Lisa Johnson, Entrepreneur
Lisa Johnson is a multi-seven-figure business strategist helping people create passive and semi-passive income streams, Sunday Times bestselling author of Making Money Online, host of a number one podcast, anti-bullying ambassador, regularly makes making millions on product launches and is also the mum of 11 year old twins.
She started doing affiliate launches during the Covid-19 pandemic and thought an exciting £3 million week was a fluke, but she hasn’t made less than £2 million through launching that particular product since then.
Under all of that, Lisa stands out as a beacon of integrity and resilience in the world of digital business. Her vision is to change the business coaching industry by showing people that they can make great money without resorting to sleazy marketing tactics like promising overnight success and using trauma marketing. Lisa rightly makes the point, ‘How many Netflix documentaries do we need about the coaching industry being bad before we do something about it?’
I spoke to Lisa about building a team, balancing work with life’s demands and more.
Anti-Bullying Work
Aged 11, Lisa won a scholarship to a local private school, however, she lived in a single-parent household in a council house with her father. Unfortunately, she was bullied for being poor and wearing second-hand clothes. As a result of this, Lisa left school without any decent qualifications. When she started talking about money online, she came up against similar bullying tactics and it took her a lot of personal reflection to work through that trauma. This is the reason Lisa is so passionate about helping the bullied, the bullies and bystanders through her work as an Ambassador of Bullies Out.
From In Debt To Multi-Millionaire
Lisa pulled herself out of £30k in debt by working hard on her business. At the start, she had a full-time job and was a single parent to two young children. Waking up to work at 5am before heading to her job, sacrificing her lunch break and then her evening downtime from 8pm to 10pm were the keys to Lisa’s success. As she puts it,“The only things I was doing were things that were going to get me to my goals. I didn’t have branding or a website until well into multi six-figures. I just spent time on things that would make me money.”
Work Life Balance
Lisa curates a culture of freedom and fun for herself and her employees. The standard work week is four days, anyone is able to take unlimited paid time off and they enjoy group holidays a couple of times a year. Speaking of her reasoning for this, Lisa said “As long as everything gets done, I don’t really care when they work.”
Aside from the uphill battle at the start of her business journey, Lisa seems to embody this quote as well, regularly taking multiple trips abroad and bringing along her children whenever she can. On holidays, Lisa might do 2 hours of work in the morning before the kids wake up and then spend the rest of the day off.
Whilst she doesn’t have set times off, for instance, the weekend, Lisa has an approach to work life balance similar to a lot of entrepreneurs. Lisa doesn’t feel a lack, because she is passionate about her business, “I believe if you really enjoy what you’re doing, you don’t see it as the same kind of work. I had a 9-5 that was very different to this.”
Another aspect of managing work life balance is to decide and stick to what is a priority. Lisa holds a family first attitude and explains “I’ve turned down a lot of things, you won’t see me hanging out with all the 7 figure and 8 figure entrepreneurs that everyone else does at the same old retreats and things. I choose to put my children over doing that.”
Building The Right Team
Before building a team, Lisa was already making seven figures. Contrary to the popular notion that having a team will free up a founder’s time, Lisa shares that “Hiring a team doesn’t mean you will work less, you will work more but make more money.” To help get the right mix of people, Lisa hired family, friends (who would have no problem being honest) and those in her audience who she could see had the skills she wished she had. They also had to match the company values of integrity and transparency.
Lisa’s Top Tips For Entrepreneurs
- You have to sell a must have, not a nice to have product or service. Consumers are already battling a cost of living crisis, so your solution must fix an essential problem.
- Spend three to six months to prepare properly for a launch. Audiences have been burned by con artists and false promises so they have to trust you. A great way to build trust is through a free challenge launch so that customers can get to know you and your product.
- Don’t feel you have to use ads at the start. It’s better to find what’s working and only then scale that offer with ads. With so many platforms, it’s very possible to grow an audience organically. Lisa lost £27,000 in four months by using ads incorrectly.
- To build a successful business Lisa shares that ‘“It’s quite unsexy. Doing the unsexy stuff day to day to day to get where you want to be. There is no such thing as an overnight success.”
What’s next?
Lisa’s latest venture, That Strategy Co, launched this October and is a response to subpar training in the online business industry. The Strategy Co provides a suite of CPD accredited courses in topics including Facebook Ads management and AI innovation. This is so that businesses are able to hire people they know have been properly trained, and so that professionals can learn in-demand digital skills to a high degree of quality.
She is also running a sales and strategy day in London on 5th December. As with all of Lisa’s projects, this solves a big problem, “I find strategy is the biggest thing lacking with entrepreneurs in the online world, for some reason, we believe if we’re online we don’t have to have a strategy or KPIs or anything that we should have in place as CEOs.”
Find out more about working with Lisa here, and connect with her on LinkedIn here.
