Building a work-from-anywhere empire on Instagram with Brooke Vulinovich

Transcript

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio

CLARE: Can you imagine having a thriving business that allows you to live and work anywhere in the world? Well, that is exactly what today’s guest on the show, Brooke Velinovich has done. She’s built a thriving membership that allows her to live and work anywhere in the world. And in today’s episode, She shares exactly how she’s done that and some of her top tips for creating a scalable business using Instagram.

Welcome back to the podcast, Brooke. We were just saying, I think it’s been years since you last came on the podcast.

BROOKE: It has been years because you were in your wardrobe recording. Hiding amongst clothes and I was lying on the floor of my bedroom in my one bedroom apartment. Yes. I remember.

CLARE: Well, a lot has changed for both of us in the last couple of years, but before we dive into that, maybe a great place to start if anyone hasn’t listened to that episode yet is a quick intro to who you are and what you do.

BROOKE: So my name is Brooke. I’m the founder of the social club, which is an online training community that teaches business owners how to grow and sell on Instagram. I also dabble with some keynote speaking. I am a wife to my husband, Dom, and I am now a mom to my little 2 year old crazy little boy Carlo.

CLARE: Oh, I know, like talk about big changes happening, hey. And also, I believe that you are in the process of getting visas for Croatia.

BROOKE: Yeah. So when we originally spoke, I was in my one bedroom apartment in Perth in Western Australia, and we now live in Croatia in Europe. So we officially picked up our ID cards yesterday for our residency visa, which if anyone has been through visa processes around the world, Europe, especially being one of the difficult ones.

So like, that’s one of my greatest life achievements.

CLARE: Oh, I, I mean, look, I even remember getting my Australian passport and I was pregnant and perhaps in hindsight, a little bit hormonal, but I was bawling because every time I’d go in, they’d be like, no, this document is this, and I just want a passport. Why is this so hard?

BROOKE: That’s right. It’s so hard. And as someone who considers themselves a type A personality, I’m very organized. I’m always prepared. I research what I need. I do things by the book. It’s impossible. It’s near impossible. So it’s even more frustrating because for an unorganized person, that must just be their life in general. But when you’re a super organized person to not be able to do things properly, because what is properly it’s very frustrating. And I can only imagine being pregnant on top of that would add to the chaos of it all. So well done for getting it.

CLARE: I literally sobbed and you know, in the post office, I remember it very, very vividly. And even now I don’t think I was overreacting. I had gone in there so many times with so many different pieces of paperwork and it felt like everyone was giving me different pieces of information, but I don’t need to tell you about this cause you’ve just been through it.

BROOKE: Yeah, you’re so right. It’s almost a full time job. The hours and hours and hours and hours and hours spent dealing with this is a role within itself in your life. Anyway, we’ve done it now. But you got there in the end. We got there in the end. However, now we begin citizenship. So this was just for permanent residency, now we’re applying to have dual citizenship because I personally believe for our son and any future children we may have, it’s a golden ticket. If you have dual citizenship, especially now that Croatia has joined the EU, that means when he grows up, he can live and work anywhere. in the EU without visas. That, that’s a golden ticket to life.

So, and we’re also learning and teaching him Croatian too, because as well, I feel like it doesn’t matter how much money or success you have in your life, it still takes you just as long to learn how to speak another language as the person next to you that may have no money and no success. What we consider priorities in life has changed. We’ve got older as we’ve got older. So we’re trying to, you know, think about how we can set Carlos up life. I mean, isn’t that just being a parent? What can you do for them that’s going to set their life up better? And they’re two things that I think are really going to be huge. So if Carlo tries to leave home. That’s another story.

CLARE: You ain’t going nowhere.

Well, I know you’re a big traveler and I’ve always thought the same. I had a couple of friends when, you know, I lived in London and I just think you can just go anywhere. You can work anywhere. I don’t think they realize how lucky they are to just be able to have that experience. So the fact that you’re able to give that to him and any other future children is such an absolute blessing. So curious to know with your business, how does that work? You just can pack up and work from anywhere in the world.

BROOKE: I can now, I couldn’t always. So as I I said, I have a training community, which is a subscription now called the social club. It will be six in March this year, where I deliver weekly online training to businesses in 36 countries across the globe. But when I started, I was only teaching in person workshops. I was doing in person consulting. I was writing strategies for businesses. And I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined it was possible for us to do this. But I think COVID had a lot to play with that because anything I was doing in person, obviously during that time was cancelled. And I really had no choice but to go all in on my online service, my subscription. And from doing that, the subscription really grew. And it was the first time in my business as well. I’d had reoccurring income. I’d never had reoccurring income up until that point. You know, it was like, if I do a workshop, I get paid. I’ve got some money to the next workshop until I, if I do some consults, I get paid. I’ve got some money to do a strategy, I get paid, gets money, but the membership really it opened my eyes to a different way of working since starting my business and obviously a much more scalable way of growing the business. And then ultimately a way for us yet to be able to pack up and leave and I can do it from anywhere.

And I also I have a couple of services. Now I’ve got the five day Instagram makeover, which is a five day program that then leads in all online that then leads into the membership. I also have an online course again, that’s all online and I have my sort of higher ticket one. It’s a 1 to 1 service where I audit brands on Instagram and then write them a custom strategy.

So that’s also something that I don’t do any like discovery calls or anything like that. It’s a questionnaire really detailed questionnaire where I get information off the client. They can fill that out in their own time. And then I go away and I work on it. And I obviously have a delivery period. If I need anything from them, I can contact them.

On Instagram, but it means there’s no there’s, there’s no need for, you know, setting time, time zones or meetings or anything like that. So it works for me, but it also works for the client that it attracts as well because they’re busy too. It’s like, give me the information I need, let me go away and do my job and I’m going to send it back to you and you can review it in your time. So that as well has allowed, I had a similar style of service a few years ago, but it did involve in person one on one as part of it, which obviously we just don’t need anymore and, you know, zoom and all these online platforms just make it so much easier to deliver the same quality of service without needing to be in person.

CLARE: I love this. I know. I’m really curious to dive a little bit more into your membership model because I ran a membership for a period of time and I found that it didn’t really work interestingly for my audience because I tend to attract sort of You know, hire like six, seven figure business owners and it was easier for me to sell my services than it was for me to sell this membership portal.

So talk to me about this. You’ve got a massive following on Instagram. What is the big driver? Like, why do you think people are so magnetized to the platform that you’ve created?

BROOKE: Well, there’s 2 elements to the membership.

There’s the lessons, which is the Instagram education. It is keeping you up to date with the latest trends, the app updates, algorithm updates, et cetera, that most of the business owners that we attract, they’re just too busy working in their business to keep up with that, which obviously I completely understand. And I’m obsessed with Instagram and using it as a business tool and a sales tool, so I love actually spending time researching all those things that most people hate and then picking out the good bits and delivering it in a way that is not Also about educating them, but about teaching them how to implement it. So we always focus on actionable tasks each week that we break down step by step, delivered to your inbox again. So it’s super, super easy. You don’t have to log into a portal. You don’t need to remember a password. It’s just in your inbox. Here’s what you need to do this week to grow and sell on Instagram.

And then there’s the community element as well. So that was not really the intention when I first started the membership, but it just happened over time. Like I said, the membership is almost six. Now we do a lot of online events. We do a lot of in person events. And when you start to see the same name and the same faces pop up time and time and time again, these business relationships form, friendships form. And obviously it’s, it’s the accountability and the support that when you are running a business often from home alone, you do get really lonely. And. Yes, you might have friends outside the business and you’ve got family, but they just, they just don’t understand. They don’t, just don’t understand it on the same level.

So having the combination of the two, the education side plus the community side, I believe is what has led to not only the growth of the social club, but the reputation that the social club has. And obviously, the members get really good results.

CLARE: Gotta love that.

BROOKE: Yeah. Look, if, if they weren’t growing on Instagram and they weren’t making money from Instagram, the membership would not have continued to grow, but just like me. I was once upon a time trying to start a business and I had no money and I needed the world to know I existed. And so I started using Instagram, just, you know, posting a bit here and there. And random pictures of whatever, and it wasn’t really working. So I invested my time into really learning and understanding how I can use this free app to grow a business. I didn’t know that there were better times to post than others and how you find that out. And there’s only four really key types of content you need to post and what hashtags are and why you should use them. I didn’t know any of that, but I invested a lot of time into learning it. And. I started using all these tools that are available for businesses on Instagram, and it started to work. And I simply started teaching other people how to do that too. And six years and thousands of businesses later, there are, there, there are members in the social club that are literally doing better than I’m doing in my business. There are members in the social club that, you know, I’m making multi six, multi six, seven bigger businesses. Because of what they’ve learned on social media from the social club, which I just, it inspires me to keep doing what I do. So does that answer your question?

CLARE: Yeah, absolutely. I, I know exactly what you mean. You know, I’m a lot of times I’m working with people earning more money than me and I fricking love it.

Like my husband said he sometimes thinks I celebrate people’s successes, other people’s successes more than I celebrate my own. And it’s such a, it’s such a blessing to have a, you know, a business and a role where you can create such impact in other people’s lives. Isn’t it?

BROOKE: Totally. It’s really, really, really nice.

And like my biggest wins when I get those messages saying I made my first sale or I just had a 10 K week or I made more money off Instagram this week, this month, then I made it my entire annual salary of my last job. That is cool because I know how that feels because I used to feel the same. I remember when I sold out.

One of my first workshops and I was, I was teaching the workshop and it was a three hour workshop and within that three hours I had just made more money than I had made in an entire month in my role at my last job and I just thought, This is insane. I can’t believe this. And it’s all from Instagram.

It’s just from learning how to use Instagram as a sales tool, which that is very cool and very powerful. And again, it’s free. And there are so many costs in business. So why wouldn’t you invest to learn how to use something that’s free for your business to build it and grow it?

CLARE: How do you think being a business owner has changed now that you’re a mom?

BROOKE: Oh my God, so much. So much.

CLARE: I’ve noticed even a difference in the way that you show up online.

BROOKE: So much in so many ways. It’s been interesting for me because Carlo was a really good baby, really, really good baby. And I also had a really What I consider difficult pregnancy. I was really sick for the majority of it. And it was very, very hard. It was real. I was really sick and showing up was really hard and I had really bad insomnia as well. So I was sleeping at one to two hours a night. And then I finally had him and because he was such a good baby and it was like a light was switched and I wasn’t sick anymore.

That first sort of 12 weeks for me that most people say is really, really hard. I actually found like a relief because I was finally sleeping. I didn’t feel sick anymore. Move further than from the bed to the couch without needing to throw up and it meant that even though I structured my business so I could take 12 weeks off.

I took 5 days off because I was in hospital and then I was kind of bored and, you know, 5 days off. That was the longest I’d had off since starting my business and in business only years, five days off is like two years off. So I went back to work pretty much straight away. And again, because I wasn’t feeling sick anymore and I was sleeping, I actually felt energized and I really went quite hard when I first started my business and then about Not first out of my business, first had my son and then about six months in, he stopped sleeping. And that’s when things kind of changed for me.

We did start working with a sleep specialist, got him sleeping again, but I’d already ramped it back up to basically a full time job. And then all of a sudden my son was waking up every 45 minutes. And that was rough that, that, that I would say for me, the light six to 18 month mark was hard because that’s just when they, they wake up and they want more of your attention and trying to do anything is just harder and harder and harder.

And I remember before I had children, my mom friends, you know, saying, I can’t even respond to a text message and being like, what do you mean you can’t respond to a text message? Get it now. Completely understand. Completely know what it’s like. It’s not even trying to even respond, but if I pick up my phone, my phone goes ape shit. Like, absolutely loses the plot.

So my boundaries around When I’m working, I’m working when I’m with my son, I’m with my, with my son. That’s been a learning experience. And then obviously, you know, every couple of months, like, Oh my God, Clare, pray for me.

We’ve just entered the one hour nap era. So you go from like sporadic naps all over the day and you can work when they’re napping and then you go down to 2 naps and then you’ve got your like short nap and your long nap and you plan to do the most of your stuff in your long nap. And then that goes down to 1, 3 hour nap, which is like the Mecca of newborn life. And you can get so much done in that 3 hours. And that 3 hours goes to 2 hours, 2 hours goes to 1 hour. And I know eventually that 1 hour is going to go.

You just have to be adaptable, really and we, well, part of the reason why we left Perth as well is my son was working. My son, he feels like my second son. My husband, was working full time and I was at home with Carlo for 12 months, also trying to run my business. Being I guess a full time mom to my son and it was really hard. It was really, really hard. And we tried to get him into daycare and the wait list was like six months or 12 months. So, I also didn’t really like the idea of having a nanny in the house while I was trying to, well, we were only living in a tiny apartment. So there was nowhere to like, get Carlo away from me and if he can see me working it’s just not gonna happen. I’m not gonna be able to work. So there was just a lot involved with it just wasn’t really working for us. And then we came over here. Well, we figured out basically, Dominic sat down and looked at our numbers and looked at our finances and with the work that he was doing at the end of the day, because he had his own company as well at the end of the day, take off insurances, take off, you know, all of the goods he was paying for and, you know, His car, just everything at the end of the day, how much money are you bringing into the family? And basically, if I can work, even just 1 or 2 more days a week, can I make that money? And yeah, there was some options.

So I introduced a new service into my business and, and that covers his wage at well, actually, when we launched that new service last year, within a day, we made half of his entire year wage. So that was, yeah, and we only, we launched it the day we flew out of Perth. So it was really risky because no one might have bought it. But they did. And also it’s just.. It just made us realize there are always other options, especially as a business owner. Of what you can do, and yes, there’s big, big, big risks, but it solved a really big problem that businesses were having and are still having when it comes to Instagram and and provided a really good solution. And I mean, if there’s a big problem and you provide the right solution, you can’t go wrong. So it changed our life, but it also is changing the lives of the businesses that we now get to, well, I now get to work with because I’ve got that time to do it. So it’s a win win for everyone, really.

CLARE: How fantastic. And so is Dom the primary carer?

BROOKE: Yes, he works in the business now as well, which has actually been so helpful. He does a lot of just the shit I don’t want to do like, yeah, just a lot of the things that are like annoying and calls and meetings that I just don’t want to do now at this level. Like if I had to sort of look at it, he probably does more the CEO stuff so I can just teach Instagram, which is what I like to do. I don’t like doing all that business side of business anymore. I never really liked it to be honest. It’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to be the CEO. I want to just teach Instagram because that’s what I love. That’s my passion. That’s my zone of genius. And that’s also like. Not to sound like a d**k, but that’s what I’m really, really, really good at. So why would I waste an entire day doing a CEO day when all I’m, what’s going to happen at the end of that CEO day is I’m going to be frustrated. I’m going to be infuriated. I’m trying to do things that are annoying me when all I want to be doing is.

Teaching Instagram, if I could spend a full day teaching Instagram, the impact that I could have and the difference that I could make is what’s going to fill my cup and make me just love what I do even more.

So, he does that stuff to answer your question. And yeah, he’s pretty much the full time carer for Carlo. So like today, for example, it’s 8am here. So he takes Carlo out. Well, I get Carlo up in the morning, give him breakfast because I’m not very early, hang out with him in the morning, and then I normally start work either 8 or 9 o’clock.

So Dom will take Carlo out, and then he comes home, we have lunch together. What I really like about, I mean, Croatia specifically, I assume the rest of the Europe is like this. There is so much focus, obviously, on family, meals and eating together. So that’s really important to us. We all eat together because we kind of live in, we live in a house, but anyone that’s familiar with Europe. Like Dom’s uncle lives next door. Dom’s other uncle lives downstairs. We’re living in Dom’s dad’s house. So he’s also here too. So everyone’s here together. And we eat together all the time and that’s really special and really cool. And there isn’t as much focus on that in the Western world. But, you know, family for me has become My highest value and that quality time with family is really important.

So we’ll stop what we’re doing, eat together, carlo then has his nap and when Carlo is napping, that’s often when Dom and I will work together because when he’s napping, I can’t be online. I can’t be recording. I can’t be doing things that make lots of sound. But Dom and I can focus on whatever we need to do together. And then I don’t really like to work in the afternoons if I don’t have to. But it obviously just depends what we have on. And then we’ll go do something together as a family when Carlo wakes up. So he wakes up at like two o’clock now. And yeah, we’ll go do something in the afternoon. Or if I’ve got a really big work day, I go down and I work in a hotel because then I don’t have to worry about Carlo’s nap time or anything like that. And it’s actually quite cute because my son thinks I work at the hotel and he thinks that’s what my job is that I work at the hotel and it’s so adorable. And even today he goes, he goes, mommy, what you doing today? That’s how he talks. And I said, well, I’ve got a podcast. And then I’ve got a meeting with Tay Tay. My assistant, calls her tay Tay. And you go, at the hotel? It’s on the internet. It’s so hard to explain to them, how do I explain that?

CLARE: So well, my kids are five and eight and they still have no idea what I do. I do ask them and I say, I say, What, what do I do? And they’re like, you make money. And I always have a bit of a giggle and I’m like, I help other people make money as well. But yeah, it’s very, very cute asking kids what, what their parents do.

 If people are listening and thinking, wow, like this sounds really cool having a business model where I can live and, you know, work anywhere and have this flexibility particularly utilizing the, Program platform, Instagram. What would be your advice to business owners who are wanting to create some sort of scalable platform? Like what have been the biggest game changer, like things that have shifted the needle for you in terms of growing your membership platform?

BROOKE: Online funnels are a really big thing. So firstly, I like to look at it as if there’s someone listening and they think I could never do that. There is always an option because people always want to learn a skill. So if you’re really good at something that you don’t think or you think is, you know, location dependent, we’ll teach other people how to do that because they’re going to learn it online and they’re going to learn online how to do it.

Do something that is location dependent. Like we work with a lot of hairdressers, a lot. I would say fundamentally that’s, that’s my biggest core market and, and hair and beauty and wellness and people that either own hairdressing salons, own beauty salons, or they own fitness studios. And they want to move into the coaching space because they’re also at a time where they realize that if they want that freedom and that flexibility, how can they do that when they have, you know, a hair salon or a beauty salon or a fitness salon, a fitness salon, a fitness studio.

So thinking outside the box with your business, and if, if there is no possible way that you can create. Your business online will teach how to create your business and do that online. It’s one of the best ways and learning, I suppose, what funnel is the best option for you and your business.

So, I have an email funnel, which is a five part sequence so that when people sign up to my mailing list, it introduces them to who I am. It explains the problem that I solve. It explains. What 5 day instagram makeover is because that’s now the entry point into the social club and it also showcases the results that we achieved for our clients under the social club. And before I did that, before I even knew that funnels were a thing, you would just sign up to my email list and start receiving my weekly Instagram tips. When we introduced the funnel, that’s when, you know, we were selling multiple, multiple memberships a day. Sometimes, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 memberships in one day, depending on obviously what lead campaigns we have going on. So that was definitely a game changer. Set up your funnel.

What else? Look with a membership as well versus say, an online course, you have to have something to continue to teach. So another reason I believe the social club to be so successful is because we teach something that’s forever changing. I can’t set a 3 month, 6 month, 12 month program for Instagram, because along that time, you know, we try and set a schedule for the social club. Like right now, my lesson schedule for the social club to the end of the year is planned out. I would put a million dollar bet on the fact that That, that lesson plan will change between now and the end of the year. Like it’s just, it’s impossible. It’s impossible in what I teach to rinse and repeat. It’s just impossible. So if you were thinking that you’re basically going to be teaching really the same thing, it would actually be much better for you to just create an online course, it would be better. It would be easier. It would be less of your time and probably be more profitable as well, which I know is your is your big zone of genius Clare.

And that’s another thing I get asked all the time. I want to start a membership and I say straight back, can you keep teaching this forever? Or will you be repeating yourself over and over? Because if you’re repeating yourself, it’s an online course.

What else? Pricing in terms of What do you want to charge in? Because a really big mistake that I made in my business. Well, we’re not a mistake. You don’t know what you don’t know, right? But when I first launched the membership, my business was still relatively small. I launched it within the My 1st 2 years and I wasn’t registered for GST yet because I just hadn’t reached that revenue marker yet. And so I launched the membership and then obviously the business grew and I had to register for GST. So I couldn’t charge GST on the membership because when you have a subscription service, you can’t change the amount of money that the people signed up to are paying. The service won’t allow you to do that, which is looking after the consumer. I totally understand. So I had to then take 10 percent of what I was earning through the membership, obviously, and add that to my GST.

Now, at the start, when I only had, you know, 100 members, that was, that was fine. As the membership started to grow, and grow quite significantly, that was a Big sum of money that was coming out of what I was earning. It wasn’t on top of what I was earning because I wasn’t charging it because I couldn’t. So we basically had to do a big overhaul of the membership and do a price increase, then add GST on top of that, which was the one and only time I’ve increased the price of the membership. But it had to be done because yeah, I was pillaging away money to the government that I, it was my hard earned money. So think about that when you launch and even like think big, even if you are really in that early startup phase at GST to your point, you can register for GST at any time, you don’t actually have to wait until we hit, what is it? Like 70 grand, 75 grand, 80, something around something around that mark. You don’t have to wait till then, but if you’re going to launch a membership, Think long term and how that could impact your bottom line and add your GST at the start.

What else? I feel like they’re like the big, real big three that have financially cost us.

CLARE: I’m curious to know what, in terms of your actual outreach strategy, are you just using Instagram to reach your audience or do you have multiple different marketing strategies?

BROOKE: At the moment, it’s just Instagram And podcasting. I’ve actually taken a break from podcasting for about a year because we have been traveling so much and we haven’t been in one place for longer than a month, maybe 2 months at a time. Really, really hard to basically just lock in anything that required a time because I didn’t even know what time zone I was going to be in. Let alone what country. So, yeah, that’s something I took a break from, but I originally I was doing Facebook ads and Facebook ads used to do really, really well. And then it got to a point where it was costing me more than the lifetime value of a member to acquire a member. So obviously that’s not a smart business decision. And the ad agency that I was working with at the time just said, because of some updates to iOS, which I know is not true for everyone, but this is what they said to me, they just couldn’t bring those costs down.

So when I think it was when I had Carlos, I’m going to say 2 years ago, we stopped our Facebook advertising and then it’s, yeah, just Instagram and for the last 12 months because my life has been so everywhere, which has been awesome and really exciting.

I feel like I spent the last 12 months really riding the wave of the hard work that I had put in for the previous 6 years and really just maintaining the business because we didn’t know where we were going to be and we didn’t know what we were doing. Long story short, the reason why we are living all over the world is because just before COVID we bought a block of land in Perth and decided to build and there was some very big issues with our builder. We were originally told 10 months till completion. It’s been three and a half years and we’re still waiting. So we were sick of paying rent and mortgage. Our interest rate has tripled from when we first signed up and the cost of living was just getting ridiculous. And again, Me with trying to work and look after Carlo everything was just a storm that I was like, Let’s get the f**k out of here.

Basically, let’s look at other places around the world that we can live for cheaper than we live here. Yeah. And cause we still are on no timeline with our builder. And when we originally left Perth a year ago, we did not think we would still be away a year later it’s all worked out though, and it’s been awesome, but that’s why I sound kind of like, why is she so all over the place? That’s why we’ve been so all over the place, because we’ve sort of thought, well, we’ll go here for a little bit and surely our house will be finished by then. And then it hasn’t been. So we’ll go here for a little bit. Surely our house will be finished by then. And that’s what it’s been for the last year. And now we’re in a place where, we’re actually in court. So our house is not going to be finished anytime soon. So we’re like, f**k it, let’s just, let’s get the one year residency permit and at least we don’t have to go anywhere for a year. Which meant I can now focus on ramping up the business again. And so I really sat down and had a big look at sort of my overall strategy. And what I like to do is look at things that worked really well. And how does that now fit into also my life as a mom and how often I want to work because I don’t want to work 12, 15 hours a day, 7 days a week anymore. And that is what my life looked like for the first probably it.

To be completely honest with you until I had Carlo, that’s what my life looked like. I worked and worked and worked and hustled and hustled and hustled because I was so in love with what I was doing and creating and I, I loved that I had created this business that actually brought me so much joy. I’d always worked really hard before starting my business, but now I was doing it for me and that was really cool and really addictive. Enter Carlo, my child and I created something else in my life that I actually really love and really enjoy working on and spending time with. So I’d like to have that balance now between the 2 otherwise what’s it all for? But we do have a really good balance here now.

And so I thought, all right, what have we done in the past? Yes, we’ve done Facebook ads, but it’s just that I wanted, I really wanted to spend some time changing sort of the business model before we dove into paying for advertising again. So I looked at, okay, where can we bring in some more revenue? And what’s, what gaps are we looking at now with brands on Instagram and small businesses on Instagram? How are they looking to learn? What do they want? And I think with the rise of TikTok and short form video content, business owners don’t want to sit through a three to five hour workshop anymore. They want to learn something quickly and they want to get quick wins and quick results. So with my order and strategy service, I’ve been doing that now for the past. 12 months, and I’ve almost ordered and written strategies for almost 100 businesses from smaller to quite, quite large brands. And I started to notice the same fundamental mistakes that were coming up in terms of setting your account up properly and utilizing all of the business tools that are now available on Instagram that didn’t exist, you know, even 6 months ago.

So I thought, let’s package this up into a do it yourself 5 day program. It’s 45 minutes to an hour a day is all that you need. And it will ensure that you have set up every single business Instagram for business tool available on the app, so it really gives you the best possible opportunity and chance of reaching as many of your ideal client as possible, attracting your ideal client when you’re not on the app and then converting them into really qualified leads and ultimately sales for your business.

So I thought, let’s set that up. Because that’s a way that we can reach sort of more low hanging fruit that do need help, but can’t afford the audit yet and don’t want to join a membership. They don’t want ongoing training. They want something quick and easy that they can implement today, so we set that up. And yeah, that’s also that’s also been a game changer, but it’s changed the, like, the funnel of the structure of the business and it’s allowed me to promote something that is. Lower, I guess a lower, lower risk for a consumer. But that’s also required a new email funnel. It’s also required new lead gen. And I wanted to get all of that back and a lot of work, obviously on the back end, a lot more automation, different tools, different, Programs and platforms than we were using previously. So I’ve spent probably the last 6 to 9 months working on all of that, setting up all of that beta testing it getting it all right.

And then I was like, okay, it’s time to go hammer on the marketing because you’ve got to build the foundations first before you start. Promoting it right. So we I’m now back doing brand exposure activities. I suppose you could call them. So I’m doing a lot more podcasts and do 1 to 2 podcasts a week, every week. I’ve been doing that for the past 2 months. I write articles as well for business publications, which is something that I can do for free. And I actually really enjoy writing as well. I’ve just invested in a new business coach as well, which is something that I haven’t had a business coach in I don’t even know how long, 18 months, maybe a long, long time, but it’s always been a fundamental part of my business that has really helped my business grow. I fully believe in business coaching, like look at the top athletes in the world or just top performers in the world. Do they do it alone? Nobody does alone. Everyone has helped. So I was looking for the right coach and yeah, I’ve invested in, I spent more than I’ve ever spent on a coach before. So that was a little bit scary, but you know, you’ve got to go all in. If you want big results, you’ve got to go in big. You’re not going to get big results from playing small. And I have believed that the whole time in my business. So watch this space because that could be exciting.

CLARE: I’m so excited for you.

BROOKE: Yeah. And then and then Facebook advertising is something that I do want to look into again, but I just want to make sure that the funnel is squeaky, squeaky clean first.

And yeah, and we used to do a lot of events and we still do events. I didn’t realize I’d be taking such a big break from events because obviously a lot of them were in Perth, and I thought I would have been back in Perth sooner than now, but I’ll be back in Perth next year. I’ve had some really good time, some really exciting opportunities actually come up next year by the time this episode goes live, I might be able to officially talk about it, but I will be all over Australia and another country next year. Which is cool. That’s super exciting.

CLARE: Look, I have loved this chat. I feel like we could, you know, Keep on chatting for ages, but we do have to wrap this up.

 Brooke, if people are loving the sound of the social club of, of coming and joining your Instagram, is it called Instagram makeover? Correct me if I got that wrong. Yeah, yeah. How can they, how can they connect with you and how can they join?

BROOKE: So you can connect with me on Instagram. Surprise, surprise Social Club Community is my business and Brooke Vulinovich is my personal Instagram account and if you are interested in the five day makeover, if you head to socialclubcommunity. com. It’s on there and you can get started on that today and start selling today.

CLARE: Oh, I love that. I love that. Well, I will obviously share all of the links in the show notes to today’s episode. Brooke, thank you so much for coming on the podcast again, and I wish you all of the best of luck in this next chapter of your life.

BROOKE: Thank you, Clare. I appreciate it. Thank you for always being there. You’ve been there since the beginning and I, I do appreciate your support and here’s to the next 10.

CLARE: Yes, I’m cheering you on every step of the way. Thanks, Brooke.

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio