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EP 160: Finding New Customers Without Marketing Your Life Away with Lagom Body Co Founder Kristen Runvik

The Nitty Gritty

  • How Kristen Runvik is scheduling her life, job, and business to make sure she’s spending her time the way she wants to
  • How she divides her time to find  balance between her side hustle with her day job
  • What she does to get the most out of Instagram marketing without letting it consume her
  • How Kristen takes what she has learned at in-person events online

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More than 44 million Americans have a side hustle to earn extra money for living expenses, savings, and investments. But having a side hustle doesn’t necessarily mean you have a plan for quitting your job and going full-time with your business.

In this week’s episode of What Works, Lagom Body Co founder Kristen Runvik shares with us how she divides her time between life, job, and business, how she finds new customers without spending all of her time marketing, why she has a love/hate relationship with Instagram, and more.

We release new episodes of What Works every week. Subscribe on iTunes so you never miss an episode.

Marketing your business without marketing your life away

“I have this notion of being anti-hustle. I don’t want to be working 50 to 60 hours a week. I want to be really intentional about the way I am approaching my business and my work.” — Kristen Runvik

Kristen Runvik is a holistic clinical herbalist and the founder of Lagom Body Co. And… she’s also our Member Experience Specialist at CoCommercial. She teaches workshops on holistic seasonal health and creates nature-based skincare products that nourish the skin and spirit.

She does all this while going to herbalism school.

Some people might think that this is insane.

But Kristen approaches things differently. She intentionally creates space for the grounding self-care that makes working full time and growing business on the side possible. She does all this by avoiding the bad habits that are prevalent in the content marketing world and maintaining healthy boundaries.

Whether she is working from home, from the coffee shop, or the top of a mountain, she is balancing strategic thinking with the creative process. She sets up operations aspects so that she can keep the product in front of the right people, in a way that is consistent, comfortable, and meaningful. In this way, Kristen can maintain her passion for helping women optimize their health and live their purpose.

Using Instagram to drive sales

“I have a love/hate relationship with Instagram but I realized when people don’t see my content and they don’t see my stories they’re not clicking over to my profile and then over to my website.” — Kristen Runvik

Kristen, like many of us, hates feeling like she has to be on social media 24/7.

She experimented with going off of social media to see what would happen.  When retail sales completely dropped off, she realized how much Instagram was sending customers back  to her website. Kristen came back to Instagram in a healthier way, with more intention behind her process.

Instagram is now where some of her most engaged customers are coming from.

Translating in-person event success to online events

“An interesting thing about in person events is that you never know what’s going to happen. Sometimes events are really busy and you make no money and sometimes they’re dead and you still make money. You just never really know is going to happen.” — Kristen Runvik

Kristen does a couple of different types of in-person events. She sets up a table and gets face to face with a potential customer at vending events. She also  gets direct engagement with a target audience at curated events that that often include an educational element. While she has love for both, for her, the curated events are much more effective in terms of sales and building her email list.

Yet, Kristen still likes doing a little of both. It is a lot of work but she still sees value. This is where she can actively be part of the community she love and where she can keep an eye on what happening seasonal living and natural skin care industry.

She’s learned to translate her successes with in-person events to online events, too. She takes these lessons and eliminates the components that don’t work. When teaching online workshops–DIY skin care, setting goals and intentions for the year–she can drop the inventory aspect and can showcase the educational element and make this more profitable as a business.

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What Works Is Brought To You By

Mighty Networks powers brands and businesses – like yours! – that bring people together.
With a Mighty Network, online business owners just like you can bring together in one place:

  • Your website
  • Your content
  • Your courses
  • Your community
  • Your events online and in real life
  • And charge for them…all while building YOUR brand.

Visit mightynetworks.com to see more examples of brands bringing people together and taking their businesses to the next level.

I pay the CoCommercial team—and myself—with Gusto. Now, you might be thinking… “I’m not ready for a payroll provider.” I was in the same boat when I started with Gusto. Gusto gave me the confidence to hire—both contractors and employees—and they’ve made it easy to stay compliant, offer great benefits, and keep me in control of our money. Gusto automatically files and pays your taxes, guides you and educates you along the way, and takes the guesswork out of taking care of your team. We love Gusto and we think you might too. Test it out—and get 3 months free–at gusto.com/whatworks.

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EP 299: How To Design Your Own Sales System

EP 299: How To Design Your Own Sales System

This week, I’ve got 4 more stories to share with you from small business owners who have intentionally done things their own way when it comes to sales and selling. They’ve found what truly works for them–even if it bucks the prevailing wisdom or would make a bro marketing expert role his or her eyes.

These stories come from business coach Ashley Gartland, marketing expert Amy Lippmann, designer Mel Richards, and work reinvention coach Lydia Lee.

Listen for how they incorporated these same considerations into finding their own unique sales systems. They designed their systems with personal values, strong relationships, reduced anxiety, and agency in mind.

EP 298: Creating A Less Harmful Sales System with Wanderwell Founder Kate Strathmann

EP 298: Creating A Less Harmful Sales System with Wanderwell Founder Kate Strathmann

This show is called What Works for a reason.

Sometimes it’s a declaration: this is what worked for this small business. And often, it’s a question, “What works?”

Today’s episode is very much a question, many questions, really:

What works when it comes to selling when you want to avoid manipulative or exploitative practices?

What works when your values conflict with many of the best practices of selling online but you still want people to buy your stuff?

What works when it comes to sales in a business that is actively anti-racist and anti-capitalist?

And even more bluntly: Can you even sell things without causing harm or perpetuating harmful systems?

My friend Kate Strathmann is the founder of Wanderwell, a bookkeeping and consulting firm that grows thriving businesses while investigating new models for being in business.

Recently, Kate took a bit of a detour from how she’s used to building her business, which is 90% referral based and fueled by deep relationship- and community-building. She decided to offer a small group program called the Equitable Business Incubator as a way of exploring anti-capitalist business practices and how they apply to the small businesses we’re building.

To fill the program, Kate need to sell differently.

Which led her to asking the question: Can you even sell things as a anti-capitalist?

While that might not be your specific question, I have a feeling that you too have wondering how you can effectively sell your offers without causing harm, perpetuating harmful systems, or damaging relationships. And that’s why I knew Kate and I needed to explore this topic on the show.

This is a conversation about what a kinder, less harmful sales process could look like—and it probably contains more questions than answers. But I’m confident those questions can help you find the answers that are right for you and the sales system that you want to build to make your business stronger.

We start out by defining what we’re really talking about when we talk about capitalism and anti-capitalism. Then, Kate shares how the Equitable Business Incubator came to be and how she ended up selling it. And then we dig into what makes many of the sales formulas and best practices being taught today problematic—and how to think differently to create your own alternative practices.

Now, let’s take a look at what works for creating less harmful sales systems!

EP 297: Selling A New Program With Proof To Product Founder Katie Hunt

EP 297: Selling A New Program With Proof To Product Founder Katie Hunt

Today’s guest is Katie Hunt—who is a member of the former group and serves the latter group.

Katie is the founder of Proof To Product, which helps creative entrepreneurs run and grow thriving product-based businesses. She works with designers, illustrators, and artists to help them develop in-demand product lines and get them sold in stores all over the world.

Not long after the pandemic threw her business and the industry she serves for a major loop, Katie and her team launched Proof To Product Labs to provide a completely digital, ongoing support opportunity for business owners when they needed it most.

And that launch was a smash.

Katie and I get into all of the nuts and bolts of how she adjusted the offer to meet the moment and how she warmed up her audience before the campaign, as well as the exact mix of emails, podcast ads, and social media content she used to sell the offer when it went live. We also talk about how she sees the sales system evolving in the future and how the offer has been received now that people are using it!

What Works offers in-depth, well-researched content that strips away the hype of the 21st-century economy. Whether you love the podcast, the articles, or the Instagram content, we’d love your support.