IAM1210 – CEO Creates Online Courses For Her Clients

Dr. Destini Copp is a business and marketing coach who helps business owners scale their digital product revenue with automated sales funnels and reduce their reliance on services or freelance work.

She is a college marketing professor turned online entrepreneur and a wanna-be, Serena Williams-like, tennis player. She is the host of The Course Creator’s MBA Podcast and the Creator of The OneClick MBA membership.

• CEO Story: Her passion is teaching and the dream of having her own business motivates the CEO to build her own personal brand by helping others create their own online courses and digital products.
• Business Service: Online courses and memberships, automated sales funnels. It grew more as they listened to their customers asking them to make a sales funnel for their own company.
• Secret Sauce: Outsourcing for business and personal needs made a huge impact on my life. Freedom and flexibility are my core values in business.
• CEO Hack: Making systems in the business and staying organized. I use Gmail Calendar, Asana, and Trello, tracking systems that track the PR activities that we are doing. And having a standard operating procedure written down.
• CEO Nugget: Don’t worry about the small things like logo or colors. Customers care about how your products are going to help them and how they will enhance their lives. Focus on marketing. Focus on building your own business assets – website, email list, the important is the amount of traffic on your website and how you are converting that traffic into paying customers.
• CEO Defined: Enhancing the value in other people's life. Everything that we do enhances the business owners so that they can have that freedom and flexibility in their business.

Website: https://destinicopp.com

Book: https://destinicopp.com/book

LinkedIn: destinicopp

Instagram: destinicopp

Pinterest: destinicopp

Facebook: destinicopp

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Transcription

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00:13 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEO's without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is to I AM CEO podcast.

00:40 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Doctor Destiny Kopp of Destiny cop.com dot. Doctor Destiny. It's great to have you on the show, Gretch.

00:50 – Dr. Destini Copp

Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here with you today.

00:53 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, super excited to have you on as well. You have so much wealth and knowledge. Before we jumped into getting to hear a little bit more about that, I wanted to read a little bit more about Doctor Destiny so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. Doctor Destiny is a business and marketing coach who helps business owners scale their digital product revenue with automated sales funnels and reduce their reliance on services or freelance work. She is a college marketing professional turned online entrepreneur and a wannabe Serena light tennis player. She is the host of the Course Creators MBA podcast and the creator of the one-click MBA membership. Doctor Destiny, I want to hear all about your tennis prowess. No, I'm just joking. It's great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:33 – Dr. Destini Copp

I am ready to go.

01:35 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. I know it's actually on. To hear a little bit more about how you got started when I call your CEO story.

01:43 – Dr. Destini Copp

Yeah, happy to jump in here. So I actually graduated from college with an accounting degree, which is not anything about what I'm doing today. So I just mentioned that. So folks are like, you know, can I switch careers? Well, I've done that several times, so it's perfectly fine. I eventually made my way into marketing and worked in corporate marketing for many years and got burnt out like many of you probably listening to this can relate to. And I really took a year off and kind of looked at my life and said, what do I want to do? And at that point in time, teaching online was just getting started. And I love teaching. Like, I love helping people. I love being an educator. And that's when I moved into teaching at the college level.

This is when online courses were just getting started, if you can believe that. This was back in the dark ages around 2005, and I did that for many, many years. Started out as an adjunct faculty member and then kind of worked my way up to an associate vice chancellor of academic affairs at the university level, and I got burned out again. And it had always been my dream to own my own business. And that's what I was like, you know what? I've got to do it now. It's like, now or never. And that's when I made that transition into, you know, setting up my own personal brand and helping others create online courses and digital products.

03:09 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I definitely appreciate that. I think you gave a lot of hope to people, especially when they reach that burnout place. So many times, we think that we're stuck in whatever we're doing and can't make a change. We can't make those changes. But I love how you've been able to kind of pivot and, you know, it sounds like, hit the ground running in so many different ways.

03:27 – Dr. Destini Copp

Yeah. I mean, I've changed my career so many times, I can't. I can't even remember at this point.

03:33 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That sounds like it. And it makes so much sense because I even, you know, when you mentioned, you know, having that background in accounting, I've always heard that accounting is kind of like, you know, the story of your numbers. So being able to have that, I imagine you'll probably be able to converse with people on a really deep level. And I even feel like marketing has turned into a lot less of forcing people to do something, but more of being a professor, being an expert, showing what you know so that you can kind of guide and help people. So I definitely can hear how those transferable skills kind of, it seems like they spill over to what you're doing.

04:03 – Dr. Destini Copp

You know, marketing. You know, marketing is about educating people. It is about taking them along that journey, if you would, and helping them. So it has all kind of pulled together if you would.

04:15 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. So I want to drill down a little bit more here how it kind of pulled together. Could you take us through how you work with your clients? And we'd love to hear more about what you cover in your podcast and how you kind of help to empower and educate people.

04:29 – Dr. Destini Copp

Yeah. So I'll dig into this and I think this will be an interesting story for folks. So my main personal brand is destiny cop.com. and from that, you know, our main brand there, we help business owners, as you mentioned, scale with digital products and evergreen sales funnels. But from that personal brand, I've also launched other brands to kind of build upon that and kind of fill in some niches where we needed to help others. So, you know, in terms of that, what I would tell people, is just because you start out doing something, it doesn't mean that you can't expand your portfolio or add other products and services to it or even other businesses like what we've done with our main brand.

They all kind of tie in together because what we were finding is that, you know, we have this main brand, we have this, you know, main product and service that we have, which is helping people build online courses and memberships and sell them with automated sales funnels. But people were coming to us and they were needed, and they needed somebody to do their sales funnel for them. So that's when we launched our agency to do that. Just pieces like that that have helped us grow over the years. But really at the core of that is listening to our customers and figuring out, you know, how we can help them, but also staying true to some of our core values. Marketing is, or having an online business is 90% marketing, and I always say only 10% product creation. So the marketing part can be a lot more difficult for folks than actually creating the product to sell.

06:11 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And it can, it kind of sounds like, you know, there's shades of the book, the e myth, where a lot of people don't realize that they have the expertise, they have the knowledge, they want to know the course, but they forget about that integral piece. Like you said, the marketing piece of marketing, sales, and all of those aspects actually turning people from viewers or people that are listening to actually becoming clients is something that you have to kind of maybe spend like you said, a bulk of your time and energy in terms of doing. What would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce? And this could be for yourself, the business, or a combination of both. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

06:44 – Dr. Destini Copp

So I love this question, and this is something I'm very passionate about. And I don't know, it's not, once I mention it, you're going to be like, well, yes, but, you know, I have brought this into everything I do in my life, and that is outsourcing so I don't grocery shop. I don't clean my house. You know, I don't just go out and go shopping. You know, Amazon comes to our house several times a week. And I've also, in my business, we outsource, you know, we use people on Fiverr, people on Upwork, just, you know, contractors that we've used over the years where we don't have that internal expertise in-house. And that has really helped us grow our business and meet our customer needs. And not having, even from a personal standpoint, not having to worry about is the house clean when somebody's coming over or I need to run to the grocery store, just having all of that delivered or having somebody come to your house to do it has made a huge difference in my life.

07:49 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And I appreciate you talking about that from a personal and a business standpoint because I think so many times we forget about that aspect.

07:55 – Dr. Destini Copp

Yeah. So our core values in our business are really, for me in my life in general, freedom and flexibility.

08:02 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. And I think you doing, you know, quote-unquote, the exercise to be able to understand, you know, freedom of flexibility. Were those core values? A lot of times when we're trying to figure out what to do or not to do when we have those core values in place, I think it provides you that filter, that exercise so that you can understand, hey, is this something I delegate? Or maybe I could just get Amazon to kind of deliver so that you don't have to worry about doing all those different things personally and professionally. I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. You might have already touched on this, but this could be an app, a book, or a habit that you have. What's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

08:34 – Dr. Destini Copp

So that's a good question. And as I was thinking about that, because, you know, we had kind of, you sent those questions over, I was like, I don't really know that I have a silver bullet, but one thing that I would say is I use systems in my business, period. And that has helped me stay organized and really take me, you know, this personal brand that I have and launch, you know, four businesses. And we have, you know, a couple more on the horizon. I am using the Gmail calendar, Asana, and a tracking system to manage all of our PR activities. I have multiple systems set up for keeping track of everything, so there isn't just one “silver bullet” system that I rely on.

It's everything that I have set up in my business. And, you know, one particular app is not going to solve this for you. Right. You can use Asana, you can use Trello, you can use just your Gmail Calendar, or whatever you want to use. But my suggestion would be, is just to stay organized and use whatever system that feels comfortable to you, whatever one that you like and enjoy. Because if you. If it's easy for you, then you're going to use it on a regular basis and you will have success with it. Yeah, I mean, the other thing I would kind of add to that is having standard operating procedures or sops.

10:04 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that hack. You might have already touched on this as well, but I wanted to ask you for what I call now a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice and might be something you would share with your favorite client. Or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business owner.

10:19 – Dr. Destini Copp

So what I didn't realize when I first started, you know, working, you know, having my own business and working online, I didn't realize how much marketing was involved. Now keep in mind, I have a PhD in marketing. I worked as a marketing professor. I worked, you know, I ran a marketing department that had $800 million in revenue when I was in corporate marketing. And so I know marketing, but I didn't realize how much marketing was involved in running my own business as a CEO. And I would, you know, my golden nugget or my advice to my younger self would be, is to don't, don't worry about the small things. So let's just say, you know, brand or logo, color, you know, your logo or your brand. Who cares?

Nobody cares. It's not, your product is not going to sell because your logo looks like X, Y, and Z. It's just, you know, letters there. Nobody cares about that. They care about how your product is going to help them and how you're going to be able to enhance their life. So all of that, all of your marketing should be focused on communicating to your ideal customer how you can help them. You know, what is the transformation that they're going to get by either watching your product or using your product or whatever it is? That would be something that I would remind everybody about is focus on the marketing. Look at your marketing data, look at your sales funnel. Continue to tweak and make adjustments where you need to make them.

12:07 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that nugget.

12:10 – Dr. Destini Copp

The other thing that I would say there is to focus on building your own business assets, your website, and your email list, you need to have a presence on social media. But I wouldn't put a lot of focus on how many followers you have because it's really, to a large extent, it's irrelevant. What's important is the traffic that you're driving to your website and how you're converting that traffic to paying customers. And that really will tell you whether or not your marketing's working.

12:42 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And I appreciate you so much and sharing that. And do you say that? And again, I don't want to put words in your mouth because you kind of don't own those social media platforms, for example, and you can have more control over your website and those assets like that. I absolutely love those nuggets. And now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEO's on the show. So, doctor Destiny, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:05 – Dr. Destini Copp

So this is a great question. And I think that being a CEO to me, means leading a company that is enhancing the value in other people's life. You know, whether that's, you know, for us, our core values, as I mentioned, are freedom and flexibility. So everything that we do enhances other business owners so that they can have freedom and flexibility in their business. And I just feel like if you're not, whatever product you have out there if it's not enhancing or helping or entertaining or just helping other people achieve what they want to accomplish in life, you're probably not going to be in business long. So that's the role of the CEO, is to make sure that they are creating that value. They're helping others, they're enhancing other people's lives in this world.

14:02 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. I love that. And I think so many times we look at our core values and sometimes we could just point them inwardly in terms of our team and what we're doing for our team. But I love how you've extended that beyond that and understand that the people that you're working with, you're creating and elevating those same core values so that they can experience that as well, too. I think sometimes we forget about the influence that we have, of course, with our team, but a lot of times with our clients and sometimes investors and other people as well, too. So truly appreciate that definition. Appreciate you, of course, for helping clients to do that. As well. What I want to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best they could get a hold of you. Subscribe to your podcast, and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

14:44 – Dr. Destini Copp

So I would say for business owners who have been in business for a while, I would just, you know, encourage you to never stop innovating. You know, always talk to your customers, see what they need from you. You know, in our businesses, I feel like we're almost doing it too much, right? I feel like I'm almost pivoting too much here and there. But, you know, it is, it is. So I feel like we always need to be innovating and we always need to be growing. And now, if you're just starting out, I would say don't worry about the small stuff. Like I said, we talked about it earlier. Don't worry about what your logo looks like. Nobody cares. Don't worry about your brand colors. There's a lot of different palettes that you can pick out there and they're all going to be fine. You know, don't worry about things like that. Just start, you know, put your product out in the marketplace, put your service out in the marketplace. Start talking to your customers. And with that action, we'll come to clarity.

15:38 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely love that. And for people who want to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to do that?

15:42 – Dr. Destini Copp

My website is destinycop.com and I'm sure you'll put that link in the show notes. And if you like podcasts and you're interested in creating a digital product like an online course or a membership, you can listen to the course creators MBA podcast where we tell stories of ordinary course creators who own online courses in membership businesses and we just talk about how they got started.

16:04 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes, just like Doctor Destiny said. But I truly appreciate, you know, that last piece as well, too. Love that you inspire that and remind us to do that as well. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:17 – Dr. Destini Copp

Thanks so much for having me, Gresh.

16:21 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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