Tash Corbin is a business mentor and coach who specialises in helping women with lean start-up businesses and finding marketing and sales strategies that really align with their strengths.
She’s very passionate about helping women to find the right niching so they can craft a really resonant messaging and offers that are going to convert really well with their audience and marketing strategies that work for them.
Full Transcript
Bev: Hello and welcome everybody. It is so exciting that we are at number three in our wise woman in business series. And I am so grateful that I have beautiful businesswoman to connect with and draw on their amazing wisdom.
So today, I would love to welcome Tash Corbin. So Tash and I have a fairly long history together because when I started my online business I was looking for somebody who had some nous around corporate people too. And she was a perfect match. So welcome to you Tash.
Tash: Thank you Bev. It is so exciting to be here.
Bev: Let’s kick off because maybe not everybody knows you in my audience. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your business. What it is that you do.
Tash: Yeah, so I specialise in helping women with lean start-up businesses and finding marketing and sales strategies that really align with their strengths. I am very passionate about helping women to find the right niching so they can craft a really resonant messaging and offers that are going to convert really well with their audience and marketing strategies that work for them. I have been in business since 2013 and I also run the Heart-Centred Business Conference, which we try to have every year. COVID pending. And the next one is in March 2021.
Bev: Yeah. I am so looking forward to that. I did not even bother to change my accommodation. I just said to the lady "We are not coming now, but we all could be coming sometime".
Tash: Love it.
Bev: Yes, so that is exciting. And so Tash, today we want to talk about your journey with technology and how you went. So tell us about your first online experience and how did that turn out for you?
Tash: Okay, so I am actually going to tell you to always like to sneak in an extra one. So in my first experience of online business was when a friend of mine from University, Denise Duffield Thomas had her online business. And she used to run webinars, but they were on an instant teleseminar. So you used to phone in and then everyone was on the phone together and you had to remember like star, twenty-two, hash to unmute yourself and all sorts of things like it was so painful. But I was just so hungry to learn about money mindset and the things that she was teaching.
So I was always showing up on these instant teleseminar calls. And they used to cost a fortune because they often did not have an Australian number you had to call a U.S. number, or you had to call an Indonesian number or some random number in order to be able to get online. So that was actually my first experience of an online business.
My first experience is having my own online business were assuming, I needed to have the world's fanciest website. And that would do all the work for me and did not really work. I basically set up a really beautiful shop in the quietest street, in the quietest town, and did not tell anyone about it. And I was sitting there at my shop waiting for people to come and buy things from me and no one turned up, of course. So that was my first foray, I think into online business, especially with the technology side and quickly learnt I have to go and get my own traffic that does not just magically come to me.
Bev: And that is so true because we think that the website is the starting point.
Tash: Yeah.
Bev: We could even have just a Facebook business page. So if we work out our niche first and then once we really know who we talking to, we put the money into it. That is just classic. So Tash, in terms of your business now, if we fast forward and we have got you in my feed everywhere. Let us be honest. So we know that you are very active in the social media space as well and obviously in my inbox. And how does your business leverage technology to really get the outcomes that you want today?
Tash: Yeah, I would say that technology is one of the backbones of my business and it is why I am able to run the business the way that I do. So for those who are not aware, I am currently living in New Zealand. I moved here for my dog. I have this backdrop that I take with me everywhere. I have been pretty much a mobile entrepreneur since 2014 and we have had some extended stint stay in several places, but I would not be able to do this business 20 years ago.
There is just no way. Technology is the reason why I can work with women all over the world. I can talk to you now and do this interview. I can be making money in my sleep and have payments come in. I can pre-schedule up all of my social media posts onto Facebook. And so therefore when I show up, it is me showing up and being really present with my audience not trying to remember I have this thing that I needed to talk about on Wednesday or whatever it might be.
It is so pervasive like it is everything. It is the entire reason why I have a business is because we are so fortunate to have the technology solutions we have now. And I am able to run our businesses in such a beautiful way. The first online course I ever purchased, then the second online course I would purchase, I had to post a cheque to the United States because that was the only way you could pay her. As I talked about like instant teleseminars.
Just people complaining about paying $10 a month for a technology tool or something right these days. Before, all of the tools that we had now, the only real webinar platform was GoToWebinar and it was $197 a month at the base level. When I first started my business and people like "Nah, why would I pay $20 a month to Zoom". I was like, "Oh my gosh if you only knew how far the technology has come and how far these platforms have come for us and how much easier it is these days".
So if there is a technology solution and I have to pay a little coin for it. I am all for it because I know how much time and energy it saves me and how much it is responsible for my business. Not only growing but also being able to deliver to my clients and help them achieve what they want to achieve without me having to ask them to post me a cheque.
Bev: That is amazing. In fact that it even got there probably is more amazing today. So what are some of the lynchpins of your technology that you're running the business with?
Tash: Yeah, so I would say my website is my online home. So that is definitely a big part of it these days. And my website is split between two platforms. So I have a WordPress website and then I also use Kartra which is all of my sales pages, my courses, my mailing list opt-in forms freebees. All of those sorts of things are housed there. So I am between two platforms, but it is fairly seamless between the two these days.
So that is like the core, like online home that I have. Then Facebook is my main traffic source. So I have my Facebook page and I also have a group called Heart-Centred Soul Driven Entrepreneurs. And those two spaces are really where I go out and get the most traffic at this point in time. And I use a combination of organic strategies and I normally use Facebook ads but at the moment, I am on a 90-day at hiatus. Having some fun with organic growth strategy for the moment.
Bev: You are fasting from ads?
Tash: I am fasting. Yeah, I am on an ads fast until the end of September. I am doing a little bit of an experiment to see what impact that had on my organic reach, my business growth, and then when I bring ads back, how that impacts on ads as well because I have heard a few whispers about people taking breaks from ads and then how much cheaper their ads are when they come back and I am willing to put in this little experimental time.
I love being really present and connected with my audience. So it is no biggie to me to take the ads out and then we will see what happens when I bring them back. So yeah. They are really the main ones I of course you Zoom for a bunch of things as well. So VIP client sessions, group calls, and I did use Zoom for webinars up until about six months ago, and I have moved to Live Webinar for my webinars now.
Bev: Yeah, it is amazing that the tools that you have listed there and when you talk about things like learning platforms, I think I have been through three already.
Tash: Yep.
Bev: So one of the things that I want to just share at this point because you are talking about working between two main areas, your website and Kartra. Is that one of the best pieces of advice I was given in the early days is do not store your videos on the platform that you are using now because very few people stay on that platform.
Tash: Yep.
Bev: So it is always better to embed those videos. And if you do not know what I am talking about happy to have a chat with you about that. But if you think now of what is one tool that you just cannot be without you. It is just not negotiable. What would that be?
Tash: Mine would be Facebook because I am a social person and connection with my audience is my number one priority. And so I would not give away Facebook for the world. So many times, they have been so many faces over the last seven years being in business where people say Facebook's dead moved to another platform, Facebook sucks blah blah blah.
And I have stuck with Facebook because I love it. I love that I can have my own space on my page, but also a shared space with my group and being in other people's groups as well. It still has like, the leading number of users consistently. And for me, there is just some beautiful things about the connexion that you can have thru Facebook. And these days like I have had a five-day boot camp that I ran this year twice.
And I delivered that entire programme on Facebook. And the tools and the functionality that we get now with Facebook, like you can have a shop on Facebook. You can take payments. You can book people in on Facebook. It has so many functions these days. You can do videos; you can have those rooms and actually meet with people. You have got Messenger.
To me, that is my one non-negotiable. Even if I were moving platforms with all of the other things, I would still see Facebook as the core of my business. And if I lost my website, I would not fear that I have lost my business because I have got my Facebook presence. And if I were to lose my Facebook presence, I think that would be the one that would hurt me the most. And so that is why I would say that us the one I do not want to fall. Yeah.
Bev: Yeah good point. And we have got a question here is what made you decide on Kartra as a course platform?
Tash: For me, the biggest thing was having everything in one space. So prior to that, I was on ActiveCampaign and Thinkific made some changes to the way that they were billing so previously, I had like one monthly payment with Thinkific. But if I wanted to move on to all of the new features that they were releasing, I needed to go on to a different payment structure that included ten cents per student per month. And at that point in time.
I had over 5,000 students on that platform and it was just the price point just went thru the roof and I was not happy with the email functionality that they had. And there were certain things that I was happy to be okay to not have on Thinkific at I think I was playing like US$89 a month.
But it was going to move me up to US$300 a month and I was like "No, I am not doing that" because it does not have all the things that I need, and I would still have to pay for ActiveCampaign and we were using Zapier at that point in time as well as a bunch of other things. So the reason why I chose Kartra was because it was everything in one and it allowed me to let go of a bunch of different tools.
So I now pay $199 a month for Kartra but I do not have to pay for an email platform. It has an email platform, and it is a really sexy intuitive way to use email platform. It has all my sales pages. It does all my payment processing and all those sorts of things. I just link it up to Stripe and PayPal. It also has the ability to charge tax based on location, which was important for my business as well because prior to that where Thinkific are could not.
And so we think it could be I was having to basically bear the cost of GST. Because I could not differentiate between an Australian client and an overseas client, whereas with Kartra, I can. So that made it much easier for my tax obligations as well. And yeah, there was just like it is really easy to use. I could, I did not need to upload all of my videos to the platform. I could use the ones that were already on YouTube and just linked back to them which is as you talked about like do not upload things in platforms.
I had uploaded everything to Thinkific and so we actually had to go and download everything from Thinkific and then upload it to YouTube. But now it is from my YouTube channel. Even if I move from Kartra, it is so much easier. So that was a really good thing for me as well. I found Kartra had a much better deliverability rate for my emails than ActiveCampaign. I was getting a lot of my emails were not making it to people's inboxes with ActiveCampaign.
And so I really wanted to make sure that we improve that deliverability and with Kartra, it has been much better. We have a few like I would say we have probably like a handful, like half a dozen people who every now and then their email provider blacklists me. And sometimes it is because their inbox is full or something like that, but it is really easy for us to get them reinstated through Kartra.
Ultimately it ended up saving me so much money. So I saved, I was spending about $80 a month on Zapier. I was spending $100 a month on ActiveCampaign. I was spending US$89 a month on Thinkific, but then that was going to go up to US$300 a month. I was spending money on If This Then That, IFTTT.
I was spending money on Zendesk, which is a customer service portal. And Kartra actually has one so we are moving. I prepaid a year so we have just kept Zendesk for now, but we will move that over to Kartra as well. That will save me another $800 a year. So, to me it was just a no-brainer decision and I do not have to link things and use APIs and coding and all of those sorts of things.
It is a really easy for me to do it. And if I lost a team member, I could pick up the slack with Kartra very simply and easily. And I have a couple of people I know who are Kartra specialists who I can hire to help me with stuff. The other one is Affiliates. So the Thinkific Affiliate platform did not work for us because it did not allow first and last clicks.
And so we had to have an affiliate plugin. And that was a $100 a month. So that was another $100 a month that I saved as well. The Affiliates in Kartra is really simple and straightforward. So yeah, all of those reasons are why I chose Kartra.
Bev: And I guess the question that was going on in my head is what about the stability of the platform and availability? So now you have put lots of eggs in one basket, what sort of guarantees were you looking for from that provider?
Tash: To be honest with you, I’m not a tech person so did not ask that question. But from what I know now, they have really amazing stability and we have never had an outage with Kartra which I think speaks volumes. So I have been on Kartra for over a year now and anything we have had an issue with their customer service has been really amazing. Yes, there are some features that I would really like them to incorporate because I want to let go of Acuity Scheduling now.
So I also use Acuity Scheduling for bookings, but they do have a calendar booking system in Kartra but it does not work well with non-US time zones. So I have submitted that as a feature request. It is on their radar to be putting that in. And there are a bunch of features that it did not have when we first joined that we want to know it would be great if it had it. And now it has them. So I really like the way that they work with their customers as well to get the features that they need.
And yeah, I am a raving fan of Kartra. I am an affiliate as well. But yeah, I really do love that platform. To me, it has answered so many of the things that were challenges back in the day where you had to Frankenstein eight systems together. And what like I was willing to do that because doing that technology working behind the scenes saved me time and energy and allowed me to show up for my audience in a way that grew my business and made me more money.
Even if I still had to Frankenstein systems together, I would do it. I would pay the money. I would hire the people because I know for every $100 I put into my tech stuff, it saves me hours behind the scenes and I am better off investing my time and energy in connecting with my audience making sales and delivering high quality services to my peeps.
Bev: Exactly. I love what you said there as if we think of it we are not technology practitioners. We are business coaches. We are all these other things so actually learning one platform really well and it is servicing a large proportion of your business. It makes sense from a technology learning process.
Tash: Absolutely.
Bev: What is the best guidance or advice that you were given on your entrepreneurial journey?
Tash: There has been so much and it has been amazing. I would actually say and this is so random, but the thing that popped to mind so I am going to share it is when I was at University in the early 2000s. I did business and marketing part of my degree. And the marketing phrase "If you try to speak to everyone you will end up speaking to no one" has served me so well throughout my business journey. And for me, I now specialise in helping people find their niches and I know that that is one of the reasons why I have had such amazing growth in my business.
And I have really magnetised the right people to me was because I knew who I was speaking to and who I was not speaking to. And so many people really resist niching and getting a hundred percent clear on who they are speaking to. And in that process, they end up costing themselves growth and time and money and sales. And so that has been one of the most critical pieces of my understanding of how marketing and biopsychology works and it has really helped me throughout my business journey.
Bev: And I think the thing there too Tash is it is not a forever niche because you do evolve. I think of my own business on the health and well being side. It definitely evolved over time, but it was so good when we got together to talk about my new business venture to help businesses get online quickly. Basically, it was clear looking for practitioners because they will identify with me and they’re holistic practitioners because that is sort of my field of expertise as well.
And you understand the nuances that comes with that and so if someone sees a tech person who does not understand health and well-being practitioners and holistic practitioners and they see you, it is a no-brainer to work with you because there is that extra level of understanding of the special things people need to be mindful of. The rules and regulations around being in the health and well-being space.
It is so important that those things are taken into consideration and if people hire someone who does not have that level of understanding, then they are putting themselves and their business at risk. So, of course, they are going to invest in working with you because you are the logical answer and also you’re the safest. And so I think that that is huge. And yeah, it is a no-brainer for you to specialise in that space.
Bev: And I was just laughing with someone earlier today about the evolution of technology. And knowing that in my undergraduate degree I was using punch cards. So it is awesome to come back home in some sense but I have all this other experience to share with people. So it is awesome.
Tash: I did two marketing subjects at University and we worked on websites in one module in those two. And that was the only online element that we talked about in terms of marketing was websites. We did not talk about online advertising or any of those sorts of things. That was 2000 to 2004. So yeah fascinating.
Bev: Yeah. In that time period, I was managing a team of graphic designers and web developers!
Tash: The academic system was a little slow to catch up with.
Bev: Awesome. And so Tash do you have got an upcoming free training that you would like to share with us today?
Tash: I do. I do. I have a training for those people who really want to fast-track their business start-up. So if you are not yet getting consistent clients from the online space, I actually have a free training.
I think that is a really good one because it really helps people to see the strategy part of how they find and connect with and then convert people into paying clients. And then of course, it goes really beautifully with what you do around the technology and platforms that support that.
Bev: And today, it has just been awesome because we can talk about anything. We have talked about health and well-being, business and those are a few things. So thank you so much for always being so willing to open the kimono. And there are no secrets in the Tash Corbin world. That is what I love about you is that we can actually talk about what is, what the real thing is it is going on or not going on. So, I appreciate your time today and thanks for being with me.
Tash: No worries. Thanks so much Bev.
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