Quinn Tempest: 0:57
Yeah, I mean, did I ever? I think it’s frankly the reason I have my own business in the first place was because I burned out so badly in my first job out of college. Actually, when I was living in LA, I went to school for acting, which I haven’t done since, but I’ve used plenty of those skills and so I took the first job. That kind of came my way without thinking and I burned out so badly that I ended up in the hospital. Very bad case of mono long after college years and really had to get my health back on track. And what was good about that, looking back not at the time was that it really set me on this path to being more purposeful and being more intentional, both in my life but also in my career. And so it you know, burnout was the impetus for me starting my own business, because I just had to learn how to take care of myself. I wanted to get in touch with what really lit me up about work, and so, although I was kind of an accidental entrepreneur, I think I had all the skill sets that led me to. You know, now, 12 years later, still running my business and doing pretty well.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 2:10
Wow. So okay, let’s talk about the accidental entrepreneurship. What was the bridge show you? Yes, you had that. You had to overcome the sickness, so at that point did you go off on your own. And then what did that look like for you?

Quinn Tempest: 2:23
Yeah, and so this is a long time ago. This was back in 2010, 2011, and I just figured I had a bit of a skill set from a design and marketing background and I figured, well, why not get paid to do this? Although it did feel more accidental at the beginning, I actually got my first client in a coffee shop because he was on the phone and he needed a pen, and so I handed him one and we got to talking and then I found out he needed some design work, so he became my first client. Which, funny story, a few years later, I ended up meeting my husband the same way in a different coffee shop when yeah, when I needed a pen.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 3:01
So yeah, coffee shop luck.

Quinn Tempest: 3:04
Yeah, it’s actually how I got most of my clients when I was starting out. But that was kind of the first thing was I had a skill set. I met, you know, made a connection. I started a business and over the years have really had to refine what it is I offer, what I do, and now my business obviously looks completely different than what it did in that coffee shop 12 years ago. But I’m thankful that every step of the way led me to where I am now. Very cool.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 3:33
Who do you work with now? And then, what does it look like now in terms of the type of services you provide?

Quinn Tempest: 3:40
So now I work with really all female founders, so women’s solopreneurs, women’s small business owners and I think the thing that connects them all is that they want to grow and prioritize intentional growth in their business without compromising what matters most. So, because we are all women, I find that how they grow a business and the decisions that they make is very different than some other clients I’ve had in the past — men, corporations, things like that — and I find a lot of purpose in that type of work as well is to think about their life, their purpose, their meaning, and then develop strategies whether it’s a business plan or a marketing strategy to really help them grow while valuing the things that are important to them. And as a new mom myself, I feel like that has become more salient for me in the past 15 months, so it’s something that’s important to me. So I still do marketing strategy, but I’ve transitioned a bit more to business coaching. I still do a little bit of design work because I love it, but mainly my focus is now running my collective, which is called the Create Your Purpose Collective, and it’s a community of women just like this who need that mentorship and accountability to grow without burning out.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 5:05
Yes, I think that’s excellent, and that’s been actually the theme of some of our recent episodes, just talking about the idea of online communities. Now for you, in a sense, though, you have kind of like two communities. You have your Create Your Purpose Community, which I took a look at and checked out, and it looks amazing. You all have welcomed 200 to 300 members over the course of the past four years. My first question is what prompted you to start that community, and did you do it alone or did you partner with someone or people to make that happen? And then I have a few other follow-ups, but that’s the first one.

Quinn Tempest: 5:44
Yeah, yeah, it’s a good question, because it was a long, winding road and I won’t go into the full story, but I’ll tell you, the biggest thing that compelled me was that I was working one-on-one with what I now consider the perfect collective member a woman, a collector, a creative, a consultant or a coach of some sort who wants to be more purpose-led in their business. And so I was working one-on-one, consulting for them, doing their brand identity, design, building their websites, copywriting, marketing strategy all the things I do well. And I noticed over time that they were all asking me similar questions or doing similar challenges, like they were feeling burned out in their business. They didn’t know how to get new clients, they weren’t sure how to raise their prices All of these different swirling questions that a lot of entrepreneurs have in those earlier stages of their business. And while I felt so grateful to be able to support them one-on-one, what I really wanted was not for them to just talk to me about it, but for them to be able to talk to one another about it, because I’m sure you’ve experienced this, where in your business, something is going awry or feeling a little bit tough and you think it’s your fault. I always think of the Taylor Swift “antihero song where she’s like it’s me, hi, I’m the problem. It’s me. And that is what we do, especially as women entrepreneurs. We self-blame and we think it’s something we’re doing wrong, when really for me, as a business and marketing strategist working with hundreds of women over the past 10 years, I don’t see these as your fault. In fact, they’re typically normal challenges that all entrepreneurs go through and I’ve seen them navigate it well. But it can feel like in the moment that you’re the problem and you’re doing things wrong. So I wanted to normalize challenges but also give them the education they need to learn new skills, the accountability and then also just the inspiration that keep going, because entrepreneurship is hard, and so that was kind of the core motivation was I wanted these women to be able to talk to one another, to know that it wasn’t just them, and also get the support they need to take that next purposeful step. So that was the initial thing, and when it came to partners, I wanna say partners in like the traditional sense, but I did hire a community strategist who helped me design the entire programming. That then became the collective, the entire experience I wanted members to have, which I think was probably like one of the best things I’ve done in my business because it really helped me create an idea and an experience that hasn’t really changed much since the beginning because it’s been so successful. Of course I’ve iterated, but I think going through that community design process was invaluable for me, having the collective run for now four and a half years.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 8:52
That’s not something a lot of people think about. Like most people think, I’m starting a group or I’m starting a community, I’ll just go start it, you know, and hope they will. I’m dating myself a little bit but, like Wayne’s World, like build it and they will come. So I don’t know if anyone gets that reference, but anyway I got it but kind of along those lines. And so you hired someone to help you really set up what that community was gonna look like. Out of curiosity, was that someone that was referred to you? Did you go out on a search to find someone that could do that specifically?

Quinn Tempest: 9:30
I did search for someone and how I found her — her name’s Sophie, she’s amazing — was because I was in a community that was also attached to a course and I really liked it and I thought it was really well done and I felt like I had grown so much in my own business and it was also a very niche thing it was for web designers to learn processes and so it was a long time ago in my business but I liked it and I remember looking at the person who ran that course in community and I noticed you know who she linked to and so I ended up on Sophie’s website. I contacted her and the rest is history. But she taught me so much about what a community is, because even before and maybe this is splitting hairs, but I do think it’s important you mentioned I have a podcast community and I have a community- community when I actually don’t think of them as the same thing. Like to me, a community is where people are talking to one another and they can be there independent of me, whereas with my podcast and I think we conflate the term community with audience, sometimes especially online, like a lot of people oh, my online community when they really just mean like their following or their email list or whatever. To me, like if you take me out of the equation, those people can’t talk to one another, they can’t exist really, because they’re just interacting with my content. So for me I kind of look at them differently. And yes, there’s community aspects, but my collective is a community. Like you can take me out and they are tied.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 11:06
I love that. Okay, but let’s shift gears also to that podcast. Okay, so let’s relabel it podcast audience. But one of the things you and I talked about prior to today was the fact that you’ve done both private and public podcast, and for some people the concept of a private podcast is foreign. So would you be willing to share, like, what’s private versus what’s just a regular old public podcast?

Quinn Tempest: 11:36
Yeah, yeah. So I think, from a strategic perspective, it really depends how you want to use them. So a public podcast, I think, is something we all know and love, right? We all are subscribed to many, we listen to many. It comes to us on any podcast platform we want to listen into and it’s for everyone. Now, a private podcast is a relatively new thing and it can be used in multiple different ways. The ways I used to have used it was last summer I decided to do a private podcast. Now I called it an audio series, but you can call it a private podcast. I’ve seen them called a pop up podcast before and what that is is it is literally only for the people who sign up to receive it, and they can’t find it on Spotify, they can’t find it on Apple podcasts. They have to sign up to get a personalized link. Now, of course, they can listen to it on those, but they have to get a private basically audio feed link to be able to access to it. So, from a strategic perspective, the reason that I did this in my business was that I was looking to get out of the webinar world and the masterclass world and the live workshop world because, as you’ve probably seen, or maybe your clients have seen, the show up rate to those have gone down drastically over the years. Where, say, you get 100 people sign up? You might only get 15, 20 people who show up live, and then you’re putting all this energy into this live session and it just fizzles out. And so I figured, well, what’s a better way to still deliver education, to prime my audience for my enrollment period, for my collective, and to also pre qualify them and to make sure that I’m getting the right members applying to join us? So I decided I wanted to experiment with a private podcast, and so I have pulled my audience a couple months prior and asked them what their biggest challenges were at the time. The biggest thing I heard last year, which still continues this year, is attracting ideal clients. You know it was a big struggle in 2023 and continues to be, and so I put together the ideal client reset audio series. It was, I think, a five episode mini private podcast where I gave people tips on how to find clients, how to raise rates, how to make sure you close deals, and all throughout that it was sponsored by my collective, so they were learning about the collective. They could apply right when that podcast came out, or, I think, on the third day. It was just a great way for me to talk about a specific topic. It was also time limited, so I think this is another thing that’s cool With a public podcast your episodes are live. They’re evergreen. That’s great For this. It’s like you got to listen before it goes away, because this is a specific time-based podcast. There’s only five episodes. They’re only going to be live for like, say, a week and all of these things are. You know you can think through with your strategy, but that was how I did it and I think it went really well. I’d like to do it again. I’m actually considered doing one in May for our next enrollment period, and I’ve also seen people do it not in a live way but as like a lead generation way. So I’ve seen some people have like an audio training on their website as their lead opt-in and it’s more of an evergreen. So it’s just another way to use audio in your business to drive a little bit more strategic, targeted lead gen as well as, in my case, to nurture possible collective members to apply.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 15:20
Yeah, I think you dropped so many great points and definitely even as we think about just trends in general and how audiences and consumers are engaging online, the idea just simply that podcast listenership has dramatically increased so much. I think I saw a stat recently that said 80% of adults listen to podcasts in the US, which is huge. Versus where it was about 20 years ago, it was something like 15 or 20% of people. So the opportunity now, even with private and one thing, Quinn, you can clarify this private doesn’t mean subscription, that some people will also kind of cross the lines there too. It does sit, so subscription is like it’s behind a wall. In a sense, you could say that’s private, but what you’re saying was something that was open to people who wanted to register for it. They just needed to get that private link and it was for a limited period of time, right?

Quinn Tempest: 16:19
Yeah, I mean there was still an opt-in aspect, at least in the one I did, so they had to provide their email to get it. But it’s not necessarily a subscription in the sense of like their paying or anything like that. I mean there’s definitely different strategies like that I’ve seen. I’m actually in this group, so the tool that I used was called Hello Audio. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but it’s great and they have a Facebook group. So it was a great way for me to research how people are using private podcasts, because the way I used it is just one way people are using it in online business spaces but, like you said, it’s just another way to deliver audio content in an accessible format, and I think that’s what I wanted is that so many of my potential clients and collective members are on the go a lot and they don’t have a ton of time, so these episodes were 15-minute max. They could tune into it wherever they were and get that information and build that relationship with me without having to show up live to something. So the way I did it was just one way. So there’s lots of different strategies and I think you just got to approach it intentionally and with purpose of like, what is the goal, what is the delivery method and then how do I want to execute this to support the overall business goals I have.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 17:38
Got you, and outcomes for you from what you said earlier, was this helped introduce people to your collective as well as you were getting opt-ins right, so didn’t help grow your email list.

Quinn Tempest: 17:51
Yeah, definitely. It was a late summer launch, so I think just overall it was a little slower and it was my first thing back after an extended maternity leave, so it was a good way back for me to kind of ease in. I think I got around 80 subscription, or not subscription, sign-ups from it. Many of those were new to my email list, many of them were also existing in my email list, but it was, from like a high-level business perspective, very helpful to get myself out there again to grow my list a little bit and to give that value which then nurtured people not just in that enrollment period last fall but also in the current one we just closed a couple weeks ago in February.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 18:33
Wow, awesome. Any final thoughts just about podcasting from your experience in general that you think for anyone who is either, maybe already has a podcast and they’re just seeking ways for growth, what are some thoughts that you have in general about just how people could approach that?

Quinn Tempest: 18:52
I think the cool thing about podcasts that has always surprised me coming from a marketing background where I love data, I love seeing who’s opening my emails, who’s clicking on them all of that, is that podcasts aren’t the same. There’s more anonymity to who is tuning into your podcast, which can often be a little hard as a data-driven marketer to wade through. But what I’ve seen anecdotally is that people are tuning in and they’re also tuning into content that I posted on my public podcast years ago and they’re nurturing themselves into other pieces of an element of my business. Even one of my new collective members just emailed me today saying she tuned into an episode that I posted last year and found it so supportive and it was a big reason why she joined the collective. And so I think it’s like those little anecdotes yes, you can’t track things as well of who is listening and what they’re listening to and how it impacted them in the same way that a blog article could, but I think that’s almost like the magic and the power is it’s doing the work without you, and if anyone wants to get started, don’t recreate the wheel. Start with content you already have that you know is successful and turn it into an audio format. In fact, that’s how I got started with my public podcast. I had been writing emails for years, every single week, and I just started taking bits of those, creating more verbal scripts out of them and posting those as episodes. So I wasn’t doing anything like brand new at first, because I just wanted to experiment with the new format.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 20:36
Wow, I love it. Well, this has been a really wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for letting us just peek behind the curtain to how you’re growing your different groups, communities, audiences across podcasts, as well as just directly with your online community. How can people get in touch with you, Quinn, if they want to just learn more about the collective or listen to your podcast?

Quinn Tempest: 20:59
Yeah Well, I think the best thing to do is to take my quiz. If you’re interested in this idea of purposeful entrepreneurship and intentional growth. I have a quiz that’s now been taken 18,000 times, which is so fun. It’s on my website. So go to QuinnTempest. com. It’s right on the homepage, and the goal of it is to help you tap into your entrepreneurial drive. So there’s just 12 questions. You’ll get a result at the end of what that could be and it’s just a fun way to kind of get involved in my universe. And then also I’m on Instagram way too often, so you can also find me @Quinn. T quinttempest on the ‘gram.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 21:38
Awesome. Well, y’all be sure to follow Quinn. I’m definitely following you myself and I really enjoyed talking with you today. For everyone else, until next time. Thanks for listening. Bye