SDH 421: How to Use Your Best Assets to Give Your Clients Exactly What They Need with Tasha Booth
Hello, my She Did Her Way listeners! Welcome back to another episode of the She Did It Her Way podcast.
Today, I have the pleasure of welcoming the lovely Tasha Booth. Tasha is an agency owner, coach, podcaster, and founder and CEO of The Launch Guild.
The Launch Guild is a course-launch support and digital marketing implementation agency, supporting established coaches and course creators with course and podcast launches, operations and systems management, and content management and repurposing. Her team is over 20 members strong and works together to support their clients and being able to put their focus back into their zone of genius.
Additionally, she mentors virtual support pros, VA’s, and OBM’s who are passionate and ready to grow their business, while living life on their terms. Tasha also is the host of the How She Did That podcast, a podcast where virtual assistants, online business managers, and project managers learn business and tech tips.
Tasha is an Air Force wife to her husband Scott and step-mom to Grace and Meredith, and a work from home dog mom to Stanley and Boomer. In her spare time, Tasha watches true crime tv, sings karaoke, and tends to her organic vegetable garden.
Tasha considers her businesses to have two sides. The agency side does full-service launch support for established coaches and course creators. It includes podcast launches, course launches, membership launches, and more. On the other side, there are three different programs where they support VA’s, OBM’s, and project managers on starting, growing, and scaling their businesses.
Tasha has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. With a degree in musical theater, she performed professionally for 12 years, then finally just decided that she wanted more stability in her life. She explains there's kind of a ‘feast or famine’ thing that happens with musical theater and pivoted to be the health and well-being director for two YMCA locations in Tucson, Arizona. There, she loved her job but hated the pay. With any nonprofit, there's a cap or a ceiling, to how much you're able to be paid. She was a workhorse and was expected to be all and do all while knowing that her paycheck was never going to get bigger.
At the time she had goals of being debt-free; a dream she still has today. Tasha was driven to accumulating wealth in a way that gives back to people and communities, but knew it wasn't going to happen if she continued just working her nine to five. She started blogging as a hobby for virtual assistants, and she started to see a real need in that niche.
One thing she had to come to terms with was that the business that she wanted, and the vision that she saw for her business in the future, was not going to be sustainable while she was still in her 9-5. She couldn't take on the number of clients she truly wanted to, and couldn't have the income that she knew was possible when she wasn’t working at it, full-time.
She finally decided she couldn't be completely dedicated to both her own business and her 9-5 anymore, and finally decided she was ready to make her ultimate leap. By 2018, she built her business to the point where she was able to leave her full-time job, only eight months after starting her side hustle.
When she had first started out, she was a VA that just said yes to every type of business and quickly realized that was, number one, the fastest way to burn out and hate the business she had built. And number two, it wasn't scalable at all. She started really niching down by figuring out what she was amazing at, looking at what people are coming to her for, and what she truly loved doing.
In the center of all of that was launch support. One of the things she found was that coaches and course creators are constantly building new things, but if she was the only person supporting them, it wouldn’t work, because she couldn't be a graphic designer, a Facebook ad strategist, and a copywriter. She considered her client’s pain points, all needing multiple service providers, and began to build her team from there. Thus, The Launch Guild was born. In 2020 alone, The Launch Guild has grown from 15 teams to 22 teams!
The second part of her business comes from doing what runs in her blood, teaching. Tasha’s mom was a teacher for 41 years, and Tasha, herself loves teaching people what she knows.
She kept getting people that were looking to find out about her business and how she could support them, but Tasha knew that if she wanted to help and support them in an intentional way, she needed to be intentional about building that side of her business. As The Launch Guild started really gaining speed and traction she hired a director of operations, Shayla Ray, her absolute right hand. This gave her the space to start building out the coaching side of her business. She started with one program and basically it was the same thing all over again. She looked for the need and looked to fill it in the way that she saw best to fill it in a unique way.
What makes Tasha so unique is that she believes in being intentional about setting up your systems and having that foundation before pressing go on starting a business as a VA. There are a lot of courses out there that say you can set your business up all in one weekend, or advertise making $5,000 in five days, etc. and a lot of times it doesn't work for people, or if it does work, there's so much overwhelm because they don't have that proper foundation to really hold the whole thing together. Tasha's approach, while it may be a little bit slower, is sustainable and more profitable in the long run because it doesn't require people to have to come back to the drawing board to set up those foundations, afterward.
She teaches coming from a place of ‘what do you want’, ‘what did you originally want in your business’, ‘did I want to work 80 hours a week’. The answer always is: ‘I wanted more time with my family’, ‘I wanted to be able to say yes to more things’, ‘I wanted more time with my kids’. Decide that you're going to make business decisions from that place, instead of from a place of ‘they asked, so I said Yes’.
Tasha left college with over $60,000 in debt. Between that and being reckless in her 20s with credit cards (like so many of us!) she hit $80,000 in debt. Now at almost 40, she’s less than $20,000 in debt and can see that light at the end of the tunnel and hopes to knock out the rest within the next six months. She has learned to be really intentional about it and focuses on her goal and making it a priority. On the business side, her goal for next year is to have her first million-dollar year and while it sounds super scary, she knows she can make it happen by being intentional about it.
In this episode, you will…
Learn why you must decide on your ‘why’, right away
Feel inspired to get through hard times
Hear the importance of creating great systems right from the beginning
Find out how to not feel so isolated and grow your tribe, when working alone, from home
Discover the importance of setting goals, as a family, for your business
Insights:
“I was making more in my side hustle than I was in my full-time job.”
“You can have a vision for the future. But you also just need to be grateful for where you are right now and be okay with the fact that like, maybe right now, it means you take on two clients, at max, so that you can still live life and like, enjoy time with your family and enjoy downtime and everything so that you don't burn out.”
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” Marianne Williamson
“Who are you behind? Who are you not ahead of? We're the only ones that put self-imposed deadlines and certain restrictions on where we believe and think that we should be.”
“We live in a hustle culture in the online space and that can work for some people, but it's not usually sustainable long term.“
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