Fabric and paper designer Carina Gardner was fed up of hearing the widespread belief that “you can’t make good money as a designer.” On a mission to prove the skeptics wrong, she developed her Design Suite program, which shows budding designers that you *can* run profitable design businesses (while also teaching them amazing design skills).
To sell her course, Carina was live launching every month, but that soon became a recipe for exhaustion. On top of that, it was also taking significant time out of her business—limiting the time she could spend with her current students and curtailing the opportunity to explore new endeavors to grow her business.
Carina’s new, winning formula of combining live launching with a Circuit has not only generated seriously impressive results, it has allowed her to put more time back into developing her programs and focusing on existing customers.
Here, we learn how the Circuit Sales System helped Carina grow her business to seven figures in less than three years and opened up doors to take her business to new heights.
Creation of the Design Suite Program
Carina is a fabric designer with a PhD in design who taught at the University of Minnesota before she started her own design business about 15 years ago.
Two years ago, Carina started a program called Design Suite to fill the gap she found: “There are lots of programs out there teaching people how to learn how to design and not a single one teaching people how to become profitable owning design businesses. And so we created this program in complete need of the market.“
She realized that most designers aren’t very profitable. They don’t know how to make money, and they’re scared of sales.
To develop her program, she mixed what she knew as an academic with what she knew from being the creative director of a scrapbooking company. She could combine her knowledge about physical products and the design manufacturing world with the 13 years of experience she had from owning a digital business.
The important need was to teach students how to make profit. Creative professionals all hear how they can follow their passion but don’t expect to make any money. What has been so transformative for Carina’s students is that she not only teaches them amazing design skills, but she gives them the exact steps to take to become very profitable with their businesses.
Live Launching Drawbacks
Figuring out a sales system was a daunting task for Carina. While she knew sales systems for designers, she didn’t understand it for business or what would work best to sell her program.
When she first started out, she developed a design boot camp—her monthly live launching method. This allowed her to filter through and ensure she was getting the right people into her program.
Unsurprisingly, live launching every single month became draining and started taking its toll. Even if it’s something that you’ve done multiple times before, it’s not just a case of being on camera a couple of hours a day. There’s still the prep work, the preparation, doing the event, getting ready for the event, and the time that it takes away from you working on your business. Not to mention the recovery time, too! It can easily eat up a week of every month, which is a quarter of your time.
Implementing CSS for Success
Carina still believes in live launching but she wanted to figure out a way to reach more people as there are only so many people Carina can teach in her live boot camp. When she discovered the Circuit Sales System, Carina realized this would be game-changing in terms of being able to teach more people.
How Carina does her boot camps has changed because of CSS. She still keeps a live component but she doesn’t do it quite as often. CSS allowed her to have individual deadlines with her boot camp, which has made live launching easier—something Carina admits sounds crazy because with CSS you don’t even have to live launch!
By marrying the boot camp with CSS, it has heightened sales and given Carina outstanding results with her sales up this year by 50%! She is now even getting rid of the boot camps for a couple of months so she can fully test out CSS.
So far, the results have been insane from this heightened piece, and at the time of speaking with Carina, she had just had her best week ever financially in sales (by a long shot!)—a lot of which was due to the CSS. Her business is now in its third year and they’re expecting a multiple seven-figure year! Go Carina!
More Time With Students
One of the best benefits of implementing the CSS is that it gave Carina and her team more time back to use in other parts of her business and to focus on her students.
CEOs or people in leadership roles can often end up spending most of their time on the front end trying to get more people into their program. But thanks to the CSS freeing up more time to work on her business, students who come into her program see her and her team a lot in meetings and trainings.
“By having the time, I get to focus on my actual design members. That’s the whole point of this for me, right? To get them successful. I’m only successful if they’re successful. So, I actually care much less about the people on the front end because lots of them will not come into my program and they’re not going to be successful and I can’t help them.”
Carina says it’s really not about being live—“I think it’s just they need to see you more. That’s the thing we figured out. We have a longer CSS, more of a 90-minute CSS, so they spend more time with me. So, that helps. And then for us, we have a high-price product, we have a $15,000 product, and because of that, they do need a little bit of nurturing.”
Students know that they are going to get help building a design business. And a lot of that just comes from more touchpoints for these higher-price programs. “That’s why a boot camp works for me,” Carina says. “It’s not actually the live launch for five days; it’s just having five videos with me.”
“The beautiful thing is CSS has given us back so much time. Even the way we do those live launches has completely changed so now my team isn’t trying to follow up with people. We don’t have to turn off something. We don’t have to turn on something. It hasn’t just helped me—it’s helped my entire team.”
Ease of Updating the Circuit
Although it took Carina some time to build the Circuit, now that it’s finished she says it’s very easy to make adjustments depending on what’s happening in the economy.
Now, she can come in, change a few slides and make some adjustments based on what’s happening in the economy. She’s not making up something new—she’s just cleaning it up and making adjustments.
Now that Carina has her Circuit built, she has freed up time to explore other avenues. She recently moved into the short-term rental market and is showing people how to use the digital products they sell as a design business! Something like this would never have been possible before the newfound freedom her Circuit has given her.
“I never really thought I would build a teaching program because I was making so much money as a practitioner, as a designer. But I just think there’s a lot of power to being a creative and figuring out more ways that you can bring in income.”
Watch More
Curious to know how the Circuit Sales System skyrocketed Carina’s sales? Watch the entire conversation on the Energize Your Online Business podcast.
Learn More
- See Carina’s Courses
- Follow Carina on Instagram
- Listen to the Make & Design Podcast
- Subscribe to Carina’s YouTube channel
- Carina’s Book (Note: This post contain an affiliate link.)
Your Turn!
Have you implemented your Circuit and found success like Carina? We’d love to hear about it! Tell us in the comments below.