The Membership Helping Women Take Small Steps Toward Massive Personal Progress

Stu McLaren: 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 Varela: Toni Bache, welcome to the It’s a TRIBE Thing Podcast. How are you?

 

Toni Bache: I’m amazing. Thanks so much for having me, Shelli. How are you?

 

Shelli Varela: I’m great. Can you start with telling us who you are and who you serve?

 

Toni Bache: Sure. Well, I’m Toni Bache and I serve busy women. I help busy women make massive progress in their lives in business in super small, simple, and fast steps.

 

Shelli Varela: Amazing. I loved our pre-conversation and I’m sorry to do this to you, but it was so good. Can you share with us how you came to have this revelation? Because you’ve had some quite interesting turns of events that you thought were quite normal.

 

Toni Bache: Yeah. Absolutely, Shelli. It’s been quite a wild journey. So, really, my story starts I was working in corporate and I loved my corporate job but I was like really, really, really just burnt out. I think I was sick and I just could not shake it. I mean, really sick, couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I would get home after work. I would literally go straight to bed, eat mashed potatoes and gravy because like my throat was so sore. I was constantly dizzy with vertigo and it just sucks. To be really honest with you, it was just awful. And I’ve been to all of these doctors. I had all this medication. I’ve had like surgery on my ear, all of this stuff, I just didn’t feel any better. And I thought, “You know what, I have to figure out like how I can take care of myself better because this is just not working for me.” And I thought, “You know what, I want to start like one thing that had just been really bugging me for so long is I wanted to get fit and healthy again, but I was always too busy to exercise.” So, I would be like, “Okay, so this week, I’m going to like exercise for three times a week and I’m going to like go to the gym three times for an hour and I’m going to sweat it out, and it’s going to be amazing.” And then it would get to like Thursday, and I’m like, “Oh crap, like I haven’t been to the gym yet.” 

 

Shelli Varela: I’m completely familiar, by the way.

 

Toni Bache: I think we’ve all been there. So, I decided like clearly, I was unwell. So, I wasn’t in any state to sweat it out and go to the gym but I thought like what I really need in my life is like, I guess, you know, a routine and like a rhythm of doing it. So, I thought I’m going to exercise every single day for 30 days but I don’t have to have like any strict rules around it like all I have to do is move my body for whether it’s five minutes, 10 minutes. I just have to like intentionally move my body. So, I did that for 30 days. And then at the end of 30 days, I was like, “Well, that wasn’t quite as hot as I thought it would be.” So, it’s like I’ll do it for 60 and then that became 90 and then kind of continued on. And it got to the point where I exercise every day for 365 days for a year. And I was like, that’s pretty cool. Pat on the back. And my husband was like, “Oh my gosh, you should like write a blog post about it. Like that’s such a cool story.” And he had this blog. It was a running blog. He’s a runner, he loves running but it’s not like a big blog. It’s like friends and family read it. No one else reads it. It wasn’t like publicized. So, I wrote this blog just like I’ve never written a blog before to just bash it out and put it on his blog. And then all of a sudden, it somehow got picked up by Arianna Huffington’s publication, Thrive. 

 

Shelli Varela: Of course, it did. 

 

Toni Bache: I don’t know exactly how that happened but it happened and it was amazing. So, it got published and then so many people saw it. And so, they were coming to me and saying, “Toni, it’s such an amazing story. Can you help me do the same thing? I want to exercise. I want to feel better. I want to break through this like corporate burnout feeling. Can you help me do it?” And I’m a helper. I love helping people. So, I’m like, “Of course.” So, I started to help all these people one-on-one, but we’re talking about like hundreds and thousands of people. So, it lasted about a week before I realized it’s completely impossible to actually help all of these people one-on-one and live and have a job and everything else. So, I decided I need to find a way to help a lot of these people at once. And I thought, “Well, I’ll create an online course,” but keep in mind, I had no idea what to do to create an online course. My husband and I had always had side businesses but they were more product-based or service-based that was like him showing up face-to-face. There was never any kind of online courses in our background. 

 

So, I literally was like, “Okay, I’m going to do this,” made the decision, rip the band-aid off. I actually was on a business trip in the United States so I was like not in the best, didn’t have a whole lot of time to pull this together but somehow, I said, “Okay, I’m going to do this and I’m going to launch it on the first of the month, which was a week-and-a-half from then. So, I had no business, no audience, no list, literally nothing. And I come up with a business name, I created a website like a sales page, even though I didn’t know what that is, created the course outline and marketed the course. Within a week-and-a-half, it literally started a week-and-a-half from the time I made the decision to get it started with zero marketing spend. And literally just made kind of personally messaging people from my Facebook and from my LinkedIn and putting it out there in the [inaudible – 6:14]. From there, I had 330 people sign up for the course.

 

Shelli Varela: That’s incredible. 

 

Toni Bache: Yeah. It was…

 

Shelli Varela: Sorry to interrupt you, but like that so speaks to just get started because you don’t have to have all the fancy stuff. And, you know…

 

Toni Bache: There was nothing fancy about it, Shelli. It was nothing fancy. So, it was literally halfway through the course I was like, “I’ve never done this before. Can you give me some feedback?” And they’re like, “Well, we would like video.” I’m like, “Okay, now I’m going to do video.” Like halfway through the course, it went from being just me writing to them and telling them what to do to me explaining it in video. 

 

Shelli Varela: Can you share with people what the course was?

 

Toni Bache: Yeah. So, basically, it was a 30-day course and it really at the core at the time, I don’t even think I realized this but at the core of it, it was teaching people how to create a habit with like little five minute videos roughly five minutes every day. At the beginning, it wasn’t videos. So, it was little five-minute segments every day of what they needed to do to create habits in their life. And at the same time, as they were learning these habits, they were actually implementing and creating a habit in their life, whether that be intentional movement, or drinking water or eating more healthfully, or whatever the habit they chose was, they were implementing it at the same time that they were learning it along the way.

 

Shelli Varela: So, then what happened?

 

Toni Bache: So, it went super well. I got amazing feedback. And so, I did it again and I did it again and I did it. I did it quite a few times and I loved it. But what I was really missing was I felt like I didn’t know at the end of the 30 days to know, “Do they continue on?” There were a couple of people that emailed me. There was a couple like there were quite a few people that actually got to the 365 themselves as well. But there was this whole other group of people that I had no idea. And I knew for sure because some of them had told me that they hadn’t succeeded at it. So, I remember I actually watched this yesterday because I was thinking about this moment, and I went back and watched the video. And I remember I went live in the Facebook group that I had supported the cause. And I said, “I’m thinking about this crazy idea, and I don’t know. Tell me. Be honest. This isn’t a sales pitch but tell me, be honest, this is my idea that I really love helping you through the course. But I feel like there’s more support that I need to give you to kind of teach you more things along the way. And I also feel like you need that accountability and that ongoing in the community. So, like, would you be interested if there was sort of this ongoing support that went with this course where you could commit for a year or you could do it monthly and we had this ongoing support?” I didn’t know it was a membership. I didn’t know what was it like I didn’t know that was… 

 

Shelli Varela: Toni started an accidental membership site. I love it. 

 

Toni Bache: Exactly. An accidental business and accidental membership. So, people were like, “Yeah, that would be really great.”

 

[ANNOUNCEMENT]

 

Stu McLaren: 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] 

 

Toni Bache: So, this was like about December 2 I think I posted it and so I decided I was going to start it on the 1st of January. So, of course, that’s also a little to…

 

Shelli Varela: In real Toni fashion.

 

Toni Bache: Total Toni fashion so I had to hustle a little to create a membership within a couple of weeks but I did it. And then it just completely changed things for me because it changed how much I could help people. It changed in terms of having that ongoing support and accountability. But for me, I still had my corporate job, right? So, even though this business was going super successfully, I didn’t necessarily want to walk away from it. So, I had to figure out how do I make this business work in just a couple of hours a week because I didn’t have hours and hours and hours to spend on it. So, the membership model, even though I didn’t know that was what it was at the time really helped me to kind of calm down and say, “Well, I’m just going to do one piece of content for one hour per week. I’m going to do this for marketing,” and it really enabled me to do my business in a really, really short time frame. It went well but I realized that I had pretty much no idea what I was doing. And so, that’s when I heard about Stu and TRIBE and I think it was about it was a year and three months after I started my first membership that I decided I’m going to join TRIBE and figure out what on earth I’m supposed to be doing inside this membership. And I learned all of the things that I was doing really wrong and improve that for my members. 

 

And then from there, kind of my journey doesn’t end there. I’ve got this amazing membership that I love and I cherish those people and those busy women like I just love helping them change their lives and getting control of their lives. But because I’ve had all of this success in business, and not just kind of general success, but success in doing it in a really short amount of time, doing it in just a few hours a week, all these people were coming to me saying, “Can you help me with business coaching?” And I have background as a coach and I have background in business and I tell you, I’ve done a lot of online learning myself. That’s kind of my thing I love doing. So, I started coaching all of these people one-on-one and I literally didn’t have a website, didn’t have anything. I didn’t advertise. It’s through word of mouth. So, more and more people were coming to me and all of a sudden, my schedule was completely full of one-on-ones. 

 

And so, kind of had that same epitome like literally, it was like duplicating my whole life again, where I was like, “Well, I can’t help all of these people one-on-one, but I want to help them, I want to serve them and I don’t want to charge a ridiculous amount for it.” So, I’m going to actually create a membership around this. And so, I created The Five Minute Business and it’s very much the same. It’s so funny because it’s totally unintentional but it’s very much the same model that I began with at the very beginning, five-minute video, five-minute action, five days a week, and there you go. 

 

Shelli Varela: I love this story because it busts so many limiting beliefs and the fact that you didn’t even realize it was a membership site that you started speaks to something really key that I want to point it to everybody and that is that people sometimes can get caught up on the labels and the idea and the overwhelm of it. But if you take all of that away at the end of the day, what you have is the thing you want to give, the thing you know and love, and people who want to hear about it. It literally boils down to something as simple as that.

 

Toni Bache: Absolutely. 100%.

 

Shelli Varela: I’m interested in the whole concept of the five minutes, five minutes a day for a habit, five minutes a day for the business. What advice would you give to people who think they don’t have time to start a business, start a membership site? Do the thing that is that their heart is calling them to do? What is the biggest excuse that you’ve seen people make? And what is the irony about the thing they thought was true that turned out not to be?

 

Toni Bache: 100%. So, I mean, I literally hear it every single day, not just in my business. You’ll hear the same thing, Shelli, but every time you ask people, “Oh, why don’t you do this or how are you feeling?” And it’s, “I’m so busy.” Everyone was this busy badge of honor and, “I just don’t have enough time. I’m too busy.” And it’s constant. They’ll give you a laundry list of all of the things they’re doing that makes them too busy and each and every one of them are really legitimate, right? Nobody’s like saying that they’re making it up that they’re not actually busy but each of those things is a choice. We all have the exact same amount of time in every single day. And what really matters is what we do with that time. And it’s about choosing what you really want in life and deciding that that’s where you’re going to invest your time. So, don’t sit on social media, don’t watch TV. I mean, it doesn’t mean you can never do it, but make choices. You know, instead of I run a business in five hours a week, instead of watching TV one hour a night, I work on my business, and that’s the choices and the trade-offs you make. 

 

I’m not special. I’m no different. Like anyone can do that. That’s really what I preached in every single thing that I teach my members is, “You don’t have to make this over-complicated. All you have to do is start really small. You have to be consistent and you have to just keep doing the same thing over and over again until you succeed and then you repeat.” And that’s all you need to do. You don’t need to make it complicated. Keep it simple, keep it small, and just do it over and over again until you get where you want to go.

 

Shelli Varela: Such solid advice. If you were to look a year into the future, and if your business could be, forget about logic, the absolute perfect pinnacle of what you would love to see in the world, what would that look like for your life and for your business? 

 

Toni Bache: You know, this might sound super cheesy, but I feel like I already have that like I’ve created this space for the most amazing people to hang out in and I get to help them every single day which is what I love doing. And every time I see one of their results, like my husband, literally, I was in a meeting yesterday and it was my husband, myself, and a client and the client was filming and my husband’s like showing me in my face like comments of people’s like, “This has changed my life.” And that’s why I do it. I just feel so blessed. So, if I can do that for even more people like that’s the pinnacle of success for me.

 

Shelli Varela: That’s amazing and to understand the ripple effect of what happens beyond the person that you’re helping, it does compound faster than people realize. And you know, like Sue says, you come for the content, but you stay for the community and those people that are rallying with you and championing you and locking arms when you’re having those days when you’re like maybe you don’t feel like exercising today. So, hats off to you. 

 

Toni Bache: You just got to do it.

 

Shelli Varela: Yeah, absolutely. If people are looking for you online, what is the best place they can find you?

 

Toni Bache: Yeah. Honestly, they can go to my website through ThreeSixFivePlus.com. And that’s probably the best place to find me and otherwise, on Facebook, I’m super accessible.  

 

Shelli Varela: Amazing. I am so excited to watch what happens as you cartwheel and catapult through serendipity because your story, my friend is incredible. 

 

Toni Bache: You know, it’s a pretty cool story, Shelli, but I think there’s nothing special about me. Anyone can do the same thing. And I think it’s just, you know, follow your dreams. Don’t give up and always just start small and do those things that seem impossible and then all of a sudden, they’re possible.

 

Shelli Varela: Best advice. Thank you so much for your time. You’re awesome.

 

Toni Bache: You’re so welcome, Shelli. 

 

[CLOSING]

 

Stu McLaren: 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.

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