The Art of Online Business

Building a 7-Figure Business During the Pandemic While Raising Twins, Featuring Holly Haynes

• Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie • Episode 860

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Holly Haynes joins me to discuss how she successfully built her seven-figure business while balancing life with twin daughters and going through the challenges of the pandemic. 

With an extensive background in business consulting and a knack for creating scalable systems, Holly now focuses on helping female entrepreneurs grow their businesses efficiently.


Watch the episode ‘How Income Stacking Can Add A Zero or Two to Your Annual Revenue With Holly Haynes’ (releases October 9th).



Please click here to give an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes! Thanks for your support!



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Speaker 1:

Welcome back to another episode of the Art of Online Business, and in this segment it's how she built it. You can see Holly Haynes right next to me. Hey, Holly.

Speaker 2:

Hi, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely my pleasure. I can't wait to ask you tons of questions about how you built your marvelous business. So, if you're listening right now, holly helps female entrepreneurs create simple, scalable offers and systems to grow to multi six figures without relying on the social algorithm, and she's been featured in thrive and on art entrepreneurcom. She has a 20 year business consulting background with fortune 500 companies, which makes me a little jealous, not a little but I'm like how do you rack up so much experience?

Speaker 1:

Oh, wow, I'm not done yet. You built your seven figure business while working full time and you retired yourself and your husband. We're going to talk about that in a moment, especially how you navigated working through the pandemic with two twin daughters at home. You run your strategic coaching business now and you're a Crush the Rush planner company and you host a Top 100 podcast, also called Crush the Rush, and I can't wait to just dive in in this episode about how you built your business. But also listener if you're still listening, hopefully you are.

Speaker 1:

In the next episode, holly's going to talk about something called income stacking, which is what she does, but it allows you to take your expertise and teach it at different levels so that people coming into your business ecosphere say, like at the beginning or the more expert level, basically based on their different needs. You have something that can serve them where they're at, and you've set it up in a way that they can grow with you and keep coming back for more and more knowledge and transformations, and so I look forward to the next episode. If you're like Quajo, I just want to go to the next episode right away. The link is in the descriptions below, and if you're listening right now and it's on a Monday when this episode first dropped, hold tight for two more days and that second episode will release in another two days. You ready, holly?

Speaker 2:

I'm ready.

Speaker 1:

Can you start off by telling me what was that moment like since you retired your husband Like? What was that moment like when you're like, hey, hubby, I think maybe you don't need to work anymore. Let's talk through this.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so it's actually the opposite. So my husband was a principal and a teacher and I was working in corporate and we had our twin daughters at the time and I don't know, putting two newborns in daycare is like more than our mortgage. And so we were like, hey, we've got to do something a little bit different. And so my husband actually at that point stayed home with our girls while I continued to stay in my job, because I was making more money and it made sense. And so then he started another career as a realtor, which he still dabbles in a little bit. But so when I decided to build my business and eventually step away from corporate, it was basically supporting everything to salaries, all the things. And so when you've been in I'm so I'm almost 46. I was in corporate for 22 years like that's a big jump. It's a big jump to go like, hey, maybe I'll sell something online and it's like a $47 course and there's no one on your email list except your high school friends to. We were making a decent income from my corporate job and now we have to replace all of that. And if you're in the United States, like there's benefits and retirement and college funds and it's like this is not a small undertaking, and so the way that we sort of worked through it was at the beginning and I've told this story before I didn't share anything. I would literally like work in the cracks of the morning and in the evening and I would just pretend that, you know, the business was just running itself until I finally was like I need, like I need help, like if I'm really going to step into like running this, I would say, build a full time business on a part time schedule, like we need to be on the same team. And so I actually joined a coaching program with my husband and he went through it with me and I took him to a retreat with me and at this point we're, like you know, still learning the basics like what's an email funnel? Like what the heck is Kajabi, like what's this thing that we're like we're learning all the things. And my husband was sitting in this like conference and we were listening to someone speak and he like turned to me and he was, like I think you could, like you, really have a thing here. And I knew I had it, but I never like shared it and voiced it, and so I can, I remember it very vividly we're at Clearwater Beach in Florida at a at a like, a mastermind event, and I again, my husband and I were with us. I brought my girls with me, my mom was watching the girls and my husband's.

Speaker 2:

Like you need to leave your job, like you're not going to be able to do this the way that you want to do it If we're all of our focuses in different directions. And so I think it was just you know a lesson that, like you should tell somebody what you're working on, like don't do it in a bubble. And then, once you sort of have the support, like what would it look like if you took that next scary step? Like I was not making my salary, I was not even close. But together we put a plan and said, okay, if I did this for one year, like what would our, what would our family life look like? Because the last thing I wanted to do was quit my job and then every day wake up and be like, oh my God, I have to make this money. Like that's a horrible, horrible existence.

Speaker 2:

And so we put together like a monetary plan of like if everything fails which you know it's not going to, but if worst case scenario, like our family, is good for a year then let's go, and I feel like for me, that's probably the biggest lesson, because, again, so many people leave their job and then they're waking up every day like, oh, I've got to sell 17 things or I have to do this or I have to do that, and that is like not a way to operate from.

Speaker 2:

So I feel like being on the same page, taking the first step before you're ready, and then we sort of we were lucky enough that we were able to take that like monetary impact off for a short amount of time, right, like not forever. It could be two months, it could be a year, whatever that is. We like set a deadline and said okay, in one year, and we actually revisited every quarter, every three months. We're going to check in, where are we at, what do we need to do, and at the end of the year, if it doesn't work, then I'll go back to work, so that was kind of how it worked out.

Speaker 1:

I like how you shared something I don't usually hear, which is one you didn't just say like replace your income. You talked about retirement and college savings and this and that, and then you also talked about having a financial runway that you and your husband went through and sat down and decided, like this is how long we can go. I got a quick question, but before I ask that, so you're sitting, just so I can understand correctly, you started this in your free time, in the hours of the night and then, right, so by yourself yeah and then you're like this this is getting real, like it's making some solid money.

Speaker 1:

So then you actually told your husband about it, and that's when you wrote him in to come to a group coaching program mastermind. He learns about, like how it's going, and then you two start dreaming together about what it would look like if you actually pursued this and weren't doing it at 2 am or whatever time In addition to your high paying corporate job, which I'm guessing was high stress too.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, because this was actually in 2020. So I actually joined a coaching program by myself in January, before I had a business, which may or may not have been the best idea, and then the pandemic hit. So here I am, like I'm like 10 grand in the hole from joining this like big program with no business, and then the world shut down, and so it was like, okay, I gotta like let's, we gotta turn this around.

Speaker 2:

And so not only did I learn a lot from having support, but like, okay, like my husband and I need to be partners in this, I need to share, like what the vision is. And then my vision became our vision and that's when we really started to see the growth, because it was like the you know, the family dynamic was all working together towards the same end goal that is cool.

Speaker 1:

I, I totally agree with that. I recently made a decision to bring my wife on into this business and like, yeah, slowly having her be in more episodes, because, like we kind of had to navigate our. Our kids are eight and four, how old are yours? Or eight and five?

Speaker 2:

Sorry, Ten, they're almost 11.

Speaker 1:

These are 10. Before we were hitting record, we were talking about how yours are in fifth grade as of yesterday.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Today right.

Speaker 2:

Well, they started last week. So yeah, we're three days into the school year, but yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so ours start next week week. But we were navigating because our youngest just turned five in the spring, right, and so my wife is considering what to do to re-enter like the work field, and since we live down here in Mexico, it's like I use remote opportunities and options and she just wasn't feeling them. So then we decided why isn't she trying to be a Facebook ads manager too? And then eventually she'll be in the business with me, and now she is, and so I. It's a cool opportunity we have, right To work together with our spouses.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you got to navigate it. I think, like I was joking like when we first started working together, it's like, okay, we've got to set boundaries because, like, I'm the type of person where, like when, I don't want to talk about business 24, seven, and then all of a sudden, like my husband's bringing up like the finances at 10 o'clock at night and I was like, no, I'm not going to be able to sleep, and so it's like we had to like sort of set some, some rules. But then it's, you know, it's been fun because we do have the flexibility, so we have been able to like do some more things as a family. Or, like you know, now the girls are at school and it's like, hey, do you want to go to lunch? And it's like, sure, let me. You know, like you can. It's got the flexibility if you can really work on like how to manage it.

Speaker 1:

Agreed, agreed. I want to go back to to a hard time, because I guess I know the listener doesn't know yet but like I know how big you've grown your business and especially I was impressed when we were talking in Voxer and you said that you've recorded like 450 plus episodes since 2020. And that was also like a major accelerator of your business growth. So it's like I mean, you don't just snap your fingers and get to a seven figure business, but before we talk a little more about like what really moved the needle to borrow an overly used cliche can you take us back to a hard moment?

Speaker 2:

I usually say a dark moment, but just a moment where I mean you guys set out the financial runway that we could talk about, that, that people need to hear this, but after you set out your financial runway and in that first year, like what was the moment, if there was one, where you were thinking yeah, I mean, I think honestly, the hardest moment was probably the first year before we got to that point, because it's when, I mean, I always joke that I've only had a business in like pandemic financial crisis, crazy United States election, like it's never been normal for me and I don't know what a normal business environment is, something. But you know, I think at the beginning, because I invested so much at the beginning, there was a lot of pressure to be like how, how do I get this back, like what, and then the world shuts down, and so I think we forget that that was just like a really really weird time. But for me, I think that probably the most challenging moment is I thought that in order to be successful, I had to do what everyone else was doing, and at the time it was like launch an online course, talking about how cool it was to work at home, and what I found was I'm not really a course consumer. I like podcasting, I like to listen to things. I like community, I like to teach. I can't I'm not great at like sitting and just like podcasting. I like to listen to things. I like community, I like to teach. I can't. I'm not great at like sitting and just like consuming things. Some people love that and that works for them. And so I had launched.

Speaker 2:

I launched a course, so that's what I thought everyone was supposed to do. I joked that I had like four people in it and it was like you know, 200 bucks. And I was like, oh man, I made like $800. And like, what do I do now? And so I think it was this moment where it's like I have to do things that feel really good to me and I really can't worry about what like Sally the other entrepreneur is doing. It doesn't matter. And so at that point that's when I actually launched our mastermind I went from like a $200 course to like a 10 grand mastermind, because I was like I have the experience.

Speaker 2:

Like most people don't have, the business experience I have. I have 17 certificates, certifications that nobody knows what they are. Like I've worked with really big companies. Like I could teach you these things. And so I I was like I got to flip the model or it's not going to work for me and I think it's a better fit for my clients. And you know, if you're in corporate and you are looking to build a business like you don't have time to watch an hour course, like you want somebody to come in and be like, hey, you need to do this, and so that's kind of what we did, and so it was dark for a minute, but then it's turned into this really cool community focus. That's been really fun.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha. So when you said consultant for 20 years, you're talking about business consultant, like with I don't know one of the big four companies and you're going in on a project and consulting like this.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, exactly yeah.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

That is so intriguing. So what got you through that hardest moment though?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think I well I know I didn't have a choice because I had already like sunk so much money in, and so it's like okay, like we got to keep going, like we got to figure this out. But I also knew and one of the things that I talk about is this this thing that I termed the bus stop dream, and so my girls- stop dream yeah, bus stop dream.

Speaker 2:

And so I remember, like because it was COVID and I was now working from home, which I had never done before in my entire career that I could put my kids on the bus. And there's like this video of my daughter we actually just found it and like she got on the bus for kindergarten and then she got off and she got off and she was like she's like you know five, and she's like mommy, you told me there was gonna be toys in kindergarten and there was none. And I was like, oh, my god, I can't, I can't miss another bus stop. Like I, I want to be at the bus stop because I would have missed that. And I'm yeah.

Speaker 2:

So my whole goal was, okay, I either have to build a business that allows me to like help get them on the bus and off the bus, or I have to find something in between where, like, I find a different job or a more flexible job, and so that's kind of like where the motivation came from, of like I think this pandemic is going to last a while. So I've got, like you know, a year I don't know, at the time we didn't really know to figure this out. I'm going to really capitalize on the fact that I've got some flexibility now and I'm not giving it back, like when it comes time. When it came time to go back to work, I quit my job Like I'm not coming back. So I had a little bit of a deadline, I guess.

Speaker 1:

Yeah that. So tell me what contributed the most to your business growth, Like, was it the coaching program and mindset and health and strategy, or was it going on what I consider to be an immense number of podcasts, like recording sessions? What really helped?

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean, I think there's always. If you have somebody that you can trust that has done something similar, it's always worth having that in your back pocket, Right? So I would say, like I was in a program, it was a really small mastermind, it was super close knit where I could ask questions and I just I was like okay, well, I'm going to do everything you told me to do. I did everything. I showed up to every call. It was like 110%, let's go.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 2:

But also I had to figure out the client attraction tool that worked for my schedule, because I had young kids. I was working full time. Instagram was not the thing. I just didn't have time. Like I didn't have time to make reels or like be on stories, and so I had. I was like, okay, what can I do? Like I've got to put myself out there. What like, what can I do? Like I've got to put myself out there. What like, what can I do? And so we started the podcast.

Speaker 2:

We started doing one episode a week and I found that the episodes that I did by myself better than the ones that I had guests. But I love doing the guest interviews and so, long story short, I was like, okay, I'm going to do both. So then we added two episodes. Then I like started studying podcasts. We had so many episodes so fast we started doing throwback episodes because we've got so many good episodes, why not reuse them? So now we have three episodes a week. So we've gotten to a point where we have like I think we're at like 460 episodes right now.

Speaker 2:

Now it was like my platform, like I just went all in. We created a content plan around it, like that's everything we did. And then going back to the lesson learned about doing a course, I could talk like this forever. It's really fun for me and I feel like I'm an okay speaker. So I was like hey, I'm going to go talk on other people's podcasts and I do think there's a strategy to this. You can't just like I mean, you can talk and people will look up what you do. But we really worked on, like, what are your key topics?

Speaker 2:

and like, what funnels do we have behind the scenes to like do the work when I point people to the right direction? And so I gave myself this was in 2023 a challenge to. I think I was pitching like five to ten podcasts a week and I ended up being on over 300 podcasts, which, if you add it up, that's over 700 interviews. It's great because I can introduce myself, I feel like I can tell a good story and I met a ton of amazing people and the I mean you've seen it from the mastermind that we're in together, like the amount of collaborations and friendships and just like amazing conversations that came from. That is like what builds us.

Speaker 2:

So I didn't know that that was going to happen, but it really came from. I didn't have a lot of time, and so I just picked one thing and went all in 700.

Speaker 1:

So 700 guest. Pod how many of the guests? No, 300 guest podcast.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I was on over three and we still I mean, I still I'm doing this one right, so we, like, we still kept going that put in 2023.

Speaker 1:

That's geez. Okay, I have a little break this summer. I had to like pause for a minute, but when you take out holidays and vacations because you and your family love to travel. Once a quarter, you said. Actually, that's a lot of podcasts, like you know, once you remove.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean it was basically every day for a while. And you know, in hindsight it was like, well, were all of them ones that like helped you grow? Probably not. Did they help me practice? Yes. Did they help me get my messaging down? Yes. Were some of them like awesome ones that like truly moves the needle? Yes, do you have to do 300 to get that same effect? Probably not, but it just worked. So I was like, well, let's, let's keep going.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so I'm guessing the listener is like me and wondering, since you talked about having funnels behind the scene that did the work when you were a guest on someone's podcast and pointed a listener somewhere, can you shed a little light on what worked better? Was it sending people back to your podcast or sending them to a certain lead magnet? Yeah, so my favorite tip is when.

Speaker 2:

So at the end of every podcast, most people will ask like hey Quajo, you know, tell us where we can connect with you or how to find you and most people give like 17 links or like, hey, I hang out here and then I hang out here, you can download this.

Speaker 2:

I stick to one. It's one thing and I tell a story about why you should download it. Because people remember stories Right, why you should download it, because people remember stories right and they're into it. Like in this case, I'd be like you know what I? I love to travel. Obviously, I've worked full time. I don't have a lot of time.

Speaker 2:

I created an entire challenge on how to set up your dream schedule. Go to hollymariehainescom forward slash CEO week. You can download it and you can learn how we put this together and I'll explain, like in more detail, like what we talked about in the episode and like why this is like an extension of what we talked about. Like you want to set up your own bus? Stop dream, go download this challenge. We've had over 300 people do it and I'll just like talk about it Like it's like a book or something and it's worked really well because people remember stories right. We all know that. And then we all know because you, I mean you know that funnels help do the work for us. And then we've just been really strategic about how we set up our funnels, like making sure that they, like reiterate the story and the relationship and the community, and like what makes our world a little bit different.

Speaker 1:

I like it. But since we're here, can you tell a listener a little bit more about your five day challenge that helps working moms build?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the bus stop dream was kind of my motivation, and when I was working full time I only had about an hour a day. So an hour a day is eight hours a week. That's like 412 hours a year. Cause people are like that's not enough time and I'm like, well, if you had 412 hours you can do a lot with that, right, like that's a ton of time.

Speaker 2:

So what I did was put together this schedule based on themes. So each day was a theme, because nobody wants to wake up at like 6am and be like, oh man, I only have an hour. What do I do in my business today? And so every day I had a theme. Like it might be podcast day, it might be pitching day, it might be build your website day, so I teach you how to build the themes that make sense for your family and your business goals. And then I actually do it with you in the challenge. Like we've had like over a thousand people take it and you can see like all their comments in the challenge. Like it's really cool to see all these women are like, oh, what about this schedule? I'm a nurse, like how do I fit this in?

Speaker 1:

and so it helps you design a schedule that's going to give you what you need to to scale your business in a way that works before the listener clicks through to the next episode, where you're going to talk about income stacking and how to take your expertise and present it in different ways to teach people who are at different you know stages along their journey. What is the one final thing you would like to say to the listener in this episode that's going to help them take that next step in their business?

Speaker 2:

oh, so good. I think I would say that you know, one of the things that I've shared a lot lately is you don't have to copy and paste someone else's business. Like I think when you get on social or you know, you look at what other people are doing. You're like oh, you know, sarah did that and Sally did that. Like I feel like when we've had the most success is when I've been able to like turn off the noise and be like I want, wanna do this. I don't really care if no one else has done it before, if it's different than what someone else has done, right, like it feels good. And I feel like when it feels good, that's when you do better, and so I would just encourage you to like take the CEO week challenge, design your dream schedule and like what feels good for you and then surround yourself with the support so that people are excited for you as well sweet.

Speaker 1:

so that's linked up in the show notes below right now, along with the next episode, and I can't wait to talk to you in that one. And I just want to say, holly, thank you for being here and sharing something really important. I do mean this I don't think I've heard somebody else, outside of one guest who it's his business to talk about finance and having your business work for you, but I haven't heard anyone else mention the importance of a financial runway.

Speaker 2:

It's pretty important, I think.

Speaker 1:

It's hugely important. We had to go through it. So, yeah, you're absolutely welcome and for you who's listening to the episode, go ahead and find her links in the show notes below and we'll see you in the next one. Until then, take care and be blessed bye.

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