Running a three-brand business, I know what it’s like to wear a *lot* of hats. But as a New York Times bestselling author, blogger, podcaster, product creator, speaker, and CEO… *comes up for air*… yep, it’s safe to say Ruth Soukup also has a few things on her plate!
And the ironic part is, when Ruth began writing her first blog back in 2010, she hadn’t even planned on starting a business. But after hitting the ground running, she’d already made enough to retire her husband in just three years. Today, we’ll learn how her robust, multi-brand business is still going gangbusters, thanks to her Circuits (yes, plural!) helping to bring the *right* people in front of her offers.
Starting Brand #1: Living Well Spending Less®
Ruth started out as what she calls a “classic mommy blogger” back in 2010 with her first brand: Living Well Spending Less®. As a stay-at-home mom with two small children, Ruth quickly realized she could make money from sharing her own life on the internet. (The 2010 version of influencing!)
At the time, her husband was an aerospace engineer, but hated his job and was miserable going to work every single day. Ruth was determined to make enough money blogging that he could quit his job—despite him thinking it was a “dumb” idea! (Of course, that only fueled Ruth’s motivation to succeed even more!).
Back then, there weren’t many courses about blogging or the business side of content marketing, as we now call it. But after three years of trying lots of different things, Ruth eventually figured out how to make enough money that her husband could quit his job (and have to eat his words)!
Starting Brand #2: Elite Blog Academy®
As soon as Ruth’s husband was able to quit his job, Ruth suddenly had a bunch of people asking “How did you do this?! I want to do it!” and that’s when she decided to write her book: How to Blog for Profit Without Selling Your Soul.
A lot of people were interested in the book (ok, that’s a *slight* understatement—the book ended up going to number two on Amazon!) because there simply wasn’t a lot of information out there at that time about how to create a successful blogging business.
In addition to the book, Ruth wanted to create something more to help people who are keen to follow her online blogging success. And so she ended up launching her second brand: Elite Blog Academy® to give people a step-by-step process for how to create a successful blog-based business.
From Burnout to Brand #3: Thinlicious®
Ruth was successfully running both brands for a long time before she decided that she needed to create something to tie them both together. She started the Do It Scared® podcast and released a book of the same name. But with so much going on in her business, and a rapidly growing team, Ruth reached breaking point in 2019. She was completely burnt out and realized something needed to change so that she could prioritize her health while running a business.
She made some drastic changes to her business, cutting her team down massively, and the pandemic made it easy for her to retreat and be more behind the scenes. Ruth was also struggling with her weight, which made her feel uncomfortable in her own skin and more reluctant to be on camera all the time.
She finally got to a point where something had to give. As she started diving into the research for health and fitness and figuring out what she needed to do for herself, she ended up creating a whole weight loss system that enabled her to lose (and keep off!) 40 pounds. She was so much more happy, vibrant, and confident and started showing up on social media again.
Naturally, people started to notice this huge transformation and wanted to know Ruth’s secret…and the teacher in her just couldn’t resist sharing it!
“I needed another company like I needed a hole in my head, right? So what do I do? I started another company. About 18 months ago, I started another brand called Thinlicious.”
Ruth now has multiple teams focusing on her three main brands: Elite Blog Academy®, Living Well Spending Less®, and Thinlicious.
The Sales Tactics That Fell Short
Ruth previously used different methodologies for selling the products and courses across her three brands. For Living Well Spending Less®, one of their main products is a physical product called the Living Well Planner®. This follows more of an e-commerce model and is very much based around email marketing to drive sales. But for the other brands, a mix of live launching, evergreen, and paid challenges presented their own problems when it came to consistency and effectiveness of sales.
High-Pressure and High-Risk Launches
For the Elite Blog Academy®, Ruth had traditionally always done big launches. And by “big”, we mean only opening the doors once a year…*gulp*.
And, as you might expect, the risk and stress associated with live launches of that nature turned out to be incredibly overwhelming:
“It was this huge launch once a year, you know, multimillion dollar launches…which are very exhilarating in the moment, but incredibly stressful, right? Because there’s so much pressure on that one week. The credit card company freaks out because all of a sudden you have a million dollars in sales in one day when you haven’t had any sales and they think that it’s some sort of scam and they can confiscate all your money. I mean, I had PayPal hold onto a million dollars for two years. I had to hire an attorney because they wouldn’t give it back!”
For this brand, Ruth also did big affiliate launches, where they would only let their previous students become affiliates. This worked well for a while but it got to the point where it was just too much to manage.
Evergreen Funnels
The pressure of having to make a whole year’s worth of revenue within one week meant this just wasn’t a sustainable business model for Ruth in the long run.
“I mean, it’s a lot. And we had it both ways. We’ve had years where we’ve crushed our goals and blown it out of the water. And then we had years that we planned on numbers and then they didn’t happen. And those are hard years and it’s a hard moment, right? And you have to kind of balance that out. And so that was sort of what made us want to move more towards an evergreen model.”
Ruth eventually began doing evergreen webinar funnels. They would only open the doors to the public once a year, but behind the scenes they would have a “back door entrance” where people could come in. But as more things got added into the mix across different brands, with different timings to consider, it became too much to balance at once.
Quarterly Challenges
For the Thinlicious brand, Ruth had an entry level program called the 28-Day Metabolism Reset, which was really just phase one of her program. She would host quarterly challenges which you could get into by purchasing the 28-Day Metabolism Reset.
The idea was that in the last week, people would want to upgrade to TAS (Thin Adapted System), which was phase two of the program. But the problem was that phase one was almost so good that people didn’t realize it was incomplete. And it just wasn’t converting at the level that she wanted.
Now, Ruth has gone all in on TAS, and is focusing on getting people into that program right away. She has also moved the focus toward the yearly membership versus the monthly membership so that people are more committed to their weight loss journey.
Instead of getting people coming in and frantically trying to absorb all the information so they can cancel their membership as quickly as possible, Ruth wanted to focus on getting the *right* people in front of her offer—people who recognize that this is not a quick fix, but a lifestyle.
Converting the *Right* People With a Circuit
Ruth loved the Circuit Sales System Lightbulb video and immediately got excited about the potential it could have for her team and all of her brands. After purchasing the CSS course, her teams started implementing it and she has seen some great results from it so far:
“For Thinlicious, it’s been awesome. In fact, it’s fantastic for Thinlicious because making the decision to lose weight for people is a very personal decision, right? So to have something that really walks them through it in that kind of in-depth way, we’re getting great conversions from it, but we’re getting the right people converting, who really get it and they’re ready to commit. And that part has been really cool to see. And then for EBA, we were seeing some great results, but what we realized with EBA through doing it, is that we needed to make some changes to our program. So we’re actually launching a whole new program for EBA in 2024 that we’ve started selling some beta spots for. And then we’ll set it up and redo our CSS funnel once we have that going. But we’re excited about that program too.”
When Ruth reflects on her intense, once-a-year launches, she realizes the stress didn’t end once the launch week was over:
“You kind of think that you’re just trying to make it to launch, but we had to learn very quickly that, oh no, no, no, the next month is going to be basically hell month after the people get in. Because they have all the questions and all the things and everybody’s confused. And especially when you start to get people who are not the right fit and they’re especially needy. And it’s always the ones that shouldn’t be there in the first place that are the neediest. And so the money is great, but money is not everything. It’s really having the integrity to know that you believe in what you’re selling. Now I am much more clear that not every person is the right fit for me or for my products.
Through building out her Circuits, Ruth has experienced major growth as a business owner in being able to recognize and accept that not everyone is the right fit for what she has to offer.
Ruth also realizes that you’re doing people a disservice if you’re not charging enough for your products. She would rather charge more in order to get the right people into her programs because when the right people come in, they’re willing to invest in themselves. And that’s an important part of it, too.
The reality is, if people don’t invest in themselves, they will never get the results they need because they’re not committed enough. We value where our money goes. And so the more money you’re investing in something, the more seriously you’re going to take it, and the more likely you are to take action and get the results you want to see.
Pursuing Your Passions
Having been in the online space for many years, Ruth has certainly gone through all different waves of the “hot-right-now” tactics that marketing gurus tell us we *should* be doing to grow our business.
But looking back on her journey, Ruth has learned that you need to focus your attention on the things that energize you, rather than drain you:
“If you hate TikTok, but everybody’s talking about TikTok, don’t go on TikTok! There are other places to go. There are other things to do. You don’t have to be everywhere. You have to be strategic about doing the things that actually are interesting to you and feel like they are the right fit for you and for your brand. The more authentic you can be to yourself, the better off you’re going to be.”
There are always going to be new tactics that people tell us we simply “have” to try. But nothing beats taking back the reins, having a cohesive strategy for your business’s growth, and building a platform that YOU can control so that you’re not at the whims of everybody else. And that was one of the best parts about the CSS course for Ruth:
That’s what I love about CSS, honestly, is because it’s a great strategy. It’s very cohesive.
It’s very much like put people in here and keep tweaking it. And it just simplifies things. And I think the more you can simplify too, because that frees you up to then be able to pursue the things that you are energized by. It frees you up to pursue the attraction strategies that lift you up, whether it’s starting a podcast, whether it’s going on TikTok, whatever it is that you want to do right now or to try some new things, then you know that you always have this way of getting people in and converting them.”
Read More
In this blog post, you’ll find out more about why live launching is chaotic, stressful, and downright risky (and the stress-free alternative to boost conversions).
Watch More
In this episode of the Energize Your Online Business podcast, we meet New York Times bestselling author, (serial) entrepreneur, blogger, podcaster, product creator, and Circuit Sales System student Ruth Soukup. (Phew! Is there anything this lady *can’t* do?!) Before finding the CSS, Ruth tried a mix of tactics to sell her online courses and products—one of which included an incredibly risky once-a-year live launch! Listen in to hear how adding a Circuit to multiple brands in her business allowed her to build more consistency and get the *right* people in front of her offers.
Your Turn!
Are you relying on high-risk launches to sell your course like Ruth was? Let us know in the comments below!