The journey of a fempreneur is often a tapestry woven with diverse experiences, challenges, and pivotal decisions.
In this article, we delve into Jamie Trull’s inspiring entrepreneurial journey.
Listen as she describes how she transitioned from a corporate role to becoming a successful financial educator and digital course creator.
By taking a closer look at her story, we can draw valuable insights that entrepreneurs from all backgrounds can apply to their own ventures.
A Transformative Shift in Priorities
Jamie Trull’s journey began in the corporate world, where she worked in finance roles for significant corporations like Coca-Cola.
However, as her life evolved, Jamie’s priorities shifted with the arrival of motherhood.
This period of change ignited a spark of realization that the traditional corporate structure was no longer in alignment with her aspirations.
She recognized the need for a shift and sought to create a life that aligned with her newfound priorities.
Embracing Change and Starting Anew As a Fempreneur
Embracing change often requires taking bold steps, and Jamie and her husband demonstrated this by uprooting their lives and moving to a new state.
This significant transition marked a clean slate for Jamie, providing her with the opportunity to define her own path.
As she reflected on her journey, she recognized that change and starting anew were integral to finding her true calling.
Entrepreneurial Insight: Embracing change and taking calculated risks are vital to achieve growth and freedom.
As an entrepreneur, be open to pivoting your business model when you recognize the potential for greater impact and scalability.
Navigating Challenges and Finding Her Niche
Jamie embarked on her entrepreneurial journey by offering financial services to women-owned businesses, aiming to empower them with financial literacy.
However, she encountered challenges in terms of scalability and the limitations of one-on-one services.
Through these challenges, Jamie discovered her true niche: the realm of online courses.
She realized that by creating educational content, she could impact a larger audience and offer scalable solutions.
The Power of Learning and Taking Action
Jamie’s journey into the world of online courses was facilitated by her determination to learn and her willingness to step outside her comfort zone.
Attending a Masterclass by Amy Porterfield opened her eyes to the potential of digital courses.
She recognized the opportunity to share her expertise with a broader audience and, despite initial doubts and hesitations, took the plunge into creating her first course.
Entrepreneurial Insight: Continuous learning and upskilling are essential for entrepreneurial success. Invest in your education and seek mentors who can guide you through new territories, helping you avoid pitfalls and accelerate growth.
Embracing Serendipity and Seizing Opportunities
Sometimes, the universe provides unexpected opportunities that nudge us in the right direction.
Jamie’s encounter with Amy Porterfield’s team and her subsequent appearance on Amy’s podcast marked a turning point.
This encounter reinforced the idea of creating digital courses and pushed Jamie to take action. She joined Amy Porterfield’s Digital Course Academy, a decision that would shape her entrepreneurial path significantly.
Entrepreneurial Insight: Taking action is the catalyst for realizing your entrepreneurial dreams. Progress occurs when you step outside your comfort zone, implement new strategies, and persistently work toward your goals.
Pivoting in the Face of Challenges As An Entrepreneur
Jamie’s digital course business faced an unforeseen challenge—the global pandemic of 2020.
However, her business model allowed her to pivot swiftly and offer timely content that addressed the financial concerns of businesses during the crisis.
This experience highlighted the resilience of an online business model and the flexibility it provides in times of uncertainty.
Entrepreneurial Insight: Your mindset plays a significant role in your entrepreneurial journey. Cultivate a growth mindset, challenge your limiting beliefs, and embrace the confidence to push beyond your comfort zone.
Impactful Results and Building a Community
The decision to create digital courses led Jamie to remarkable results. Her first-course launch garnered $44,000 in revenue, demonstrating the potential for financial success through online education.
Moreover, Jamie’s journey brought her closer to her audience, allowing her to build a community of engaged learners who resonated with her content and mission.
Entrepreneurial Insight: Community and mentorship are invaluable resources for entrepreneurs. Engage in networking, seek guidance, and establish relationships that can provide insights, motivation, and solutions to the obstacles you encounter.
Overcoming Excuses and Cultivating Growth
Jamie’s journey is a testament to the power of overcoming excuses and self-doubt. She emphasizes that the journey isn’t always smooth, but taking action is key.
Her ability to overcome obstacles and create a thriving online course business highlights the transformational impact of persistence, determination, and embracing opportunities.
Entrepreneurial Insight: Entrepreneurship requires grit and resilience. Understand that challenges are an inherent part of the journey, but overcoming them will lead you to the rewards of achieving your goals.
Your Own Entrepreneurial Journey
Are you inspired by Jamie Trull’s journey and eager to embark on your own entrepreneurial path?
To support you in your journey, Jamie Trull offers a wealth of resources and insights on digital course creation.
Visit jamietrull.com/coursecreation to access these valuable resources and learn more about how you can turn your expertise into impactful online courses.
Whether you’re seeking guidance and tips on creating content, marketing strategies, or navigating challenges, Jamie’s resources can provide the tools you need to succeed.
Just the Beginning
Jamie Trull’s entrepreneurial journey from a corporate career to a thriving online course business is an inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Her story encapsulates the importance of embracing change, learning continuously, seizing unexpected opportunities, and pivoting in the face of challenges.
By applying these lessons and taking action, entrepreneurs can navigate their own unique journeys, achieve their goals, and create impactful businesses that resonate with their passions and values.
Visit jamietrull.com/coursecreation to take the next step in your entrepreneurial journey and explore the world of digital course creation.
Video Transcript
Please note that the following is a direct transcript and has not been edited for errors or omissions. It is a verbatim representation of the spoken words and may include colloquial language, grammatical errors, or other inconsistencies. We have chosen to provide the transcript in its raw form to preserve the authenticity of the conversation. We recommend cross-referencing with the original audio or video source for complete accuracy. Find the latest resources at jamietrull.com/amy
Hello. Hello everyone. Jamie Trull here, your favorite C P A and financial literacy coach. And I hope that you’ll indulge me a little bit today because we’re gonna do something a little bit different than talking about our typical business finance related topics. Instead, I would love to tell you a little bit more about my entrepreneurial journey. And I am doing this because sometimes I think it’s helpful to hear about what has worked for other people when building their businesses,
what hasn’t worked. Some of the lessons that I’ve learned along the way. And maybe you’ll find it interesting, maybe you’ll resonate a little bit with the story that I’ve had at different points in my journey. But either way, I’d just love to share a little bit more with you, because some of you have been watching these videos for years at this point and maybe don’t know a ton about how I got to where I am today and how I built this specific business.
So I’m gonna tell you a little bit more, and I thank you for joining me today. And I also wanted to say hi. If you’re just coming across this channel and you have no idea who I am, I am Jamie. Trell, nice to meet you. I am a financial educator and what I love to do is teach business finances. And I actually don’t do any one-to-one work as a C P A anymore.
And instead, my business is entirely doing educational content for small business owners. So it all started with one online course. That is how this part of my business, this phase of my business that I’m in all began. And so let’s take a little bit of a stroll down memory lane, shall we? Now, if you’ve been around for a while,
you may know that I started my career in the corporate world like so many others did, working in big four public accounting and then moving into a corporation. I worked for the Coca-Cola brand in their bottling company, and that really was a large part of my career. I was there for about 10 years doing various different jobs, mainly within financial reporting. And technical accounting.
Sounds super fun, I know to everyone. But that basically meant that I was responsible for, you know, the accounting that was going on there at the company, making sure that any new accounting regulations that came out, I was the one reading them and interpreting them and helping the teams put them in practice. And I also helped with our normal filings that we would do,
that we put out about the financial information about how the company was performing. So all the different metrics, how are we explaining to our stakeholders how the company is doing, and diving into a lot of the metrics around our numbers and understanding what they really meant and telling that to our investors. So that was a large part of what I did. And honestly,
I really loved that job, I enjoyed it so much.
I got to travel the world, especially to Europe, several, several times. And it was great for that stage in my life. But when I graduated to the next stage of life, as so many people know, so many women, especially when I became a mother, things could have changed a little bit.
And all of a sudden, the workaholic, Jamie Trull that I was, had different priorities.
It was reallya hard time to reckon with.
Interestingly enough, of course it coincided with, you know, a a time in my life where I was also moving up the ranks at the company and had more and more responsibility and was able to travel more.
But then I had a baby at home, and that was very difficult. So it was several more years that I kind of made that work. But I realized that that life wasn’t the life that I wanted for myself. And I know that that is like the first realization that a lot of future entrepreneurs have is that I, I don’t think this fits me anymore.
I knew something else was gonna come next, I just didn’t know what, and we tend to, in this family, do everything all at once, okay? And I don’t recommend that. That’s one of the things that I probably wouldn’t do if I were to, you know, do it all over again. I would maybe do things a little bit slower,
but when we change something, we change everything. So in 2017, I had my second child, my daughter Nora, and we also moved, literally we moved when she was just a couple of months old to a different state. I left my job, my husband left his job. Now my job was going away anyway, because we had just moved the headquarters of the bottling company from Atlanta to London.
And I knew I didn’t want to move to London again. I had a three month old at home. That wasn’t gonna be what I was going to do. So we decided to move the family back home to just outside Nashville, Tennessee. And that really was an interesting move because it required my husband to leave his job. I left my job and we built a house here,
and we just kind of started over. It was kind of a clean slate situation, which was great in some ways, but it was a lot of transition. And I think that I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I was and who I was in this new stage of my life. And so there was a lot of limbo in there,
especially when my daughter was young. I took some extra time off, I did some consulting work back for the company that I had worked for to help them out. And then finally said, okay, you know what?
I think I wanna do something on my own, I can’t walk back into another corporate office building.
I just couldn’t visualize it for myself anymore. And so I decided to say, let’s get creative. Let’s figure out what I can do to help contribute to the family income. I had no grand plan. I had no plans at the time. If you had told me that I would have a YouTube channel with over 20,000 subscribers or a Facebook group with 40,000 members in it,
I would’ve laughed at you because none of that was on the radar screen for me at all, at all. And I would love to take credit for what has happened over time, but I feel like I’ve been just as surprised as anyone else to see where this business has gone. So I started, of course, like most business owners do, I started to do what I knew best,
which was helping people with their finances. I am a CPA by designation. I know numbers, I love numbers. I’m a massive numbers nerd. And I found some clients just kind of almost happenstance around me here in Nashville.
And I began helping what turned into mainly being just women business owners. Which wasn’t necessarily what I stood out to do. But it was just the clients that I ended up getting.
And then I realized how much I loved serving these true women[fempreneurs!], small and micro businesses.
To help them understand their finances more, scale their business, make smart money decisions. And that’s really where I carved out my niche.
My favorite part of what I did was virtual CFO services. So I would basically be an outsource C F O for multiple different companies come in,
help them understand their profit margins, make decisions on pricing. You know, understand how to be able to create and keep more profit in your business and pay yourself more as a business owner. So that’s what I did until I pretty quickly realized it was about a year in of doing this that I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I loved the work that I did,
but I wasn’t making even half of what I had made in my old corporate job. And while I wasn’t working quite as much, I was still working a lot. And it felt really daunting because I couldn’t take on any more clients. I kind of maxed out at about 10 clients, and that was working all the time for these clients. And I realized,
yes, I can raise my prices, which I did, but at a certain point I didn’t want to raise them anymore because it would put me out of the range to work with the types of businesses that I really wanted to help. I didn’t want to work with $10 million businesses. I love kind of, you know, that under $500,000 revenue business, mainly because they’re in this place where if you just can get over the hump,
right? So many business owners in that zone get stuck from between like 50,000 and 500,000 and can’t get to the next level. And oftentimes there is something financially that they need to get past and that that’s something that I can help them do. So that’s my favorite type of person, type of business to serve, is someone in that zone. And if I’m charging $5,000 a month for my work,
that puts me outside of the, you know, realm of possibility for a lot of business owners that I would wanna serve. So I, I kind of was at this impasse of trying to figure out what I was gonna do, how can I make this work? How can I serve the people that I wanted to serve? And I had, again,
accidentally fallen into the world of, you know, trying to create a name for myself on social media, mainly Facebook at the time, flashback to, you know, 2017. And in 2019, around July, I created a Facebook group called Financial Literacy for Women Business Owners. And just started going live in that group every single week teaching on a topic that I saw on social media.
Maybe people were asking questions about, maybe it was, you know, what type of entity type is best for my business? Or how do I save money on taxes? Or how do taxes even work, right? I started doing some content around that. And the purpose of it at the time was to build up a list for clients for my one-to-one service business.
But it really didn’t take long for that to really take off. I was shocked at how many people from all over, I had customers in North Dakota, I had them in Alaska, I had them in Louisiana. I mean, it was all over the United States and I had clients all over. And it allowed me to work with people in various different places.
And so going through that, it allowed me also to grow a pretty sizable waiting list, which was amazing, which was really, really amazing. But again, I was only one person at the time. I was not interested in, you know, trying to clone myself by hiring somebody else and to do this work, right? And so I again kind of came to that time period of like,
I have to make a decision. What am I gonna do? And I feel like there was a little bit of serendipity. I don’t know if you guys have ever felt the pushing of something that, that like the idea that just keeps coming up and keeps coming up and keeps coming up until you literally can’t ignore it. That’s what I will say about online courses.
It kept coming up, I kept hearing about it. I’d hear a podcast about it, I’d see something on social about it. I mean, it was all over the place. And so it was in the back of my mind and I was like, ah, you know, and I had so many different excuses for why it wasn’t right for me or why now wasn’t the right time,
right? I felt like I needed to, you know, gain more experience first, or I needed to understand more about tech first, or I don’t know, be more of an expert than I already was, which again, is just what we do to ourselves, right? We never feel ready. And so I had all these excuses. The most legitimate excuse of all was the fact that how was I gonna find time to create and figure out how to make a digital course,
figure out how to market a digital course, right? That wasn’t my thing at all. I’m not a techie person by nature. And I have been very upfront with that, which again, is why it’s so hilarious to me that I have an online business now. And so it finally just kept coming up and I kept pushing it off, kept putting,
shake it off, saying, I don’t know, I can’t do this. And then I got a call from someone on Amy Porterfield’s team, and this was completely outta nowhere. She did not know who I was. She had seen me comment on something I had just kind of happened upon a webinar that Amy was doing talking about digital courses. I attended part of it literally while I was outside,
you know, playing basketball with my kids. I was also listening to this webinar and I just had, I posted one question in the comments that nobody answered, but then this person from her team, Jill, for those of you who know Amy Porterfield’s team reached out to me, her content manager, and we got on Zoom and she asked if I would come and be on Amy Porterfield’s podcast.
And that was a podcast I had listened to a couple of times at the time, right? Online Marketing Made Easy, it’s one of the top, top business podcasts in the United States. And I was of course kind of shocked at this point in time, but you gotta say yes to these things. So I said, yes. I showed up, basically it was a,
an interview for an ideal customer avatar. So Amy was doing an interview and I’ll put the link below because it’s a cray time capsule of like just this journey for me and where I was at that time. And I can listen back to it and hear the person in that interview didn’t even know what was to come. And it’s so cool to have it.
But we basically did this interview where she talked to me about online courses and you know, why I hadn’t done one yet and what I would potentially teach. And at the end of that, I said, this is I, I mean I have to do this, I have to do this. So I joined Digital Course Academy, which is Amy’s flagship program that she opens once a year.
I joined it. I said, okay, I’m going all in on this course business. And I even pre-sold my first course without making a single thing. I had not recorded anything; I had an outline and a sales page, a little short sales page that was a template from Amy, and that is all that I had.
We sold $17,000 in like three days of that course.
And that was a pre-sale that I did just to the audience, to my Facebook group that had been growing over time just by doing live content too. And I don’t wanna make it seem easy because that had been six months in the making of work, right? I didn’t just show up and say, Hey, internet, buy my things. But it really showed me what was possible and that I didn’t have to hustle for that money.
I could create something one time, create an asset that would be mine that I would own, and that I could sell over and over and over again. And that to me was incredibly intriguing. The idea of being able to wake up to new sales in my inbox, which happens to me every day now, okay? Every day I wake up and there is a new sale for me to look at from before the day before at least one.
And so that was something I hadn’t even dreamed of when I was stuck in this cycle of service work where I was, you know, just really overwhelmed just trying to service my one-to-one clients. So this was a new world and I said, I’m going all in. And I had a full marketing plan, thankfully again from Amy’s Digital Course Academy. I am not unbiased about that,
by the way. So you will see my reviews of Digital Course Academy. They’re not unbiased because I’m extremely biased about this program. It worked so well for me that I have a massive opinion of it. It changed everything. And so flash forward now, it’s been four years since I did that, and now I have a thriving digital course business with not just digital courses.
That was the main thing. Financial Fitness Formula was my very first course, that very first launch. All told netted me $44,000. And the great thing about doing the pre-sale for my Financial Fitness Formula course was that I knew it was gonna work. So I could then take some steps to reduce my client load in order to make the time for me to be able to create the course.
Okay? So you don’t have to wait until you have all the time in the world to do this. You can do it and you can test it and you can make some money upfront. And then that can help you to be able to kind of wind down what you’re doing on the service side of your business in order to make more time for this,
right? So that is, that is something that really worked well for me that I’m so glad that I did. Now, I did make the course week to week, which was stressful, super stressful, but it got done. It got done. And since then we have rerecorded and put the quality up a lot from what that very first course was.
But people got a ton of value out of that very first course, even though I didn’t know how to edit, even though I didn’t know I didn’t have the best equipment, right? I was using literally my camera phone for most of it, right? Like I, you don’t need all the bells and whistles. That is stuff that you can really,
really build over time to. And now I have better equipment, I have a better studio, I have some cool, you know, boom mics hanging out here. But that wasn’t the case back then, right? That has not always been the case. And I’m so glad that I started because I’m the person that will put things off and put things off and put things off and then wish that I had started earlier.
My favorite quote is, A year from now you’ll wish you had started today. I remind myself of that. Every time that I’ve put something off, I remind myself that every time. So if you’re thinking about digital courses, I want you to go check out a lot of the free resources that we have. So jamietrull.com/amy is where you wanna go.
If you are watching this video the day that it comes out, be prepared because tomorrow we’re dropping something new. So there will be another video, Amy is coming on the channel with me tomorrow, woo-hoo. And we’re gonna talk a little bit more about digital courses, who they’re right for, and kind of talk about some myths related to digital courses. So if you’ve got some ideas or excuses in your head about why it isn’t right for you,
but you keep coming back to it, I want you to come back tomorrow because I think that’s going to be great for you if you’re watching this some other time. That video’s already out there. So go find it. We’re doing some myth busting with Amy Porterfield herself and it’s really cool too. ’cause a cool part of this story as well is that Amy and I have gotten to become friends over time.
So somebody that I looked up to as a mentor now has become somebody who is a friend who, you know, I will send, you know, we send voice memos back and forth about various different things. We meet up sometimes for drinks and dinner. And one of the other pieces of my story that I wanna talk about is the fact that that digital course and even just being able to have a digital course and reduce my client load,
right? And that was, this was January of 2020 when my first official launch and when I started delivering my first course, I finished it in March of 2020. So y’all know, y’all know what happened then, right? We all know what happened then. And I am so thankful for this type of business because number one, e-learning lots of other businesses were,
were really struggling in 2020. My business was not, okay. E-learning was huge. Now, I did have to pivot my business at the time, but it was much easier to do because of the type of business that I had, right? So I started to do content around all of the things going on with PPP loans and EIDL and, and employee retention tax credits and all of those things to help business owners whose businesses were struggling or shut down or whatever else they were dealing with.
And that grew my business exponentially. But I was able to do it only because I had built a business model that allowed for it. Had I been serving all these clients, I never would’ve been able to do this, right? I never would’ve been able to really seize the moment to help people in that way. And it still is something that is probably going to be the thing that I remember most about this journey someday when,
you know, leaving this world, I’m just so grateful for that entire time period and the ability to be able to help. And I still have people telling me every day that what I was able to do by, you know, taking some of these pronouncements and explaining it to people and you know, getting this information out there and allowing people to know about the help they could get.
I still get people telling me today how that that saved their businesses. And that is really meaningful to me clearly. But again, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without this business that I have. If you have been around, whether you’ve been around since you know the beginning, right? Whether, whether you’re an OG and you’ve, you’ve been here for years,
whether you came during c o, which a lot of people really found me during covid, or maybe you just recently found me, you know, yesterday or today, maybe this is the first video of mine you watched. I hope you like and subscribe. I have to do that. My son would say smash that like button because it really does mean a lot when you subscribe to the things that I do.
I love doing this so much. I could never do anything else. This is my dream to be able to do this. And we have just a little visitor that’s coming in. I’m gonna let her come in. She was supposed to be being quiet and coloring. Ooh, you wanna show your coloring? And it allowed me to, this was not planned at all,
but this business I love, it has allowed me to be able to be home a lot more and be present and be at the bus stop. And mommy, this is not red, this is orange. Have all the flexibility that really need. Will you say hi? Hi. I talked about you in this video. I talked about how we moved here when you were just three months old.
Do you remember that? No. I Spent all that time doing the whole background. I Love it. Do you like the fact that mommy works from home? Yeah. Yeah? Why? Because Mommy, I don’t like when mommy goes out. ’cause I like Mommy, stay with me. Yeah, I like to stay with you too. Subscribe. Alright,
well if you wanna learn more about online course creation, go to jamietrull.com/amy. Should they do it? No, no subscribe. Well, you should do that too. And we will see you next time. Again, come back tomorrow or go check out the channel for my exclusive interview with the amazing Amy Porterfield. And y’all are amazing.
We’ll see you next time. Bye for now.
