2021 Year in Review
2021 was the first year in business for Pennington Perspective in which we publicy shared our offers and accepted anyone interested into them. While technically the business was formed in 2020, and we've been mentoring other entrepreneurs and businesses since 2018, 2021 proved to be our first real opportunity to serve others beyond our immediate network at scale. Here are some stats on how we fared in 2021:
In the 38 weeks that we have publicly done business in 2021, we served a total of 492 people. This delivered an average opt-in rate of about 13 new people per week. Of those 492, 353 of them opted into a free offer. While, 139 opted in as paying customers. This gave us a freebie to paid conversion rate of 39.3%, which is incredibly healthy considering trends show typical rates to hover around 20%.
Of the two freebies we made available, our most popular was the BOSS Up Masterclass, with 245 opt-ins. Whereas the free Put A Name On It Lesson (extracted directly from our The Start-Up Incubator course) had 108 opt-ins. Of particular note here: the Put A Name On It Lesson has a conversion rate of 42% for those who ultimately enrolled in our paid course, The Start-Up Incubator. We chose to use this free lesson as an opt-in because it allows us to track progress inside of Kajabi (our platform of choice), it provides valuable and timely information to the enrollee, and it's a seamless upsell to the main course. We have Shannon, at The Social Bungalow, to thank for teaching us how to use a free lesson from a course as a freebie opt-in. The last piece we'll mention here, is the tripwire we created just ahead of Black Friday: our Ultimate BOSS Guide. This guide is an $11 planner intended to help new entreprenuers plan out all the details associated with getting their business started. It is typically only offered after the enrollment into the BOSS Up Masterclass, but we also made it available publicly for Black Friday. We've sucessfully sold 52 BOSS Guides!
Our mini-course, Business Viability Benchmark, is one the foundational elements of our core offerings. And to think, it wasn't even an offer when we started! It wasn't until our consultant, Artisha Walker, discovered we didn't have an entry level option, that this mini-course was created. It took us just 2 weeks to put all of the content together, because we knew EXACTLY what the missing piece was once we zoomed out. We use this course as preliminary work to The Start-Up Incubator for anyone who is still in the idea phase, because the #1 objection to The Start-Up Incubator was "How do I know my idea is good enough to start a business?" We also use BVB as lead up work for anyone enrolling in Self-Made Accelerator to ensure the points the course covers are known before we begin. In 2021, we saw a total of 31 enrollees in BVB and we also created an Instagram Story Series for it. We are using this product as our "loss leader" with the understanding that it contains incredibly valuable information, but isn't necessarily the work that people come to us to do.
The Start-Up Incubator occupied the majority of our focus in 2021. We launched it twice. Once in May, and again in November. Though both launches proved to be incredibly exhausting, neither of them garnered the amount of students we had hoped (see May launch recap here). In both launches, we had a total of 45 enrollees. Our first launch hit about 50% of our goal, while the second hit about 20%. We are proud to say that of the 45 people who have enrolled, 26 businesses have been started! That is nearly a 60% success rate and something we are VERY proud of! Despite not hitting our goals for either launch, we chose focus on showing up for those who did invest with us, resulting in a 34% conversion rate to our more advanced offer. The Start-Up Incubator will go evergreen and be made available on-demand for anyone looking to start a business, while we shift focus to more established business owners in 2022.
The next offer we are launching begins in Janauary 2022, Self-Made Accelerator. We started building the waitlist for this offer back in May, when graduates of our beta program were ready for the next level of business. We began to idneitfy entrepreneurs who wanted to work with us, but were beyond the getting started phase. We experienced several delays with this offer, as it was originally set to launch in August. It was then pushed to October, and eventually we landed on January 2022. We used that extra time to beta test the content on individuals, collect case studies, and really iron out the logistics of the offer. It proved to be fruitful, as we sold out our first cohort (8 people) in December! We've had 11 total people sign up, and 10 of the 12 who were on our waitlist secured a spot for themselves. Of the 26 people who have successfully started a business through The Start-Up Incubator program, 9 of them have enrolled in Self Made Accelerator (a 34% conversion rate). This data proves that once people get started with us, they want to continue their work under our mentorship.
Our major takeaways from our 2021 in business are:
We need to remain focused on the work we are doing. Despite not hitting the numbers we set for ourselves, feeling like a launch was a failure, and at times thinking that "nothing is happening", we see how large of an impact we've made in such a short time.
Building a business online (only) is not viable for us. Though it seems to be a popular business model, we have found that attempting to market, sell, and scale solely through the internet (or in our case, Intagram) is quite time intensive and laborious. Building the know, like, and trust factor strictly online takes time, intentionality, and patience. It is quite unlike meeting someone in person, where a connection can be immediately felt. We're looking forward to providing more of our services in person.
We must stay true to who we are. Building on the last two points, we "tried" a lot of things in 2021. Some things didn't feel in alignment, but because we were learning, we tried them anyway. Now we know, that is not necessary. There are as many different options available to us as there are businesses, and we needn't force ourselves into options that don't fit.
Want to work with us in 2022? Here's how!
