2162 - Transforming Your Expertise into High-Ticket Services with Level Up Creators' Amanda Northcutt

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05with us right now it's amanda northcutt amanda you are the co-founder and ceo of level up creators you were found on the web at we level up creators.com amanda it's great to have you thank you so much josh i'm so happy to be here i should also point out that you are the host of the Level Up Creators podcast. So to our friend that's listening, if you're liking what you're about to hear, you might want to just go ahead and subscribe right now. But Amanda, before we get going, talking about the work that you do, and I'm really excited to talk about the work you do, given kind of a stage that we're in right now, and I'm going to use myself as proxy.

1:47I'm going to be pretty transparent in this conversation. Before we get to that, though, I would love to know what are you geeking out on lately? Like what are you into movies, entertainment, hobby? What, what suits your fancy lately? Yeah, well, it's a, we're recording this in March. And so it is still, still big time ski season here in Colorado. I'm in Fort Collins. So we ski up at winter park most weekends during the season and we are mountain sports people. So this is one of our favorite times of year. I'm also a drummer. I have like the most beautiful drum kit of my dream sitting on the other side of my desk.

2:21And so I love to sit down and jam a little bit. I love playing basketball pretty much every day also. I could talk about all three of these things, but I'm curious about the drum kit or the drum set. What kind of music do you play? Oh, I just like, I've played since I was like eight. So that's been a few decades ago. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I sit down, I'll play jazz, rock, punk rock, just whatever, depending on my mood, right? Whatever, whatever needs to come out, that's out on the drum kit. What is a song that you play when you need to get some out of your system? Oh, my gosh. I don't know. Probably something by Nirvana.

3:00Yeah. You know, I got to tell you a story. So we were at a Nirvana tribute band, and this was a couple of years ago. And I've since become friends with the band leader as a result of what I'm about to tell you. So anyway, so I'm up, you know, just shooting video of him. And he says, there's a kid, and you'll appreciate this because based on some pre-conversation that we had, there was a nine-year-old holding a sign in the audience saying, I can drum as good as Dave Grohl. So the band, this was not rehearsed. And I've talked, so this was not, he goes, there's a kid, you know, da-da-da-da. He goes, come on up here, buddy.

3:39And so he brings him up. He said, what's your name? It's Colin. And he's like, so you can really drum like Dave Grohl. He's like, yeah. He's like, well, what do you want to play? And he goes, in bloom. And so like, all right. And so the drummer, the Dave Grohl from the tribute band gets off. The nine-year-old gets up on the drum kit. I'm shooting video of the whole thing. And I'm like, oh my God, what's about to happen? And the kid starts, you know, and it's like the place just erupts and I'm shooting the whole thing. And I sound like like a middle school girl, like just can't stop my ecstatic energy about how amazing this is.

4:25So anyway, I'm shooting the whole thing posted to Facebook. It's had about a half a million views on that video. So I made some, I actually tried to get them on TV as well because I had some local media connections. But I've become friends with the kid's mom. They live in Atlanta. So we've been lifelong friends for the past two years, made friends with the bass player, Rhino, who runs the band. And now I am so into the tribute band scene that I'm now going to shows and they ask me to shoot videos for social media and stuff like that. Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah. So that inspired me, in fact, to like when I saw that nine-year-old play, I'm like, what is my excuse?

5:05I started, I picked up the bass guitar and now I could play over a hundred songs, you know, fast forward a year and a half later. So much fun. Amanda, so much that we could talk about. Let's talk about what you do with Level Up Creators. Yeah. Yeah, so we help subject matter experts whose primary social platform is LinkedIn, typically 15 or more years of experience, build recurring revenue businesses based on your expertise and area of passion. So we really jive with coaches and consultants who are selling high ticket, high touch services and all to the end of the holy grail of business, which is, of course, monthly recurring revenue.

5:42We don't chase down the one time client. We're going for long term relationships, expansion, revenue and referrals. Okay, that's me. Take me through a discovery call. I am potentially a customer here. Yeah, so the best question that I think any consultant can ask in a sales call or in an engagement is, where are you now? Where are you trying to go? And what's keeping you from getting there? And then, of course, trying to understand what have you tried already that's worked. And I mean, all businesses is you are creating solutions that you are uniquely equipped to create and provide for a specific subset of the population who is feeling painful, pervasive, urgent, expensive problems.

6:20We're just looking for a beautiful match, a marriage, if you will, of those two parties coming together. And kind of your methodology is your special sauce and how you deliver those value outcomes and transformations that you promise during your marketing. And we help people figure out every infinitesimal piece from wherever they are to wherever they want to go, which is usually a multi five or six figure MRR number. Yeah. So our biggest. So if I can, I'll just continue to use me as a laboratory by proxy. And hopefully this will be valuable for other people like, yeah, Josh is in my same situation.

6:54So we've got, you know, we're high ticket engagement. You know, it's many tens of thousands of dollars to engage us over the course of a year. Not everyone has to stay with us for a year, but definitely during the first four months, it's very, very high touch. And we've loved it. We're very good at it. We've had over 250 clients. We're exceptional at it at this point in our journey. And it's interesting, Amanda, because I thought about offering maybe lower ticket or lower tier offers that might be a little bit more, you know, kind of associated with like a membership type service. And I declined to do that because at the time there was just so much hubbub around like, I don't know, kind of that bro-y ClickFunnels, you know, passive income kind of stuff.

7:43And that turned my stomach so hard that I'm like, I never want to be that kind of a business leader. Like, I appreciate that. I want to serve down market. But it seems like it just seems so saturated by a bunch of bros that I would much rather work high touch, earn my stripes, create some great results. We have results now. Our clients are doing seven figures. So now I would like to bring that downstream. But what would you prescribe for me? Yeah. One, congrats on the success so far. I mean, you and I sound like we're very much cut from the same cloth in that regard. And I love the high ticket enables high touch and extraordinary value outcomes and transformation.

8:19And so there's an equitable mutual exchange of value happening, right? Especially when you can be dripping out value over a period of months in exchange for that recurring revenue, right? And everything is done under the guise of value-based pricing, right? We're charging based on the value that we're bringing to the table for sure. So my advice to you, one, if we were in a traditional discovery call, I would ask you a lot more questions. But yeah, I would want to understand what your vision is for your organization. Like what is, you know, what's bringing these questions up about going down market?

8:52I recognize that right now lead gen is dying. And in the B2B world, every platform that's out there, email, LinkedIn, advertising, SEO, we are experiencing the slow death of the internet because of all these great platforms that have been badly abused by lazy marketers who are overfishing the waters. So LinkedIn just no longer works like it used to because, and this is because people have abused it. And so initially it was just aggressive marketers, then it was cheap labor, automation, and now it's AI. LinkedIn will soon be nothing but bots talking to bots. um uh seo blogs are going to be just nothing but ai generated content uh email marketing forget it like that you know that ship has sailed long ago so the trends are moving in the direction that every i'm sorry to feel like i'm kind of you know soapboxing here or whatever but um but yeah so i i feel like i have a moral obligation because we've been able to systematize and create consistent results for our clients.

9:59They can have high level connections with zero lead gen. It is all about relationships. It's all high touch. It's all Bob Berg, go giver. We've just been able to implement that where our clients are able to. So anyway, long story short, we have to do this because if I don't do this, I don't serve that audience. We already have the track record. Basically, Basically, everything's kind of boxed me in. Amanda, I have to do this. And I want to do this because one of our core values is democratization. So for me, it's very much a hard, like we're making good money. We're fine. If I don't grow bigger, I'm cool with that.

10:35But I recognize that this opportunity is too big for me not to. So I need to be able to get the wisdom and the best practices that we've created, AI and all the technology that we've built. I do want to make this more accessible. Yeah. That's why. That's my why. Yeah, yeah, that's great. I think it would be an interesting exercise for you and I to chat about like what the value outcomes and transformations are that you can provide based on your methodology. Like how can you package up your methodology and put it in a different vehicle, whether it's a course, a membership, a challenge, any number of down market potential opportunities with their, where they're, you know, lower touch, right?

11:11Not so high ticket, not so high touch, but somewhere in the DIY or done with you range. Yes. Yeah. And let me ask you this on that note. I'm of the opinion that courses are a lot harder to sell today than they were in the day. And I would not even begin to consider creating just some membership, some course driven membership. Um, my speculation is that, um, I would much rather go that courses are great. Um, but there needs to be been what we're committed to. And we've already kind of on the roadmap and, or we already have it built for our, our, our high plane clients is we just want to break off some of these tools that they get to use and be able to be able to price those at something that's much more accessible.

11:57So something that provides ongoing value rather than just education communities. He's great, obviously. But I think that, you know, the thing I think we're most focused on, you know, in terms of like lower ticket membership would be it needs to be a tool that somebody can use on a daily basis because it is going to give them such enormous benefit that there's no way that they would ever want to be without it once they have it. Heck, yeah. I mean, I love the idea of tool subscription. I mean, I come from Silicon Valley and SaaS and I've been in recurring revenue online for 20 years. And so, yeah, I love that.

12:32I love that idea. And you're absolutely right. You're spot on with regard to courses. I mean, people are on to one. You talked about the prevalence of what we call icky marketers, which we are the antithesis of. I have no tolerance for people who prey on people who are desperate and therefore, you know, buy my course, buy my course and build your own course. And you'll make a hundred thousand dollars on a launch. Like I have no tolerance whatsoever for people who, uh, prey on others in that way. So that's, God bless you. You are my people. on that. And with courses, I think people are onto the fact that fewer than 10 % of us actually complete a course that we purchase or pick up for free.

13:08And so completion rates are low. We are all seeking community, which makes you think, oh, maybe we do a member membership, but memberships typically are going to be lower dollar and they require a lot of attention. They think if they have like access to you or your team or whomever, depending on what you promised in your marketing, you got to think about the back end operations and the implications of administrative customer service tickets, propensity for technical issues, do you need, you know, a software team? What platform do you use? Like, there's all of these things that come with more customers when you go down market.

13:42And so it's very important to know what you are getting into. And again, how that fits into the larger fold of your business and what you're willing to trade, you know, in exchange for that. And just understanding the implications for customer service and success is very, very, very, very important when you are going down market. More customers, like more money, more problems, more customers, more problems typically. Yeah. Yeah. Your website, welevelupcreators.com. Do you mind maybe just sharing, like, how do you work with folks? And it looks like you have, and God bless you for this, you've got multiple levels of engagement.

14:19Yeah, we do definitely. And right now we're focused on one thing in particular. And then we also do have a down market option that helps us fulfill our long-term vision, right? And so levelupcreatorschool.com is the productization of our consulting methodology, which is the MRR method, the monthly recurring revenue method. So levelup creator school is a fantastic option. You get access to myself and my entire top tier team of consultants, we have an expert for everything in your business, if you are our ideal customer profile. So that's cool. And the other thing that we're running right now, as of this year, our business is only 20, 20 months old, we built a multimillion dollar bootstrapped company in 18 months.

14:58And one thing that I have effectively bet the business on right now is this MRR accelerator. And so we're taking a group of five people through a seven month program, and we have promised them multi five figure MRR guarantees. And if we don't for any reason, achieve the guarantee by the end of the accelerator, we continue to work with those folks at the same capacity to get my myself and my full fractional team until we hit the mark. And so this has been fabulous. I mean, it's going unbelievably well, we're launching the second cohort on May 1. And we're well on our way to filling that cohort up as well.

15:32So we are, we have a very upmarket six figure program with a monster guarantee. It is the safest and best investment you could possibly make. And all of our participants have said, if you get an invitation from Amanda, you should do this. You'd be crazy not to. And then level up creator school is to help people who are in earlier stages and don't have the access to here's everything that you need in business in one place. Like I hate that people have to go learn how to do email marketing here and learn how to do social media here and learn how to build a course here. And one, I don't think you should really be building courses so much anymore.

16:04But yeah, so that's kind of the two ends of the spectrum for us right now. Your website, welevelupcreators.com. You know, I'll tell you, Amanda, you and I need to chat privately after this, because there's more for you and I to talk about. But I want to make sure that our friend that's listening, because I know you've got resources available as well. Do you mind sharing? There's a lot that you make available to our friend that's listening. Where do they go from here? How can they start getting into your world? Hopefully they can tell by our conversation that you're good people and you have a lot to offer.

16:42Yeah, thanks, Josh. Again, I'm Amanda Northcutt. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm the founder and CEO of Level Up Creators. So I'm there every day on LinkedIn. And if you go to MRRAccellerator.com, you can learn about the accelerator program. And we're very transparent about our pricing guarantee. Everything is on that page. You can join the interest list. Um, I'm starting sales calls for that. Um, I guess a bit after this podcast drop. So I will be in the thick of that right now. And you can also go to we level up creators.com and we have tons of free resources, free mini courses and email drip course called creator to CEO that is wildly popular creator business blueprint.

17:19So if you're a subject matter expert, you're, you know, have a fledgling, uh, consulting or coaching business, or you're well on your way and you're like, man, I really want MRR. I'm so tired of chasing down every single client that I get every month. Yeah, go check out our website. And the ups and downs, like, you know, for those who are mainly doing client work, ours is a little bit more recurring already. And we'll talk about that later. But, you know, for people that do short engagements, it's maddening. It is so distressing. Because a lot of times, you know, when you have these, and this is the world that I'm in, as I work as a fractional CRO.

17:55And so I'm dealing with clients that, you know, historically have had good months and then they have bad months and those bad months are just demoralizing. And it's like, is there something wrong with me? Is there something wrong with my system? Is there something wrong with the economy? Is there something wrong systemically? Nope. You probably just didn't have enough at bats. Right. And so, you know, it is the number one stressor for small businesses that is that instable income And, you know, monthly recurring revenue is how you solve that. Amanda Northcutt, your website, again, is welevelupcreators.com.

18:29Please, to our friend that's listening, go ahead and hit subscribe as well on the Level Up Creators podcast, which you can find. But please do check out all of the free courses and guides, Amanda, at your website, welevelupcreators.com. Amanda, it's been a great conversation. Let's have another one. Thank you.

18:54Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

19:36I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

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