Interview with Anna Runyan on The Growth of Classy Career Girl

Interview with Anna Runyan on The Growth of Classy Career Girl Recently I had the amazing opportunity to be interviewed as a spotlight member for Ali Browns Elevate business coaching program. I joined Elevate in May 2013, and my business has exploded since.  I have since quit my corporate job, had a baby, and hired my husband as COO of Classy Career Girl so we can have the freedom to travel the world and enjoy our lives chasing after our 10-month old daughter, Mila. Hear about my journey to where I am now and what I have learned in this interview.  My two business coaches, Sue Painter and Joy Chudocoff, are interviewing me on the call. Let me know your thoughts in the comments! Anna Runyan Spotlight Interview Heres the transcript of the interview, in case you want to read: Sue: Well, we’re going to start with a member spotlight, and so I think we have Anna Runyan on the line ready to talk with us about her business, which is Classy Career Girl. If you are on the call today and you would like to follow along with her website and look it up, let me give you the URL. It’s classycareergirl.com. I know Joy and I have both worked with Anna. She is an Elevate member from San Diego. Anna, are you on the phone? Anna Runyan: I’m here. Can you hear me? Sue: Yes. We can hear you just fine. How are you? Anna: Hi. I’m great. How are you guys? Joy: Great. Sue: Good. Sue: How’s your little one? Anna: She’s good. I hope you don’t hear her screaming during the call. I think she should be going down for a nap now. She’s only six months now. It’s a lot of fun. Sue: Yeah. That’s great. Well, we wanted to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about the work you’ve done in Elevate and how you’re building your businesses going on. Why don’t you start by telling people a little bit about what Classy Career Girl does and let us know what you’ve been doing in Elevate that has produced your biggest result? Anna: Okay. What I do is I help women ditch their dead-end job and find careers they love in 90 days or less. That’s through  my Love  Your Career Formula. What happened before Elevate is I had this blog. I had readers. I had a small list, but I could not figure out how to monetize it and so that’s the biggest thing that Elevate has helped me, figuring out how to monetize, figuring out how to come out with my products and my services. I think the first Access call I was listening to I heard about strategy session and so I immediately went out for it with an email list and tried to get strategy sessions in and I was able to book five of them right away that next weekend, and that turned into my first client, basically. That was a huge eye-opener for me. Sue: Yeah and I think I remember that actually. You were talking about learning about that term, low hanging fruit, who do you already have on your list. Anna: Yeah, I had people who wanted to work with me. I just had never really made an offer to them or anything. That was exciting and then Sue, you really helped me too. I took advantage of individual coaching with Sue and now Premiere with Joy. But, Sue helped me get over my fears of doing an event. I remember we were talking and you just said, “Oh, you should do an event.” I was like, “Nope. Not going to happen.” But, you helped. I think we made a little chart of what could go wrong or why was I afraid of doing that event and what’s the worst thing that could happen and how I could resolve those fears. We did the event, and 20 women came, and half of them bought my first product. It was a huge success. I got photos from it, video from it. I got confidence from it, and so that took me off. Thank you, Sue. You helped me a lot. Sue: You’re certainly welcome, but you’re the one who faced the fear and took action, so the kudos goes to you. Joy: Yeah and it’s not easy â€" just to toot your horn a little bit more, Anna, is that you did it all while you were getting ready to give birth to you daughter and then you gave birth and I  know that you and I have been talking and you’ve been in one of my groups, even right after you had the baby. It also says a lot to your conviction and your dedication to making your business work. Anna: Yeah ad I really want to make it how I want it to be. Through the process I’ve realized individual coaching is great, but I don’t have the time to have a bunch of individual clients now, so you’ve helped me put it together into more of a group program so that I can spend less time, help more people, but it’s less time for me. Yeah, it has been a crazy year for me. Joy: You were in â€" didn’t you go to Europe to speak? You went somewhere really far away right after you had the baby. [RELATED: How I Made My First Sale] Anna: Yeah. Part of that live event I had there was an exchange student here from Brazil. She heard about this event, and she went back to Brazil and told this business school all about me. They had to bring me down to speak, so I got an invitation. This was before my daughter was even born. I got an invitation to go to Brazil and speak. It was going to be three months after she was going to be born. I didn’t know anything about being a mom then, so I was like, “Okay, we’ll do it,” â€" they flew out my husband and my daughter, too. It was an amazing opportunity. I spoke to 800 women there. Then, the topic was about helping them get ahead in their careers. There weren’t a lot of role models for them, so I felt like I just made a huge impact while I was there. Joy: I love that. Sue: I love it too because this is proof positive that you never know when you are at a live event or when you do your own live event, who’s going to be in the audience who really will be an influencer for you and here this person was an exchange student that ended up being something really valuable for you. Now, you probably have people on your list from Brazil. Anna: Oh, yeah. Yes, I know a lot of people from Brazil now, which is amazing. Yeah, it was very up leveling, I think. I remember, before the event, I asked Joy â€" I have imposter syndrome too. I was like, “I don’t know why these people are flying me out. Am I really that important?” I think I remember you telling me that, “You will always have imposter syndrome. It’s not like it goes away, feeling like you’re not good enough.” That helped too. Sue: Yeah. Joy: Yeah and it gave you a big push, and I’m glad that you started your webinar series, which was just a smart thing to do, especially since you have a newborn, so your time is somewhat limited, to give this information to more people. You’ve just been â€" Anna is someone â€" and this is just a good teachable moment for everybody. She’s just someone who’s very dedicated to building her business. She’s committed to coming to all the calls, our group calls and then our one-on-one calls. She’s active in the forum, so she’s made a commitment, and I think that’s the key, commitment to your business. When you do that, then typically, those are the people we have on these spotlight calls are those who are just highly committed to their business and are going to do whatever they need to do to make it happen. Would you agree, Sue? Sue: Yeah, absolutely. Anna, before we let you go, now you launched your â€" you have a 90-day formula, a group program. Is that the one that’s the Love Your Career Formula? Anna: Yes. Sue: Okay. Do you want to talk a little bit about what happened when you launched that? Anna: Yeah. What happened is I put together a webinar series, basically promoting the group that was going to start. I had done a lot of â€" in the past I did strategy sessions to enroll people in the group. This time I had very limited time. My daughter was only three months, so I was just going to do one webinar. I didn’t have time to do all these strategy sessions. I made the same amount doing all the strategy sessions for that first launch. It was $6,000, three months after giving birth. I was happy with that. Joy: You bet, absolutely. Sue: Yeah, that’s really cool. Anna: Yeah. It’s nice to be able to just stop â€" I had to go down and stop for a little while, but then, when I felt ready, after three months, I could bring back my business basically. Joy: Yeah. Okay and then you have another program launching in January? Anna: Yeah, I’m launching a Corporate Rescue Plan program and that’s for women who are in corporate who want to ditch their jobs and start online businesses. Joy: A rescue plan. I love that. Sue: I love her titles. Love Your Career Formula and Corporate Rescue Plan; I know a lot of people who need that Corporate Rescue Plan. Anna: I know. Me too. It’s from surveying people and talking to people. I have so many people that want to get out of their jobs, but some people want to go back the job search way, going through LinkedIn, resumes, but then there was this whole other market I was missing that wanted to do what I did too and quit their day job. Now I feel like I’m covering everyone, which is a lot easier. Sue: Yeah and with group programs you have the time to do that, so that’s cool. Well, Anna, do you have anything else you want to add before you go? Anna: I think my advice would be just getting involved as much as possible, asking questions. For me, I had so many ideas in my head and it kind of drove me crazy. It’s helpful to talk  through them, to have both of you help me focus in. That would be my tip is to get involved. Sue: Okay, well thank you so much for being here on the call today. We’re really proud of you. You’ve done great. You’ve done great, and it’s shown. You have had a busy, busy year. You built a business; you had a baby. You put the pedal to the metal, but it’ll pay off for you in the end. We are really happy to have you here. Thanks, Anna.