Kickstarter, Summit, Negotiating and Moving Home… All at the same time
Curious about creating abundance in your business and life? Go NEXT LEVEL with your results when you manifest and launch offers in FLOW! Let me paint you a picture of a Period Coaching Summit nestled inside the warm embrace of the Period Oracle Card Deck Kickstarter, with a surprise twist of manifesting the beautiful mountain house of our dreams (for free) thrown in for good measure… all in FLOW with my menstrual cycle! I am The Period Coach after all! So what does it take to create a successful launch plan and manifest life dreams into reality in flow? What does it *actually* look like?
I’ve been a digital nomad for years, traveling around the world, coaching, speaking, writing my first nonfiction book The Revolution Will Be Bloody, co-facilitating workshops, teaching in red tents and red yurts – yes a red yurt in the Australian bush! So I plan my business in harmony with my travel schedule AND in FLOW with my menstrual cycle, of course!
At the end of 2021, we *thought* we knew our travel plans. I built the year with our travel in mind.
I knew that in 2022, I would be launching the Kickstarter for the Period Oracle Deck, and hosting my first annual Period Coaching Summit. After talking with Tash Corbin, my business coach, I decided to nestle the Summit in the middle of two weeks of Kickstarter’s four-week campaign. This was going to be A LOT. The launch plan needed to allow marketing for two events simultaneously, one that involved over 20 speakers to guide. A summit is the equivalent of herding cats. I’m often the cat so I can say this 😉
The plan was to spend May and June at Jenn’s house (my partner Chris’ sister). We would be in one place, with our floor, including a bedroom, an office, and a loft space.
Launching the Period Card Kickstarter and the first annual Period Coaching Summit with an office to myself. Using the loft space as a Kickstarter fulfillment area. Room, time, and space to launch! Perfect May it is!
But the best-laid plans… We ended up NOT being there. Instead, we suddenly found out that we needed to find and negotiate buying a house, with cash, on the other side of the country, in one of the craziest real estate times in history. But that’s an entirely different story.
How The F Did I Pull This Off?
I’m pulling out my journals, my line-a-day book, my menstrual charts, my Asana history, launch plan notes and my Toggl time tracking reports, to share with you how I managed all of this without:
- Having a meltdown
- pulling all-nighters
- feeling like my hair was on fire
- burning out
- overwhelm – ok there were some moments of deep breathing
- most importantly not stressing out my team.
THE TIMELINE:
It was in July of 2021 that I decided to do the Kickstarter and Summit together in early 2022. That’s as far as I got since the Period Coaching School launch was at the beginning of August this year so that’s going to be my sole focus during July and August.
In September during my follicular phase, I worked out our 2022 travel, at least for the first half of the year and my launch plan was to use May for the Kickstarter/Summit combo since we should have been in a great place for hosting all that at once.
In October 2021 during ovulation I started reaching out to the speakers I knew I wanted for the summit.
I set the Asana board up, while I was in follicular, adding general dates to all the tasks. I didn’t have a board from my previous summits so while I did have to start from scratch I made it a bit easier on myself by copying some tasks from my webinar board and the launch spreadsheet, then filled the rest in from memory. This was my 4th summit, so I knew what needed to be done, I just needed it somewhere the whole team could access in real-time.
I set up the Asana board for the Kickstarter as well. It was my second Kickstarter so I did most of this from memory.
Carrie, one of my part-time assistants, started our Kickstarter Slack channel and set up the launch spreadsheet for the summit. This involved cloning the old summit spreadsheet, and then updating the speakers we had so far, their info, the dates, links, etc.
November and December 2021 I wrote the first draft of the booklet that comes with the Period Oracle Card Deck while in my follicular phase. During ovulation, I contacted the rest of the speakers and in luteal I finalized the speaker list.
We also had the goal of the cards themselves being ready to print in January. Spoiler alert – they were not ready in January!
This takes us to 2022 with 4 months left to nail a successful launch plan before the Kickstarter goes live.
In January 2022 I got the Kickstarter budget estimated and the financials connected on the back end.This was over a few weeks so I was in follicular, ovulation and early luteal. I started scheduling the summit speaker interviews, which is easy enough to do in luteal since it’s mostly just sending out the booking link. Those interviews would be scattered through January, February and March.
Here’s the TWIST: On January 31st Carrie, my VA, who lives in the pacific northwest was going on vacation for basically a month – end of April through mid-May. She has a house full of animals including a cat, dog, tortoise, and 3 snakes, and her normal housesitter moved out of state rather suddenly. She asked if we’d like to house-sit.
Chris and I have always wanted to spend more time in the Pacific Northwest so we were excited at the idea. Plus the timing would have us there with Carrie during the launches in May. That would be perfect! Working with my assistant there in real life. IDEAL.
So we said yes!
In February I wrapped up the card deck booklet early in the month, or so I thought. While I was in Follicular, Ovulation and a bit of early Luteal, I finished recording the audiobook version of my book The Revolution Will Be Bloody, or so I thought, LOL. Never assume anything is done!
18th we traveled to Florida to visit my parents and enjoy some sunshine for a few weeks. At the end of the month, while we were in Florida, I got the opportunity to sponsor the Los Angeles premier of the movie Business of Birth Control. Which changed ALL the travel plans.
This is when it gets… messy…
Now we needed to add driving from Florida, back to Indianapolis to gather our road trip stuff, we’d need to add Los Angeles in for the movie premier. Not a huge problem, we’d leave earlier than planned, take the long route LOL, and we’d still get to Carries in time.
BUT in March we found out that we got to buy a house in the Albuquerque area of New Mexico, but it had to be done quickly. That’s a whole other long story, but in this case, it meant we needed to add in a whole other stop in a totally different part of the country. We needed to leave even EARLIER and go even further.
So we ran back up to Indianapolis on March 11th, I was Day 8 thankfully, and started furiously packing in between working, which was mostly showing up for my calls and not much more. Before we left the first Period Coaching School certification presentation happened. Carmen was our first brave soul and she knocked it out of the park! Tough act to follow!
Every year in March I do a free Endometriosis awareness webinar, so I needed to make sure I did it before we left. I held it on the 17th which was Day 14, perfect timing.
In between packing, cleaning, and working, we also had to find houses to look at, on the 19th we found out the houses we liked, the ones up in the mountains with trees and nature, needed a lot of repairs. The houses down in the high desert were in better condition, more move-in ready, but felt so dead. Lots of rocks, cement walls, and maybe a tree or two, but not much life. I’ll admit to being worried.
So we did a dream house list. Our first draft was pretty good but a few of my friends, Meredith, had done this before and had suggestions that made me realize it could be WAY better. One of my Period Coaching School students, Jane, is really good at this stuff so she and I talked about it and I expanded and improved the list with her, which also reinspired Chris so our final list was pretty epic!
The 23rd & 24th last minute summit interviews were squeezed in, so inspirational! I was moving into Deep Luteal and fortunately these interviews were so inspirational they helped buoy my energy.
We headed west on the 25th, Day 22 for me, and stopped at St Louis arch, Gateway National Park (NP) as a little fun along a very boring interstate.
On the 26th we made it to Great Sand Dune NP and spent the day there. We hiked up to the tallest sand dune and it was an EPIC view! I admit it took forever, Day 23 isn’t my highest energy for sure! After we came down we saw as much of the park as we could but there wasn’t much left we could see without having to do some serious hiking.
So we headed to Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP and made it in time for dinner.
Black Canyon was amazing! Great hiking in the snow, zero service! The road was still closed for the winter but we were able to walk it. It was icy and snowy, so it took us a long time to hike out to the painted wall but we made it! We had lunch and enjoyed the view and hiked back to the car. Again we tried to see some other sights in the park but most of it was closed so we decided to head to Mesa Verde NP.
It’s not far and we made it with a few hours of sunlight left. We drove the whole park to get a feel for it, not a ton of hiking there. We saw the amazing cliff dwellings, went up to the fire watch you could see SO FAR away from up there! It was really beautiful and we learned a lot about the indigenous people who lived there so long ago.
The next morning, on the 28th, we headed to Albuquerque and saw the “red house” which was our favorite at the time. Needed a lot of work, but it was just outside the city, not up the mountains but at least up in the hills a bit. Lots of trees which I felt way better about than the desert houses with rock lawns.
When I woke up the next morning I looked through the new houses that had been posted and found one I ADORED. It was way up in the mountains just under 8,000 feet (2438.4 meters) altitude, right next to the National Forest, so there would never be too much building around us. The temp is always 10-15 degrees cooler than down in Albuquerque, with a monsoon season to keep us in water, snow in winter, and summer high temps of 90 (32C) so never really boiling hot but also even in winter the daily temp would be around 40 (4C) which is above freezing. And almost 300 days of sunshine to keep us in a good mood even in the cold of winter!
Chris and I both wanted to see it first. So we met the real estate agent there first thing with a list of 13 houses we wanted to see. 5 sold before we left the mountain house, and by the time we’d seen the second house 2 more had been sold. By the third house, another 2 had sold. We only managed to actually see 4 places that day. That’s how quickly houses were being sold! So we put an offer in on the mountain house immediately. Fortunately for us, only two other people had put offers in.
We collapsed in bed at the hotel that night, feeling really anxious about the house. Really there was only one we wanted, all the rest were going to be a terrible disappointment after the mountain house.
Want to know what happened next? Did we get the house? Was the Kickstarter launch plan a success? Stay tuned for part 2!
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