Jodi-Kay Edwards With Alignment Is The New Hustle

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com To learn more. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a good one today on the show, we have Jodi-Kay Edwards with alignment is the new hustle. Welcome to Kay.

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:00:44] Hi, Lee, thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:45] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your practice. How are you serving, folks?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:00:50] Right now we are offering personal development and business strategy sessions. The whole idea is to fall into alignment with your authentic self and find your messaging online so people can learn more about the brand itself.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:02] So what’s your backstory? How did you get into this line of work?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:01:06] Backstory, born in Jamaica, moved to America, just caught up in the whole American dream. The hustle, right? We we were the hustle from a very young age, and I realized very quickly that hustle led to burnout. It leads to a lot of really great opportunities and money and things like that as well. But I was like, You know what? There has to be a better way, and I realized that when you can align your mind and your thoughts first, instead of just always taking all this action, if we can put some intentionality behind it, it’s a little bit easier to get the same level of success or same version of success that we’re looking for.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:37] Now, do you kind of have a sweet spot in terms of the type of client that you serve? Is it focus, you know, on creatives or is it on makers or on, you know, executives, leaders like who? Who do? Who is the folks that really resonate with your message?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:01:52] So a majority of my clients generally have some type of spirituality, background, whether they’re interested in law of attraction or they understand this whole realm of personal development. A lot of my marketing copy speaks towards that, but I do primarily focus on creatives and CEOs. So I do brand management for some artists who are in the music industry as like our higher level packages and coaching services and then people like myself who are, you know, just want to do the coaching at this level. And then artists, it just really captures the creative side and then the CEOs when it comes to corporations, small businesses of mind, but large businesses as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:30] Now what’s the pain that they’re having, where your team is the right answer for them? Like, what are they going through? What are they frustrated with? Where they kind of raise their hand and say, I need some help here?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:02:42] I love this question, and I always believe that as coaches, we should be the product of what we’re selling. So my ability to just hop on this interview and not even prep for it and just know my unique selling point, my value proposition, my niche, my industry have a clear understanding of my messaging and my marketing and how to explain that. That’s the biggest thing and the biggest transformation that our clients go through. It’s by taking them through the various exercises so they can see their worth, they can see their value and of course, communicate that value so they can show up online, get seen and get paid. So without communicating that they’re not getting paid. And then content marketing and social media marketing feels super confusing when it can really just be as simple as understanding the value that you provide and being able to communicate that online.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:27] So can you share some some advice for these folks that are struggling or are there some things they can be doing right now without engaging your services that maybe low hanging fruit for them so they can kind of get some momentum?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:03:41] Yeah, absolutely. There’s so much free content out there in the world, and I always say information without implementation is just information. So even in my free content, I’m showing your free content or other people’s free content. It’s really just looking at what you need right now. What does your business need right now? What do you need right now to move to that next level to bring you one step closer to success? And it’s not consuming more information. It’s being hyper intentional and creating almost like a free blueprint. We’re all selling some type of blueprint, right? So it’s creating your own unique blueprint based off of what you feel. Your pain points in your business are right now, and you can go ahead and take that free information that’s out there. It’s part of our sales funnel for us as coaches, but we put it out there because it really actually does help people. So if someone was able to shift their mindset from just all this free content, I don’t know how to do with it to like, Oh, here’s another free training. Here’s another thing during that webinar listen to that podcast and don’t just consume the content. Listen to how they sell. Listen to the marketing phrases or the keywords that they use. And if that’s applicable in your business, go ahead and write those down and start using those things in your business right now.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:51] Now, have you any examples where you can talk about maybe a client that was struggling or maybe plateaued or was frustrated and you’ve been able to help them get to a new level? Obviously, don’t name the name or the company name, but just maybe the challenge they were having and what you did to help them kind of get to the new level?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:05:11] Yeah, absolutely. I have lots of different creatives, so I’ll give you one of my creatives. I’ll put like my website designers and developers in that area. And she was stuck at around two hundred to five hundred dollars per month, and we were able to scale her business after just about 90 days of working together to about five thousand dollars per month. And really the biggest thing she came to me with a brand, so a lot of people might think, Oh, well, I don’t need a coach, I don’t need this. I don’t need that. Well, a lot of people can’t even explain the difference between branding and marketing. So then, of course, when we can take a look at tightening up a brand, how do you want people to feel? How do you want people to engage? What do you want people to think about your business? And then we pair that with an actual marketing campaign or marketing strategy. We can start to fine tune the ways that we promote our offers. So by officers getting together and figuring out a few of her, her branding elements and putting an actual marketing campaign behind it to push her branding elements out into the world so she could be the go to expert in her industry. She was able to see a return on investment, mostly from her social media, expanding, reaching new people and, of course, being able to book more sales calls. And then, of course, in the sales training that we do, being able to close more leads and raise her prices.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:31] Now you mentioned you mentioned a couple of phrases, and you’re right, most people don’t understand kind of the nuance between them. But can you explain to folks the difference between branding and marketing?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:06:41] Yeah, I’m actually coming out with a webinar on this because it wasn’t until this year that I realized there’s so many people were were confused on that. But something that is that makes it a little bit easier is the brand isn’t just the logo that’s an element of your brand. A lot of people think I’m working on my branding, I’m going to rebrand, I’m going to do my colors, I’m going to do the logo, I’m going to do all those things. And while those do play a great, huge role of your brand, that’s not your brand alone. So when you think of a brand, think about Wendy’s and think about Taco Bell or even think about Wendy’s, and let’s pick a fast food. Maybe Sonic. We might have noticed that one DS has this personification to their brand. Wendy’s always kind of talk smack about Taco Bell. If you look at Wendy’s Twitter, it’s hilarious. So what sets them apart and their brand apart from other fast food chains and other fast food brands is that they have this memorable experience. They incorporate humor into their brand. So then of course, they have their logo, they have the little red headed girl with the freckles, and that logo has evolved over time, like many of our locals do as entrepreneurs.

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:07:47] But that part alone doesn’t do anything. Now what does Wendy’s do? They take that, and they have these marketing campaigns. We see the commercials. They might work with influencers and we might see someone biting into a juicy burger. Now, all of a sudden, we have the branded elements that increase the like, know and trust. We like, know and trust Wendy’s for x y z reasons, which we don’t have time to go into detail here today. But then the marketing campaign pushes it out at hyper relevant times in the industry for them to generate sales. And those two things coming together create brand awareness. And also, like I said earlier, increases the like non trust factor, which also feeds into the business cycle and the sales cycle of our businesses so we can generate sales, not just generate content and burn out on free content and not just sell, sell, sell all the time. It’s a powerful combination when we know how to make the branding and the marketing together.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:44] Now in your work, are you also helping your client kind of land on appropriate pricing?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:08:51] Absolutely. Pricing, definitely for me, I can speak personally stems from this intrinsic value, and there’s so many people out there that say charger with charger worth, and I do believe in that. It’s something that I have said as well. But if you’re just new and you don’t know how to facilitate a transformation for someone, there’s going to be this disconnect between you charging ten thousand for a package where you’re really just in it for the money versus you knowing this is a ten thousand dollar transformation and I can talk about it like it’s a hundred thousand dollar transformation. So when it comes to pricing, I’m really helping my clients and say, Hey, I want to make sure that you eat. I want to make sure that you’re charging your value, and I want to make sure that you feel confident enough about this offer that you can communicate that value to someone else. What becomes a no brainer for them? And then behind the scenes, because I believe in ethical marketing that you actually know how to get that person, all the things that you’re promising them.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:48] Now, do you find that some people when you start talking about marketing, you talk about pricing, they start feeling kind of icky that they, you know, they’re trying to serve people, they’re trying to help people. And the money kind of complicates things and it makes them uncomfortable.

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:10:03] Yeah, absolutely, and I always say, if you understand how to provide a service before the sale, those should not be any of my clients who are feeling icky or feeling like they don’t have any value where they have to give away their best stuff for free all the time. Generally, the people that feel sleazy when it comes to selling are the people who haven’t taken the time to understand if they can even help that person, so they’re pushing the sale forward. Now, if it’s me and I’m talking to someone, I have no problem selling because I know through my framework I’m trying to identify their problems. I’m looking within my company and saying, Hey, you know what? I actually have the right people in place. I have the right trainers, I have the right coaches, I have myself, I have the right courses, tools, resources to actually help me with that problem. Do you want to hop on a sales call? But I’m not going to offer someone something based off of the fact that they have money just because someone has money to pay those prices does not make them a, we call it, NCLH marketing qualified lead. So you have your leads and you have your qualified leads, and we need to spend a lot more time qualifying our leads for our product suite versus just putting offerings out there and saying no one’s buying well, you have to identify who’s who’s an actual buyer and who’s someone who’s just a supporter in your audience.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:20] Now do you have an exercise you can share for our listeners to help them identify who that ideal prospect looks like?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:11:27] Yeah, absolutely. There’s so many different ways we can do this, but when we start at the top of our funnel, so that would that might be someone engages with our social media content and we say, Hey, tap a link in my bio, go ahead and download this thing. They put their name in their email and right there they’ve they’ve said yes to something. They’ve said yes is something that you’re promising. Now, let’s say that funnel is like a simple three step email funnel. You, you do email number one. You give them the thing that you promise you introduce to your email number to you, trigger a pain point or remind them of a pressure point, something that they want. And email number three, you solve that pain or pleasure point, and you’re able to fill the gap with your specific offer there. And maybe instead of sending them to a landing page, you’re actually just inviting them to hop on a call with you. Now, the people that say yes and open your emails right then and there, they’re qualifying themselves. They’re interested because before they open the email, they had to look at the email subject line. And then from there they had to actually read the content of the email. And then from there they actually had to click the link. And maybe you can if you’re looking at your analytics this deep as we all should, and so we can understand if our marketing is working or not, maybe that person has or has actually clicked the link.

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:12:38] Now, if you have it a little bit more advanced, you’re retargeting people who click that link with a Facebook ad or something like that. They might be targeted and tagged and all those things with the Pixel. But for you at like the basic level, you might just be saying they said yes to me multiple times. Let me go ahead and connect with them on a deeper level. They’ve already been qualified. Now what? A lot of us are maybe taught to do at the beginning, which I don’t necessarily agree with, is go to your Instagram DM. A bunch of random people do the cold calling, and while that works for some people, it doesn’t work for a majority of us because we’re super in our head about the sale and it’s confusing and it just leads to a lot of rejection. So if you find that what you’re doing right now, you’re getting a lot of no’s. Take a look at are you actually qualifying those leads with your content? Are they actual? Are you giving them a chance to say yes to you? Or are you just assuming that they’re lead because they have a pocket book and a beating heart?

Lee Kantor: [00:13:37] Yeah, that’s great advice. That’s so important if you’re not aiming this right, it’s going to be a lot of stress and a lot of anxiety on your part. You don’t have to work that hard if you’re doing this right.

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:13:51] Through that to that

Lee Kantor: [00:13:52] Now on this show, one of the reasons we do the show is to help coaches learn from each other. Can you share with our listeners how you got your last client? How did the last person that wrote you a check come into your world?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:14:06] It was the easiest last client. I do something that I will give you guys here is I borrow other people’s audiences like I’m doing right now. I either get pitched to be on podcast or teach a lot of different summits. I also am speaker. I speak on stages, so while I have my marketing going on in the background, I have this strategy that I believe it’s never too early to implement where you collaborate with other people in your industry. And I was actually able to be fully booked out a few months ago just by being on a really large podcast in my industry. And then my last client that came on board actually found me from that podcast interview that was out earlier this year.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:46] Good stuff. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. If somebody wants to get a hold of you, what is the website?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:14:54] You can find me at w-w-what jodi handlers dot com. I’m also on all social media at Jodi had rates.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:01] And that’s Jodi K a y e d debit cards, right?

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:15:08] Yep. Yep, Jodi I K-Y Edwards. You got it.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:13] All right. Well, thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work, and we appreciate you.

Jodi-Kay Edwards: [00:15:17] Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Have a good one.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:19] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see, y’all next time on Coach the Coach radio.