Meet Our Elevators – Jasmine Andrews

Introducing Jasmine Andrews

Jasmine launched her business (now dubbed Brain Candy Consulting) back in 2011, around the time her first child was born. She didn’t have much experience inside of WordPress aside from personal projects she used it for, but she was able to leverage it in one of her first major projects.

Her Big Break

Jasmine’s first client (a referral from her technical writing days) wanted help updating a book and converting it to Kindle format. She then turned her attention to boosting sales of it on their website. At the time, customers were only able to purchase one book per session, which, as you can imagine, can be detrimental to the user experience and to the company’s conversion rates.

Jasmine knew there had to be a better solution, so she taught herself how to use WooCommerce and PHP. Although she was nervous that she didn’t know what she was doing, the results of her work proved otherwise.

At launch, the website (which now had a shopping cart capable of handling multiple purchases) generated $10,000 more in sales than usual.

From Burnout to Blueprint

As happens to many of us, Jasmine began to make and repeat mistakes in her work and eventually experienced burnout as a result of working too much and not charging enough for her efforts.

After a couple years of her revenue being in the red, she entered the Blueprint course, ready to turn things around.

In particular, it was the Go Wide Go Deep method that changed her approach to business. It made her realise that it was the consulting piece – getting to know clients, understanding their needs, helping them build the perfect site – that she really loved. And so she added paid discovery and audit services to her offering (which had only been traditional web design services prior).

Whether clients came in just for the smaller ticket items, or transitioned to larger projects, Jasmine was making much more money and with a lot less work. Her success ultimately boiled down to the following points:

• She was providing a service that she really loved.
• She was targeting a niche that she was passionate about (content-driven non-profits).
• She was no longer charging based on the time or resources used, but on the value, she was delivering to clients.

Consulting proved to be her perfect sweet spot.

The Power of the WP Elevation Community

Jasmine has put the WP Elevation community to good use and on a variety of platforms. She’s made use of:

• The accountability partner
• The public and private chat groups
• The Facebook group

These are places for her to not only share her own struggles and wins but to help others get to where they want or need to be. And, as she mentioned in the podcast, people generally aren’t this transparent or honest in the real world, which makes it much easier to connect with others’ journeys. Because of this, Jasmine views it as an environment that helps everyone grow and win with WordPress.

A Case Study

There’s a story that Jasmine tells towards the end of the podcast that makes for a great lesson about what can happen when you go above and beyond for your clients. You’ll have to listen to the podcast in full to get this entire case study, but the gist of it is as follows:

Jasmine delivered HUGE results on a project that was originally supposed to be a month of training and support in WordPress. However, she was only able to produce these results because of the approach she took with the Go Wide Go Deep method.

With four weeks to complete the project, she spent two of them asking questions about what they wanted from the site and how they were going to provide services to customers. Once the user research and empathy mapping was done, she was able to hop into Divi and help them get their new site up by the four-week deadline.

What the client got, as a result, brought massive changes not just to how they viewed their website, but also to how their internal processes worked. She saw the site as something beyond just aesthetic marketing. Because of this, she helped them transform it into the important business tool that it should be and gave the client much more than they had bargained for.

Wrap-Up

There’s so much we can learn from one another in this space if we only just take the time to be open about our experiences. I’m really grateful to Jasmine for joining me in this podcast as her story is one that I think a lot of Elevators (and even those on the fence about joining) can learn from.

PS. Don’t do this business thing alone! Join our Facebook group, Digital Mavericks, which has over 6,000 digital creatives who support each other to grow their business and help each other get unstuck.