Replaced the income from her previous (hated) role.
Name: Nicola Prentis
Business: Teaching people in ELT how to make money doing (almost) nothing. Nicola creates and runs online courses about investing and making your money work for you instead of the other way around
Website: www. chilledinvestor.com
Problem: Nicola had come to hate her constant struggle to get paid enough or even be offered interesting work as an ELT materials writer. She had an idea that she’d like to teach people about personal finance instead, but no idea how to go about making that work as a business.
Result: She’s now had at least 50 people go through her personal finance and investing courses, and has replaced her writing income. She also massively grew in confidence now she knows she can make the income she wants from her own business.
I really can’t say enough times, do it (the group programme). I don’t think you’ll regret it. I think that you’ll bring things out of yourself that you didn’t know you had. And then you’ve got a potential future that’s completely different from the one that you thought you had.
Before joining Designed to Flourish
I was working, you know, as a materials writer and, after COVID, like a lot of us, I was really reflecting on just how much I hated it. And I couldn’t really see a way forward. I started to work out that there was something else I wanted to do because I’d got this new interest in personal finance. And I’d got as far as realizing that I wanted to teach other people about how to do that, but I didn’t know how to go about that.
And so I was stuck really. And one morning, New Year’s day, I think it was two years ago. I woke up at six o’clock in the morning and I was suddenly like Rachael Roberts! She does coaching. So I went to look at her website, found out that she did a group programme and then I booked a consultation straight away and I was really impatient because I had to wait until something like the 6th of January because obviously it was Christmas and she wasn’t working.
I wasn’t one of those people who had any hesitations about doing the course. I knew I needed it. I knew that I lacked all the practical business skills that would mean that I could turn an idea, because I’ve had lots of ideas in the past, that I could turn that idea into something concrete. And I knew I really wanted to do it.
Were there any surprising things that you learnt on the programme?
So I was saying to Rachael things like, I don’t know what you write on a website. I’m a writer. Tell me what to write. I’ll be able to write it, but I don’t even know what. And I knew that I was going to have to do marketing and I didn’t use any social media platforms really apart from personally using Facebook.
And so what I learned on the programme was all of that practical stuff. The stuff that surprised me that I learned was the more mindset type of stuff. I’m a person that’s quite reflective anyway, but she had us doing exercises about our inner troll. And I never expected to get anything like that from the course. And that started from the very first introduction session.
And another thing about doing a group programme is you’ve got everybody else, not just encouraging you, giving you goals to meet. So I think there are so many benefits of doing a programme like that, that even if you think you know what you want to get out of it, what you’re going to get is going to be 10 times more.
What changes have you made as a result of doing the programme?
Once the course had finished, I set up my first beta course, which is a process of launching that Rachael taught us and gave me the confidence to kind of move things forward. And I sold that out in about 12 days, I think, and I sold two more places than I’d actually even been intending to set up.
Since then, it’s been about two years now, but I’ve, I’ve, I’ve learned all sorts of business things, not necessarily all of them from Rachael, because one of the things that starts happening when you learn a new thing is that you feel supported to then go and start finding out even more stuff from other places. And so I’ve, I’ve created lots of courses and products now. I’ve sent at least 50 people through various different courses that I’ve got. I’ve replaced my income. I don’t do the writing work that I hated anymore. And I have a belief that I can earn whatever I want to earn from my own business that I created.
And none of that would have been possible without the course
What would you say to anyone considering doing Designed to Flourish?
I really can’t say enough times, do it. I don’t think you’ll regret it. I think that you’ll bring things out of yourself that you didn’t know you had. And then you’ve got a potential future that’s completely different from the one that you thought you had.
And although I am learning different business things from other people now, not just Rachel, it is those basic things that I put in place every time I create a product, every time I need to launch it. And those are things that will be helping me in the future as well. So as an investment, I mean, it was the biggest one that I made and the one that paid off a thousand times.