Kelly Leardon: 0:17
Sonja, thank you so much for having me. I am truly honored. I love, love, love your podcast.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 0:23
Thank you so much. Well, I’m really excited to have you here, because I like to say, when we had our first conversation, you shared with me what I like to call just the fairy tale story. For anyone who’s listening who is a business coach of any sort, a consultant or any type of coach, you don’t even have to be a business coach, or even a course creator. Kelly did the magical thing that everyone really wants to achieve, which is when she launched her new product, which we’re going to talk about today. She had an amazing December $28,000 launch. 500 Instagram followers Kelly currently has on her page. She didn’t run any ads. She’s growing organically. Kelly, how in the world do you do that? Before we get into that, though, let’s let’s talk a little bit about what is Walk Like Warriors, tell, describe that to me.

Kelly Leardon: 1:20
Absolutely. So it’s a play on my first name. So my first name means “warrior woman and anyone who knows me is like, yeah, that is very fitting for her. I am a high passion woman. I tend to be pretty bold, courageous, fearless, and as I started to work with female entrepreneurs, I noticed them sort of leaning into that part of me and needing to kind of pull courage and fearlessness from me, and so it’s all about helping women live bold, fearless, courageous lives and their personal life If there are women of faith and their faith, and certainly in their business.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 2:03
Wow, I love that and I love how you said like it’s such a great point that when we are seeking support whether that’s in our personal life or as business owners sometimes we need to find people we can lean into who have the qualities that we possess and desire. So I love that you’ve been able to be that to a lot of the women that you’re coaching and working with. So you started Walk Like Warriors last year, and what was the beginning of that for you?

Kelly Leardon: 2:33
So this is the funniest part of the entire journey is that it started in June or July of 2023, I started to get consistent with it and it was like just a passion project. So I was working at the time as a certified fractional director of operations. So small business owners would hire me to come in, clean up their ops, help them systemize, streamline, help them see blind spots in their business, what needed to be improved, and so I’m helping all these business owners grow in scale right, and I’m thinking I don’t really have anything for me at that time. When you’re a fractional director of ops, you grow more through word of mouth typically, like you don’t typically have a huge social media following and things like that. But I thought, I’m kind of curious. I love being on Instagram, so I’ll just sort of do like a faith- based page. I was talking a lot about habits. I’m a master of time, which I have ADHD, so like the fact that I have this weird part of my personality, that’s just a complete hot mess. But in the areas that matter to me, I’m very streamlined and focused. So I just started. I was just having fun posting. I joined a program in August. That was to learn how to create better graphics in Canva and then put them on Instagram. So that was really powerful part of my journey. But when I started, when I enrolled, when I invested that money, it was to grow this passion page that was in and then a funny thing started happening in August, September, slowly, solopreneurs got into my DMs and they weren’t asking about what the page was about. They were asking me questions about how to grow their small business. And you know that you are sitting on something that you have a blind spot to. When people are literally messaging you, how do I do business with you? That is like the opposite of a dream. Yes. But at the same time I was like, oh, it’s not really even clear. And I’m thinking but they can’t afford me as a director of operations. And so people started saying, Do you do one- on- one coaching? I want you to coach me. And of course, as a director of ops I was coaching CEOs, but never solopreneurs and very small business owners. So I was like no, I’m sorry, I don’t do that. And then the next one no, I’m sorry, I don’t do that. And I mentioned it to my business coach and she was like what are you doing? Why would you not do that? And I’m thinking because I know how to help. Like you know, there’s small businesses such a strange word because it could mean you’re trying to get to your first 10,000. It could be you’re doing a million a year in revenue or a million a month in revenue. So I was sort of at that mid to higher range in the small business category and I’m thinking do I know how? Like, I know my systems work, but do they work with a solo preneur trying to break six figures or trying to break seven figures with a team of one? Maybe they have a VA. Maybe they have a VA and social media manager. But they don’t have these teams of 20, 30, 40 people. So I took my first coaching client in October. Wow, I think by the end of November I was full, which full to me was 10. Okay, I never. It wasn’t like I was like you know, I do this, I do this, you can click here, click here. It was seriously people sliding into my DMs. I need you, you have to help me. So it was just word of mouth at that point. And then the wait list for one on one coaching got up to 15 or 20. And I realized that model is not going to work. I am very passionate, I am my ADHD. What I love about it? It’s like a superpower. It’s a curse and it’s a superpower. But that hyper focus, that hyper fixation, Sonja, you could say, Kelly, you know what I’m really curious about. You know random thing, giraffes I would spend 18 hours just researching it for you. So I’m gonna make that into two sentences. I love doing that. And so coaching was like you know the six working geniuses, my highest genius is galvanizing. So it is like I can spur and pump people into action, which is so powerful. But then that hyper focus of someone says and I’m trying to run a subscription model, and I’m not totally sure I will spend 50 hours learning, hashtag, all the things. And so I realized, though that’s not scalable. I don’t wanna take more than 10, because I want my 10 to have all of me. I want them to feel like they are getting incredible amounts of attention and focus for me. So I have this system for growing a small business. There are six pillars of a healthy business, and when all six pillars are healthy, your business is growing quickly, but well, like it’s growing to scale. That’s what a lot of people get wrong. It might grow fast, but it’s so scotch tape together. When it grows fast, you’re gonna just end up toppling. So I always say you’ll see these people on Instagram, they’ll explode and you’re like whoa, how’d they do it? And then they implode because they don’t have any foundation of what they’re doing. So I came up it’s called the success squad, so it’s kind of a play on the word warrior and it’s more small group coaching model, and that was the launch. So I just mentioned it. In December and I’m sure a lot of entrepreneurs can identify with this I had a moment, like December 15th, I was gonna launch January 1st. I said to my husband this is going to be mortifying if nobody signs up Like I’m so afraid that I had just to be transparent. I’m an open book. I think that’s one of the reasons people are drawn to me on Instagram. I just share everything. At that time I think I had seven people on the wait list and the whole was 10. So I mean everything I tell my business owners not to do is the things I was doing, but the growth in the demand was so it was. I hadn’t really seen it before. I’m not saying I’m a unicorn, I definitely don’t think that but it’s just that I think that my personality, my secret sauce, my work history, what I bring to the table. Solopreneurs and when I say solopreneur I even mean like they have a VA for 10 or 15 hours, but I mean just pretty small business owners they realize I’ve got this awesome product or service, but I have no idea how to run a business. So I had less than 500 followers at the time and I just went for it. I just was like I’m gonna just do this and see what happens, and if I fall flat on my face, then it’ll be a lesson to the people watching and I’ll just share it. I’ll share every part of it. And so somehow, before doors even opened, three people signed up, like door open was, I don’t know, 9 am on a Monday. On Sunday night, I see these registrations coming through and I’m like how did they bypass the system? I still don’t know how they did it. I must have had an open link somewhere that I didn’t know about. But it’s just been. You can tell I love what I’m doing. It’s been tremendous fun.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 8:50
Wow, okay, I have so many follow up questions. This is such a good story and I love how passionate you are about it. So one question is let’s go back to that first 500 followers. How did you go from Instagram is new and fun to me to getting in front of the right people? Did you go out? There’s so many methods Like when I’m teaching Instagram trainings to clients so many methods for how you can grow a following. Some people go out and follow other people. Some people already have a great email list. Some people follow their friends. How did you just, in the beginning, start to find the right people that would you weren’t thinking of it as a product, but just, I’d say, for as far as just the faith-based aspect and people, the natural side of you that wanted to talk to people about time management and habits and things like that. How did you get in front of those people?

Kelly Leardon: 9:45
That’s an amazing question. I love it and I will say, getting so. I didn’t like. A lot of times when people have fast growth, it’s because they had a successful page and then pushed them to the new page. When I say I started at zero, I mean literally in June I had 28 followers, I believe, and when I got to that first 100, I actually cried. It would be like somebody listening, seeing a million dollars in their bank account for the first time. You get emotional because it was such a grind to get there. And I’ll tell you what didn’t work was on my personal page being like hey, I have the people who know you from your old life. They don’t care about the new. Like they really don’t. Maybe one out of a thousand will actually invest. Everybody else is like who is she? What does she think she’s doing? So it truly was all organic and it did start like that and in this way, as a director of ops, I think very strategically about what I’m doing and a lot of people are like what does that even mean, Kelly? This is what it means in regard to Instagram or any social media channel, as I looked at the likelihood of going viral and building a brand that way, there’s such an upward curve to gaining trust and actually helping these. So if I had a Reel go viral and I get 200,000 followers in the next two weeks, right, they don’t know me, they don’t like me, they don’t trust me, so you’re having to invest so much time with that gap, right? And so what I started thinking about is coaching is a higher ticket item, whether it’s one on one or group. But I started thinking about what actually is moving the needle in my business is when people reshare, and so I would rather have somebody post something about me, like Kelly talks about this all the time on Mondays and this is what we do and I see them. I see them showing their system boom, 10 followers. So what someone might think is that’s a who cares. I mean, that’s nothing. But if you go viral with 1,000 and there’s no trust factor there and you’re starting from zero in a relationship, but Sonja you’re following, if you say Kelly’s my business coach, she is freaking amazing. You should follow her when they come into my ecosystem, I don’t have to build trust. They’re like Sonja said it I trust her, she’s smart, she knows her stuff, and so that happened. I would say maybe in August or September, somebody with a larger following like posted me 50 followers in a matter of an hour, something like that. Every one of those followers was engaged from day one. And it’s because she had built such a powerful, engaged, close knit community that when she says something, they trust her, and so, from a strategy standpoint, the wheels were turning like I could. First of all, I can’t dance to save my life, so I’m like this whole style of Reels it ain’t working for me. The really shallow soundbite crap that you see everywhere. That’s so inauthentic to me. I’m not doing that. I want to help, If you like. I give away so much free coaching in my stories every day, and so what I realized was a tiny, hyper-engaged community where it’s almost like you have ambassadors or disciples or super fans. When they share you, it is worth. It’s, to me, that equates to having a Reel go viral, Because when those people come in, they trust you from the get- go and they see you as an expert who can help them with their problem from the get- go. That’s how I did it. I mean, if you even want to call it doing it and I don’t want to come across as Kelly had no strategy, was an accident. No, I realized pretty quickly the chances of going viral are like Sonja going to the gas station buying a lottery ticket and winning a million dollars. Now I know that you’re actually more likely to go viral than to win a million dollar lottery ticket. But my point is that if you did that and I went to the gas station, same one play the same numbers the next day, you can’t control that. And so for me with strategy is I always want to control in a business what can be controlled and when things are so like algorithms, there’s some things you can do to improve your knowledge of how that works. But I would rather focus my attention on results, and it’s really really hard to build a large business on social media through the attempt at virality versus an engaged community as everything, and this is how I coach around it too, because there’s less and less people able to have explosive growth by growing viral. That was a common thing in 2020. We ain’t having that anymore, sis. You gotta have a different strategy, and so that really and truly has been what was the most powerful, and somebody with a pretty large following shared me. When I started coaching her, I woke up my husband’s like what happened with your following? And so I realized she had posted. She said follow her, she knows her stuff, she knows strategy, she knows operations, and from that, one share has probably led to $10,000 inside my business. Wow, and that one share. And she said I used to be a small account too. I don’t get why your account is small, Like you should be having a million followers, whatever, and I’m like I don’t need that. Yeah, what I care about is a community that there’s just immediate trust me to them and them to me. It’s really powerful.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 14:52
Wow. I just love it because it’s authentic, it’s based on relationship. It’s almost like you got a quote unquote Instagram shout out without having to pay for the shout out or, honestly, even ask for it, because you brought your value to the forefront, which is amazing. So I love hearing that. One other question I wanna ask is when you got to the place where you said, okay, I you know, you talked it over with your coach, I have a product here. At that point. Actually, this is a two-part question. One part is for the launch part itself, and especially given that you have a background in operations, did you have a system that you developed of this is how I’m going to approach launch, or did you go to your sales coach or some other type of coach and say I’m going to follow this particular system?

Kelly Leardon: 15:47
I took a lot of things from a lot of entrepreneurs that I’ve worked with and leveraged what I know to be true, based on your audience and based on your product. Obviously, a lower-priced item, the launch, is going to look totally different than a higher-priced item and are you doing cart-open-cart-close versus people can register anytime. It really was like a mash-up of things that I’ve observed what I knew to be true about my audience and what I felt comfortable doing as far as a launch is concerned, and I couldn’t leverage tons of testimonials. I could only leverage the testimonials for my coaching, but I didn’t have anyone who’d gone through this group program. That’s where, yes, my story sounds a little bit like a unicorn-type story, or it? Truthfully, I have been working inside of small businesses for 20 years and just making a lot of observations. That started as an administrative assistant, then an executive assistant, chief of staff, event manager, director of ops. My experience and I will tell you the most invaluable thing in my journey, was being an executive assistant. When you are sitting at the right hand of the CEO of a $100 million business, you see all the good, bad, ugly, the dark underbelly of everything. People come to you with things I would say nothing, has impacted my journey as much as that period in my life. I’m eternally grateful for that. I will say that, as far as the way my launch worked, it was like working inside some of these bigger companies and then people coming to me like I don’t like this and they shunted it. Just constantly learning and observing has been extremely helpful to me.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 17:22
Yeah, this is also yeah, so we’re using, I say, fairy tale because it’s the wish that everyone wants, but this really took years of preparation. It’s like someone when they see a movie star and say, oh my gosh, they’re amazing. How did they appear in that movie? Well, they were in about 12 other movies, some of which that failed leading up to that process. So it’s the same thing. It looks pretty on the outside, but there was work and, as you’re saying, a lot of intention put behind how you started that process. So that’s really great to hear. One final question I want to ask is around. Okay, we talked about audience and just how you moved into even developing the program. I’d say. The final question is when you got to, I’m ready to launch, what was that launch strictly on? Hey, I’m posting on Instagram and, you know again, people will come. Did know DM people? Did you send out an email? Just peaking behind the curtain a little bit? What were a few of the key things that you did that helped with the launch in terms of just putting content in front of people?

Kelly Leardon: 18:29
My email list was teeny tiny at the time. So I think I sent one email on cart open and one email the last day, and some of that was because I was launching January 1st and I don’t typically work the last week of the year. So here I am trying to have this launch, but then my family’s, like you, don’t ever work this week, and so I did mess that up and I truly own that. That’s something important to me is I don’t work between Christmas and New Year’s, so that was a mistake on my part. I should have sent more emails, for sure, but my list was so tiny I didn’t feel like I could really leverage it. So I was in social media sprinkling. I used to talk to entrepreneurs sprinkle, so, starting at the beginning of December, they knew that it was coming. I really focused on the pain points that it solved. I mean, I had people saying I signed up. I don’t even really know what I bought, like if you can get me from here to here. So I think that strategy of having a little bit longer of a runway the higher ticket item it needs a longer runway. The week before cart open I was mentioning it once a day in Instagram stories. I’m very comfortable on stories, so I think that’s a big part of the strategy, of how my engagement was built. And then that wait list. We emailed them the day before cart open somehow that I think that’s how they got through and were able to purchase which. They actually were sheepish when I was in stories Like guys, you people are sliding up. They were like I didn’t know I was doing bad. I’m like this is awesome that you guys were that excited. You didn’t even look at dates, you didn’t look at anything, you just saw a button and you hit a bell now. So that wait list was huge. And then I and my VA, we just we texted or DMed to the people on the one- on- one coaching wait list and just said, truthfully speaking, it could be six months before you’re gonna be able to get a one- on- one spot. This will make the most sense anyway, because a lot of people come to me for one- on- one. There are so many parts of their structure and their business that are not right. We have to spend a lot of time on that, versus if they do the success squad first, like that’s all covered and then the one on one can truly be targeted for them and their business versus a lot of the scotch tape together stuff. But I love it all, it doesn’t really matter. So I didn’t have a lot of channels to leverage. To be totally transparent, it was that wait list and almost I think all but one on the wait list signed up. I was jaw- on- the- floor shocked that I had one- on- one coaching clients sign up. They’re doing both right now simultaneously. I’m like how much of Kelly do you need? I don’t know if you need this much. Well, that was amazing, that was really amazing. And then one of my one on one coaching clients she just mentioned it on her story and I had a couple of people sign up from that. So I capped it at 10 because it’s a little bit of a beta group right. So I didn’t want to like overfill it and then feel like I was scrambling. And then I ended up having three people sign up the next day. They had been in DMs. I wasn’t trying to do false scarcity, because that’s really it to me. I hate when people do that, but they truthfully they were like going back and forth, going back and forth, and so I had gone to bed and then I woke up the next day and all three of them were like we want it, we want it. So it ended up at 13. But I would just say that for each person listening, your secret sauce, your core values, and your audience are like a trifecta to how to approach launches. Because I think when we listen to some of the big voices in the space, they’re teaching from the perspective of what worked for them. That doesn’t work for everybody. So, like webinars to funnel into this, it just didn’t feel. Maybe in the future I would do that, but I think some of it is. We try to follow the big names and they have wisdom to offer us, but at times we ignore our gut and, as women especially, our gut instincts are typically right with the way we should do things.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 22:04
Well, let’s wrap up quick lightning round a few fun questions. One dream vacation today. I know that might change from time to time, but if you could go anywhere, where would you go with your family?

Kelly Leardon: 22:19
Anything with turquoise waters and white sands. I’m talking Caribbean. I love. It’s just my favorite place in the world and if I can hear the waves, it is the ultimate de-stressor for me.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 22:32
Awesome. That’s a yeah. The beach I love as well. That is my always my dream vacation as well. So one other question If we, if you were, let’s just say, living in a different universe, you know I like to play with the whole theme of Avengers multiverse, what’s another version of Kelly doing that’s completely moved away from operations, coaching, anything like that?

Kelly Leardon: 23:00
Oh, wow, that’s pretty intense. I’m at my best when I’m helping other people have what they want. So trying to think of, I feel like as long as I was teaching or coaching it could be any realm in the entire universe and I would be happy. My heart is really fulfilled when I get that message. Like you changed my life. So anytime I always tell my coaching clients I want every one of them to be making 100 times more than I’m making. That’s how I know that success to me is that I want the people that I’m working with to 10 or 100 X their wildest dreams. And so, I don’t know, that’s probably a little bit fluffy of an answer, but I can’t think I can’t separate myself from what I feel like I was truly called to do.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 23:47
I love that. Yeah, knowing your purpose, I love it All right. Well, Kelly, if people are interested in learning more about Walk Like Warriors, how can they get in touch with you and find more information?

Kelly Leardon: 23:58
Website or Instagram. Instagram, somebody has that handle so I have underscores in between, so it’s like Walk- underscore-Like- underscore-W arriors. I’m in Stories every day, doing tons of free coaching every single day in stories and on my website, top right button, prime real estate, there’s a button that says freebies and what I’m really known for is my freebie. It’s seven strategies to save 12 or more hours a week. I’ve done it with every single executive I’ve worked with Most of them average saving 15 hours a week. So that’s a really jam packed, value packed freebie for your listeners.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 24:32
Yeah, we can all appreciate getting some time back. I know I do so. Thank you so much for being here Everybody. By the way, those links to Kelly’s Instagram and our website where you can get the freebies will be available in our description, so be sure to check that out. Check Kelly out. Kelly, perhaps we’ll have to have you back in the future and hear more about your journey. I really enjoy chatting with you. Thank you so much. Have a great day everybody. Thank you.