The Design Business Show 131: Creating a VIP Day Business Model with Jordan Gill

Jordan Gill, operations consultant and founder of Systems Saved Me, helps overworked one-woman shows become streamlined solopreneurs. Her jam is creating a cohesive operating system for managing your tasks, files and inbox. She’s been on podcasts like What Works and CEO Vibes sharing her love of replacing monthly retainers with one day virtual intensives. She currently lives in Dallas TX with her cavapoo Vivienne and collection of 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles.

Here’s what we covered on the episode:

How Jordan was on episode 61 of the podcast and how we met 5 years ago on a launch that wasn’t the best experience for us, but bonded over the situation and became friends
In 2016 Jordan went full-time into entrepreneurship and ended up getting connected with some business owners where she was doing monthly retainers, which is the only business model she knew from a service perspective
Jordan talks about how she had 4 clients at the time and says that about 5 months in, 3 out of the 4 clients were launching and shares that it was very stressful which is how she figured out monthly retainers were not the way she shows up best
When Jordan started looking into other ways of doing business, she hired a sales coach who was doing 3 hour VIP Days in her business, so Jordan asked if she could do that in her business but with systems
How Jordan decided she wanted to charge $3000 for her intensives but had some struggles, thinking no one would pay that because she’s too young but says she benefited from being young and naive because she did it anyways
The majority of Jordan’s business revenue came from VIP Days and weekends, and how that really allowed her to experience entrepreneurial freedom, which is why she teaches this business model now
Sign up for Jordan’s Done in a Day Virtual Conference to figure out how VIP Days would work in your business
Jordan shares the 3 types of VIP Day structures, backstage, blended and book-end and also shares that she has a quiz you can take to know which structure would be best for you
The backstage structure is when you aren’t really getting on a call with your clients at all, they just reserve your day, examples of this are website design or copywriting — it’s more of a service type VIP Day
How Jordan does the blended structure, where she’s on a call the entire time and is building the process at the same time, while the client watches her so they can become more familiar with the tool along the way
When you think of a bookshelf you can sometimes have one book-end or two on either side of the shelf, and in the book-end structure, wherever you place the book-ends, those are your actual calls with your clients
Jordan tells us about the most unique VIP Day she’s been approached with and how the woman wrote songs to help heal people of trauma, so Jordan went to a friend who was excited about the idea and ended up getting the woman a referral partner
Jordan talks about how we’re both similar in the way that our best energy comes from when people invite us into a space to speak, because of this Jordan doesn’t go live on Instagram much, instead she builds relationships with people and the invitations for her to come speak just happen from there
How Jordan knew she was going to do a rebrand and told her content manager that she wanted to only hire VIP Days which was interesting because VIP Days are a newer concept so it got a little tricky when finding people she wanted to work with in the VIP Day format
The story of how Jordan hired a branding agency in Dallas, TX had them come into her home so they could truly get a feel for her and then when she got her results back, they created a SpongeBob SquarePants house for her logo, which made her feel so misunderstood
When Jordan did her rebrand she hired a brand strategist who actually helped style her for her photoshoot too, she also hired a copywriter to go over all of the copy she had written, a photographer who really understood her, and a website designer— all were VIP Days
Jordan says it was such a relief to do this rebrand and shares one of her favorite areas is the directory on her website, where she gets to showcase clients who have gone through their program so you can go hire them for their VIP Days
The decision to move from Kajabi to Showit Jordan says was because of Kajabi’s limitations on how you can organize the back end of your website, so she decided to switch when they were rebranding and says she was between Showit and Squarespace and shares some of their differences
How Jordan’s team was very involved in the switch because it’s their mission too, it’s not just the Jordan show — her ops coordinator moved all the courses, her graphic designer helped with the logo, patterns, prints and icons for the website, and her content manager had a lot of input on the social elements they needed
Jordan explains that if you work in the rebrand space it’s okay for your clients to not necessarily be overly jazzed about the branding process and just because they have doubts and fears doesn’t mean you aren’t doing your job well, it just means they are out of their comfort zone and you have to reassure them
Sign up for the Done in a Day Virtual Conference, it’s on March 8th and 9th, 2021 and you will get live virtual events in a fun, active and supportive environment