How (and When) to Host Your First Paid Workshop as a Doula with Sarah Temte
Wanna know the secret to kickstarting your online birth business offerings in less than two weeks?!
In Episode 20 of the Birthworker Podcast, I'm joined by Sarah Tempte from Wake Up to Freedom. She will be sharing her insight and experience from teaching students how to host simple and wildly successful mini-workshops.
In this interview with Sarah, we chat about:
How simple it really is to create, sell, and host your mini workshop…
Maintaining the balance of providing value while still upselling your other offers…
The step-by-step framework to host your first workshop… (psst, you’re gonna want to write this one down!)
… and a whole lot more!
Sarah Temte: Workshops are short, paid online events where you help people answer a question that's been bugging them, solve a problem that they've been struggling with, check something off their to-do list, or learn something new. And it's just this tiny, mini first experience with you and your brand that creates a relationship with people. It creates trust and allows you to build an audience of people who have already experienced a little bite-size of your work and are excited about what else you might have to offer.
Whether you want to do one-on-one consultations with people, sell a course or have some sort of program, or even do bigger events, that workshop is a great way to build trust right away on the front end. So for most people, that workshop is something that's $10, $20, or $50. And we encourage people to make these paid because it gets that extra level of buy-in from people where they are going to put this thing on their calendar, they're going to show up, they're going to spend an hour with you on Zoom and they're going to be committed to it and treat it like something that they paid for and they're invested in.
And then it's like the world is your oyster after that. You've got these people who have had an awesome experience with you. And after that, you can go wherever you want with it.
Kyleigh Banks: Are workshops something that are always done live or can you record it and just sell it from your website?
Sarah Temte: Yeah, we recommend a little bit of both.
Kyleigh Banks: Okay.
Sarah Temte: So what we usually do is host the first one live, but record it with the intent of selling the recording. So we always recommend that people are kind of intentional with how they have that live Zoom event so that the recording can be sold later. And then you get the best of both worlds. You get that live energy of the first one where people are asking questions and it helps you often sell the first one because there's a date, there's some urgency. And so it can help with selling those first 5, 10, or 20 tickets.
But then after that, you've created an asset. Do you want that thing to work for you? You've got a recording, don't just let it collect dust on your computer. So we teach people to package up that recording, make a little checkout page for it on your website, and then you can continue to sell it dozens and hundreds of times in the future.
Kyleigh Banks: Mm-hmm. I have to mention this because this was me a couple of years ago when I was starting to do online events and webinars and things like that. I was like, "But I'm on call for a birth. I'm a doula, I'm on call. I can't host a workshop. What if I have to cancel?" And I actually used it as an excuse to almost do a fake live launch and recorded a workshop plus a webinar and pretended it was live.
And I just look back and I'm just like, "I wish someone told me you can actually run live events even if you're on call." If you have to cancel, that's seriously no big deal because in the birth community, we're dealing with pregnant moms who know that we're doulas, who know that we're on call, and who probably also have their own kids. And so not only is it okay, but I've actually found a lot of times when I'm authentic and raw and share that I have to cancel because I'm on call or maybe there's something going on with my toddler, it makes me more relatable and my sales literally go up when I do things like that.
Sarah Temte: I love that.
Kyleigh Banks: So don't be afraid.
Sarah Temte: And I think with business, I've found that when you're honest and upfront, people are so much more understanding than you think. I think we've all got those gremlins in our head that people are going to be so mad, so upset, so frustrated. But like you said, everyone has stuff going on in their lives.
Kyleigh Banks: Mm-hmm. Should a new doula wait to make a workshop until they have more things to offer on the back end?
Sarah Temte: You know, we have some people say, "Oh, I can't create a workshop yet because I don't have this huge program to sell on the back end. I don't know yet what my full vision for my business is." What we always recommend is a workshop can actually be a beautiful way to find out and discover what your next offer should be.
Before you spend six months creating a program that you're not actually sure if people want, or what exactly your target audience needs, start with something really easy to create: a workshop. Spend one or two weeks talking about it on social media, then host a really simple one-hour event. You don't need super fancy slides, you don't need a huge sales page, and you don't need a funnel. It's a really simple way to get started and then it gives you so much information to work with. You get to find out, "Wait. Okay, when I posted this post about this birth that I attended or about this moment in my life, tons of people signed up for the workshop and when I sent this email, no one signed up. I guess social media post, number one, is more what people are looking for."
And you also get to engage with real humans who are buying your work. You get to see, "Oh, these are the types of questions that they're asking. Oh, this is what they want support with. I never would have guessed that." We always learn so much from running our workshops that we couldn't possibly have discovered.
I think a workshop is a great first offer to create, and then you can be really open at the end. What we recommend, if you don't have an offer to sell yet, you don't have that big polished program, at the end of your workshop just say, "Hey, if anyone needs a little bit more custom support, wants to chat a little bit deeper about this, or is struggling with how to apply this to their life, book a paid one-on-one session with me." And we recommend just making a link and charging whatever feels good to you. Whether you want to do $50 a call, $200 a call, or $300 a call, whatever feels good for getting on a call with someone for 45 minutes to an hour, you can sell these just really simple one-on-one open coaching sessions. And it's a great way to make a little bit of extra money on the back end of your workshop before you have that full polished offer.
Kyleigh Banks: I have a question for you, and I had a student ask me this recently and they said, "Is it icky to sell something on the back of something that people already paid for?"
Sarah Temte: I love that, and I love how many good, generous humans are running businesses that have questions like like, "Ugh, I don't want to be salesy. I don't want to be pushy. I don't want to be icky."
I always recommend a couple things. So one is think about all of the real life businesses that you engage with on a daily basis that keep asking you for additional sales. So think about going through a drive through to order a burger and they're like, "Do you want a soda and fries with that?" Or think about an online subscription to something like Hulu and there's always the, "Well, pay extra to get an ads free version." Most of the businesses that we interact with every single day have multiple offers and we don't think anything weird about that. It's just like, "Oh yeah, that's just how business works." And so hopefully that gives all of us a little bit of freedom that it's completely normal and reasonable to have multiple offers in your business and multiple ways to support people at different levels of payment.
The second thing is you absolutely do want to be conscious of the fact that people paid you for your workshop. So you don't want people to end up feeling like, "Dang it, I paid $37 for this workshop training and it was just one giant sales pitch." So if you're creating a paid workshop, priority number one should absolutely be delivering on the promise that you made. We don't want it to be a bait-and-switch workshop.
So whether you're teaching someone birth meditations, how to prepare their body for birth, or how to have conversations, if they are choosing to have a hospital birth, about how to set boundaries or make a birth plan with their OB-GYN…whatever your workshop might be, you want to make sure that you fully deliver on that promise so it's not like, "Oh, I told you I would solve this problem, but just kidding! You have to pay extra to get the real solution."
But if you do fully deliver on that promise, give them that support, give them the information, it's completely fine at the end to say, "Okay, I've given you all of this, I hope this helps. I'm so excited for you to go implement this and go apply this to your life. And I know that some of you want to also solve this problem. I know that some of you also have questions about this or I know that some of you also want personal support with this during the rest of your pregnancy. So for those of you that that applies to you, I just want you to know that I have this other offer or this other invitation."
Kyleigh Banks: Mm-hmm. I love that. I learned this trick from Rick Mulready. He said, "If you're doing a paid workshop that is leading into a larger paid offer, maybe a high ticket offer, just always throw in a slide or a sentence at the beginning of your workshop and let them know that that's going to be coming at the end." And it just almost lets them put their guard down, so like, "I'm not going to sell to you, I'm here to teach you. For one hour, I'm going to teach you and then if you want to know how you can work with me, I will tell you about that." Literally that one sentence can let those people put their guard down and trust you a little bit more.
Sarah Temte: I love that. Yeah, that they're not worried that a sales pitch is going to come out of left field. They know what to expect.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah, exactly. Something else that happened to me when I was a new newbie, I went through all of Amy Porterfield's programs, and she set the bar so freaking high. She's amazing, she's helped me grow this multi six-figure business, but I didn't need to be trying to copy Amy. I didn't need to be putting out a product where for her, she has a team of 20 full-time staff creating these things for her, and I was literally trying to copy that. So I am wondering from you, how can we actually turn a workshop into a minimum viable product? How can we make it easy for ourselves? What does it look like to do it right, but do it the simple way?
Sarah Temte: That's such a good question, because dang, it's so easy to compare yourself to the Amys who do have that huge full-time staff, they're running their course for the 18th time and they have a professional copywriter and graphic designer and all of the things.
I think the first thing is remind yourself that people aren't paying you for how pretty your slides are or how cute your worksheets are. People are, in this case, paying for support with their birth, with their pregnancy, with this huge transformation in their life. And that's going to be that “make it or break it” of if this workshop helpful for them. Did it answer the questions they have or help them move through the fears that they have about their upcoming birth? Not, were your slides perfect and was your checkout page super flashy?
And the second thing is, and I know this from working behind the scenes back when I was copyrighting for many of these big online influencers, is one of the reasons that they need to keep polishing their program and having this beautiful product is because as their audience has grown, they can't be as intimate with their audience. So they need to keep making this better, more polished product, because they know that they're going to have 2,000 students go through it. Every piece of that product needs to be perfect because Amy doesn't have the bandwidth to answer 2,000 people's questions. Whereas the beauty of running a workshop with a smaller audience is that you get to show up with 10 women on your workshop or 30 women on your workshop and you do get to see their questions in the chat and answer their questions and give them that little bit of extra intimacy and support.
And no, a workshop is not one-on-one coaching or something where you have to feel all of this one-on-one type of pressure, but there is an intimacy when you're starting out that is worth way more than how polished your workshop might be. So we always say like, start with a really simple payment link. You don't need a huge sales page. Start with super basic slides or grab a $20 slide template pack off of something like Creative Market and just keep it super light and simple and put your energy into showing up for your workshop attendees and really serving them with your expertise. Don't feel like you have to become a professional graphic designer before you host your first workshop.
Kyleigh Banks: I love that you said... Absolutely everything there. That's phenomenal. I've never had a full sales page for any of my workshops. I charge maybe $25 and they each get 50 people with a few emails and a few social media posts. Yeah, they don't need a full on sales page. I'm not saying that you don't need a sales page for your ebook and your mini course, because you definitely do and probably a much longer one than you think you do, but for some reason workshops are just a little bit more intimate, a little bit more special.
Sarah Temte: Yeah. I think because it's just a bite-sized thing to solve a bite-sized problem, you don't necessarily need tons of explanation. It should be simple enough to explain in a couple sentences. And if it's not, you might actually need to tighten it up a little bit.
We've sold all of our workshops just with simple checkout pages first, and then down the road after selling the recording, once we hit 500 sales or more, that's kind of the mark for us where we're like, "Okay, this is a product that is working and people are loving it. Now we're going to put the energy into building a full sales page after we've already made a few thousand dollars from this and had hundreds of people go through it." We never do it before that point because it's not something you need to worry about.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. Something I heard actually this week, one of the students in The Birthworker Membership said she wanted to run a workshop, and she posted essentially her outline of the things she wanted to cover, and she asked us if we thought an hour would be enough. And what she was actually trying to do is compress an entire childbirth education course into one hour talking about interventions, pain, mindset, making a birth plan and all these things. I know what I told her, but I would actually love to hear it from your words. Is that something we can do? Can we take an entire childbirth education course and just make it short?
Sarah Temte: I mean, I wish, right? That would be pretty cool. But no, most of the time when you try to say, "Oh, I have this huge vision for everything I want to communicate, and I spent years studying this and I want to share everything that I know all at once," we think that we're serving people and really we're just overwhelming them. We're giving people a fire hose of information and it's so much content that they're left saying, "I don't even know where to start. I don't even know what step one is."
So start with something simple. Choose a bite sized piece of birth education that you're really passionate about. I think that often really requires, especially for people like birth workers who have so much passion around what it is that they do, is really dealing with the discomfort of dropping the savior mentality and feeling that you have to save someone with a single $20 product. And that's hard when you know how life changing the work that you do is, but it's not possible.
Instead, choosing one little piece of education that will move the needle for someone, or open a door for them, or help them prepare, or release fear around maybe one aspect of their birth, or one aspect of their birth plan, or one aspect of pregnancy preparation, that's actually more of service because they walk away actually feeling empowered to do something about it. They're like, "Oh, I can make a birth playlist, or I can do these breathing exercises, or I can have these important conversations with my partner about how they can support me." Then that empowers them to take the next step. When they're ready, they can come back to you and get the next piece of information, or work with you or someone else. But start with that bite-sized thing.
Kyleigh Banks: What would you say to someone who says, "I'm going to create a new workshop every month for 12 months this year and teach 12 different topics so that I can create this bank of all these workshops that people can buy"?
Sarah Temte: I think it depends on the person. I've seen some people where posting tons of workshops and having all of these bites sized offerings can really work for them. They love promoting multiple things. They love having all of these different offers for sale and they love launching workshops. So for them, launching a live workshop every single month isn't overwhelming. It's not draining. They love the energy of being live and then they can quickly package that recording and sell it.
However, I think for many people, that can be overwhelming. When they actually get into it, creating a workshop every month might feel like too much. And it can start to feel like you've got so many irons in the fire. You're juggling so many plates and you've got to keep promoting all of these different workshops and you've got people with questions saying, "Well, I'm trying to decide between these two workshops, what should I sign up for?" And it can start to feel like a lot. So I think it depends on your personality and your marketing style and your audience.
I think for a lot of people it makes sense to have 1-3 front end workshops, and then a backend offer that goes a little bit deeper and has some support involved for the deeper pieces of their work. But if you like having just those lighter, bite-sized, more passive offers like a workshop, I have seen some people who literally just have a library of workshops. I just think for most people that isn't the model that makes the most sense.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah, I love your example of having 3 workshops and then a bigger program, because as birth workers, our clients and our prospective students are only pregnant and aware that they're pregnant for seven months or eight months, and they're really only looking for childbirth education for maybe five of those months in most cases. So let's just say, yeah, create 3 workshops, run them once per month, and then every quarter keep repeating those exact same workshops and you'll hit all of your audience essentially.
Sarah Temte: Yeah, that's a really interesting point. The birth space is unique in that where the timing does really matter. It isn't, "Oh, I'll sign up next year." It's all happening right here.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. Do you think that someone needs a certain amount of people on their email list or social media before they're ready to run a workshop? Or can we have a goal maybe for them to hit before they're ready?
Sarah Temte: Yes. Some of it depends on engagement level. We recommend having, at minimum, 300 to 500 people who are engaged with what you do. So for some people, they started it as a personal account. You maybe have your personal Instagram account and you've shifted it to be more business focused, but 80% of the people are still friends from high school, people you grew up with. And in that case, we kind of want to discount those numbers. You want 300 to 500 people who are engaged and following you for what you do. And then at that point, I think you can absolutely get 30 people at your first workshop. And I think that's a great number to aim for.
That being said, I've seen so many people say, "Screw it, I'm doing it anyway. I just started a month ago. I have 100 people in a little Facebook group or on my email list, and I am okay in this stage of my baby business doing a workshop for five people or 10 people," and that's totally worth it for them.
I have hosted workshops that had 3, 4, or 5 people at the very beginning of my business, and it was the best thing I could have done because it helped me go from the planning stage of my business, which I think is so easy to get stuck in where you're just listening to all of the podcasts and signing up for all of the courses and doing all the whiteboard mapping of, "Oh, this is what my business could be."
Actually putting a workshop out there for me made my business real for the first time. And even though I wasn't paying my bills with the three people who signed up for my very first $50 workshop, it still was the moment that I said, "I'm running a real business. These people paid me money. They're showing up to a paid event with me. I'm creating a real product." And so for me, that made sense. It kind of depends on what your goals are and what you're comfortable with, but you don't need 10,000 followers to run a successful workshop.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. Can you run me through, just like a high level, what kind of assets are people going to need to create in order to launch their workshop?
Sarah Temte: Yeah, so for your first workshop, the first thing you need is a way for people to pay you. You need a checkout page. If you're just getting started, we recommend something like Gumroad that has a great free plan and a checkout page builder that's really easy. You can also use a full course creator platform like Teachable or Kajabi, or you can even do something like open up your PayPal business app and create a product link on there. I've sold a handful of workshops way at the beginning just with a PayPal link where just could put the price, a two sentence description of my workshop, and then I would manually send people that link.
The first thing you need is that way for people to pay you, a little sign up page or sign up link. Then you need a way to email people or contact the people who've signed up. So ideally, on something like Gumroad or Teachable or Kajabi, those systems are going to have a way to automatically send a message to people who registered for your workshop. If you're using a PayPal link, you'll just need to manually email people to send them the details and be in communication with them.
Then you need a place to host the workshop. Zoom is going to be the easiest for 99% of people. You can just use a Zoom meeting and have people mute themselves during the actual training portion of the workshop so you get a nice clean recording, or you can upgrade for a month to the webinar feature where people will just see you during the workshop and can just engage in the chat. Then you need a way to give people the replay for the workshop. People who signed up for your live workshop should get access to the replay. You can do it really simply by literally uploading the Zoom recording to Dropbox or Google Drive and sending them the link.
Or if you want it to be a little bit more of a polished course experience, you can use those course builders like Teachable or Kajabi, or even Gumroad has an option for hosting the recording of the workshop. And that's where you can also include any downloads. If you do have a guided meditation or a worksheet or something, you can also include those there. So that's all you need for running a live workshop. It's actually really, really simple. You don't need to overcomplicate it or sign up for 18 different softwares. That's really all you need.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. Notice that you didn't mention a bunch of slides, you didn't mention a fancy microphone, you didn't even mention a whole bunch of emails. Because honestly, when you're just getting started, you really don't need a bunch of emails unless you have the funnel or the other product or everything mapped out. So I love that.
Now, all of that is stuff that you teach inside Mini Workshop Magic. Is that right?
Sarah Temte: That's right, yeah. We have a workshop of our own, it's very Meta. It's called Mini Workshop Magic. If anyone wants some templates and some kind of straightforward directions of, "Here's how you set up a payment link or here's how you come up with a topic for your workshop," we've got some good stuff in there.
Kyleigh Banks: Now when I heard about Mini Workshop Magic, I'm like, "Okay, this must be like a $400 or $500 course that's giving me the templates." And really I've noticed building a business, the most valuable thing is just the workflow and the idea of what comes first and what comes next. So when I heard that you guys were offering it for the price that you're offering it, my mouth actually dropped. Would you tell us a little bit more about it in case people are interested, and then where they can find it and find you?
Sarah Temte: Yeah, of course. So you can find Mini Workshop Magic at www.miniworkshopmagic.com. So that's super simple. And then inside, it's a 60 minute training on everything you could need, from how to come up with a workshop topic, how to validate it before you create it, and we’ll teach you how to build a wait list for your workshop in less than 24 hours. We'll show you some recommendations for delivering the workshop, making your slides, how to make a really gentle invitation at the end if you do want people to sign up for a paid call with you or a program with you.
We also include some things just to make the creation easier and as light as possible, like literally a workshop outline of like, "Here's what to include in your introduction. Here's what to teach. Here's how to conclude your workshop." We also have some templates and a Zoom setup guide. Just pretty much our goal is you don't have to think, you just have to follow the seven-day launch checklist and you'll finish it having a paid workshop with real people signed up and excited to come learn from you.
Kyleigh Banks: Okay, last question is, how long before they want to launch the workshop should they start thinking about it and get Mini Workshop Magic?
Sarah Temte: Yeah, so we're all about keeping things so light and simple for your first launch. You could literally sign up today when you're listening to it and one or two weeks from now have a workshop. This isn't something you need to overcomplicate or spend an entire quarter outlining and planning it. We've got a seven-day launch checklist to literally keep it so simple. So I would say, yeah, grab our workshop. Take a day or two to go through the training, it's just 60 minutes. And then take a week or two to launch your workshop.
Kyleigh Banks: Awesome. Where can people find you? Are you on Instagram?
Sarah Temte: I'm not on Instagram. Well, I am personally, but we don't do a ton of social media for our business. You can find us on Facebook. Our business name is Wake Up to Freedom. Or you can send me friend request, I'm on there, Sarah Temte. And you can just find out more about our business in general at www.wakeuptofreedom.com.
Kyleigh Banks: Awesome. Thank you so much. That was phenomenal. You had me smiling the whole time because just everything you said was spot on to what I experienced as a business owner. So yeah, thank you for giving us your time. We really appreciate it.
Sarah Temte: This was a blast. Thanks for having me.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah, you're welcome.
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Meet your host, Kyleigh Banks, a side-gig doula turned CEO of a multi-six-figure birth-focused business. Her passion? Teaching birth nerds, like you, how to build an incredibly successful doula business that allows you to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and most importantly, make a lasting impact on the world.