Key Takeaways
- How a career change into providing eyelash extensions led Tara back into the world of business.
- Why Tara’s coaching is specifically related to running an eyelash extension business and how it preselects highly qualified candidates to become subscribers.
- How moving to a launch space formula and closed membership helped Tara get over a hurdle, grow her waiting list to over 2,000 people, and bring in a massive influx of cash to help her solve major problems in her life.
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Ready to reclaim your time and attract more monthly paying customers? Our step-by-step guide will show you how to build a membership site that turns your passion into recurring profit. Click here to download!Memorable Quote
- “Yes, I teach business skills to people who do eyelash extensions, but the purpose behind it is empowering women to have something that they love that pays them well and that they have this confidence of ‘I am capable of anything.’” – Tara Walsh
- “Stop waiting for perfection to happen because it’s a myth. You can get so much more accomplished and learn so much more by just testing it out and trying.” – Tara Walsh
Episode Resources
Lashpreneur.comTranscript
Read The Transcript
[INTRODUCTION]
Stu: There is a big trend brewing that’s revolutionizing the way business is being done. Big companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple are jumping on this too but so are thousands of others in all kinds of markets like photography and calligraphy, fitness, finance, meal planning, lesson planning, dog training, and so many more, and they’re doing it by shifting to a recurring revenue model. Hi. My name is Stu McLaren and for more than a decade I’ve been helping tens of thousands of entrepreneurs generate recurring revenue through membership sites. Join our host, Shelli Varela, as she takes you behind-the-scenes to see how these companies are building a thriving tribe that spends with them every single month. Now, let’s get to today’s episode.
[INTERVIEW]
Shelli: Tara Walsh, welcome to the It’s a TRIBE Thing Podcast. Buddy, how are you?
Tara: I am fantastic and very excited. Very, very, excited.
Shelli: I’m super stoked to tell your story as I’m super stoked to tell everybody’s story. However, yours is super interesting because you are in like a tiny little niche and you are absolutely crushing it. So, let’s start by telling our amazing audience who you are, what your niche is, and who you serve.
Tara: Fantastic. Well, my name is Tara Walsh. I’m an Aquarius. I like long walks on the beach. No, that’s not what you had in mind. Yeah. I am a business coach for lash artists so eyelash extension service providers who are artists at hearts and love being a service provider but approach business like an employee which gets them stuck. So, a little bit history about me. I actually have a business degree, went to school for business management, worked in corporate sales and marketing for eight years doing the hustle hamster wheel to nowhere. Got an ulcer from such doggy dog kind of behavior in the corporate world and decided that’s not really my style. So, at the time I just gotten married, my husband and I were trying to have a kid and decided I’d go back working at a restaurant to be a waitress because it was fun, easy, and flexible. We ended up getting pregnant and 16 weeks later I miscarried a late term miscarriage and that rocks my world like none other. And while I was going to the grieving process and the depression of just not really knowing what to do when you lose a child, I decided all expectations were off of me to have some very successful career and I moved into what would really be fun and light and exciting and so I decided why the heck not, I’ll go against my parents’ wishes and go to beauty school.
So, I became an aesthetician and really thought I’d be doing facials, waxing for the rest of my life, but there’s this hot little thing, this little trend that started coming about at that time called eyelash extensions and I’ve had them done in the past for my wedding and they were ugly and I didn’t like them but now I guess things had changed. Curls had changed and I got them again and I was like, “Oh, these are amazing.” So, during my grief of losing our daughter, I found purpose in caring for other women through facials and all of that fun beauty stuff so really found that was my purpose. I was going to just go do facials and waxing as an employee somewhere but it was through a great mentorship that I had at my first job as an aesthetician that I realized I actually know a lot about business, given all my business training and there’s a lot of opportunity in the aesthetics world. And so, I thought I really love lashes. I’m going to get a lash training and I became a lash artist. Really, really fell in love with it and thought, “I’m going to start a business as a lash artist,” and that I never, I mean, personal development on level 100 getting into business ownership.
So, I struggled for the first two months of my business, ended up hiring a business coach, and that changed my business. I became very successful as a lash artist and realize there was a need in my industry off lash artists where they had no business information and the information they were giving out was massively detrimental to running their businesses, giving away free services. So, I just started giving away tips in our lash artist forums for free and then after a couple months I decided, “You know, I don’t want to be a lash artist forever. It’s very physically demanding.” So, what’s next for me? I didn’t want to hire on staff and so I thought maybe I’ll be a business coach and so I started taking one-on-one clients very much following the path of Amy Porterfield like take one-on-one clients until you know what your audience wants and then do one-to-many. And so, after about three or four months of one-on-one clients, I decided I need a place to be to give my information away that’s paid and not free and so what I didn’t realize I was doing at the time was creating a membership program. I called it group coaching at the time. It was all online and I did…
Shelli: The accidental membership.
Tara: Exactly. Membership owner by accident. Yep, MOA and I did everything wrong. I gave away free lifetime access. I had so much content. Every week there was a new training and so that’s kind of how I got into the world of memberships without even realizing that’s what that was called.
Shelli: I think it’s brilliant that you have two, again, very diverse things. You have your business prowess and then you have your skill but you are able to identify a need that is like super, super hyper-niche, but also like so innovative for you to see that and to be able to go, “Hm, I have both of these skills,” because, to your point, many of the lash artists have the skills of doing the job but don’t have the business knowledge to actually give their business legs.
Tara: Yes, and when I was going through all these kind of free suggestions in our forums, there was no one giving business advice in any sort of formal fashion. There are a couple now, but they’re usually those that teach lash extensions like how to apply them and then they have a section of their curriculum that’s business. Whereas I’ve gone the opposite way where I am solely business. You’re not going to learn how to apply lashes from me. You can go to like 70,000 other people to do that and because we’re not regulated, anybody can teach lash extensions, but for people to actually get results in their business, which then they can afford these higher end trainings, that’s kind of my little sweet spot.
Shelli: That’s amazing. So, can you tell us about your launch and how that worked for you like you’ve had success as a brand-new membership site owner? Talk to us about what that looked like kind of out of the gate because you’ve had success where other people are kind of hedging to get started. You were out of the gate, who’ve unleashed this amazing membership site.
Tara: Yes.
Shelli: And what advice would you give people who were kind of starting where you were but maybe not having the same results as you’re having?
Tara: Yes. So, my membership exactly a year ago it was on the chopping block. I was stuck at like 70 members. It was open all the time so I had people be like, “Oh, I can’t wait to join. I’ll join on Friday,” and then they would just disappear off the face of the earth. It was taking so much time. It was only bringing, I would say only, it was bringing in $2,000 a month, but it really wasn’t enough for the amount of time and energy I was putting into it. So, I said I’ve given it six months and then we’ll move on to like e-courses. I created an e-course that I was launching but it was feast or famine because it was a one-time launch so I do $9,000 and then that would have to last me three or four months until I was able to launch it again. And the more I wanted to grow my business, the harder time I was having to get that money to last. So, I was following James Wedmore and he was an affiliate for TRIBE and so I went through the TRIBE launch just trying to get little nuggets of knowledge here and there on how to run a membership. I had zero intention of investing in my membership because, again, I didn’t want to go in that direction. I thought I was going to shut down the membership.
But there was something that James had said during his kind of talking about TRIBE and membership sites which he has a very successful one because I was like, “James, I really want to do your course. How can I do this course and do both of them?” and he said to me, the pivot point for my entire life I feel like at this point was, “Are you going to fight for your circumstances or you’re going to live for your possibilities?”
Shelli: Now, hang on a second. Are you going to fight for your – say that again.
Tara: Circumstances. Are you going to fight for your circumstances or live through your possibilities? So, I was saying I didn’t have enough money to do both courses because I wanted to do James’s course and I knew that was in a couple of months and TRIBE sounded like a great opportunity as well. How can I possibly afford both? My membership wasn’t doing that well. And this, I mean, this little Wedmore woo is what they called it. It was a little foreign to me. I didn’t quite understand it, so we had to break it down, but basically, was I going to live for the circumstances that the Tara was operating in at that point? Or was I going to live for the possibility that maybe not only investing in both courses if that was an opportunity, what I might get from that? And so, I could’ve took that and ran with it and decided, “Screw it. I’m just going to figure it out along the way. I don’t know what the next 20 steps are,” but when I signed up for TRIBE, it took me a couple of weeks to finally get into it because I was just really didn’t really want to go through the membership. I really didn’t want to continue on with my membership, but I thought I need to at least give it a go and see if I can get my money out of it, realize going through it that there I had done everything to a T that they say is detrimental to a membership site.
Like, the things that you think like you should provide a lot of content or you shouldn’t provide a lot of content. I was trying to give away as much information as I had, but from a user experience that gets to be overwhelming and you lose people, you know, not having it open 24/7 going launch space and I think for my membership, closing my membership and moving to a launch space formula was the number one thing that game changer because when we closed the membership, we started actually going through a video launch for it. I couldn’t have imagined the results that we got. I blew my own mind the first time in my business ever.
[ANNOUNCEMENT]
Stu: So many people in all kinds of niche markets are leveraging their existing knowledge and influence and they’re transforming it into passive monthly income. This isn’t luck. This is a repeatable formula for producing a growing subscription income and if thousands of others can do it, you can too. To find out what type of membership site would be right for your business, visit GetTRIBEGuide.com. Go to GetTRIBEGuide.com and download it today. You’re awesome.
[INTERVIEW]
Shelli: That’s amazing. Can you talk about the difference between as you are evergreen, and you’re open all the time versus the results you had as you decided to close it up and just launch it?
Tara: Yeah. I love that you called it evergreen because I didn’t even know what that was at the time. I was hit before it was cool. Yeah. It was interesting when you have to close off your membership because then you have to be intentional about marketing it and I think that helped me give me a perspective because I didn’t want to sound like a broken record where I’m talking about it three days a week on social media, “Hey, join my membership,” because it just became salesy rather than building up and then creating the anticipation. At this point now, the way that I – it’s been seven months since we did that last first launch and we’re launching again here in three weeks. Because I’ve been able to talk about it here and there, we’ve built our waitlist to 2,000 members. So, I have 2,000 hot leads that are ready to join my membership which before I didn’t even have that many people know my name in our first launch.
Shelli: Incredible. After you start getting some success with the membership, you had talked about what this meant to your family not only to the people that you serve and now these women or men who have these lash businesses can now have a business that’s sustainable and use their skills to create an income for themselves and their family but can you talk about the difference that having a successful membership site has made to your family personally?
Tara: Yeah. The week before our last launch I was crazy stressed-out. We had zeroed out our checking account. My husband and I, our marriage was awful. We had just started marriage counseling. I had a six-month-old and a three-year-old and I didn’t know if I should be a business owner anymore like right up until I think open cart, I was still questioning whether this was really the best idea for my family at this time but I knew I’d already set up kind of all the dominoes and I just needed to see it through. We did 291 new members in that launch and our monthly revenue went from barely not even breaking even to $13,000 to $14,000 in monthly recurring revenue and I’m getting chills as I say that because that was so transformational to not just my business, but to my life. We discovered five weeks after my open cart phase that my husband actually had PTSD and he’s had it for years and this was kind of he was just self-destructing and I’m watching him, knowing that like I tried to do everything. I’ve tried to financially provide for a family, not really knowing why he wasn’t thriving.
And when we uncovered this, we actually decided for our family that to give my husband the best shot at getting the therapy he needed, my kids and I moved in with my parents so that he could not be exposed to the auditory sounds of kids which is part of his trigger and I was able to pull back on almost everything I was doing in the business and just love all my members and show up for my members and give the rest of the capacity that I had to focus on having a stable environment for my kids supporting my husband for his therapy and it shifted this hostile mode, this always trying to do more in the business to not just coasting because we still grew despite my efforts to not have it grow because I was trying to focus on family, but it just allowed a lot of breathing room where the financial stress was still there, but not nearly to the extent and I knew with the pattern of what you’re taught inside of TRIBE and just kind of the methodology of creating a really successful membership that it was only to grow from there.
Like, this new formula I now have this kind of big burst of money and I knew as soon as I was ready and have the energy to launch again that I was going to get another burst and it was just going to continue to grow from there and be monthly recurring revenue.
Shelli: What’s your goal for your business? If you are able to like shine a light in the future and say two years from now, forget about logic, all things being perfect and you’re following sort of this methodology that you’ve now learned that clearly is working, what is your biggest and highest hope for the ripple effect of your membership site?
Tara: Yeah. Now, that I have a paid place that pays me well to impact and empower women, yes, I teach business skills to people who do eyelash extensions, but the purpose behind it is empowering women to have something that they love that pays them well and that they have this confidence of I am capable of anything. So, I see it as the more my membership grows not only am I having an impact on these women that are my members but then they’re going out into their communities and having this camaraderie, the sisterhood of these lash artists where up until kind of the past year or so it’s always been this kind of caddy you’re going to keep your business secrets to yourself because your competition is a threat to you. But so many communities so many lives are being changed because it seems so silly that eyelash extensions but even the way that these business owners show up for their clients that they are not stressed and they’re not desperate to try and get people in because they have this consistent revenue. They know how to market themselves based on this membership that they had then can show up and have a powerful impact on women who when women get eyelash extensions it’s not just because they want to look like a Kardashian, it’s usually a self-confidence issue is that they don’t feel great about themselves or they just come out of cancer treatments or they just have gone through a bad breakup and they just want to feel good about themselves then. So, just empowering and equipping my members to be able to be fully present and show up professionally and be able to give more of themselves so kind of more income, more impact.
Shelli: Well, it’s amazing when people stop feeling like they have to be in competition or feeling desperate, how they show up completely differently and I love that essentially from you taking this information that you learned from TRIBE and executing it to a T, you’re able to work smarter not harder with this amazing success but then pay forward the success like the ripple effect going forward. Like, yes, you’re empowering women but it’s through the vehicle of this membership site and all because if you trace it back to the root, you were going, “Okay. This isn’t working how it is. How can I invest in myself? How can I execute and follow through, so that I can create a different result?” And look at what you’re doing for everybody else.
Tara: Yeah. It’s been a crazy journey, that’s for sure. But even beauty providers tend to be fairly insecure themselves, and they probably have a lot of people in their lives that tell them they’re not good enough. And so, the power of what I created was that there’s a lot of people telling them they can do it. Why can’t they do it? If I can do it, why can’t they do it? And to just give them a little bit of self-confidence, give them a little kick in the butt to go do something, try out a new way to market your business, show up live on Instagram like, “Did you die? You did it. Okay. Great. Did it work? Great.” It’s kind of this just pushing them to stop taking life so seriously or thinking that they can’t do something because it really is easy, like all you have to do is push on your phone, go live and there you’re there. It’s just all that buildup and what does this mean if nobody shows up or doesn’t engage or this fear of like what other people are going to think? If we can strip away that, then I’ll keep doing this. I’ll keep showing up every day for this membership, but I think, yeah, it’s simplified a lot of things on my end and then also increase the impact that this business I have created.
Shelli: I love it and I love that you are a person who takes a lesson learned and learns and turns it into a lesson created for other people. So, getting back to the don’t fight for your circumstances, live for your possibilities, and you’re showing up in that exact way for the people that you serve.
Tara: I’m proof that it works but you don’t define it as a failure. Just look at everything as an experiment.
Shelli: So, to bottom line this for the listeners, if you follow your instruction to the T and model those that are doing it, you can work smarter, not harder that a closed membership site was the thing that really was the game changer for you in terms of creating like talking people off the ledge to take action on the thing that is actually going to create positive transformation for them and also the ability to have a successful membership site that allows you to put your family first.
Tara: Yes. And not waiting for something to be perfect. I mean, I’m far from perfect but we’re doing okay being the most imperfect bunch of beauty professionals out there. So, stop waiting for perfection to happen because it’s a myth. You can get so much more accomplished and learn so much more by just testing it out and trying.
Shelli: And also too, authenticity, there’s a lot to be said for showing up as you are and that’s how most people will resonate the best with you anyways.
Tara: Yeah. Serve. Just love on your people.
Shelli: I love it. Well, I love that you were able to come and spend the time with us. This has been an awesome lesson for all of us. If people are looking for you online, where is the best place they can find you?
Tara: Well, I don’t want you all following me unless you’re a lash artist. It’ll ruin my algorithm. You can go to Lashpreneur.com and kind of see how my membership and my business plays out.
Shelli: I love it. Thank you so much for taking the time. We appreciate you.
Tara: Thank you.
[CLOSING]
Stu: I hope you love that story. It’s amazing, right? That’s what It’s a TRIBE Thing is all about. So many people in all kinds of niche markets are leveraging their existing knowledge and influence and they’re transforming it into passive monthly income. Listen, this isn’t luck. There’s a repeatable formula for producing a growing subscription income and each week we’re going behind the scenes to show you exactly how they did it. Get the latest stories and actionable ideas from each episode at www.ItsaTRIBEThing.com and if you know one other person who could benefit from this, tell them to subscribe. Tell them to go to ItsaTRIBEThing.com.
[END]
