EXPERTISE TO INCOME: Lesson 5 - Case Study: Jill, a Pastry Chef Turned Stay-at-Home Mom Turned One-Person Business Owner & Rock Star
Welcome to Expertise To Income™ from BarryBazMorris.com.
This is a free 6-lesson mini-course that provides you with an overview of the concepts behind starting a one-person digital business offering a specific type of product—your authoritative 6-lesson mini-course, based on what you already know well and delivered via email.
LESSON 5 - Case Study: Jill, a Pastry Chef Turned Stay-at-Home Mom Turned One-Person Business Owner & Rock Star
Today's lesson is inspirational.
It's the tale of Jill, a young woman who trained as a pastry chef and was quite successful. However, when she and her husband started a family, Jill needed a better solution than returning to restaurant work.
Jill has two young kids who keep her busy.
She took time off from her career as a pastry chef to stay at home with her kids. She and her husband decided together, but soon, a bit of a money crunch occurred.
While her husband fully supported Jill staying home with the children, they felt the burden of stretching their income to cover the increasing expenses now that both children are in diapers.
Jill looked at ways to generate extra income, but nothing she evaluated struck her as true to her personality. She wanted something that wouldn’t add stress, had a short learning curve, and didn’t require her to learn a new career.
She wanted to use her knowledge as a pastry chef to generate extra income. Jill always loved taking photographs of the pastries she prepared, and her Instagram account was that of a foodie who made even the most complicated desserts effortless works of art.
Of course, it took Jill years to learn and develop her skills as a pastry chef, so it seemed logical to tap into what she already knew was her most meaningful work to generate an additional revenue stream for her family.
Jill started small with a no-cost blog on WordPress.com. She found a free theme that worked for her and started a blog for stay-at-home moms who loved to cook pastries. Yes, there is such a market. Who knew?
Over a few months, she had hundreds of stay-at-home moms, dads, and even business executives who love cooking and eating pastries sign up for her free blog and the PDF of her 10 Favorite Summertime Recipes she offered as an incentive.
Monetization
Wanting to monetize her efforts, she used ‘the simple formula’ by hosting an evergreen subscription newsletter for $19/month. It seemed a modest price, and she thought it was fair for what she offered in the subscription:
There are two original pastry recipes per month, with color photos and a brief video instruction covering the tricky parts—nothing fancy, just her iPhone on a portable tripod capturing how she performed each step.
An attractively formatted PDF of each recipe and instructions suitable for printing for placing into a binder or notebook.
A free monthly 60-minute Zoom call for subscribers to ask questions and get answers.
Jill was surprised when her first blog post describing the program resulted in 30 people on her free subscription list signing up for the $19/month offer.
After another blog post about the program, she converted 25 more free subscribers into paying subscribers. She quickly did the math and realized that she had 55 people in her subscription program.
Her new formula looked like this:
55p x 19d x 12m = $12,540 (an extra $1,045 per month her family didn’t previously have)
Over the next six months, with the addition of more promotional blog posts, she saw 43 additional sign-ups. Word spread via social media, and moms told other moms about it, etc.
Now, her simple formula looked like this:
98p x 19d x 12m = $22,344 (an extra $1,862 per month she didn’t have before)
Jill saw some subscribers drop out while others added, as she expected. She was becoming wise in Internet commerce and didn’t take it personally.
She marketed more aggressively, and her numbers continued to grow.
When she published her $15 downloadable pastry cookbook with all the recipes to date, she sold over 120 copies to both new and existing free subscribers.
In two weeks, she generated an additional $1,800. She now offers the pastry cookbook as a free bonus to new subscribers to her subscription program.
Jill has no plans to stop creating new recipes for her digital subscribers. They love her recipes and love having access to her on each monthly video call.
She’s since set up a private Facebook page for her group so members can share photos of their creations. The community is thriving, and members support one another.
Jill loves being a stay-at-home pastry chef who contributes to her family’s financial well-being.
Jill's a rockstar, for sure. However, her experience wasn't a fluke. She understood the formula put in good old-fashioned hard work. Her success didn't happen overnight.
Jill’s story proves that packaging what you know is the most powerful one-person business you can imagine. It blows the socks off learning to sell household goods or weight-loss products.
Think about it. What automatically created Jill’s potential for success? She packaged what she already knew and did the work required. By packaging what we already knew, she projected expertise, authenticity, and personal authority to her readers. With that in place, she helped others and generated revenue while sharing her experience.
What about you?
Are you starting to think about your experience and expertise and how you might be the next Jill?
The final lesson in this free mini-course is about what it takes regarding technology and training.
Specifically, you'll learn about:
Email capture, lists, and delivery
Payment processors
Making your first offer, and…
Growing your offers to include multiple subscriptions