Veronica Broomes: 0:27
Well, thank you very much, Sonja, for that warm welcome and brilliant opportunity to speak with you and your listeners or viewers.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 0:36
Absolutely so. How do I jump right in? Because, Veronica, over the past few episodes, we’ve been having conversations with different business owners, and one of the overlapping themes that I’ve noticed is business owners who have groups or online communities in some way, shape or form, and they’ve been finding ways to nurture them, and that’s, of course, for those of you listening, one of the reasons why I asked Veronica to be here today. But let’s start out first, Veronica, by just kind of sharing a little bit about your background and what you do.

Veronica Broomes: 1:10
Okay, so happy to do that.

Veronica Broomes: 1:11
So my name is Veronica Brooms and, yes, I’m on the opposite side of the pond.

Veronica Broomes: 1:16
I’m in the UK and what I do as a business growth coach and mentor is help business owners to be able to strategize in terms of their pricing so they can get that right price to ensure profitability, to be able to grow and scale their business using what I describe as the 4P1S system, which is about productivity planning.

Veronica Broomes: 1:37
It’s also about your profitability and pricing and sustainability, because that’s one of my areas of expertise and it’s not everyone who needs the S at this stage, but I’m happy to also do that as appropriate, and what I do is to help business owners to grow and scale their businesses, to set the right price and to do so without burnout. So I do this by way of initially it was one to one sessions, but over the years I’ve worked into delivering talks and group sessions through business enterprise support organizations and, more recently, to launch a business accelerator membership. If there’s time, of course, we can explore those, but you mentioned groups and one of the aspects that I reluctantly came to presently to set up a Facebook group. So happy to explore that with you.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 2:31
Absolutely. And also just I want to hit on just for a moment the fact that you work with the businesses that you are partnering with and that become clients, yours, or go through your accelerator on pricing, which is and I heard the word burnout, because pricing is very stressful for a lot of business owners. So just curious out of curiosity, your business accelerator, is it a set amount of time that people go through this? Is it ongoing?

Veronica Broomes: 3:01
It is ongoing, so it’s called a goal star accelerator. I thought goal is an aspirational and looking for excellence and you want to be able to star in what you do. It is ongoing from the perspective that people can tap in and out as they need to, because from my experience of being a coachee or a mentee on growth programs is that you can be overwhelmed with lots of information and pillars to go through and sometimes what you simply need is someone that you can ask questions of, somewhere that you can go and get the specific information that you need. So pricing is one where people can do a one to one session, but in terms of the accelerator, we talk about what not to do, as in terms of mistakes to avoid, as well as what to do. But it’s not only pricing in the accelerator. It covers all aspects of your business.

Veronica Broomes: 3:56
But pricing is one area that I’ve niched in over the years, and way back in 2010, I had trained up as a small business coach, and when you train as a coach, you’re told oh, you should have your niches. I didn’t have a clue as to what niche I should be at that point, because I came as a business owner. I wasn’t new to business, but I was new to coaching and previously I’d done more training rather than coaching. But I realized soon enough that pricing was an area that people struggled with, and even in one of my businesses, which was a training business, I thought if you sell cheap and I use cheap deliberately rather than low price you’ll find people who think you’re offering great value when they’ve learned about what you’re offering and therefore they’ll stay with you.

Veronica Broomes: 4:47
No, no, no, they don’t. And so I realized that for pricing it’s so important that we step back. So I go through a pricing strategy approach to what I do and, depending on where the business is at, we can also have what I describe as a revenue model, so we can look at which are the items in your pricing menu, your pricing list, how to position and prepare and plan to achieve those, and then what that would look like if you’re able to have those different segments of your menu bought by your clients or your customers. And so that model gives you a sense as to what maybe you want to put greater emphasis on and which are the areas that are higher priced but you need fewer clients or customers for.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 5:42
Okay, got it. So you used a phrase I reluctantly started a Facebook group. As I’m growing my business, let’s talk about that word reluctance.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 5:51
What made you reluctant to start a Facebook group to begin with?

Veronica Broomes: 5:58
Because I’m not a digital native. I didn’t grow up in the era where Facebook was the place to be, and certainly not for business, and so when I think of Facebook, I think of Facebook as the place that people communicate for family or friendships, which I don’t do much of. I have some of that, and so my reluctance was the fact that, yes, I had a Facebook account for many years. I had doubled in some aspects of Facebook and joined many groups for different reasons, and then I learned to be in and out of groups, because you don’t keep adding them to your list. You need to review that list to see which ones are still relevant and then to exit. I didn’t know at the start, and then, when I was in a sales mentoring program, it was suggested that one way in which you can grow your group or develop your links is actually Developing a Facebook group, and I thought I don’t know, because the idea having to be on Facebook and connecting with people and Doing the work to keep a group lively didn’t appeal to me. I was focused on setting up the modules for the 4p 1s system and getting the training in there and recording the videos, and I had started, or restarted a mailing list, because I’ve had different mailing lists over time. And then I thought, okay, because you focus and you’ve invested in this sales strategy and if this sales mentee saying it’s one of the approaches, veronica, you should do, it Does she’d also said I should have Do Instagram lives, which I also did Reluctantly, but I probably enjoyed doing those more until I decided they were it wasn’t Helpful to be speaking to myself so often and lives. Coming back to the face group, so I started and I invited the mentor and then the person who was developing my, the modules of doing the background work in terms of creating that program that was going into the training, and then I invited a few of the people who were in the group as we are relatively small cohort on the sales mentoring program and and so it started gradually. Oh, and then I my social media assistant yes, she was in the group and we had plans as to how we’ll grow this group and, yeah, and it was just a slow.

Veronica Broomes: 8:28
So, like the first year or so of this group, I had less than 50 members. I probably had like 30 something people in the group for time, but I knew I thought that, yeah, maybe I still need to do this group. But how to do? It wasn’t and they? I didn’t have the answer, because what didn’t appeal to me was to be on Facebook Just messaging people inviting them to the group, because I still have to do the work after. And then we, with my social media assistant, we planned a strategy that, yes, we’ll reach out to influences I had some other support with that We’ll reach out to invite people into the group. So we started doing some of that.

Veronica Broomes: 9:10
The rules were a bit lapsed at the start because I thought, rather than insisting that everyone give, answer the questions or Share information about what they do, I should just allow people to accept an invitation. But then, for some reason, I started thinking this is an inefficient way of working and I came across someone who had a group who said that you can learn how to grow your group within her group, and it was a monthly subscription. So I thought, okay, magic would happen, that I just need to pay the subscription and then suddenly I’ll be flooded with lots of people in my group. So you know the post that you go through which would say, yes, I’m looking for whatever it is, or I help Whatever it is, or you join other people’s promos and then you can put Asterix VIP or whatever the program is. So I did that for a few months and then I realized it’s not magical. It doesn’t happen that people just start coming to your group. You need to do the work, and so you actually need to be in groups, posting, making comments, responding to others. And so I was with that subscription for about three months and I realized, if I’m doing all this hard work and I’m still paying a subscription and I didn’t get this magical number of hundreds of people coming into the group immediately, but then it means that this learning has to be used in a different way. So it’s about being consistent. It’s about posting in other groups. But I did have a period where, over within less than a month, I actually had like 300 people in the group. It took maybe about six months to get to the first hundreds.

Veronica Broomes: 10:56
I continued doing this slow, but then I got the stage where, yeah, I could see the results. I could see how you can get lots of people joining your group. You can get lots of people 10, 15 people signing up daily in your group. And because I went through that accelerated period and Convince now that it is possible to grow your group, but you do have to put in the hard work. At present I’m not doing any of those subscriptions within other people’s groups, but that doesn’t mean I will not do it in future, because I could see how a Focus period of promoting as a VIP in another group can allow you to grow your members. So we’ve just crossed six hundred. So we know, at the stage where I have six hundred and eight or six hundred and ten, but as a huge change From where I was Right musical Well, and to start from zero.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 11:56
So I want to break your story down in a few ways Because, yeah, you started a group with no base, right?

Sonja Crystal Williams: 12:05
Some people will launch into the creation of an online community because they have a big email list or they already have an audience that exists somewhere, so it is definitely to your point.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 12:18
It can be and feel very challenging when you’re in a position where I am starting this completely from scratch. So growing to a few hundred of strangers who are now a part of your group and engaged is a huge accomplishment. I also want to back up to that group that you were in so you mentioned you were in like a sales mentorship group that you were a part of and first just saying and I hope everyone’s listening to this, particularly those of you that are new business owners that the learning doesn’t stop and that, even if you are a coach yourself, like joining other people’s coaching programs, mentorships, things like that create huge opportunities to meet for both collaboration and learning and the fact, Veronica, that you actually applied what you learned in the group, Because a lot of times we can get into some of these groups and these training opportunities and not apply anything at all. So it sounds like you took two routes, which was the Instagram live route, the Facebook groups route.

Veronica Broomes: 13:21
Yeah, now let me clarify a piece on you that it was a sales mentoring that got me the Instagram and Facebook, but not the growth. Yeah, I can go elsewhere to get the group recognizing that it’s not one size that fits all. And if it’s a coaching mentor you’re not willing to invest in yourself, it’s hardly likely that you’ll have as much information and support and options that you can offer your clients, so it’s so important. Yeah, so I interrupted there, but I just wanted to clarify that it wasn’t that sales mentoring that gave me all the answers. It gave me some insights and, yes, the idea is the word.

Veronica Broomes: 14:03
But I had to then find other ways because I thought, if this is the objective, like any coaching scenario once I didn’t have a smart goal around that, but like any coaching scenario, you begin with the end in mind, as Stephen Covey said. So my objective was to grow Facebook group. How I broke that down and got there were the options I needed to pursue, because it wasn’t a case to say, oh well, I will guarantee I’ll get my first hundred and a hundred days. No, because at that time, especially since I was reluctant, I couldn’t say the point of having an objective like that. No, I don’t want to be spending four hours a week or four hours a day sending putting messages on Facebook in the hope that I’ll have people joining my group. So, yeah, I’d say that I wanted to clarify that. So the sales mentoring program opened my eyes to some possibilities, but then I needed to take further action in order to actually actively grow the group.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 15:07
So once you to a place where you know, hey, I’ve got several hundred, or you went through that period where you had that nice bump and growth, how much time would you say you were spending? Were you on Facebook on a daily basis? How did your you mentioned you had a little bit of assistance. How did they play a role? So what did that picture look like from a time commitment standpoint?

Veronica Broomes: 15:30
I would say, generally I wouldn’t spend more than two hours a day on Facebook, and it’s not every day, like over this weekend, for example. I actually spent Maybe around two hours in a block. But the reason I spend that time is that I wanted to be able to respond to some posts in groups. I also wanted to add my details to some larger groups which I’ve been part of for a number of years and occasionally I go in and post. So this weekend in particular, I wanted to be able to post about the Facebook group so that people are saying promote your business. It’s always good to promote your business every time. So I joined those lists, I like and then I comment and if they’re people from my group, so the business growth coach online. If they’re people from my group, I’d like some of their posts because they’re not exclusive to me, they’re part of other Facebook groups but but it means what I’m doing is investing my time strategically.

Veronica Broomes: 16:39
So others are creating these opportunities to pose, and this weekend in particular, last weekend in particular what I did was to post an invitation to my Facebook group as well as post a link to the Gold Star membership, because I’m saying here my call to actions. And then, in addition to that, what I did in my group, my Facebook group, was to like and comment on a few posts that other members of the group had made, as well as posting some events for the rest of this month. So there was there’s actually an event that I’m doing through one of the enterprise support organizations that I don’t usually post in the Facebook group. So what I decided this year I’ll do is to keep that event section more active.

Veronica Broomes: 17:30
So, whether it’s related to business growth coaching, whether it’s related to the day in the month when we’re having that Q&A for the Gold Star program, whether it relates to sustainability talk that I may be doing, I’ll put those events in the group. And so that’s where I spent my time, and I saw that that was time well spent, because, whilst I’m not seeing immediate results, I know that information is there. But you’ve seen someone who’s already or a couple of people who’ve already done maybe for one of the events. If I hadn’t posted, it would not have been. No one would have responded.

Veronica Broomes: 18:10
So you also need to be able to think strategically when you’re seeking to grow your Facebook group or any other presence you’re looking to have on social media.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 18:20
Absolutely, and so for this group, it’s not because there are so many forms of how people can launch a group or an online community, and I know for me personally. One common form I’ve seen is you’re already the user of a product or service and then they have a group attached to it. That’s one way, but yours isn’t that way. Yours, it sounds like, and correct me if I’m wrong it sounds like this is a group of people who have an interest in business, growth and coaching. They’re not necessarily using your product or service yet, so this is your opportunity to take someone who was a cold contact and get them familiar with you, your service, your systems, through that group. Is that right?

Veronica Broomes: 19:03
Indeed, and that is spot on, because when I started the group or the intention from initially was people who signed up to buy the group coaching program which emerged from my sales mentoring program People who bought that will then be part of a newsletter subscription and then will be invited to the group.

Veronica Broomes: 19:25
But because that didn’t work that way, I still needed to have a group to say to people whether I’m sharing or partnering with another coach as part of, maybe, their campaign to grow my list, I’m offering three beers. We describe it in the business or for some other reason. I needed to be able to have something happening in the group that I can then get people to say, ah, this is time well spent. So now, yes, it’s about the engagement, but it’s also about me posting about events so that people can see ah, here’s what Veronica is doing and here’s how she may be able to help us, and they’re encouraged to ask questions. So when I do what I describe as a warm welcome, so when people come into the group, we do a warm welcome to the group and I put a note, say remember to tell us about you and your business. So there’s no issue about whether you can post in the group or not, you’re encouraged to do that, yeah wow, good stuff, veronica.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 20:29
Thank you so much for sharing this intriguing journey of Launching the Facebook groups and really just getting into some of the nitty-gritty details of what it looks like to build one from Zero to 600 plus today. So again, congratulations on that. Where can people get in touch if they’d like to see more about your Facebook group or even some of your particular Services and tracks that you offer as a business coach?

Veronica Broomes: 20:57
Well, thank you for asking that question. So, on your hand, your invitation to share my details. So, of course, I’d love to have more people in my Facebook group because, I’ve explained, it’s about business growth. It’s about helping people to be able to grow and scale without burnout, and pricing is one of those areas I can certainly help you with to be more profitable. So I’ll share the link for my Facebook group, but I also have an Instagram account.

Veronica Broomes: 21:25
So if you’re on Instagram or you would like to reach out to me in any other way, I’d say my link tree is the best, because the link tree not only has the social media information, but it also has a downloadable ebook which is about a common pricing mistakes to avoid. I think it’s still it and so this is just a start as to what you should not do when you’re setting your prices. So I’ll share those details so that, when the Recording of this podcast goes out, it means that your listeners and your viewers will also have the opportunity to connect with me, and I’m always open to that connection and Collaboration and working in partnership, similar to what we’re doing here today. Sonia, absolutely.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 22:15
Okay, so what’s the link? The Instagram link. For anyone that wants it will drop that in the comments. And then the Facebook group. What’s the name of the group?

Veronica Broomes: 22:24
Veronica, it’s business, business growth club online.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 22:29
Perfect, all right, wonderful All right on Instagram.

Veronica Broomes: 22:34
The handle is is biz, the. I said coach and UK, so this coach UK. But I share the information in the chat so I know you’ll be able to retrieve that and add it. But there’s also the link tree that will give you all the other parts of my or make most of the other aspects of my social media presence.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 23:02
Absolutely so, everyone. Once you go to Instagram, you can go to link tree from there, get access to that guide and or also check out the Facebook group. Well, thank you so much again, Veronica. Thanks everyone today for listening or watching, and until next time have a good one.

Veronica Broomes: 23:19
Thank you again, Sonja, and all the best to your listeners and viewers. You Welcome, welcome.