An interview with Leonie Dawson
Hello! This week’s blog is a little different - I had a great interview with Leonie Dawson last week and I am here to share it with you now.
In case you haven’t met Aunty Leonie (my pretend adoptive Australian Aunt) let me introduce her!
Good Leonie facts:
Creative CEO who has generated over $10 million in revenue
International best-selling author of books used by over 400,000 people
Built a massively successful business in 10 hours a week
Winner of AusMumpreneur’s People’s Choice Business Coach, Global Brand & Businesses Making A Difference Awards
Blogging since 2004 and followed by over 100,000
Former editor of business.gov.au, the United Nation’s award-winning small business website
PHEW.
Leonie has a sweety-shop full of online courses and I have taken almost all of them.
It’s all the stuff I wish somebody had taught me somewhere between school and university.
Eg. How to make money, how to share your work with the world, how to do something consistently until it is finished.
I’m a proud affiliate, (I was the #1 affiliate at the last count! I could win a PRIIIIZE!)
…and I’m also here to let you know that most of Leonie’s courses are about to DOUBLE IN PRICE, so now is the time to hop in and try a course or three if you haven’t already.
Here are some magical links for you to explore. You don’t need to do anything special - the internet knows you’re using my affiliate link just by… internet magic?
OK, without further ado, here is our interview! There is lots of swearing. Enjoy that.
Click these buttons and see
what all the fuss is about:
40 Days to Create and Sell Your E-Course
This course is my favourite. I was able to go from tired in-person-workshop-lady, to teaching people about bullet journalling in my PJs. A total game changer. Zero overwhelm. Messy imperfect action allll the way.
Click here to read all the stuff about 40 Days to Create and Sell Your ECourse.
40 Days to a Finished Book
MORE JOY AND GOODNESS. Everyone has a book inside them. Not everybody has Leonie Dawson there yelling PUUUUSH, PUUUUUUSH, BIRTH THAT BOOK BABY INTO THE WORLD, DAMNIT. Last autumn I wrote an entire book on productivity…then turned it into a course instead because, y’know. The 40 Days to Create and Sell Your e-Course course was still in my brain.
(I called it Pocket Productivity! It’s here if you want a nosy.)
Click here to read all the stuff about 40 Days to a Finished Book.
Money, Manifesting + Multiple Streams of Income
Uhhhm, this one is kinda self-explanatory.
Would you like some more money? Yeah. Ok. This one then. Do it.
Read all the stuff about Money, Manifesting + Multiple Streams of Income.
Prefer to read? (OMG me too!) I gotchoooo; the entiiiire transcript is below.
Katie:
Hello. I am Very excited to be introducing Leonie Dawson I feel like you all know who Leonie is.... But just in case, do you wanna introduce yourself leonie?
Leonie Dawson: Sure. Hi. Hi, gorgeous humans. I am an internationally best-selling author and illustrator of the Goal-getter workbooks, which are used by over 450,000 people worldwide. And I also have an e-course empire. And I teach people there, anything that I'm interested in, anything I'm interested in like money and how to create and sell e-courses and how to finish and market your book and how to sell more shit, just whatever I feel interested in. And it's been pretty fun. I feel ridiculously lucky to have a creative career, and I never expected it to kind of get to the levels it has, which is I brought in over $11 million in revenue now. And I've always only worked about 10 hours a week. It went up like a little bit at a certain point when I had a really large team and I hated that. So I no longer have a large team. I just have one assistant and it's the best. And back to my merry old, 10 hours a week, yay.
Katie: The 10 hour work week! That could be a book! You could write a Tim Ferris...Leonie Dawson’s version.
Leonie: People asked ‘how did you do a 10 hour work week?’ And I was like, I read The Four Hour Work Week. I took it super seriously. I took it literally. And then I was like, well, you know, 10 hours a week, I could do, I could probably do that. I'm sure I could get down to four hours a week and I even have a little...Oh here we go, I’ve got a little post-it note that says ‘if I could only work two hours a week in my business, what would I do then? I wrote down the things that I would do on there.
Katie:
Nice. That's such a good question. Like if you only had two hours, so two hours for the whole week...woah that narrows it down.
Leonie:
It does, doesn't it? And people are like, how do you know which ones to focus on? Like, you know, and I'm like the stuff that makes you money, that's what you need to do.
Katie:
I love what you teach about the Pareto principle as well the 80/20 stuff like that.
Leonie:
Yeah. Yeah. Like everything else, like just kill off everything on your to-do list, except for the mission critical stuff. Like everything else is going to have to go fuck itself. It's just going to be like, can we make this an explicit chat? So I don't have to like,
Katie:
Swearing's allowed. Yep.
Leonie:
Okay, cheers thank you so much. I don't know if i can contain myself.
Katie:
You did a little bit of praying. So I think that cancels out all swearing. So that's totally fine.
So back to the Pareto thing, I was talking to somebody the other day and they were like, Oh yeah, 80% of your clients will bring in 20% of your money or like, and 20% of your clients will bring in 80% of your money.
...And then also the thing about asshole clients, like 80% will take up 20% of your time and 20%, will bring in 80% of your income? It blows my mind.
Leonie:
It's everywhere. I mean, like, this is like the beauty of parado's. So for those who don't know what Pareto is, it's there's this groovy renascence man Alfredo Pereno and he was an economist and a philosopher and he just did so much that I'm just like, so multi talented.
He was looking at land ownership in Italy at the time. And 80% of land mass was owned by 20% of the people. And of course you know that's got to do with capitalism, white supremacy, full of bullshit colonialism. But he noticed that that same percentage applied to everything. So he like, the peas in his garden. 20% of his plants created 80% of his pea harvest. And so what you notice is that things are super producers. It's like not everything creates at the same level and it can either have a really good impact or it can have a really bad impact.
And so when you apply it to your to-do list as 20% of your actions that create 80% of your income, so you can like kill off the 80%, which is the low performers and just do the 20%. And we like, think about it 10 hours a week is like 25 percentage of a workweek.
Katie:
That's so true. I think that was one of the most valuable things I ever did in my business. I did B-School years ago with Marie Forleo, and she was like, ‘okay, look at your income and see which services bring in the biggest chunk of income, kill off the rest’.
It was a huge turning point.I realised that Etsy, yes it was fun, but it was taking up loads of time and made no profit. So it was like taking up 80% of the things for 20% of the money and yeah.
Leonie:
Yeah, yeah. Just kill that shit off. And it's like, even, cause we do the, in the workbooks, the goal-getting workbooks each year, I get you to list out like which ones make you like the most. Like what are your services and products make you the most amount of money in profit? And I remember doing that one year, and it was a year that I had run in-home coaching retreats at my place. And also done like six month coaching programs. And I felt exhausted by the end of the year. It had completely taken it out of me. And then I looked at the income, and it brought in like 10% of my overall income, whereas something like the workbooks, which takes me, you know, not so long to revise earned much, much more than like all of that coaching and retreat work. And then my e-Course programs like brought in
80% of the income. And I was like, so I killed off all of the high intensity stuff.
Katie:
Yes. It's when you start paying attention to it. Isn't it. You can see the, what is leveraging your time and your money and what's not.
Leonie:
Yeah. And what feels like an amazing fit for your energy levels as well. Like for somebody who's an extrovert they're going to thrive in that kind of like one-to-one stuff.
That's going to be a bit of payoff for them. Energetically then for somebody like me, who's an introvert and is autistic and would need like weeks to recover from doing an in-house retreat, you know? That's like a much bigger energy expenditure.
Katie:
Absolutely. And I think when you feel like you're working harder, I think it's that old thing that's like ingrained in you as a child is: work hard, do all the things, get really tired and that is how to run a business.
Leonie:
Yeah. Yeah. But no. Just be super lazy,
Katie:
It's the way forward
Leonie:
Super lazy and strategic. That's the important thing.
Katie:
Strategic laziness. Yes.
Leonie:
Yes.
Katie:
Oh, I forgot to introduce at the beginning that your courses are, so the earliest courses I've done, I think...almost all of them now. I think the only one I haven't done is the soul care one.
Leonie:
Oh yeah, soul care for uncertain times.
Katie:
I've done the e-course one, which I loved, which is all about how to create an e-course in 40 days and the book one! I also loved the write-a-book one.
The major thing that I liked about them is that they're in that 40 day container. So it's not like this huge overwhelming, ‘Oh my God, I don't know how to do this. It's going to take forever’ feeling. Like there was a light at the end of the tunnel at the beginning.
So yes, the courses, the prices are going up soon aren't they?
Leonie:
Yeah. So well while like I always have pretty low priced programs anyway. So they're like a hundred bucks currently and doubling in price at the end of April. So I wanted like I've given people like a month's notice because what I want is like, if anyone wants the programs, before they go up in price then they should get them now. So they can save themselves a hundred bucks as like I always say to people you're going to buy them eventually. Cause it's like a rock they've been used by thousands of thousands of people. And as soon as you are in my space, you, like Katie will end up taking all of my programs because they're all amazing. So you might as well get in now and save yourself half the amount of money. And we do have payment plans as well. For like when a hundred bucks is too tricky in one go, you can sign up to the payment plan now as well. So good fun.
Katie:
Yes, I remember the first time. I have no idea how I found it...I think it was through Denise Duffield-Thomas and I was on your sales page for the money manifesting multiple streams of income course. And I was scrolling while I was on holiday, but I was at this point in my business where a client was about to pay me and that meant I had no money. Just because they hadn't paid their invoice. And I was like, ‘we need to sort this out. I need to stop being like at the mercy of procurement systems paying me, because this is rubbish’. But yep that price point at that point, I was like, it's a lot of money, but I think it's going to be useful. And it WAS useful.
Leonie:
Yeah. That's why like I always think about like the return on investment because you know, a hundred bucks, I want to make it like 10, a hundred times that value back to you so that you'll get at least a thousand, 10,000 or more in savings and increased income from it. So the way I always think about it is like when I bought my first program, I think it was like 2008 maybe. And it was a hundred dollars. And at that point that was like eh, but then I immediately instituted all the lessons in it and earned $6,000 within the next month, which was more than I'd earn before. And I was like, ‘Holy fuck’. So if somebody had like said to you, like give me a hundred bucks and I'll give you the suitcase and there's $6,000 inside it. Like, is that a good exchange? Yes, it is. So that's what I want to make sure with my programs and especially with the money manifesting multiple streams of income. I make it even more awesome in that. You get the money back on your course straight away,
because we do one thing like in the very first week that makes you save or earn like 10 times the price of the course that you've spent.
Katie:
Yeah. I'm sure mine was like £700 a year that I was going to save after I did that exercise. And I thought, ‘Oh good. It's paid for itself seven times. Happy days.’
Leonie:
Yeah. Right. It's actually like fun to be able to play with the money and making, save and create.
Katie:
Love it. I think it's like grown up life being a nerd and implementing all the lessons is like the best thing ever. Like at school it was ’You're so Geeky’. And then when you're an adult and you take courses and you're like a sponge sucking up all the information, it's not geeky now. Is it?
Leonie:
No its very sexy and even now I still treat myself like every weekend I have like mama retreats. So every afternoon I've got two kids and I’m just like be free my children! Go bother your father, do something else. Because I'm going to bed. And I set myself in my bed with my little laptop and my art journal and my books and for fun I take e-courses. And it's just like the best. It's like my favourite part of the week.
Katie:
Yes. Such a good way to spend weekend times.
Leonie:
Hmm. It's the noises. It's the noises. And you can learn from amazing people doing amazing things for such a cheap price. I don't even understand why people go to university anymore. I mean, we need university to churn out the doctors don't get me wrong, but for everything else, e-courses.
Katie:
So true. And yeah, the online thing, not having to leave the house, not having to commute somewhere, squishing it in around your life. Like if you've got a full-time job you can squish it in the mornings or afternoons or on when you commute. When I was working as a lecturer and I was taking the e-course course, your e-course course. And I was on the train every morning? I was just like cramming my brain with all this information and like taking the lessons and like writing. And It was just such a good thing to be able to do that and not have to go somewhere special to learn.
Three cheers for the internet. Hooray.
Leonie:
And here's the thing, right? Is that in terms of learning business and marketing at university, I don't know if that's a good idea. Like I have hired people, who've done those things. Who've
got like MBAs and stuff like that. They, they suck, they don't know shit about real business and real marketing. Like, like, no, that's not gonna fly. That doesn't make any money like that does not, is not profitable. No, thank you. So I prefer this kind of like on the ground, like learning in the fields and learning from people who've actually created success. Not just people who like studied business.
Katie:
Learning from someone who's done the thing rather than someone who's read about doing the thing is always a better experience.
Leonie:
Yeah. Yeah. Because those people just pull shit out of their arse and amazing right. Like I should know. I hired them.
Katie:
Lol.
Leonie:
Yeah. All I wanted when I was growing up was to have some kind of creative career and - I'm sure if you're one of Katie's readers you're a creative human. And I just want you to know that there are so many ways for you to create a creative income and a creative business. And it doesn't need to look like how we like thought traditional jobs look, and it, we also don't have to follow how other people like, like the vast narrative about business goes, you know, we can make our creative incomes in very creative and, you know, bonker doodles ways. Really.
Katie:
I love it. It's like the whole thing about the creative industries as well. You can just invent your own job at this point. Especially after the pandemic and everything, it's turned everything on its head, the economic things, everything, and the internet. You can just look at what you like doing, how you can serve the world in a way that it's also fun for you, makes a profit that you can live comfortably, however you want to live. Yeah. It's the best thing ever.
Leonie:
It is. So it let's talk about - cause I just fucking love - your pivot story. And I don't know if like all your people know your pivot story because you know, like come COVID times last year, you're in a completely different place and your business to where you are now. So do you mind sharing where you were at and like the shift you had to make?
Katie:
Yeah, definitely. At the start of the pandemic I had just quit my lecturing job because my live illustration events job had been going so well. I was going physically to places to paint on windows and draw. And, yeah, I thought ‘I don't need to be a lecturer anymore. It's going so well. Like, fuck you guys, I'm leaving’.
And then literally two weeks later they were like, p.s. there's a pandemic. Almost all of my work was cancelled overnight. So I felt very silly. Like, ‘oh sugar, all of my income streams have gone in one blink of an eye’.
I'd taken your e-course course in November, about six months before, but I'd been too busy to actually properly implement it. I had the whole course made - I'd made a bullet journal course. It was there on the hard drive. And I just kept telling myself, ‘I'm going to get to that later.’ Part of me was a little bit scared about telling people about it, I really didn't want to be salesy, but then when the pandemic happened I was like, NOW is the time to do my bullet journal course.
And that was Bullet Journal Gang!
It was kind of an experiment.
I had nothing to lose. So I made my first course, put it on the internet. I taught it live. I think I had 34 people in the first round and it was so much fun! I'd done these workshops in person for years. So I just did it, on the internet and it was exactly the same, but because i'd made it once and filmed it, it existed. And then I was able to just invite more people to take the course, but I'd already done it. So I didn't have to go and teach it again.
And like that, like when you're talking about energy, if I compare the amount of energy, it took me to drive to Edinburgh and teach this course in a basement of a gift shop to like 12 people versus teaching one time, it's just night and day.
It used to take me days to recover, and it wasn't that well paid, and it felt like a massive drag.
And then the e-course version, Bullet Journal Gang, it was just a revelation. I was like, Oh my God, it's done. It's amazing.
And then that opened the doors to, so the good ship illustration that i co-founded with, my friends, Helen Stephens and Tanya Willis. I think a lot of you will know about that. You might even be in the Good Ship if you're watching or listening to this. Because of all the things that i'd been able to try out on Bullet Journal Gang in my playground, I was able to come to
Helen and Tania and I say, ‘This is how it worked for bullet journal gang. It might work for the
good ship’. And it felt like we had a bit of a roadmap and a blueprint of how to just take all of our ideas and get them out.
Helen and Tania are incredible, like both award-winning, they've got years and years of experience in the illustration industry. And we were able to like extract all the goodness from our brains and put it into an online platform. We've had over a thousand students go through the good ship now, so that, that tiny little bud of panic from work being cancelled, has blossomed into the Good Ship community and these courses.
I went from panicking about how I was gonna pay my rent and continue my life with no income to, yeah, like the complete opposite.
The live illustration also went virtual. So that's been doing really very well and the Good Ship has also been doing well. My personal income for live illustration, my own courses and my slice of Good Ship has come to over £167k for this last financial year.
It is mad because part of my mind is still a nanny earning £75 a week.
Leonie:
It's an amazing pivot. And also like, you know, imagine if the pandemic hadn't happened and forced you kind of into a new way of doing it, you know, like you've ended up having your most successful year ever beyond your wildest dreams, because you're like finally made the online pivot to creating passive income. It's fucking brilliant. And also both of your courses are brilliant. But me and my assistant have a special, like soft place in our hearts for bullet journal gang, both for signed up and then we both took it.
Katie:
So cute, when I saw Zita had signed up I was like ‘oh my god celebrity member!!”
Leonie:
And it's just, it's awesome. And the way that you can share things. And also because like sometimes I find like bullet journal, people completely wanky. And like, you know, it's just like a bit too, if you know what I mean, like organized and like, when you see my journal, it is not a thing of, I am not going to like design and illustrate everything. It's going to be a place where I just like hammer shit out.
Katie:
That's the way to do it. I think when you've got a creative brain, like you don't need to sit for four hours illustrating this big intricate bullet journal spread, like who, who wants to do that? You could go and do some paid illustrations or like create something useful just for planning and having ideas and getting it all out and being messy. Yes I love that.
Leonie:
Well, actually my tracker habits, tracker, I think I like adopted from your method.
Katie:
Nice.
Leonie:
Yeah. All my daily habits.
Leonie:
I love you, and I'm so proud of everything that you've done and everything you've created and it's just beyond, and I'm so proud to be your adopted Australia.
Katie:
I was going to say, I couldn't have done it if I hadn't been adopted by you. So that's also helpful.
Leonie:
Oh, so helpful. And I can't wait to visit your little cottage and we can go for a little walk. So I'll have a little cobblestone streets and shit like that.
Katie:
It's gonna be quaint. It's gonna be quaint AF.
Leonie:
Cottage core to the max.
Katie:
Yay.
OK! Leoni's courses go up double in price at the end of April. So you should just hop in now.
Leonie:
Yeah,Katie will give you the link.
Katie:
I'll put the links here or here, they will be somewhere.
Leonie:
Then she can show you the exact courses which are doubling. Then you can just go to them instead of you having to like navigate around shit. Yes. We have the full service here.
Well, we did. We talked about everything.
Leonie:
From multimillion dollar companies to creative empires to COVID pivots to the importance of not dating your family members. Your welcome.
Katie:
Lovely, good night.
Leonie:
I love you Katie, thank you everyone.
Katie:
Byeee, speak to you soon!