29: Callie Willows: Getting To 7 Figures with a Chronic Illness

My guest today is the fabulous Callie Willows.

Callie Willows is on a mission to show entrepreneurs and small business owners how they can better leverage their time, knowledge, experience and expertise as well as increase their income by creating a successful membership site and online community. 

As one half of The Membership Guys, Callie runs Membership Academy, the world’s leading training resource and community for membership site owners, together with her partner Mike Morrison.

Today, we talk about all things memberships, but also working as an entrepreneur with a chronic illness or condition. How do you balance your time? How do you know if you need a break or you’re just being lazy and how that affects your business decisions. So hope you enjoy it!

Callie has gone through all the business models, starting from client-facing with her first business- she was a nutritional therapist and naturopath and she had her own clinic. She was out seeing clients everyday but health reasons led her to actually pivot from that to a membership site and a subscription box. During that time a lot of other people in the health and fitness space ended up coming to her, asking for help with memberships on their sites and soon she realized she loved that more than running her own health membership. She started setting memberships up for people and helping them with their strategy. At the time her partner Mike already had a web development and marketing agency. Over time, she brought him in to work with her clients that needed more development than she could do and they realized that they worked really well together. So they combined forces created the digital agency and went all in on membership sites, strategy, development, ongoing marketing, etc. The agency was doing great, but they were working all hours, work was expanding and they had more and more people coming to them, saying-can you just teach us how to do this, because I can’t afford to pay you to do it for me. And that’s how they ended up setting up The Membership Academy, initially to run alongside the agency business, but within three months, they knew that this was going to be all they ended up doing.So, both of her business pivots were based on what people were saying to them and advice they were asking.

Today, Callie takes us through their business journey and some hard decisions they had to make in order to create the business and the lifestyle they wanted for themselves. How they decided to go all in on The Membership Academy and relying simply on their faith that the trend is going to continue and that it’s going to do well, because at the time that they made that decision, the membership was nowhere near the income level they were making with the agency.

We talk about the ways Callie dealt with her biggest challenge in running The Membership Academy, and that is content creation. She had to be really mindful of how she actually could create content in a way that was strategic and worked for her, without it taking hours and hours.

How to work as an entrepreneur with a chronic illness? For Callie there is a need of flexibility. Knowing that if you’re having a not great day, if you’re in pain or you’re tired, that you’re not going to do your best work and that it’s okay to actually take that day off or do something that doesn’t require “proper brain power”, we always have those things on our to-do lists. And then it’s about making sure that you are doing your best work on your good days, but also not overdoing it so that you then have a crash later on.

We all feel like we have to be on all the time, like we have to be doing stuff all the time to be worthwhile and that’s absolutely not true. According to Callie it’s okay to be lazy sometimes. Her philosophy is that life is to be enjoyed, not just to be working.

She explains how she finds balance on the days when you just don’t feel like doing the work. When you give your brain and your body permission to not have to work or focus on something then even if it’s just an hour,that break just naturally brings you back to work. Sometimes all you need is a cup of coffee and a sofa in your office.

Callie also takes us through their Retain Conference last year. Even though Mike is the front person for their business, for Retain, they made a decision that they should both be on the stage. For Callie, that was one of the most stressful things she’s ever done. But adapting to each other’ processes turned their biggest challenge of the last couple of years into one of their biggest successes.

Success looks different to everybody. Somebody might want to make seven figures, somebody might just want to make five grand a month so they can stay at home with their kids. You can’t dictate what somebody else’s success looks like and it’s dangerous that we try and model other people’s success without thinking about what our own success looks like. On the basis of this, Callie’s action steps for this week are: look at everything you’re doing in your business and are you doing it because you want to and because it takes you closer towards your goals, or are you doing it because you think that you should but actually you hate doing it and if you never had to do it again you wouldn’t mind. If it’s not going to take you closer to your goal- stop doing it.

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode make sure you subscribe so you never miss new episodes. And if you have a business bestie, who needs to hear this message go share this with them. See you in the next one.

Love and Magic,
Maggie