Carina is a fabric and paper designer who teaches people how to run profitable design businesses with her Design Suite program. To sell her course, Carina was live launching every month, but it (unsurprisingly!) became draining and was taking significant time out of her business—and away from facetime with her students, exploring new endeavors, and growing her business.
Carina’s new, winning formula of combining live launching with a Circuit has not only generated amazing results, it has allowed her to put more time back into developing her programs and focusing on existing customers.
Learn how the CSS helped Carina grow her business to seven figures in less than three years and opened up new doors to explore.
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, she started a program called Design Suite to fill the gap she found: There were lots of programs teaching people how to learn to design and not a single one teaching people how to become profitable owning design businesses.
She realized that most designers aren’t very profitable. They don’t know how to make money, and they’re scared of sales.
This program combined coursework from her teaching experience as well as her work as the creative director of a scrapbooking company. Carina knew about physical products, the design manufacturing world, and owning a digital business, which she’d been doing for 13 years at that time.
The important need was to teach students how to 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 had been a daunting task for Carina. She says she knew sales systems for designers, but she didn’t understand it for business and 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 people to find the right ones for the program.
But live launching every single month is draining and takes its toll. Even if it’s something that you’ve done multiple times before, there’s still the prep work, the preparation, doing the event, getting ready for the event, and the time that it takes away from your working on your business. There’s also recovery time, too.
Implementing CSS for Success
There are only so many people Carina can teach in a live boot camp. With the Circuit Sales System, Carina realized there was another way to teach more people. It was a game-changer.
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 deadlines with a boot camp that the CSS reinforces. It has made live launching easier—which Carina admits sounds crazy because with CSS you don’t even have to live launch!
Even though Carina has automated her sales, combining CSS with live launches has given her outstanding results with her sales up this year by 50%. By marrying the boot camp with CSS, it has heightened sales. Her business is in its third year and they’re expecting a multiple seven-figure year. In fact, she just had their best week ever financially in sales by a long shot!
More Facetime 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.
Carina says you see leadership or CEOs or salespeople who spend most of their time on the front end trying to get people into their program. People 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 gonna 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.
She says 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! She never could have explored this avenue if she hadn’t freed up time selling her course.
“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.