us. So yeah, check it out

Kris: Yeah, it’s really great because it’ll tell you at what level the piece of writing is being comprehended at So it really helps with the readability. You just copy and paste your text in there and it’ll tell you, it has a little color key to tell you whether it’s good or not. It doesn’t do the writing for you.

It’s not artificial intelligence writing, we’ll talk about in a moment. But it’s so helpful and it helps you to write like that in the future, no matter where you’re writing, even if you’re not using Hemingway, it helps you to write clearer, more concise, easier to digest material, because people they just don’t have the time or space. They don’t have the brain space. I think we’ve talked about Hemingway on some other podcast episodes. But this double series that we’re doing, is all about putting everything in the one spot so you can just go to the blog posts and find all the tech in one spot. Yeah.

Don: Yeah, and it has been essential for our business really, ever since we discovered it. Then there is Grammarly. We’ve all heard of Grammarly. It’s a good one. It’s a good go-to.

Kris: Yeah. So Grammarly, you know, you can have the Chrome plugin as well for that. It’s different to Hemingway, both are really good to have. So Grammarly is really great for sure that you are spelling things correctly. It’s good for, it’s good for tone and understanding how the tone is coming across, but, Hemingway’s so good at clarity and honestly, I don’t always agree with what Grammarly says.

Don: same with Hemingway. Sometimes you have to. You are the writer, you are the author. It is not artificial intelligence. So that’s underlined. It is not. You do have to step up and you are the author of whatever it is you’re writing.

However it does give you all of those things that we’ve talked about. So, be prepared not to agree with it at times and be prepared to be astounded by the way that it will level up your communication. So, you know, it’s one of those tools that you have to use, and the more you use it, the more experience you have with it, the better you’ll get at using it and preempting what’s going to happen, like Kris said.

writing now we write differently because we are really clear on comprehension and how that needs to be read and that readability. Hemingway has been really powerful. And Grammarly, again, different app, will do similar things.

Kris: Well Grammarly hasn’t really made my writing better. Hemingway really leveled up my writing and gave me such confidence in what I was writing. You know, I had the Grammarly plug in for years, but it hasn’t really had the same impact that Hemmingway had. So if you’ve got Grammarly, also get Hemingway and just have a play. See what happens.

Don: Yeah, absolutely. Which leads us to the artificial intelligence apps which are absolutely a force to be reckoned with at the moment in every field all over the world.

Kris: Have you been playing with them?

Don: Let us know. I’d love to know. Like I’m fascinated by it. It’s a conversation that is happening in schools at the moment. It’s happening in industry. It’s happening globally. You know, this whole movement that’s happening with artificial intelligence.

Kris: Some people frightened of it. Other people are embracing it. Really interesting. But one thing that the AI is really good at, and you can use like ChatGPT, there’s Jounce, there’s so many specific, niche, kind of AI software and platforms coming up all the time. It’s really blowing our minds in terms of, brainstorming coming up with ideas and not necessarily writing the whole thing, you know, just maybe a starting point if you are really struggling to get started. It’s such a good starting point But just keep in mind it can be robotic and it can be, um, depending on how you play with it and use it. I know that, for example, Jounce, if you use Jounce you can say things like, make it bolder, make it more fun, you know, you can do things like that to sort of play up on it. But there’s just nothing like the intuition of a human brain.

Don: Yeah, yeah. It’s it’s irreplaceable. And we were having a chat in the academy, one of the academy QnA sessions, I think that we will dedicate a separate podcast to this whole movement that’s happening at the moment and, and those who are embracing it and those who are challenged by it.

But this conversation was happening and the thing that we all agreed on is that, that humanistic element, rightly so, because you know, robots are doing the writing for us, that humanistic and warmth, that warmth wasn’t there. So you do have to be mindful that you have to take the driver’s seat. You have to be the author and be inspired by, and collaborate with, but don’t expect the end result to be the final result. There will need to be a little bit of pushing and playing. I think so. That’s our opinion at the moment. You know, I’m sure that that’s going to get more highly tuned and more fine tuned as as the time goes on. We’re in, we’re in very new ground at the moment, so you know, when anything is in beta, there’s always room for improvement,

Kris: Yeah. And the fact that it’s being used so much now, it’s getting smarter and smarter every time. It’s new data every minute, every second. It’s getting new data and it’s getting cleverer and cleverer. So have a play with it. Use that as a brainstorming tool, but if you are having some trouble with some emails, or you are having trouble, coming up with content, give it a go as a starting point.

We just need you to just be very mindful that the heart and soul might not be there. just to tweak it and put yourself, put your brand voice into it.

Don: Yeah. That’s right.

Kris: So the last one we wanted to talk about is to have some sort of messaging app. So we are talking about a messaging app that is separate to all the messaging apps you are using in your personal life. We want you to have a business dedicated messaging app.

Don: Imagine Kris and I doing cartwheels about this one. It’s really important to separate your personal life out from your business

Kris: Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So we use Voxer for this. It’s a walkie talkie style app. It, you know, you can leave messages, they can hear in real time.

You can send text messages, images all the rest of it. I guess it’s kind of similar to other things. Like if you have, you know, your iPhone and you’re sending a, a message to somebody, you can do the audio and all that sort of thing, but that keeps it in your personal life.

Don: Right? Get it out of there.

Love it. Love it. Get it out of there. It’s so, so important. In fact, if you want to test Voxer have a go at Voxer test it on us. We have a Voxer account. You’ll find us under Design and Prosper. Just search for Design and Prosper on the Voxer app and test it out on us.

Go in there and have a play and send us your podcast questions and you know, that’ll be so cool to receive podcast questions as an audio and just give us permission if you don’t mind, for us to use your audio. It’ll be really great to pop your audio onto our podcast as the question and then we’ll answer the question.

So, just make sure you give us permission to do that. We’d really love that.

Kris: We don’t have to include your name or anything but we’d just love to hear from our community.

Don: Yeah. Yeah. I’m excited by that, Kris. That’ll be so fun.

Kris: So why you need this? We talked about that you need it to keep your client correspondence out of your personal messaging.

Don: Yes. Isn’t that not enough reason why people?

Kris: Yeah. Seriously. There’s more though.

Don: But wait, there’s more.

Kris: But it’s also about that thing we were talking about before where writing is harder than just having a little voice note somewhere.

Don: A hundred percent. Yeah.

Kris: Yeah. So that’s really important just for streamlining a process. And also your clients might prefer it. Yeah. You know, give them the option and we funnel ours through our client portal, so they actually find our Voxer details through our client portal. So it’s in addition, our one-to-one clients have that option.

They have unlimited access to us via Voxer. So think about having that, but you can set the parameters around it as well. I’m open for Voxer conversations from this time to this time. On this day between Monday and Wednesday or whatever it is, you can set the parameters around it, but we find it’s really helpful to be able to have a different way to communicate like that.

Don: Yeah.

Kris: You could even link some sort of messaging app to your website if people want to leave a, message on your website.

Which brings us to, this is slightly different, but there’s a software called Video Ask, which is brought out by the people who created Typeform and it’s really great. We, we really recommend you have it on your website. We’re going to do it. So you got to hold us accountable because next time you look at our website, we should have a type form on there.

Don: Yes. Except if you’re listening to this, this week, then we might not.

Kris: Okay. Maybe in like three weeks.

Don: At the time of recording this podcast three weeks time, you can hold us accountable.

Kris: You can hold accountable because we want to have a little video on there, which essentially you record a video. It can be just on your phone and you upload it to Typeform and then you embed it on your website and it becomes like an interactive question and answer thing.

So it can be as simple as, Hey there, what can I help you with today? Is it branding or is it long form documents or is it illustration? Or whatever it is and then it can be that they click on the response and then after that you will have some options for them to choose their own adventure

basically. So it’s just this lovely little touchpoint where they see your face and we love that saying and we don’t know who to attribute it to. So, sorry if you’re listening and it was you.

Don: highly likely Kris.

Kris: It’s face is your fortune and I know a lot of designers hide behind your beautiful work, but just putting your face out there because they’re going to get on a zoom with you anyway. Right? They’re going to see your face or they’re going to meet with you in person.

Don: yeah.

Kris: So just having that beautiful touchpoint of your face saying hello and welcome. Yeah. When they lean on your website, it’s It’s so engaging. Honestly. it’s an easy level up. This type of thing. Yeah. So give it a go. Investigate that and um, we’ll lead by example. Yes. let you know how we go with that. Yeah. We’ll tell you how easy it is in a couple of episodes time.

Yeah, but it really humanizes the experience and that’s what we want. That’s, that’s how we’re going to fight the bots. People. We need to be even more human. Yes.

Don: We need to visible. We need to be there. We need to be real, almost tangible and yeah, absolutely. I like that, Kris. That’s a beautiful way of looking at it.

Kris: So if you are feeling lost about any of this tech we’ve mentioned, we cover all of this in our design business school, the academy and it is a collective of beautiful, brilliant minds.

Don: Oh, it really is. So exciting.

Kris: Our student community is always sharing new software, new tech, and we get so excited about it’s super helpful. They’re just a beautiful, helpful bunch and so visit our website to see when the next round starts at the time of recording this. Our first week is 29th of May, 2023. It’s Australian Eastern Standard Time that Monday, and that’s when the first module drops. And we do a 12 week cycle.

Don: So no matter when you join, you have lifetime access. Yeah. And this is something that we really want to shout to the rooftops about, it’s not just for the 12 weeks, you get access to us for the 12 weeks that you join, then the next 12 weeks and the next and the next, and the next. It is never ending for the life of the academy, and we don’t plan on going anywhere, anytime too soon. So when you think about that, you have each calendar year doesn’t matter when you join, when the year kicks over again because you have, evergreen access to the academy.

Each year we will be running the Academy three times and each time you will have 12 week lot of access to your mentors. So that’s nine months of the year. You will have access to us as your coaches and mentors in the Q&A session. And that’s on repeat.

That’s 2023, 2024, 2025. As soon as you join, you will have this annual access for one entry price. It’s never ending. The sooner you get on board the more access you’ll have to us. It’s really, really exciting. And I, and that doesn’t land all the time. Yeah. And Kris and I have this conversation sort of on the weekly, we’re like, it needs to land, we need, we need our beautiful academy community to understand that you have ongoing access to us. It is one of the biggest secret sauces of the experience with us.

Kris: Yes. Because you’ve got the 12 modules, right? They’re dripped weekly. You start and then there’s 12 weeks and you get one a week.

Don: And then we often have our academy people go, oh, we’re going to miss you, do we still get access? And

Kris: we’re like, it’s lifetime. For A lifetime of the Yeah. You course. Yeah.

Don: Aren’t you coming back?

Kris: Yeah. We’ll miss you if you don’t come back

Don: And they’re like, really? I get to do this again and again and again. And we have had academy members come back in again and again and again, especially at different points that, you know, that might have been challenging for them in their business. They’re like, oh, I need a little bit more feedback, or, I’d like to run this past Kris and Don and then they’ll come into the QnA and ask a question and, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s just so exciting to have access to two design business brains as you set up your business for that much time every year. It’s really like, you know? For one investment. Yeah. Yeah. We have so many Academy people scratching their heads saying, why don’t you charge more. The academy is getting bigger and better and more beautiful and more abundant each time. So the value is increasing, so the value will increase in time, but whatever that investment is when you join, that’s it. That’s it. For the lifetime.

Kris: Yeah.

Because, you know, you could go to a business school and then have to figure it out for the rest of your business career. Or you could join the academy, get all the business resources, and then have ongoing mentorship.

Don: Yeah.

And Updates Yeah and updates to resources. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we, oh, that could be better. We make it better. Or we get some feedback from some brilliant soul in the academy going, have you thought about adding this feature to that particular worksheet, and we’re like, no, we hadn’t. And yes, we will.

And then it’s updated and then you have access to the new updates as well. So it’s, as the academy grows, as the resources get better, you will have access to them and you’ll have access to that intel.

Kris: Yes, so, definitely go and check it out. We are limiting the next round to 30 people only because we want to make sure that we are growing sustainably so that you do get the support that you need. We love the, the community aspect of the academy. It’s so important to us and it’s so important that your questions get answered.

Don: Yeah. It’s big. It’s a big deal, and we don’t want to lose sight of that. .

Kris: That brings us to the end of this episode. Check out podcast 70 if you haven’t. And see the rest of the tech and check out the links, all the links will be in the show notes. Yes. that we mentioned.

Don: See you next time!

Kris: Okay, bye!