Hey everyone, welcome to week one and module one of the upward course. I am Jon Taggart. I am the founder of upward consulting and also Taggart Media Group, my WordPress design, development and digital marketing agency. I'm truly honored that you've signed up for this course. And I'm looking forward to working with you over the next eight weeks. First off, I personally want to thank you for being a part of this course, and really trusting me to help take your business to the next level. I know together with this proven process and our support, you'll be able to get the results that you're looking for. But before we jump headfirst into everything, I want to explain why I built this course. And believe it or not, I actually built this course for myself. But for five years younger me, over the past couple of years, I've probably invested well over $20,000 in various courses and online trainings. And don't get me wrong, I've definitely gotten value out of them. But probably the biggest lesson that I've learned is that when I'm willing to invest in myself, I typically find that it's easier for clients to invest with me. But just in my experience, and what I was looking for in a course or in an online training, I just felt like something was lacking, like something was missing, I was getting some results, and I was in a better place. But I wasn't quite getting the results I was truly after. So late last year, I started asking myself, if I was going to build out a course and put myself through it, what would I want. And that's exactly what I've done here. I've built this course for exactly what I would have wanted on how to grow and scale my WordPress agency. But truthfully, there's a lot more that goes into it than just knowing the nuts and bolts of how to write a proposal how to design and develop a WordPress site and how to get paid. Having a course like this would have also prevented a ton of painful mistakes. And to be honest, way too many overdraft fees. And honestly, the feeling of insecurity about myself and my agency would have been diminished greatly. If I had a course like this. Deep down, I knew that if I had a proven process with someone that would help guide me through the fear and self doubt, I could get the results I know I was capable of. And with the tools I needed for my agency owner toolbox. Really, I needed a process that would tap into human psychology of creating trust, and the digital assets and processes to go alongside of it to get the results I was after and to get them so much faster. So if you're anything like me, this course should resonate directly with you. And we'll help avoid all the mistakes I've made over the years, and get you to where you want to go as quickly as possible. I am here to get you the results that you're after. That's it. And really, your results are the only thing that truly matters. And it's why you've invested in this course. That's what myself and my team are here to help you with. So up on my screen, you're gonna see this quote, and it was originally by Jerry Rice. But it's something that really resonated with me. And I've kind of tweaked it a little bit. And it goes like this, do today what others won't, so that tomorrow you can do what others can't. And so I don't actually think this is necessarily a competition with other people. But I think it's really a competition with yourself. And the way that I read this is do today what normally I wouldn't have done so that tomorrow I can do what I've never been able to a link to this poster is in the resources section below, print it out and hang this up wherever you can see it daily, when things get challenging or difficult in this course, or really whenever you're trying something new, and you feel like giving up refer back to this quote and poster. Okay, so with that out of the way, let me tell you a little bit more about myself my story, and really how I got to where I'm at today because honestly, I really want to give you a boost of confidence. Because if a broke starving musician, living out of a van with little to no experience can figure this out, you will definitely be able to apply all of the trainings and lessons to every aspect of your business and get the results that you're after of acquiring high value WordPress clients and projects, better returns for your clients and a human a human process that will help minimize self doubt and really that dreaded feeling of being imposter, something that I still struggle with today. So this all started back for me in high school. So this all started for me back in high school. I kind of always had that entrepreneur brain that spirit inside me but I was terrible at school. I remember on the essay tees I literally only took them because I had to in order to graduate And really just at the end of the day, I just knew that school wasn't for me. And I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, then All I knew is that I wanted to work for myself, but I didn't know what that would look like. So when I got out of high school, I started going to a local community college because I just didn't know what else to do. I was working at a golf course as a caddy at the time. And when I was in junior college I had registered for the first semester, and from there, I'd show up to class. And I think after like the first week or two, I ended up just stop going and dropping out. I just, I couldn't do it. School just wasn't for me. Now, this is not something I recommend, really, to anyone. But it wasn't for me. And I just I really wanted to focus working at the golf course as a 19 year old kid, and really just trying to find my way and end up going back to junior college about a year later. Just because I felt like I really couldn't figure out anything with my life. And I was just tired of working at the golf course. So went back to school. And I think that lasted probably another month or two and dropping out again, I said, You know what, I'm going to figure out a way to work for myself. And I went full in on that pursuit. And so I ended up working for an internet marketing company, just kind of essentially like interning, I think I was making about 1000 bucks a month, maybe so a paying internship. But I was just doing a lot of the grunt work, just kind of really anything that needed to be done with spreadsheets or very basic stuff. Because I just I knew very little about the internet, I mostly avoided it. When I was in high school, I was just way more into skateboarding and music, but I knew that there was something here. And so that was kind of my first exposure to anything really internet tech related. I worked there for a couple years. And then through that I actually ended up joining a band. And that's when kind of my worlds collided. And that's when a light bulb went off. When I when I joined this band, I thought I'd found it, I was going to be a professional musician. So I treated this band like a business, I put everything I had into it, and ended up quitting my job and figured out a way to focus purely on the band as much as possible. And so through that, we ended up getting signed to a small little independent label, did a music video and then went on tour. And at this point I was fully in, this is what I was doing with my life. And I was excited and passionate for this new direction. But I knew it was going to be obviously crazy hard to find any success in it in terms of like making an actual living. And then really, it all came crashing down in the middle of our first tour, the band broke up and there was just some fighting. And that was it. Literally overnight years of pouring into this and it was gone taken from me It felt like I had no money. I actually had negative money at this point. And I actually had to declare bankruptcy A few years later. That's how much debt I was in. So I got off the road and I had to move back in my dad's house living on his couch with literally no idea what I was going to do with a pile of debt and nothing coming in. All I had was at the time was this our tour van that we use. It was one of those conversion vans, all black. We called it the Black Pearl had like the fold down seats and mood lighting. It was really creepy, but it was great, a great van for being on tour. So I'm living on my dad's couch just unsure of what I'm going to do with my life. And so I'm applying for random office jobs. Kind of couchsurfing just didn't know what I was going to do. I was really honestly I was heartbroken that the band had broken up. I put everything I had into it. And I have no regrets but it just fell apart seemingly overnight. While I was on tour, though, I had an idea with a buddy of mine. To create a ringtone distribution company at the time ring tones were the thing. And everyone was kind of overlooking independent and unsigned artists who wanted to create a website that would help a massive amount of artists generate ringtones and revenue for themselves. And so started working on this project, I convinced a friend of my brother who is a developer for small amount of money to actually build out the website for us. And essentially what it would be is bands would join for free. They upload their music. They'd be able to edit a part of their song and turn into a ringtone and then they could sell it on our site. We just take a piece of it. So we'd built that up and actually got a little bit of traction. And then we realized very quickly that we needed to raise money because that borrowing is stealing just wasn't going to work. So I ended up meeting with some top level music executives, some music producers, and everyone was really excited about it, especially me as like a 1920 year old kid. But the writing was on the wall, there was hesitation, no one really wanted to invest, because they everyone was thinking that it was a fad. And turns out they were absolutely right. So by that point, we ran out of money. And this is when I had to file for bankruptcy, as I mentioned earlier, and so once again, I'm starting from ground zero, and a family member, a friend of a family member, actually ended up getting in touch with me, and he wanted to start a ringtone company, and knew that I had the technology. And so we worked out a deal where I'd come work for him, bring my technology, get a piece of the company and start building out the kind of platform that I wanted, and not really have to worry about funding. So we did the deal started working with him full time to build out the startup. And that did okay, I think I worked on that for about four or five years. And through that process, we're using agencies for everything because I didn't know how to code. I don't know the first thing about coding to be perfectly honest, I knew a little bit about internet marketing, but not very much, because just enough to be dangerous. But I was hungry. So start working on that project. About five years into it, the company literally went under overnight. And once again, I was starting over from scratch. So at that point, I said screw it, I have no longer having partners, I'm doing this myself, I burned all my boats and fully committed to being working for myself completely. And while we are working with this agency and the previous company, I just remember on man, I feel like I could do this better. I feel like I have higher standards, I just feel like I can do what they do. So I decided that day when the company went under, I'm going to start a Web Design and Development Agency, never really building a website before never really coding, just not sure how it all works and functions. But I knew I was committing to it. And I'd figure it out. And so I just started telling friends that this is what I'm doing now. And I end up getting my first client that was a referral. That client is actually still my client to this day. But he needed a website. I didn't quite know what to build it on. I didn't know what a shopping cart was. I didn't know how you process payments. I didn't know most of the things that I know now and a lot of the basics looking back. So I ended up quoting him like 1000 bucks to build it out and took that money and filed an LLC. And so that's where my agency started about 10 years ago. So fast forward. Today, I've got a team of people working with me, I think we built probably over 100 different WordPress websites, getting referrals, we work with different agencies as their support agency. And we've generated well over $10 million for our clients generated 1000s upon 1000s of leads. And so this process works. It's taken me time. But as you see, I've had to start over and over and over until I found the right process and system. In order to get where I'm at today. What's great about it is that it isn't about some tactic or some sort of fat. This is literally built for humans in human psychology. So as long as humans are involved with your business, this process will work if you put in the time, and the hard work it will take. So before we get into all the nuts and bolts of everything, I want to walk you through what this course is going to look like over the next eight weeks. So in this first week, we're going to cover a lot of the psychology and the mindset behind having a successful WordPress agency, especially when it comes to that dreaded imposter syndrome. This is something that even while I was building up this course I experienced frequently. And this isn't just something that magically goes away. And sadly 70% of people on planet earth feel like an imposter in one way or another at some point in their career. I personally think the amount of people that struggle with imposter syndrome is actually higher than that. But this is something that is critical, in my opinion to the success of your business. And it's something that we have to tackle and deal with right out of the gate. So what are we going to be covering in these modules? Well, imposter syndrome is so prevalent and something that I wish I had dealt with much much sooner in my agency So I actually reached out to an author named Chris Kelso who literally wrote the book on overcoming imposter syndrome. He'll be walking you through what exactly is imposter syndrome and how to start to change your relationship with it. After that, we sat down and we recorded a live coaching session where Chris helps uncover some of my insecurities, fears, and shows me how to think about things completely differently when it comes to these emotions and this fear, and how to really overcome the imposter. After the imposter syndrome modules, I'm going to be then walking you through some big mistakes I've made in my agency throughout the years, and how to set up your agency and client relationships for success. Then, in week two, and this is probably the most important week of this entire course, this is the human to human process. This is where you'll start to really do things differently, and probably get out of your comfort zone a little bit. This is what I like to call a customer avatar discovery session. And this process is what gets your prospects to trust you within two hours, it helps you get crystal clear on your proposals, and the strategy behind your proposals to help with close rates, and really showing your potential client what their desired outcome will look like. If they invest with you. Then from there, I'm going to teach you how to write a proposal. So after you go through this process with your prospect, they are going to be hungry for a proposal from you. How do you put that strategy together? What needs to be in there, I break that all down for you. And what's great is, in that module, I'm going to be giving you all the proposals that I've written over the years that have generated over a million dollars for me in my agency, I actually just closed a $25,750. wordpress project this week with these proposals. So you'll be able to download them, make your changes and be ready to send it to the client. These proposals have worked and do work for me, I use these every week. And then I'm going to train you exactly the method to my madness behind all the proposals, we do a deep dive into it. So after you're trained on how to craft your new proposals, we're then going to deal with the agreement side of things. And I'm actually going to be bringing in my attorney to help walk you through exactly what you need to be thinking about in terms of an agreement with your new client and things to avoid, and not to avoid so that you do everything properly. With your agreement. Especially if you're working with larger clients, you want to make sure that you have an agreement that passes the legal smell test, and that it's written by a trusted, vetted attorney. And the great thing is my attorneys already drafted up the agreement for you for you to use in your own agency, all you're going to do is download it, fill in the blanks, make some simple changes, and you'll have an agreement that you can send out to any client and feel confident with. Then after that, I'm going to train you on invoicing, how do you invoice a client so that you can get paid as quickly as possible? What's the best way to do it? Which ones have the better fees? How do you get paid faster from your processing company, there are a few different strategies when it comes to billing your clients. And I'm gonna walk you through exactly what I do to make sure I always get paid. And so that I just don't have an issue with payment, and cash flow and getting money into my bank account as quickly as possible. And then in week three, we're going to cover all of the design aspect of this new website. So now you've turned your prospect into a paying client, they gave you the deposit signed the agreement. And in week three, I'm going to walk you through exactly what you need to be thinking about and what you need to execute in terms of design. Even if you're not a designer, if you're a front end developer, if you're just an agency owner, if you don't do design at all, I'm going to walk you through exactly how to find a designer, or how to do it on your own. That will do all of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to design. I'm also going to show you a great way of how to present your design to a client for edits and approvals. In a simple way that even non tech savvy clients can work with easily and will make your life that much easier in regards to like organizations and getting feedback. And then a week four, we're going to be covering everything WordPress. And this is going to be another great module. This is where we're going to be covering every aspect that you would need to know about WordPress developers and what you need to be looking for to find and work with the right developers if you don't have your own team, or if you need to scale up. This is going to be super valuable. And then in week five, I'm going to be covering email automations and email automations are critical. To my overall clients strategies for 99% of my clients, it's still the number one marketing channel everything out there, I believe it's a 38 to one average return on investment, meaning you generate $38. For every dollar, you invest in email, automations, and email marketing in general. And it's actually something that I built into 90% of my proposals. Because it works. My clients are extremely happy with the leads and revenue they generate, while they are sleeping, the returns are insane. We took on an e commerce client, and he might have been doing a few 1000 a month before we took over his email marketing. And consistently, he's generating six figures in revenue, with the same email list he had when we first started with them. So it works. And I'm going to uncover exactly what I do with this so that you can replicate it and apply it into your projects. I'm going to show you whether it's ecommerce or lead generation, I'm going to walk you through exactly what you need to be doing with email automations, so that you could do it yourself, or you can even outsource it. And in the final module of week five, we'll be showing you exactly how to do that if you're not comfortable with email marketing, I've got a great asset for you. Within week five. Either way, you're going to be trained completely on how to do this. And then in week six, we're going to cover launching a new WordPress site. And what you need to be thinking about before you go live, will cover QA testing, and bug fixing. And I'm going to be giving you a checklist of exactly what you need to check off before anything goes live. And also, we want to make sure that you get paid before anything goes live. I've made that mistake way too many times. And I'm going to give you some great tips to make sure that you always get paid before anything goes live. And then in week seven, we're going to cover hosting and maintenance. So after you've launched a project, after the 30 days are up have included maintenance, I'm going to show you exactly how you can start building in recurring revenue month after month. And this has been a complete game changer for my business. And it can be for your agency as well. And also with the maintenance, there'll be a module about hosting. And this is a little more advanced, we're not going to get too much into the weeds with it. But I'm going to show you if you're comfortable with hosting how you can have an additional revenue source and what I recommend with that. And then, in week eight, this is the final week. And it's another super important week, probably just as important as week two, I'm going to cover how we get clients some interesting opportunities so that referrals come to you without you ever having to look for work. It's what I built my agency on. And I haven't had to advertise my business in a long, long time. Alongside that strategy, we're also going to be training on how to write effective ad copy how to track and set up Facebook and Google ad campaigns so that you can start generating strategy sessions for your agency and really start to scale up because the referral strategy takes time to build. So after that training, we have an expert instructor from the profit first team that's going to be training you on how to properly manage your cash flow, bookkeeping, and accounting that works on a human level, and is super simple to implement into your agency. When I first read the profit first book, I immediately integrated their strategies into my business, and has been a complete game changer for me in regards to having money in the right place at the right time, and not having to lose sleep over how things are going to get paid. And after those modules, I'm then going to be covering a Google Sheet system that I've created. That helps automate the lessons that Danielle from profit first will be training on. It has really helped my finance game when I first started out, I would overdraft all the time, I struggle with knowing where money would go. So I put together a system that pairs with Daniel's training, that every time you get paid, you'll know exactly where your money should go, how much of it each and every time you get paid, and you will no longer overdraft, you'll be able to pay yourself have money for taxes the whole bit. And then the final module in week eight is I'm going to be training you on the agency website that is included with this course. It's fully built out for you and we're going to teach you exactly how to utilize it. So you can get clients paying for your services online, you can start generating leads, and it's going to be a powerful weapon for you. When I replaced my agency site with this site that's included with this course, I generated two new strategy sessions within 24 hours. I also want to mention that at the end of each week, there are going to be action items for you to complete. And the reason that we do this is I want to make sure that you're actually putting in the work and you're doing what is necessary to get the results you're after. So that's a top level overview of what we're going to be covering over the next eight weeks of this course. And I'm excited to get going. So before we jump into all of the training, I want to talk to you a little bit about what my goal is with this course, my objective, and really my goal for you, is to get you to a place where you have a process and a system that you can use time and time again, to not only attract high value clients, but charge a lot more for your projects. And not just because you're charging more, but because you're providing way more value than you ever have to your clients. And when your clients get better results, guess who they are going to refer to their friends and family. So all of this is just a gigantic positive feedback loop for your agency, from your mindset to how you provide value to complete strangers, to how you create trust with your prospects, and how you end up delivering high value projects for your clients. That gets them the results that they are after. My goal is to take you from the old way of doing things to the new way of doing things that have completely transformed my business. And with this new way, you will generate more revenue for yourself and more importantly, more revenue for your clients. So before we begin, I want you to remember that you might feel uncomfortable on some of these things, some of this stuff is going to be brand new to you. And you might be doing things in a way that you've never done before. And you're probably going to feel a little bit outside of your comfort zone. But this is good. We are going to work through this course on how to change your relationship with this discomfort, doing new things and following through on the hard things. What I have found personally is that these feelings have become signals for me, they're now my guiding light. And when I'm starting to do something new, even with this course, I feel fear, doubt myself or feel like a complete imposter. And instead of me giving into that fear, I realized that these feelings are just letting me know that I'm heading in the right direction. If I'm feeling this way, that means I'm outside of my comfort zone, that means I'm doing something different, something I've never done before. And that means I'm going to get results I've never gotten before, because I'm doing something different. So what I highly recommend is when you're going through this course, when you feel some fear, and you're like, Ah, this is uncomfortable, I know that this is a good thing and you are on the right track, your lizard brain is trying to keep you safe at all costs. But you need to tell yourself that this is exactly what you need. And you need to lean into it. So when you feel that fear, you need to realize that fear is what will get you to the success that you are after. So I had a moment when I was building this course has really doubting myself more than one time, let me be honest. And I had this light bulb go off, I'll never forget it. I was feeling super insecure, the thought of recording something and hearing my own voice, doubting that I should even be teaching anyone anything. All of those insecurities from my past just came to life. It came in, bubbled up, and I could feel it and I wanted to stop, I wanted to quit. And then I realized that fear is essentially a wall. And what's on the other side of that wall is success. And whatever that means to you. So whenever you experience these feelings, these emotions, just know what's on the other side of that fear is what you're looking for. So when you're experiencing fear, and self doubt in some of this training, just know you're getting closer to your wall, you're also getting closer to climbing over that wall and getting to the results that you truly desire. And so I just want to challenge you that in this training over the next eight weeks, if you're feeling uncomfortable, just know that you're on the right path and keep leaning into it don't stop. So within this training, I'm going to be teaching you a lot of new things, a lot of new processes and different ways of thinking. But also, there's a lot of things that aren't going to change. And I just want to go over some of them with you. So some of the things that won't change is you need to take pride in your work. You need to make sure that the work you're doing is the very best that you can do. And then it's high quality, that you're paying attention to details, you're still going to have to write great proposals, you're still going to have to have great communication with your clients and prospects. And you're going to have to be a true professional. Those things aren't going to change. These are just a fundamental things to being a business and agency owner. And you have to do the little things and take pride in your work. These are all foundational to any good successful agency You want to continue to prioritize all of them. Because remember, this is a human to human business. In this course, we're going to also talk a lot about the old way versus a new way, and why doing things, the new way is better. And again, you might feel uncomfortable with some of this, but you need to trust the process. The new way for most of this is we, the new way for most of this is we are the ones that are going to be going first. We are the ones that are going to be giving value before anyone investment Penny with us. And the reason why is this serves you but also serves your potential client. This establishes trust in offering more value allows you to be able to charge more. And last but not least, I want to walk you through some of the rules and our culture here with upward and really in our online community. And the first rule is simple. And it's this just no complaining, ask questions, don't complain. If you complain, we'll delete it, we just won't respond. also celebrate wins. If you get a win, share it with the community. This not only helps other students that are going through this course that might be struggling with something. But we want to give you validation and encouragement. And honestly, we just want to digitally High Five you for getting the results that you're after. And really that's what we're all about here. Second is be realistically positive. And I don't mean like this fluffy, positive, everything's fine when the house is on fire BS. If something sucks, call it for what it is, if something's painful, if you're struggling with something, if you're feeling uncomfortable, express it, where you get to choose what that means for you. And you can choose to be negative or positive. At the end of the day, it's a choice. And it takes the same amount of energy to be positive or negative. So be positive, find the good and things be positive with other students in this course. But be realistic about it be real, but there's no reason to be negative. All that does is just bring people down. Next is be generous, not only in this community and giving back to other students, but really with your clients. Don't nickel and dime, always over deliver and always provide more value. And we'll get into this more later on. But just be generous. It's way more enjoyable that way and everybody can win. I'm a big believer in that. Next, and this is something that I've struggled with for a long time, but have an abundance mindset. And what do I mean by that? Well, there are over 30 million small businesses in the United States and over 125 million small businesses worldwide. And this number is growing daily. And the crazy thing is, is that WordPress powers over 70 million websites, there is enough room for everybody. We as agency owners don't have competition, but a community. There are plenty of small businesses that need your talents, and this process so that they can get the results that they are after. And most importantly, is that this course is centered around humans. And as humans, we all make mistakes. This is really a big one for me, you might even find mistakes in this course. But anytime we make a mistake, we're human, we own it, correct it and then we move on. That's all. And this is the same thing in your business that you're going to find, especially with anything digital, you're going to make mistakes, I promise you, you're gonna mess up, there's gonna be some sort of bug that slipped through the cracks, there's going to be server issues. But whatever it is, there's no reason to defend yourself. Don't try to weasel your way out of it, own it, correct it and move on. And that's it, clients respect that everyone respects that we are human, it's okay, we are gonna mess up, especially doing new things. Last but not least, I want to cover how to get support during the next eight weeks and really beyond. We're going to have a support email that you can email at any time. But we're also going to have a few different things that should be super beneficial to you during this training. And there's going to be a private group that's only going to be people going through this course that you'll have access to and it won't be on Facebook. And the reason why is Facebook is facebook and there's just really too many distractions. We want to keep this community intimate, and all about this course and getting the results that we are all after. And I want this community to be a place where we all help each other. Everybody can win with this and I want to make sure that we have a strong positive community that honestly we just help each other. And if you ever need help, again, we have a support email, but also each Thursday afternoon At 3pm pacific time, I'll be doing a live q&a sessions that you can show up to virtually, and ask me any questions you might have. Once you're logged in, just hover over the Help link above, and you can register for these q&a sessions super easily. If you're getting stuck, I'm here to help you, I want you to get the results that you are after. Also, I'm going to be bringing in some of the other expert instructors on some of these calls, so that you can ask them questions directly, whether it's an attorney, authors, accountants, copywriters, you name it, we're going to be bringing them in so that you can ask them the questions that I'm just not a true expert at. And I want to make sure that we continue to provide you guys with value, because sometimes it just takes that extra help to get where you want to go. So please join those calls every Thursday at 3pm Pacific. It's also good to hear what other students are going through. So definitely take advantage of that. At the end of the day, me and my team are here for you. We want to support you in any way that we can to make sure that you get what you came here for and that is results. So this wraps up module one of week one and now we're gonna move on to the imposter syndrome module. I'm really excited about this one and I think you guys are gonna get a ton of value out of it. If you struggle with self doubt and feel like an imposter. Your next instructor literally wrote the book on overcoming the dreaded imposter syndrome. Let's hop into it.