Searchie Spotlight | The Million Dollar Blueprint: How To Scale Solo With Brandi Mowles

During This Interview, We Cover: 

• The fastest path to cash online
• The million dollar scalable model for solopreneurs
• The power of simplification and supporting tools
• Defining your own success story
• And A LOT more!
  
  

  Spotlighter Bio  Name: Brandi Mowles Business: Brandi Mowles, Meta Ad Strategist + Marketing Mentor Niche: Brandi Mowles is a wife, mom, taco snob, digital marketing expert, and former ad manager who transformed her family's life by building a 7-figure online business in just two years. Her secret? Focusing on the unsexy stuff like setting up efficient systems, overdelivering for her clients, and building genuine relationships. Through her programs Serve Scale Soar® and Conversions For Clients™, she takes a big-heart, no-fluff approach to helping online service providers scale their business with simplicity. Now she is obsessed with helping women take more action and earn more, so they too can step into the top 12% of women-owned businesses that hit the six-figure mark.

Let’s Dive In With Brandi Mowles!

Paulina at Searchie: I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about who Brandi is, who you serve and what you do.

Brandi: First and foremost, I'm a wife, I'm a mom, podcast host, digital marketing expert and a total taco snob. So that's me, like in a nutshell. My business serves the freelance virtual assistant service-based community.

I focus a lot on ad managers. I help them get started with their businesses, learn how to run ads for other people, but then also how all service-based entrepreneurs who are servicing other people and other businesses, how they can scale their business with simplicity hit those $10K months without growing an agency or having a big team.

The One-On-One Advantage

Paulina at Searchie: What point did you shift from working for other people to working for yourself?

Brandi: I feel like I still work for other people. So one thing I love is one-on-one service providers. I always say that's like the fastest path to cash online. And so even now I still have high level consultant clients that I do marketing consulting for.

I've always had this servant's heart where I love to serve. That's what I think is so powerful about one-on-one service providers too is like you were providing such an incredible service and helping other businesses grow.

So I've never fully transitioned away from it, but I think it was after I was doing about $250,000 with my one-on-one services. So that would've been my first full year in business that I started offering a second revenue stream, which was my Membership that I got started because of Stu. And I started offering that as another way to grow my income. So it wasn't fully reliant on my one-on-one services.

“One thing I love is one-on-one service providers. I always say that's like the fastest path to cash online.”

The Million Dollar Model

Paulina at Searchie: What have you learned about yourself in refining your own business model and adding that second revenue stream with your Membership site? Where did that idea come from?

Brandi: So I think one of the things is in the online space we hear like you have to grow an agency or you have to have a course on Membership in order to scale. And I was like, well I've scaled without an agency or without a membership, but I did hit a cap and that was about the 250 ($250,000). And at that point it was just me.

There was no other team and I knew that 250 ($250,000) was bringing us a great life 'cause high profit margins – which I'm a big fan of for all business owners. But I knew I wanted something more. I wanted to help more people, I wanted more revenue for my family. 

I had a goal of hitting a million dollars and I knew that I didn't want an agency and so I knew I had to have something else that was more scalable.

That's when I found memberships and courses and stuff like that, I went that way without ever giving up fully my services. But I knew that I wanted something else – because I'm a mom, I'm a wife, I manage a household – I sure as heck do not wanna manage a team. That's never been a goal of mine to have a big team or anything.

I'd rather have a smaller business, with high profit margin, than have a large team that I'm responsible for. For me that looked like “okay, how can we set this business up so I can hit my goals? We can have the most impact, but I also don't turn away from my priorities” – which is my family keeping my business simple – keeping high profit margins and not having an agency.

And that's when I dove into the courses, the memberships and started getting those going as well. But I had to get clear on, I do not want “this” in my business. So how do I create something where I can stay true to the things that I do not want? 

I think a lot of times it's easy to say what we don't want, but then we start saying yes to the things that we wouldn't normally say yes to, to get what we want. And for me it's always like what don't I want in my business? So then I can build a business around doing the things I really love.

“I had a goal of hitting a million dollars and I knew that I didn't want an agency and so I knew I had to have something else that was more scalable.”

Serving A Niche: Ad Managers

Paulina at Searchie: Has having a membership site helped with that cap and adding that different dimension to your business?

Brandi: Yeah, that was like what I wanted to do first. I really wanted to create a membership because to me that felt like I was gonna be connecting with people more. And I'm a connector, I love to connect with people, I love energy. And so that was important to me. 

So we launched our membership and our membership was doing really, really well and we were able to grow up really fast. But I found this niche that needed to be served and that was ad managers. 

Most of the programs out there were teaching people how to run ads for their own business, or they were teaching them how to create a service-based business. But nothing at that time was meshing the two together. 

So the membership was amazing 'cause it created this audience of people that were primed for my course. And my course within 18 months of launching, had done over a million dollars – but it was because of the Membership that got me the audience to get that course off the ground. 

A lot of people like bookkeepers and accountants were looking at my books and they were like, you're spending so much time on this membership and it's not bringing anywhere near as much in as the course. 

And I was like, but you don't understand – the membership gets people into my world, and once they're in my world they wanna stay in my world. And that's what's feeding the course. So I love that – with our business model – my membership is not my most profitable or highest revenue source, but I know that it's building the lifetime customer that feeds all my other business.

“The membership gets people into my world, and once they're in my world they wanna stay in my world.”

Paulina at Searchie: I know that you are super passionate about keeping things simple. So how have you found that Searchie has helped you in your quest to keep things simple in your business?

Brandi: I think the biggest thing is when you don't want a big team, you have to rely on a lot of automation. You have to rely on a lot of software that helps make your job easier. And so one thing before we were even on Searchie Hubs – we're close to being like beta members, I'm pretty sure. We used to use it as a widget because when I saw that we could search through video, and when I'm doing week after week of coaching calls and answering the same questions – I was like, wow! This is gonna set the tone for our community where they can find answers quicker. 

I work with a lot of moms, I work with a lot of busy women. They don't have time to wait around to write an email, to send a Facebook message or wait on me to answer. So if this could shortcut their process, heck yeah we were gonna do it. And that's how it started. But then the cool thing happened is when we switched to Searchie Hubs, everything pretty much became automated. 

We're on Zoom all the time. Now all those Zoom recordings go right into Searchie and then with a few buttons, they're in the right Hub that they need to be. One person on my team, she was able to shorten her day tremendously by doing that. The AI with the chapters, that shortcut our job, even coming up with descriptions for our trainings and things like that. And also with our podcast, we have over 300 episodes or something like that – four years of episodes. And those are all sent in there and we create customized playlists for our members. So they can go listen to all those episodes or they can search through all those episodes and find what they need. 

So not only has it helped our customer experience, our client experience, it's also helped our team be able to quickly get our clients and customers what they need. 

With my consultant clients, we have one call every single week that's 90 minutes to two hours. They need those video recordings for their team – so they can implement what I told them – that we need to do within an hour of it going through Zoom into Searchie, we put it in their playlist. Their team always has access to their playlist. And so they're able to quickly find their videos. It's not like this back and forth emailing or anything.

We say give us two hours and it'll be on your playlist. And we link that in their portal. It's just automated our life, which is great. And then it's created this amazing customer experience where, why would anyone wanna leave us when they're getting something that they're not getting from other people?

“If this could shortcut their process, heck yeah we were gonna do it.”

Paulina at Searchie: What tips and tricks do you have for entrepreneurs who are looking to take their business to the next level?

Brandi: The big thing is you have to let go of all the advice that we hear that doesn't fit you. There's so many amazing women business owners online, but a lot of the advice online comes from men with different responsibilities, different roles. As a female entrepreneur, usually my audience and myself we're juggling a lot of different things than those men.

We have kids running around, we have to try to do sales calls with babies screaming in the background, like how do we manage this? The “Get up at 5:00 AM, go to the gym, eat a protein shake,” that doesn't work for us. It's like, oh my gosh, I just got to bed from doing laundry, now you're telling me I gotta get up at 5:00 AM and work out?

I'm not saying there isn't a place ever in our life where that happens, but that business advice may not fit your life right now. So I think there's a lot of just blanket advice out there that doesn't fit where you are. So no matter what stage you are, no matter if you're a new mom with a new baby – which I am – or you have a five-year-old like I do – or a teenager that's about to go to college, or you have grown children, you're an empty nester. We all have different areas in our life and some of the advice isn't gonna fit our life right now. 

So instead of trying to mold into what people are telling us to do… Take the pieces that you can do and that feel in alignment with you, and run with those.

Stop trying to focus on doing all the things, and focus on the things that move the needle the fastest for you. And so having your own goals in mind is also so important. We hear $10K months, and I'll say it's in my marketing, we say $10K months, a $100K year, all this stuff. But if that's not what you need right now, why are we pushing ourselves to get it when it may not even be what we want? 

Maybe you just need $4,000 a month, so your kid can go to private school. That's amazing! That's an incredible goal. Let's not downplay that. Let's see what we can do right now in the least amount of time to get there that still provides you the life and alignment that you want.

A lot of times we're chasing goals that aren't even our goals to begin with and then we're following those goals based on blanket advice that doesn't fit our lifestyle. It doesn't fit what we can do. And honestly, most of us can't even make that stuff work with how our life works. And then we get mad at ourself 'cause we're not doing the things that they say to do to be successfu,l when that's not what your success looks like.

Your success can look like something completely different and you can get there in a completely different way than someone else.

Paulina at Searchie: What a way to wrap this up… getting people thinking, what does their success look like and the pieces that they can take that really feel the most organic and true to them.

Because I think that when we let go of those expectations – as you were saying – we can really find the thing that feels right to us at our core. So I love that!

Thank you so much Brandi for joining us today. It's been another amazing episode of our Searchie Spotlight series and we'll catch everyone in the next one.

What Does Your Success Look Like?