Welcome to Issue 18 of A Good Reputation, a newsletter about a good brand move that helped grow a small business. (Did someone send you? Subscribe here.)

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Hello Reader,

In addition to freedom, flexibility, and finding purpose, there’s one thing most entrepreneurs agree on as the holy grail of owning your own business:

Figuring out how to create some passive income.

Now, I’m not going to get into the debate of whether or not passive income is ever truly passive, because it’s irrelevant to today's story.

Let’s just say that there is such a thing. And I’ve met plenty of people who’ve built it into their business model—including the subject of today’s newsletter, Alexis Haselberger.

Alexis is a productivity and time management coach who’s built a multi-six-figure business teaching individuals and teams how to do more while stressing less.

She’s led workshops at big tech companies, including Lyft, Upwork, and Google, and has been featured in fancy publications like Fast Company and Oprah Magazine.

In short: she’s the real deal.

And for those of us who don’t want to spend the rest of our lives trading all of our time for money, she’s also #goals.

While Alexis still spends plenty of time selling her services, she did something early on that transformed her business and gave her a sweet little passive income cushion—she created a course.

And it wasn’t some big, shiny, expensive course, either. It’s a 2-hour, $94 course that—five years later—still brings in loads of new leads and accounts of over a quarter of her annual recurring revenue.

Like most people who spend any time on the internet, I’ve heard the spiel on how online courses are the path to financial freedom. And I'm actively drinking the Kool-Aid.

But just like everything I “could” do for my business, I didn’t know if I “should” invest the time in building a course.

After hearing Alexis’s story, I’m convinced I’ve been dwelling on this decision for too long for no good reason.

Building a course, I learned, doesn’t have to be a heavy lift. You can simply test the waters with something short and sweet to see if it works.

And if it doesn’t? Well, I’ll get to that.

Here’s how it worked out for Alexis.

A Good Story

Like a lot of people in my circle of creative entrepreneurs, Alexis came out of college with a totally useless degree—existentialism, education theory, and studio art.

(Okay, so maybe not completely useless if you’re going on to teach, but not great for something, like, a first job right out of school.)

As a result, Alexis spent the first 15 years of her career in catch-all positions at early-stage startups, quickly working her way up from office manager to boss lady roles like director of operations and HR.

Much like my previous newsletter subject, Alexis liked the work but didn’t love the hours or startup hustle culture. But instead of leaving to start her own thing, she decided to get really good at getting her work done in as little time as possible. (Read: Super duper productive.)

That meant learning the systems and strategies for becoming hyper-focused and efficient. Ultimately, her goal was to get her work done (and do it well) without ever having to put in more than 40 hours a week.

She succeeded. And then, people noticed.

Because she was so darn organized, her boss and team members started asking Alexis to build systems. Eventually, she was invited to teach workshops and give “lunch and learns” on all things productivity.

When the last startup she worked for went under (because, #startuplife) Alexis finally decided to build one of her own.

Productivity, she realized, isn’t taught in school. And many people—especially in our current work culture—don’t know how to be successful and efficient at work while also living fulfilling personal lives outside of it. (Especially those of us with ADHD.)

She recognized that she was good at teaching and had experience guiding her colleagues through a process. So, it became obvious that her business model could be coaching.

With that, she had a clear problem to solve, a description of the type of person she could help (um, all of us?), and a clear offer with the solution. All she needed was to find her first clients.

And she did it by doing something few people take the time to do:

Cold outreach. But really, it was more like lukewarm outreach because she started with her entire personal email list.
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Alexis sent messages to (literally) everyone she knew—friends from high school, her mortgage broker, her dentist, her husband’s dentist.

The list totaled 700 people. One by one, she emailed every single contact.

She asked if they knew anyone having trouble balancing work and life. Someone who might benefit from learning strategies to be more productive and efficient at work to free up time outside of it.

Several people raised their hands.

Then, she took the same approach to Facebook, and got a couple of clients who referred her from there.

Eventually, one of these lukewarm emails landed in the inbox of her husband’s former intern. This intern ended up in the engineering department at Lyft, where she forwarded Alexis’ email to the head of L&D. That person was looking for someone to run corporate workshops for teams. Alexis said yes.

(The mini side-lesson here: You never know who you know that could know someone who could end up as a huge client. So, reach out to your personal network!)

It went like that until the pandemic hit and even more people needed help figuring out how to work efficiently while working from home.

Before masks came off, Alexis had a six-month waiting list for new clients thanks to referrals from those first few clients and corporate workshops.

She was at her limit with what she could take on. And with 30 clients at one point, she was starting to feel the pressure of taking on too much.

While she wanted to help more people, she was limited by what she could physically do without falling back into that startup hustle culture life she worked hard to escape.

And that’s when Udemy reached out.

A Good Approach

For the uninitiated, Udemy is a platform for dirt-cheap courses you can take on nearly anything.

When they reached out to Alexis, they didn’t have a good course on time management for their business subscription offering. They found Alexis on LinkedIn and liked what she had to say.

Because Alexis was still in that hell-yes-to-every-opportunity stage of her business, she took it. The rest, as they say, is history.

In its five years running, 178,000 people have taken Alexis’ Udemy course, generating dozens of high-ticket corporate workshop leads and a handful of 1:1 clients to her core offering.

And get this: It also contributes over 25% of her annual recurring revenue. (Mind you, that’s completely passive income.)

Since her first course took off, Alexis has created four more mini-courses on things like zeroing out your inbox, how to work from home successfully, hybrid leadership, and how to manage your time and kids.

But none, she admits, have been as successful as the first. And truthfully, she adds, they don’t need to be.

In addition to the leads the Udemy course brings in, she converts people through her newsletter and referrals.

With a service offering that now includes corporate workshops, 1:1 coaching, group coaching, and self-paced courses, Alexis has created a pretty sweet little solo business that generates multiple six figures a year.

And all it took was some cold emails and a mini course. (But also: A great offering and solid reputation built through referrals.)

A Good Lesson

As a productivity coach, Alexis says one of the most important things she teaches her clients is how to say no.

Because being productive is not about getting “all the stuff” done—it’s about recognizing what you can and can’t do, and then prioritizing the rest.

In a nutshell: To be more productive, you have to get comfortable with loss. And that, as you probably know, is easier said than done—even for a productivity coach.

While this is a lesson she teaches, Alexis says it’s also a lesson she has to keep learning in her own business. She admits she recently said yes to a client she knew in her gut would not be a good fit because she didn’t want to turn down the opportunity.

And now she has to live with her decision and the impact on her time.

A Good Takeaway

While I don’t want to oversell the potential of online courses to create the passive income stream of your dreams, I am convinced that it's another (arguably easy-ish) lever you could pull to grow your reputation and create new opportunities for your business.

But there's one condition: You need to have established at least *some* credibility and trust around the topic you want to teach. And—while it might seem obvious—the information needs to be good.

If you're concerned that creating a course could damage your reputation or cheapen your work, my buddy Jay Melone (who helps with this stuff) argues that this is only the case if:

1. You put your course on par with hiring you, or
2. You create a lousy course.

He told me that the reality is the people who buy a course from you are not ready to hire you—they buy it because they’re still trying to understand the problem your course solves while getting familiar with the way you solve it.

Alexis experienced just that. The people who bought her course on Udemy weren't ready to jump into a multi-thousand-dollar coaching agreement. However, they were willing to recommend her to their companies who would pay for team workshops and training.

Now, if you're worried that you don't have anything original to say or feel imposter syndrome creeping in, here's what you need to understand:

It doesn't matter if the same thing has been said before—people want to hear it from you.

If you've established credibility and trust around your course subject, people will want to hear how you think about the thing you're teaching.

And they'll pay a little something to have the information curated and consolidated by you so that they don't have to go hunting around for it on YouTube.

If you're worried about investing the time and effort—think smaller.

Creating a course around an area of your expertise doesn't need to be a heavy lift.

There are a handful of new platforms for creating “mini-courses” that design and edit everything for you using AI. All you have to do is show up with the content.

In this lane, I’ve personally been experimenting with The Leap and Mini Course Generator.

For Udemy-type alternatives, there Skillshare, Thinkific, and Linkedin Learning. While you do have to apply to be an instructor, I hear it’s not hard to get in.

Then there are cohort-based courses, where you can try a hybrid model. These are a much heavier lift.

The ones I’ve explored include Maven, Pathwright, and Kajabi. (But, for now, I'm not ready to go all in on a big cohort-based course.)

(Pro tip from my buddy in sales: Kajabi has a one-month free trial, so you could launch your course without any risk. If it falls flat, you can pull out before any money is spent.)

While you still need to do a little work to promote it, many of these platforms have built-in audiences and marketing engines to help course creators fill seats. But even without that, it could live as a link on any of your marketing channels.

Taking a page from Alexis’ playbook, what if you just hyper-focused on it for one week and didn't get distracted with anything else?

The way I'm thinking about it is this: If it’s going to take me a week (or two) to create a tiny course that could exponentially expand my reach and income—or even just allow people to get to know me better—is it worth it?

I think yes.

And even if it turns out to be a big nothing burger, at least I forced myself to organize my process and content into a clear format that I can repurpose for talks, workshops, or other marketing collateral.

Alexis admits she got lucky with Udemy.

According to other course creators she’s talked to, only one out of every eight courses does well on the platform.

But I’d argue that it wasn’t just luck—she had something useful to teach that lots of people know they need and want.

Ultimately, my point is that the course is a small thing she did that created an unexpected (and significant) source of leads for her other, higher-income offers.

So, if not a course, what could that be for you? If you need help ideating, I’m happy to bounce some ideas around.

Things to think about. (And maybe create?)

A Few Good Resources

1. On the topic of productivity, this is a life-changing book that helped me think about “being efficient” in a whole new way.
2. If you want some quick productivity tips from Alexis, her YouTube channel is pure gold.
3. And here’s a little how-to from Thinkific on creating a mini course.

Hope you have a good one,
Renee