The Journey to Becoming an Online Entrepreneur Fractional COO

As an Online Entrepreneur Fractional COO, not only do I fill the role as your operations officer at a fraction of the cost, but I do so in a way unlike other operations officers- I have a unique specialty in serving online, service-based business owners. 

Having served as the program director and lead coach at Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula, I helped coach over 1600 entrepreneurs in launching their services online, giving me a deep understanding of the sales strategies that are unique to online business owners and what it takes to succeed from a marketing perspective.

Simultaneously, I spent years developing that business internally, serving in sales, events, coaching, and operations. From leading my own team and hiring new employees, building out systems and operations to help the company scale effectively, to leading projects that increase the quality and effectiveness of their services, I was able to support an increasing their client retention, doubling their client renewal rate, and growing the amount of active coaching clients by 50%.
 

This background gives me a unique edge – I understand the marketing and sales strategies that are specific to online business owners, and I also have a wealth of experience and expertise as an operations specialist having spent years operating (and excelling!) inside of an online business owner’s organization. 

 To say I understand your business is an understatement. 

My journey through the world of entrepreneurship actually began all the way back in my childhood as a young girl with a lot of innate entrepreneurial gifts, a wealth of ideas, and a strong passion for bringing those ideas to life and watching them thrive.

Entrepreneurship is in my blood. I grew up with entrepreneurial parents who worked together building their own construction company. So entrepreneurship took hold of me early on; my childhood was filled with dreaming up creative job ideas and negotiating with my dad to start generating my own income at the ripe age of 11. From creating a general store in my parents’ living room to then building a legitimate, local babysitting empire in my teenage years, I found ways to meet needs, fill gaps, and get paid in return. 

Growing up around my entrepreneurial parents and eventually working in our family business for a time gave me a deep understanding early on of the unique struggles business owners face as well as the special blessings it offered. My dad always made his stance on entrepreneurship clear – despite the challenges, he truly felt it was the most valuable path to reaching your full potential and not being limited by the restrictions others can impose on you when working inside their organizations.

After graduating, I went on to explore the business world to see where my journey might lead me, and I quickly found out that my dad might be onto something… I often felt limited in how fast and how far I could climb due to all of the restrictions of the corporate world, and I found myself constantly frustrated that I had talent and skill to offer that was being severely underutilized.

I decided to join my parents’ business so that my entrepreneurial gifts and ideas could be used more fully. In their organization, I would support a team of 50 workers on large construction projects, and some of my core strengths in business really began to shine. Through the chaos of a large team of people operating in a system with numerous moving parts, I could see a clear path forward, helping keep the project flowing in an organized way, and keeping each team member successfully operating in their respective positions. This is a core gift my clients lean on today, as I support them in building and managing their teams and helping each team member thrive in their role.

Eventually, I met my dear husband and got married, and we quickly became pregnant with my first child. My attention took a sharp turn – as a woman of faith, I wanted to focus on being the best mother I could be and be present for my children. There’s this disheartening idea some hold that if a woman has a career she’s passionate about, that must mean she isn’t the present mother she should be, and that’s not who I wanted to be. So I committed to staying home with them for a few years, continuing to work on and off in my parent’s business and investing in a few different online entrepreneurial pursuits during that time and continuing to advance my skills, but mostly keeping those endeavors on the back burner. Eventually, though, this nagging feeling that a part of my life was still missing only grew stronger, and I could no longer deny that feeling. 

I eventually found myself at an in-person seminar for online business owners, and it was as if I came alive. I had found my people. People who had a deep desire to use their gifts to build. People who were full of passion and purpose in their businesses. People who were committed to reaching their fullest potential in life and create their greatest impact. People who wanted to live life like I did… unlimited.

Something inside me began to break free. I truly began to accept that, as a woman of faith, my Creator made me for more, and He did not make a mistake in creating me with entrepreneurial talents. I decided it was time to walk fully and faithfully into my greater destiny in my career and begin to build the business I was created to build, and do so in a way that honored my family and still kept them first. After all, that’s the beauty of being a business owner – we get to build in our own way and on our own terms. 

A new, insatiable appetite for learning the latest and most impactful strategies for online business owners was ignited within me, leading me on a journey of obtaining certifications in some of the most reputable business and online marketing training programs.

I quickly started to see success. I built a political consulting company that did very well, but eventually got burnt out by the cyclical “feast and famine” nature of campaigns, in which the election seasons are abundant and the off-seasons are quiet. Again, I felt limited, and I knew there was more I was meant to do.

Eventually, I was brought onto my position at Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula, and I immediately knew that although I still planned to build my own business when the time was right, this was the position I was meant to be in at that time.

I began as a client concierge and quickly moved into coach to serve the clientele. In just 2 years, I was promoted to Program Lead and Head Coach, both leading our team of 5 coaches internally and coaching our clients in successfully implementing our marketing strategies to grow their businesses online. 

Internally, as the Program Lead, I ran the coaching program, fulfilling two primary roles that are consistent with how I help my clients today. 

The first role I worked with clients to personalized ideas for how they could improve their marketing and grow their businesses. Every CEO needs what I call a “thought partner” – another high-level leader who is able to look at the unique nuances of your business and strategically help you build out a customize approach that helps you scale in a way that feels aligned with the direction you want to take your business. 

The second role was as in a leadership role. I helped build their hiring process and ultimately ran a team of 5 coaches who, along with myself, were responsible for helping our clients implement our signature marketing strategies. I had the opportunity to hone our program operations and my leaderhip skills, contributing to improved meeting flow better lead the team with excellence, helped set objectives and create schedules, and made sure the team was supported with trainings to help them excel in their roles. I also learned that customization is key in this area. While some think they need to follow a rigid framework in building out a team, I find that each business has its own unique nuances that need to be taken into account to best help that business scale. This very personalized approach is what I utilize today when helping my clients build out their teams.

One of the most significant improvements I developed in the program were implementation plans. What I noticed with our clients and what I notice for all of my clients today is that they all greatly need help in focusing down on the few priorities that they should be doing. They have so many strategies they are trying to implement and directions they are trying to go, and this leaves them feeling scattered, overwhelmed, and lacking the level of clarity and focus they need to make real progress. 

I realized they needed a step-by-step plan that helped them focus their efforts effectively, and they needed it to be personalized based on the unique nuances of their business. So we developed implementation plans that helped our clients make meaningful progress in their marketing efforts and gave them personalized feedback based on where they were at in their journey. This became one of the key factors in the previously-mentioned accomplishment of doubling their client retention.

But one of the most impactful realizations I had that would change the course of my entrepreneurial journey forever was that, although our clients were successfully learning and implementing our marketing strategies, they were not making the progress I knew they were capable of for one reason – they did not have an operating system that streamlined their efforts and allowed them to scale. 

Time and time again, I saw this recurring theme – business owners can work on their marketing and growth strategies all they want, but without the right operating system behind them, their growth strategies cannot fully get off the ground and they can’t scale to the next level they dream of. 

I went all in on my operational and organizational gifts, going on to achieve my certification as a Digital Marketer Certified Partner. I now get to work with entrepreneurs with growth strategies, as well as integration and process strategies that take your marketing efforts and put them into a systematic, scalable growth structure.  

But regardless of any certification, seeing the inside of over 1600 businesses throughout my career has helped me understand that this is truly a personalized process and requires high level strategy to build out the right process for your unique business. 

Now, I’ve taken my vast array of expertise and experiences to build the RiseOp™ scalable operating system service, through which I help online entrepreneurs rise up into their fullest potential by building their personalized, scalable operating system and running that system as their Fractional COO so they can be free to operate in the CEO role and do the things they love.