AP 1193: Where Are They Now? Cathy Mazak

AP 1193: Where Are They Now? Cathy Mazak

Pat Flynn:
What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to episode 1,193 of AskPat 2.0. And you're about to listen to a special episode where we go back in time for a little bit and then we come back to the future. See what I did there? We're going to go back to a guest who's been on the show before, and this is actually one of our very first AskPat 2.0 guests. This was Cathy Mazak from episode 1,002. Starting in episode 1,001, we started these coaching calls. Before that it was always just a person who called in with a question followed by my answer. The episodes were a little bit shorter, but I never felt like I got really deep with anybody who was asking these questions because I wanted to go deeper with them. I wanted to ask follow-up questions, and that's what we started doing in episode 1,001.

And in the second episode of that version, Cathy came on and she was just starting her business. She was just in her first year of business. She had a lot of decisions to make, and you can go back and listen to that episode a little bit. We do talk about that and bring that back a little bit so you can get a little bit of a holding on what she was doing back then, but wow, you're going to see what she's been doing since and the completely brand-new set of problems that she's facing now. This is always what happens when we bring people back on who have been action takers who have been succeeding. It's like the problems don't go away; they just change. But I think it's how we understand these problems, how we tackle them, how we know that they're a part of growth that helps us understand how to get through them and that's what we're going to talk about today.

Sit back, listen in. This is a really amazing episode with Cathy Mazak. She helps academic writers, mostly women. You can find her at CathyMazak.com. That's M-A-Z-A-K. Academic Womxn Amplified is her giant Facebook group, as you'll hear as well, over 16,000 people in it. [Editor’s note: the Facebook group is called I Should Be Writing; Academic Womxn Amplified is Cathy’s podcast.] Well done on success. You're going to hear exactly how she's succeeding and exactly what she needs help with. Here we go, here she is, Cathy Mazak.

Hey, Cathy. Welcome back to AskPat. Thanks for joining us. It's been four years since we've had you on.

Cathy Mazak:
Yeah. So many things have happened. Thanks so much for having me back.

Pat:
Of course, I'm excited to catch up. Although you had told me right before we hit record that you listened to the older episode, that was episode 1,002. What was that like for you? What were the big takeaways from going back into the past?

Cathy:
Well it definitely was, it was a couple things. One, it was like, “Oh, look at the little baby problems I was having back then when my business was a little baby.” And then it was also really great to just be able to say, "Wow, look how far I've come since that moment."

Pat:
That's really great. And you should be proud of yourself because I know you've done a lot of things since then. When you say, "Well wow, look at those little problems," that leads me to believe that maybe there have been some bigger challenges that you've had over time. And why don't you give us a quick update on what has happened since four years ago? Where's the business at now? And how did you take that episode and take action with it?

Cathy:
When we talked last, it was about at the end of my first year in business, I had made about $25,000 that year and I was doing my business kind of on the side part-time and working as a professor at university full-time. I don't even think at that moment that I had the dream. No, maybe I did. I don't remember if I had the dream of leaving or not but what's happened since then, is that I did indeed leave. I took the business to $50k the second year and then to $400k, and that was the year that I left.

Pat:
Wow.

Cathy:
Yeah. I did a leave of absence for two years from my university position. The year after the $400k year was 2020, and that we did $700k, and now we have a whole other set of problems, which is the high-six-figures problem. It's a very, very different business. And also kind of incidentally, the course that we had talked about in the original episode, I think was $500 and I think you were trying to get me to raise my one on one coaching prices. And now that same course is $2,000. I recorded it and revamped it and renamed it, but it's essentially the same course. And it is really the bread and butter of our business. And I don't do one-on-one coaching anymore. The last time I did it, my rate was $1,000 an hour, and I think when we talked, you were trying to get me to get above $100 an hour, so really, a lot has changed.

Pat:
That's so cool. That's so cool. Congratulations, Cathy. Where could people go to find your main business page? Is it still the same website?

Cathy:
It's still CathyMazak.com. Even though I have a team of people working with me and have now for a couple years, the business name is still my name. I feel like that should change someday, but for now it is.

Pat:
Hey, it seems to be working out still, though. As a reminder for everybody listening, you help professionals with writing. And I think, and that's very important in the industries and fields that you help in. I eventually want to get to a conversation about how 2020 impacted your business. But I do want to go back into the past. When had you mentioned that you had grown the business from $25k to $50k to then $400k, what happened between 50 and 400? What actions did you take there? That seems to be a huge jump.

Cathy:
Let me correct myself. It was $25k to $100k to $400k. We quadrupled three years in a row. Still amazing. But what I did to go from $100k to $400k was introduce high tickets. That's really what happened.

Pat:
Explain to people what that actually means.

Cathy:
Yeah. Last time I talked to Pat, I was running pretty much a digital course business and then also doing some one-on-one coaching. The year that we did $400k, which was 2019, I created basically a next-level coaching program above the $2,000 course. Basically, it's I work with academic women. Women professors to try to help them, support them around getting their writing and publications done and out in the world. And we created a next-level program, which is more of a career program for early career professors. And the way we're running it now is very much a high-ticket hybrid kind of program where there's recorded material plus group coaching calls and then also one-on-one calls. And we ran that for the first time in summer 2019. And then we started hearing from our audience, "Well, what about if I'm in my mid-career or later in my career?" We also created a coaching program for them. Those kind of more high-ticket, so both of those programs, one is $7,000 and one is $8,000 and so layering that on top of the courses really made a big difference.

Pat:
Yeah. That's incredible. Where did you get the idea for that? Because that didn't come out of nowhere. I'd love to learn the origin story of the high-ticket item.

Cathy:
At that time, Rachel Rodgers, who has now she has a membership call We Should All be Millionaires, but at the time I took her Million Dollar Badass mastermind, and she was the one who said, "No, you got to go for high ticket. You have people who are paying you to do courses. That means they'll pay you to do more, to get more access to you." And so that's when I created, when I was in her mastermind was when I created both those high tickets.

Pat:
That's great. That speaks definitely to getting connected with other people and getting ideas from others. And that's really important. I see the same kinds of conversations happening in mastermind groups and other paid programs like that. And I think that's really smart because we're actually doing something similar. We've had digital courses for a very long time and only recently have we been adding bootcamps. The ability to not just get access to the course but get access to essentially coaches and training to help you go through those digital courses and access to people who can answer your questions right away and guiding you through that process. And that is of massive, massive value. No wonder the price jumped. You had also mentioned a price jump in how much you were charging, increasing the prices of those things. What got you over the barrier of, “Oh, I don't want to charge too much,” or a lot of those self-doubts that you have about raising your price? What made you finally be okay with that?

Cathy:
For the course, and I'll just, another plug for masterminds and coaches and getting business help. I was in Mariah Coz's accelerator program before I was in Rachel Rodgers’ program. And it was there that I just had the realization, I was like, if I'm really going to build a business with courses, I need to sell more expensive things. This course needs to be more expensive. It just was like, almost a reverse engineering. It was like, “Okay, this is how much I can grow my audience, and so that means I'm going to need, and if I convert at this number then I really need the course to be more expensive.” And so I just started eking, and then I made a leap to put the course price up and it was a lot of mindset shenanigans to make that happen.

I added too many things to the course. Oh, I was telling myself like, “Oh, I need to add more things to this in order for it to be more valuable,” which now I realize is not true. The value comes from the result that you get. And many times, the simplest way to get the result is the best. You think I can charge more if I throw in bells and whistles, and in my case, coaching and group calls and a Facebook group and all of these things. And sometimes that's not actually the best way to get the result for the client. That's just distracting sometimes. We really were in a process of adding and then cutting. And then how are we going to deliver the best way until we finally have landed on the way we currently do it? I think being able to disconnect value from things or features is really important.

Pat:
Yeah. That's absolutely huge. It's counterintuitive. If you, for example, were to have a course and you're slicing it in half in terms of how much time it would take to go through, initially, we're like, “Oh, well that's half the content. It's not going to be as valuable.” But the opposite is actually true. Because now people can get through it twice as fast and they're getting the same result, hopefully, in a much more convenient and efficient manner and can get those transformations that you're offering. That's incredible. You went from 25 to 100 to 400 to now seven and you had mentioned that there are some new challenges that have been sort of now facing you. You unlock one level, you move on to the next, and now there's new monsters. What are those monsters that you're facing now in your journey?

Cathy:
Well, I think we're going to stay right here at seven this year. 2020 was great in terms of the business. I think this happened to a lot of people in the online course and online program space that there were people who were home who needed more support and we had the programs for them. We had a great year enrolling people in our course and in our high-ticket programs. The bad part was we had an in-person event, which we had already sold out and so we had to return about $60k to people. That hurt. We did $700k in sales but we had to return $50k of it so we really did $650.

Pat:
Oh. Yeah, that sounds similar to my situation with FlynnCon. We had to do the same thing.

Cathy:
You know, when you collect money for an event, you don't put it in a drawer until the event. We had already spent it on other things, and that was painful. I guess, for me right now, the challenge of the high six figures is figuring out growth in all the ways that you have to figure out growth. What kind of business do I really want to have? Who do I want to be in that business? What does the team look like? How big is the team? How many clients do I really want to serve? Sometimes we think just especially when we're early in the business, it's like, “I just need more and more and more clients.” There actually gets to be a point where you're like, “I don't know if I can handle any more people.”

All of those questions, plus a very particular struggle in the last six months has been, we grew the team to support what was going to be maybe a $2 million business, and we didn't have a $2 million business nor did we grow enough to really justify the team that we had. This summer we've really been cutting back on team, which has been painful but necessary. Right now we're in this moment of data gathering and simplifying, and really we had expanded out the team to around eight people; we're back down to five people. It's really a process of learning what you want the business to be and how you make the numbers work and all of that.

Pat:
Yeah. They often say, "What got you here won't get you there." And so we have to face these new challenges, and they can be very difficult, especially when people start to become a part of it, people outside of ourselves. And when you came on initially a few years back, it was just you. What's it been like to add a team? We'll talk about cutting the team, but what's it been like to have to add the team to grow to where you want to go? Was that initially difficult for you? Or was that fun?

Cathy:
It was a little difficult to start because when I last talked to you, I had an online business manager, a part-time online business manager. And then in 2019, when we created the high-ticket programs, it was like, well, not only do I need an online business manager, but I also need to duplicate myself, to replicate my own work. I need to hire coaches who can do the coaching in these programs because I couldn't do all the delivery myself.

It was a process of finding the right people and training them. That was actually a wonderful process. I've found these two coaches; both of them are still with me. They started at 10 hours a week and then now I have one full-time and one part-time, and she had been full-time recently; she just got a new job so then she went back to part-time. It's really been a journey and fun to have other people to help you create the programs and deliver them and care for your clients so also you don't have to be the only person caring for the clients, which is good too. It was fun initially. Scary because you have to make payroll, but fun.

Pat:
Right, right. What did hiring the team allow you to do more of?

Cathy:
Yeah, so then it really just allowed me to be more strategic. I could work on strategy. I launched a podcast.

Pat:
Nice.

Cathy:
I had more time for content creation and our podcast has been amazing, especially for the high tickets. We launched in September 2019, so our podcast is going to be two years old real soon.

Pat:
Oh yeah. Happy birthday.

Cathy:
Thank you. And we get 10,000 downloads a month.

Pat:
That's incredible. And not only are they just downloads, they're real people listening for several minutes. How long are your episodes? And how are people responding to it?

Cathy:
Yeah, my episodes, so sometimes I do interviews. When I do an interview episode, it might be 45 minutes long. My solo episodes are around 20 to 30 minutes. And people, every time I get on the phone with somebody or talk to somebody in our programs through Zoom, they're like, "I just love the podcast." They listen to the podcast episodes over and over.

Pat:
That's so good.

Cathy:
Yeah. It's a way to connect with people. It's a little creepy. This probably happens to you, Pat, a lot, which is people feel like they are your best friend. I'm like, "I've never talked to you before in my life." They know you so well because you're in their earbuds. But it's been a great way to connect to the audience. And I love that way. I love audio as a way of making content.

Pat:
How do you bring people from your podcast to your programs? I'd love to know the journey that you take a listener on and eventually hopefully get them into a program or a course of yours.

Cathy:
My initial reaction was “magically.” That's one of the things we're working on right now, which is how can we more definitively track metrics and figure out the customer journey, the lead to customer and then the customer journey? But of course on every podcast, all the content of the podcast points towards whatever program we're going to be launching next. All summer, we've been talking about problems related to writing and publishing when you're early in your professorial career because our early career program runs in September. We're always, the content's always pushing people, and there's always a call to action of what we want them to do. For the high tickets, it's usually “Apply for our program.” The outro has used to point people towards our free Facebook group, and then it pointed people towards a freebie, but now it points to our SLO. We're always asking them to do stuff, and the content is related to whatever we're going to be opening the doors to next.

Pat:
That's so good. I love hearing every time I hear somebody say, "Oh, the podcast is doing some stuff for our business," just makes me so happy because obviously, I was a big supporter of podcasting in the early, early days, and now people are coming up to me and they're like, "Pat, you're a legend in podcasting." And I'm like, “Wow, I feel old now.” It's just so, so crazy. But I love to see the success stories coming from the podcast. And I'm just so proud of you, Cathy. You've done so much stuff, have made such big moves, have treated your business now like a CEO would. And as a CEO does, they face these big challenges like we were talking about earlier.

In your words, what are the big bottlenecks right now that you are facing? And what are you already kind of have in motion to hopefully remove those bottlenecks and get the business growing to where you want it to go again? I know you said you kind of made some cuts on the team, which is very difficult to do, but you got to do what you got to do. Where are the bottlenecks? And what other moves are you making?

Cathy:
We're in a process, a season of the business that is really about looking for how we can simplify things as much as possible? We have a value-ladder style program suite, so we have four programs. They kind of can lead one to the other. They were built the way that you build programs. You're like, “I have an idea. Let me try this. Oh look, people enrolled, great. We'll keep going.” But they're almost Frankensteiny after a certain point. You really have to be deliberate about, “Okay, is this the best way to get the result? Is this the best experience for the client? How about from a managerial perspective? Is this the best way to use my human resources?” Really everything right now in the company is up for simplification and revision, and we're kind of going program by program and doing that.

And while we're in the process of doing that, we're creating a team handbook and standard operating procedures and systems and processes, but we've been doing it ad hoc for five years. Getting all of those things really to a level where when I can, again, hire somebody new that they could come in and read the handbook and the SOPs and do the job, that's a big process. Everything is up. We're in this moment of what can we simplify? Everything's on the table. How can we make it more effective and simpler?

Pat:
I love that. That's so key. I think we often tend to either just right off the bat overcomplicate things and then we never go back to it. Or we, like you said, Frankenstein put things together where it starts to work but we can get some time back, we can get some money back and become more efficient over time too. I think that's a really smart thing. I think that's something that all business should do just maybe proactively, even before it becomes potentially a problem. But Cathy, I could talk to you for so much longer about everything that's going on, and I'd love for people to follow you because I think they're going to be very inspired by this. Again, where can people go to check in on you and your business and see what else you got going on?

Cathy:
Yeah. You can go to my website, which is CathyMazak.com and there you will find the podcast, which is also on all of your normal podcast places. It's called Academic Womxn Amplified. Woman is spelled with an “x.” Really that's what I want people to do is listen to the podcast. I also have a big giant Facebook group. It has 16,000 people in it. It's called, I Should be Writing. People, if you're interested, if you're a person who is in grad school or you're an academic and you are interested in keeping your finger on the pulse of everything we're doing, that's a great place to be. We do a live show in there on Tuesdays and just give writing advice and always sharing the podcast and upcoming programs and things into that group.

Pat:
I love it. Cathy, I love how you're showing up for your audience in all the different ways and how you're leveling up your products and your services and making these big moves and dealing with the tough things that you have to deal with in order to grow. I want to wish you the best of luck. I want to thank you again for coming on to the AskPat podcast. Maybe we'll have you back on, hopefully not in the next four years, but some other time to see where you go from here. Would that be cool if we connected again later?

Cathy:
Yes, absolutely. I'd love it.

Pat:
Awesome. You're great, Cathy. Thank you so much. I appreciate you, and best of luck.

Cathy:
Thank you, Pat.

Pat:
Wow, it's always so fun to listen in on and really time travel with you here on the show to go back in time and to see where people were at before and to see where they're at now. And like I said, in the beginning, it's the problems don't go away; they just change. And I think that that's a great sign. It means that you are continually trying new things. You're experimenting. And if you have just no problems at all, I'd worry, actually. I would worry that you aren't perhaps pushing yourself a little bit or outside your comfort zone. You're maybe complacent. If you're okay with that, that's fine. And if you're not and you've just continued to do the same thing, well, that's not fine either because you got to extend yourself a little bit, get outside of the comfort zone if you want to grow. Cathy, well done. Thank you so much. CathyMazak.com, and also her her Facebook group [I Should Be Writing], [and her podcast,] Academic Womxn Amplified. Wonderful job. Thank you so much.

And like I said, in the last episode, the next four episodes or the next several episodes are going to be episodes just like this. We love to at the end of the year here on AskPat go back in time and see how people have done and help them out even further. Maybe one day that'll be you as well. If you go to AskPat.com, you can fill out the application on that page. Maybe get interviewed and coached here on the show and then come back again. And love the stories of people who have taken action like Cathy. Thank you. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss that. Again, AskPat.com and I look forward to serving you in the next episode. Until then, keep rocking. Cheers, peace out and as always, Team Flynn for the win. Cheers.

Thanks for listening to AskPat at AskPat.com. I'm your host, Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess, our series producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. AskPat is a production of SPI Media. We'll catch you in the next session.