The Psychology of Entrepreneurship

80. Volume: Tina Tower: Micro-Million Dollar Business

In a society that makes you conform to all sorts of structures, standing out and being yourself is a rebellious act. There’s never been a better time for you to be yourself.

If you are an entrepreneur, artist, athlete or creative, one who makes something that didn’t exist before, then this is for you

In this volume of The Psychology of Entrepreneurship

I interview Tina Tower about creating a Micro-Million Dollar business because:

  • She is the Author of One Life – How To Have The Life of Your Dreams, released in 2018. And now … Million Dollar Micro Business (get your book if you haven’t already got it. I’ve read it cover to cover.)
  • She has won the Telstra National Young Business Woman of the Year Award
  • She is an Australian Business Champion featured on the Today Show, in the Financial Review, on Sky Business as well as the Business Woman to watch by Huffington Post.
  • She is a Coach to online course creators, A Podcaster, Business Strategist … and my friend 🙂 

tina Tower The Psychology of Entrepreneurship In this episode we speak about:

  • Being the example, the leader & the believer.
  • Her first exciting moment in entrepreneurship
  • The disparity of professionalism
  • The Taliban and what is happening now
  • Tina’s backstory – the lawyer, teacher, entrepreneur
  • Sales & Selling – how to not have icky sales conversations
  • The 7 day launch formula
  • How to prepare for a selling campaign
  • The mountain of value you already have
  • The most important thing you can do for women rights
  • Generational women issues
  • How to show up as an entrepreneur

If you have a business and a podcast download your free copy of The Recurring Results Roadmap for Podcasters™. Download it here – https://roadmap.wearepodcast.com

This Roadmap gives you 3 main things:

  1. Your perfect clients’ attention – You know that you’re the best kept secret in your industry. We’ll show you how to get your audiences’ attention. It’s quite simple if you follow the right steps.
  2. Their deepest engagement – No form of content is more engaging than voice and audio. We’ll show you how to create an engaging podcast.
  3. An easy method to sell – The average sales process is a mess, for everyone. We’ll show you how to avoid ‘icky’ conversations and properly grow your business.

Volume Transcript

Ronsley Hi. Its Ronsley. If this is your first Volume, Welcome. This is a weekly series where I go inside the mind of an entrepreneur, artist, athlete, academic; to decipher what is the psychology of our decisions. 

I’m Australian and I’d like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and community. I pay my respects to them and their cultures; and to Elders past, present and emerging of the land I am standing on today. I extend my respect to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who listen to this.

It’s been a while hey!

Lots of changes. And since this is the psychology of entrepreneurship it is probably important that I address the break I took over the last few months. 

At the end of May my grandma died in India after having covid19 for 3 days. For what may seem like obvious reasons now, I stopped everything. Both podcast stopped publishing. I wanted a break to process it all. What was the biggest impact was that I couldn’t go back to say bye maybe. 

I’m in Australia and haven’t left these shores for what seems like forever now. 

Anyway, I’m back. And I’ve missed you. For me to get my rhythm back, this show will be released monthly until I’m comfortable in increasing that frequency.

And, enough about me.

My guest today, is an entrepreneur that I admire a lot. She’s done lots of cool things … including most recently created her own million dollar business in a year called Her Empire Builder. She’s’ a power house. You’ll see her book Million Dollar MicroBusiness in all book stores. With all the cool things … there is one that is the biggest of the things … 

Being the example 
Tina Tower: 
I think one of the biggest things, and this is why I’m so passionate about being loud about what I do as well, is so much of the examples that we see super successful businesses… I was talking about Gary V yesterday to someone and he’s got the whole attitude of “While they sleep, we work and we hustle and we grind.” And a lot of people, I think, cap themselves at business growth because they go, actually, “I want to have a balanced life. I want to be able to have a good relationship with my partner. I want to be able to be a good parent. I want to be able to travel. I want to be able to do all these things. I don’t want to just run a business.” So they think that if running a really successful seven-figure profitable business means saying goodbye to all of that. So people will often just cut themselves off from it.
Tina Tower: 
So I’m really intentional about being an example of going, “You don’t need to be famous. You don’t need to hustle and grind all the time. You can actually package what you know and share it with other people.” The software and the technology that’s available to us now, we couldn’t do what we did five years ago. It just wasn’t there. It’s now so easy, so accessible. You need no technology, you just need to show yourself as a human. 
Showing up as yourself. Ah yes! That seems quite simple to say but not that easy to execute … if you haven’t shed the stupid voice that says “What will they think?” 

More about that in this volume. And, how to build your business around you and your expression. 

But before that … I wanted to know what was Tina’s more exciting memory when she thinks back on her entrepreneurial journey. … 

My first exciting moment in entrepreneurship 
Tina Tower:
I remember opening my first franchise, and weirdly, my first franchise was in Cairns north of Australia. And I walked down the street when I got there. I got out of the airport and went to make my way to the hotel. And down the street, I saw a little girl walking with my Begin Bright bag, which was what my company was called, on her shoulder. Just walking along, talking to her mom smiling. And I was walking on the other side of the street going, “Oh my God, that’s mine. That’s mine. That’s mine.” And that was so incredibly exciting. And then that afternoon went to the centre and it was the first time I’d seen all our signage on someone else’s building without me doing it. That was probably one of the best. As soon as you said that, that’s what sticks in my mind the most, yeah.
One of the stories’ in Tina’s book is where she got this comment from a guy who told her that she giggles a lot and that it makes her sound less professional … Actually… I’m a bit too angry right now … I’ll let Tina explain .. 
I giggle – the disparity of professionalism 
I had someone when I started my podcast send me in the email saying, “I think your content is really good, but if you want to be taken seriously, you’ve got to kind of cut it with the giggle.” I am a giggler. I just do emotion. I’m a highly-charged emotional person and it bubbles out of me. And one of the best parts about getting older was I started business when I was 20.
Tina Tower: 
And through my early 20s, I had an educational toy store, and even trying to get trade accounts and all of that sort of thing, people would ask to speak to my parents or speak to my husband. And I was really taken as this airhead because I wore rainbow clothing and I laughed a lot, and was just really enthusiastic about life. And as I kind of hit 30 and then beyond, it flipped to now you ask most people, “Oh, Tina Tower, do you know her?” And a lot of people will say, “Oh my gosh, I love her energy, her vibrancy, her enthusiasm.” And now that I’m older, it’s taken as a lot of energy. Whereas when I was younger, it was taken as, “She’s just a ditzy airhead.” So I’m really grateful for age for that, but nothing about my personality has changed. So I’m always really careful to never underestimate girls because they’re really capable of a lot if you treat them seriously, anybody is. I think one of the best parts that I’ve seen is that we can come in all different flavours and all shapes and sizes and all personality types.
Tina Tower: And that’s one thing that I’ve really started to see being embraced in the last five years, especially, is not having to stick with, like the lecturer told me that I wasn’t suited for the corporate world because I didn’t fit the traditional [dude in a suit 00:05:37] taking life super seriously. That’s really what it came down to. Maybe I could have gone into the corporate world and given massive bland vanilla companies the shake-up that they needed, we’ll never know. But I’m glad that he steered me off that path. Obviously, I’ve created a life that I absolutely love, but I love that now you can be who you are a lot more. And that is really widely accepted. But to go back to your point in…
FACT
Did you know? Taliban Fact
I think in general as entrepreneurs listening to this podcast … having a perspective on how lucky we are to be able to express ourselves. A lot of humans right now are not having that much luck. Our ancestors definitely didn’t

I think we’ve all got to step back, get out of our own way and serve the people with the gifts we’ve been blessed with. 

Anyway, Rant over! Tina … were you always entrepreneurial? 

The backstory – The Lawyer, teacher, entrepreneur 
Tina Tower:No. I spent a lot of my early life not knowing who I was or what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a lawyer in high school, and I did work experience as a lawyer and went to court and went into court on work experience. And they were trying this case where I was actually on the criminal lawyer’s side. And he was a rapist and everything was trying to get him off. And that was so the moment that I was like, “Okay, this isn’t the world for me. I don’t want this to be my everyday life and what we’re exposed to.” I think people in those fields and in medicine and in all the things where you’re seeing people at their worst times on their worst days and dealing with really heavy stuff, I just knew at that time, I didn’t want that for my life. So I then went, “Okay.” Looked at my grades really and went, “What else should I go into?” And saw business. Went into business, did that, and got to the end of my first year.
Tina Tower:And I had a lecturer pull me aside and tell me that he didn’t think I had the right constitution for the corporate world and business and I should look at something else. And to his credit, we designed our corporate branding and our identity. And I had made these business cards with smiley faces on them. So I was always that way inclined. So he said, “Maybe you should do something that’s more appropriate for your personality and go into education.” Because what else is a happy bubbly girl supposed to do other than teach children? Turned out it was the best thing for me. I switched into an education degree, loved it, but then started my business second year of uni. So I always done a lot of things. I was always, I know what I’m about to say could be misconstrued in a lot of different ways, I always thought I was made for more. I always thought I was going to do something great.
Tina Tower: I’d started getting into Anthony Robbins and Robert Kiyosaki when I was 15, 16. I went to my first personal development seminars and getting into Amway as well and Network TwentyOne and different things that brought out that personal development and that idea that, if you could, I know it sounds so corny, but the idea that if you could dream it, you can actually craft and design your life around whatever it is that you wanted to do and be. And I always kind of had that in me, but I didn’t know what that was going to look like yet. And it’s taken me a really long time. I feel up until a few years ago, I was still finding that. 
Expressing yourself is one thing as an entrepreneur. 

Selling your services and your business and yourself … that is new emotional barrier breaking territory .

Sales & Selling
Talking of sales though, because I know where a lot of, especially with a lot of my clients, selling can be construed as sleazy selling and we don’t want to sell to people. And also, people don’t like to be sold to. So that is a big thing as well. One of my friends, Colin Boyd, he has this system that he’s trademarked called infusion selling. But one of my favourite sayings of his is, selling is serving.
Tina Tower: And that really changed my mindset on selling and going, “Okay. If you look at where your customers are right now, they’re wanting to get better on Clubhouse. They’re wanting to repurpose their content. They don’t know the tech to use. They don’t know how to set up. They’re flying blind. They’re wasting so many hours for $1,000.” You can add tens of thousands of dollars to their bottom line, make their lives so much easier, give them training that they can use again and again, help their VAs, help all of this. If you just put that in front of them, you could be the perfect solution to their problem. So you’re actually serving your customers by putting that offer front and centre. Whereas if you hold back and you don’t show yourself, you’re doing your customers a disservice because they don’t know it exists and you’re not solving their problem.
Ok… Tina … you’re the expert … say we express ourselves to the best of our abilities, put ourselves out there, how to we sell? Whats the secret? 
The 7 day launch
Okay. So I’m a big fan of live launches. The limited launch formula is what I talk about all the time and going open cart for eight days. My favourite thing about doing that is, I only launch twice a year, so I go loud. I go heavy on sales for eight days, but then I don’t have to do it again for six months. So then I can focus that six months on just loving up my customers, adding value, not selling a damn thing, which I love.
Tina Tower: But then, when you’re into that sales period, everyone’s there and everyone’s been waiting for what you’ve got and it’s that sense of urgency. So everyone jumps in straight away and actually, it seems counterintuitive. I tried evergreen courses that are open all the time, and the launch, you get far more with a short launch window than you do having it available all the time. So the only way evergreen really works is when you’re funneling a bucket load of Facebook advertising to it. And you’ve got really beautiful funnels that are pumping with Facebook advertising with a price point that’s lower than $500 that can work really well, or if you’re famous. So if you’re someone that’s known in the industry like Amy Porterfield, James Wedmore, Jasmine Star, they can do high price evergreen through Facebook advertising. But if you’re just a regular unfamous person, then you need to show yourself. And this is where I think… I’ve just come off launch so I’m very, very fresh on all of that. But the human element is your super power.
So, you just sell for 7 days? 
Why don’t cap and the 7 days to launch
Tina Tower: 
Yes. That’s your urgency and scarcity, is the timeline, not the places. You don’t need to cap the places. So an example of this, I had a client who said, “You know what? My first one, I’m going to cap it at 100. We’re going to do the live launch week.” And I was like, “Don’t cap it. Don’t cap it” She’s like, “No, I just want to do it there because I really want to be able to go, ‘We sold out.’ That’s going to be a good thing.” Anyway, a good thing for who? A good thing for you and your ego, or a good thing for all of the people that you could have helped, that you didn’t otherwise help? Anyway, she launched. We opened it at the evening. She woke up the next morning, nine hours later, and she was at 103. And I’m like, “So do you want to turn it off?” She’s like, “Well, yeah. I told everyone I’d cap it.” So we got to turn it off.
Tina Tower: 
She was supposed to do a seven-day launch. Not only did she miss out on the profit and the business-building of all those people, but potentially 100s of other people missed out on getting the benefit of her program and her service. And for you to cap at 20 is laughably ridiculous. 
When we come back, preparing to launch, how to show up & generational issues that are important for us to cover so that we can have equality … after the break.

CTA Voice Over

Before the break … we covered expression, being the example & how to sell for just 7 days … that seems like there might be some prep work involved in that 7 day selling ?? Tina? 
Prepare & Campaign – Clubcasting 
Tina Tower:Yeah. So I call it the off season and I think that the off season is actually more important than… I’m a sucker for American football movies and all of the sport movies, so I use a lot of personalities. But yeah, I think the training that you do beforehand and how you get primed is way more important than when the game is actually on. What a lot of people do is they don’t seed it and they don’t prepare it. And then they just come out of the gate and they’ve got something open in launch and people are like, “What is this?” And it’s too much decision too quickly. So between now and then, that’s when you’re getting people excited, but you’re not giving them the option to buy it yet. And that can sometimes seem counterintuitive because you’re like, “Hang on, but I want to strike while the iron’s hot, while they’re there and they’re asking for it. I want them to be able to buy it.” But you don’t. You want to make them wait. You want to get them excited and say it’s coming.
Tina Tower: 
So between now and then, every conversation you have, you just drop in, “Club casting is coming.” You make them wonder like, “What is club casting?” This is what it is. Yeah. And you get people excited and then you have your free lead magnet. So have you got a one page on, “This is how to get started on Clubhouse,” or something that’s going to be relevant to that audience? 
We all know how much I love Clubhouse … I am there every Tuesday 7 am Brisbane time. I think that works out to 2pm PT on a Monday for those in NAmerica . Also that might change when day light saving times change. 

But join me on clubhouse … its the The Psychology of Entrepreneurship club … and we talk all about podcasting for business … 

Anyway …Tina… you must get the question … “but what if I have nothing to sell?” 

The mountain of value you already have
Yeah. So I find, you mentioned beliefs before, a lot of people underestimate how much they actually know and how much valuable information that they have to share with other people. Because when someone’s really, really good at something, it’s so second nature. So being able to actually break that down and go, “All right, I have this that I can package and sell to the world,” is sometimes hard because I’ll talk to people and go, “Well, this is your thing.” And they’ll go, “No, no, no. Everybody knows that, right? That’s so easy.”
Tina Tower: I’m like, “No. It’s easy for you, but everybody else gets super confused by it.” Sometimes there’s things that I’ll talk about and people will go, “Oh my God, my mind is blown. This is incredible.” And I’m like, “Really? This is the simplest thing.” But that’s what makes it so good. So I think when you’re looking at being able to scale the knowledge that you have is going, “What is second nature to you? What are people asking you for advice for all the time?” Because that’s always the telltale is, sometimes we’ll think we’re really good at one thing and that this is our thing and this is what we’re marketing ourselves as, but there could be this constant stream of people that are coming going, “I see you do this. How do you do this?” That you haven’t actually pinpointed. And if you go with naturally what people are perceiving you as, then that often works really, really well. And then I go, “You’ve got to love it. So this goes against what a lot of people say. I’ve seen people say, “Go with what’s marketable and what can sell a lot.”
Tina Tower:
But I think if you don’t truly love what you do, it’s never going to work because you have to talk about it so much, again and again and again and again. And we live in this, you’re talking about Clubhouse a lot, and it’s really easy to pick up from people when they actually care about what they’re talking about and when they’re not. And people won’t buy from you if they think you’re just doing it to sell something, you’ve got to really believe in it. So that’s kind of the few things in how to start.
FACT
According to U.N Women dot org … The most important thing you can do for equal rights is using your voice. From an article they released before International Women’s Day they say, quote
Whether you’re talking to your friends and family, or engaging with an advocacy organisation, the most important way to be an advocate is speaking up. By raising your voice for women’s rights and gender equality, you can spread awareness and break down barriers. end quote
I wonder to myself a lot. Lol .. I’m a day dreamer 

But what I wonder most is … who is looking at me when I decide not to be brave and put myself out there? 

Tina continually does that and actually I need to complement her on that. 

Tina… you show up so amazingly for yourself and for your people, because they see you doing it everyday. 

Generational women issues  
Tina Tower: 
Thanks. I think I am in a very lucky generation. The women in the generation before me worked really hard so that I can be who I am now. I think I’m one of the first generations that have been able to do that. And I see that a lot. Most of the women that I work with are older than me. They’re in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. And I see a lot of the women, especially in their late 50s and 60s have this hard exterior and this guard up a lot. And then they’ll talk to me and they’re endearing and beautiful and soft and feminine and amazing. And then when they step into public, up it comes again and it’s really hard to drop that guard and show themselves. And that is by design. That is because if that was done through their 20s and 30s, they were discounted. They were emotional women and they just wouldn’t be welcome into those certain rooms. So they had to have this hard exterior and behave like men do in a lot of traditional situations.
Tina Tower: And I even think it’s been great for men because men are now able as well to drop that fricking bravado exterior a lot that we’ve had to see held so much. I look at my sons now and I go, “Who they can be and the beliefs that they can hold and the way that they can behave is so different to the men before them.” So I’ve dealt with a lot of things. I don’t notice it as much as the stories that have happened from women before me, I only notice it with things like… So I’ve got my second book coming out this year. And there was someone that I was dealing with whose name is Chris. And I thought it was Chris [inaudible 00:18:24]. I’d only been speaking with him over email. So we were bantering back and forth all the time like, “Oh my God, I love her. She’s so funny and dah, dah, dah.” And a month later as we got into the process, and I realised Chris was a man and I was like, “Oh, shit.”
Tina Tower: And then I thought of all my correspondence and realised, “Oh my gosh, I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have said this. I shouldn’t have said that.” And had you asked me before that, I would have said, “No, I don’t talk any differently to men and women. No different at all.” And then I realised, “Oh my gosh, so different.” I was like, “Was that flirtatious?” Because we were bantering, right? We were having this conversation back and forth. So yeah, that was quite interesting and polarising to go, “Oh, yeah, I do have things that I didn’t know that I had.” So there was always the kind of censorship in doing that and in business travel and in board meetings and making sure you’re never alone and all of the things that are so naturally ingrained in us that we do have to be careful of. I see so much progress. I know it was International Women’s Day this month. So, so much of it is in the public eye and there is so far to go. The domestic violence rates in Australia and the world are just incredibly terrible.
Tina Tower: We pay a lot of money for girls in Kenya for scholarships to go to school because if they don’t, they get married when they’re 13 and 14, often to much older men. Just the inequality in the world is still gapingly horrendous, but it’s headed in the right direction. So I do a lot of work with the UN and their goals that they have. And they’re aiming for so many things by 2030, and most people would say, “It’s absolutely impossible.” We’ve got 100 years before we’re at gender equality, but I think that we’re really underestimating the generation of people that are coming up under us, because I talked to a lot of teenage girls and men. They have confidence. They are ready to go. There’s so many gender disparity issues it’s just not even a thing for them.
Yeah … you know how I feel about equality. About bias, about disparity. So, I’m not going to go into that here today. Listen to previous volumes especially the death row series and the aboriginal leaders series. 

So, lets land this plane … Tina … final words, especially how do we show up as an entrepreneur ? 

How do you show up as an entrepreneur 
Tina Tower: 
So, like you said with Clubhouse, right, is people can suss you out really, really quickly. And a lot of people, especially the people that I work with have been working behind a brand, working behind the business for a long time and not putting themselves to the forefront. But the more you’re willing to show up and serve and give free content and lives and talk to people and connect and add value and just like a fire hydrant of beautiful, valuable information, then they get a sense of, “Okay, well, this is what it’s like to work with. You actually know your stuff.” And then that’s what converts really, really well. I’ve tested all the different social media images and tiles and all, if you don’t put your face in it, it won’t have anywhere near the result than if it’s your face. And if it’s your face that’s actually moving a video or a reel, then even better. So you’ve got to show yourself. If you’re not willing to show yourself and put yourself forward, you’re not going to win the game.
30 Seconds clip from next Volume

I interviewed Tina Tower because:

  • Author of One Life – How To Have The Life of Your Dreams, released in 2018. And now … Million Dollar Micro Business – get your book if you haven’t already got it. I’ve read it cover to cover.
  • She has won the Telstra National Young Business Woman of the Year Award
  • She is an Australian Business Champion featured on the Today Show, in the Financial Review, on Sky Business as well as the Business Woman to watch by Huffington Post.
  • She is a Coach to online course creators
  • A Podcaster, Business Strategist … and my friend 🙂 

Author: Ronsley Vaz

Ronsley is the founder & chief day dreamer at AMPLIFY. He is an author, speaker & serial entrepreneur.

He has a Masters’ degree in Software Engineering and an MBA in Psychology and Leadership. He is known as the creator of We Are Podcast – the first Podcasting Conference in the Southern Hemisphere, and the host of The Bond Appetit Podcast and Should I Start a Podcast. He has an audience of over 3 million in 133 countries.

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