We recently connected with Meredith Noble and Alex Lustig and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Meredith Noble and Alex Lustig, thanks for joining us today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

Our scaling up story is one of persistence, focus, and learning quickly. We’re a five year overnight success story!

My business began before the pandemic. I published my first book (How to Write a Grant: Become a Grant Writing Unicorn) and had hundreds of community members register for my live grant writing workshops where I sold ongoing support through my online course.

Then the pandemic hit, and I found myself running two businesses: a grant writing consulting business and a course business. The trouble is that I kept subsidizing the course business with revenue from the consulting business. This subsidizing meant that when I closed down the consulting business, we proceeded to lose thousands of dollars every month.

Here’s what I did wrong so you can dodge this very easy mistake: I wasn’t focusing on a customer I loved out of desperation to get any customer. My pricing was woefully inadequate, and I served the customer for a lifetime. This meant that for every new customer, I was losing more money than I was making.

I appeared successful but was on the brink of giving up. The major takeaway here is when you’re most on the brink of giving up, that is the time when you most need to hang on because success is on the other side.
In November of 2020, we simply were not getting enough new leads or customers to be a viable business. We also were not charging nearly enough, which I didn’t understand at the time.

I’m a visionary. I have no problem coming up with ideas and yet I was out of ideas. It was the pitch black darkness of Alaska, November heading into December. That was hands down the lowest, scariest moment for me because I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to fail when I knew it had to work. I just didn’t know what to do to turn around my sinking business. My co-founder, Alex, and I decided to have a “Learning Day”. Learning Day means no business is taken care of. We just get to go online, read books, and investigate resources that can help solve problems we have.

My co-founder found a program that no longer exists today, but it was an online program designed for course creators to build courses that make $10,000 monthly recurring revenue. That is what we wanted: monthly recurring revenue (MMR) instead of starting over from zero every month. We signed up for the program. We could not afford it at all, which isn’t necessarily an approach I would recommend, but I was desperate for an answer and willing to pour my heart into it.

We leaned into that program with everything that we had and in three weeks we interviewed our ideal customer 20x over, decided who to focus on, overhauled our offer, and completely changed the wording on our website and in our email copy. We built a new webinar and sales funnel. Essentially, we built a brand new, scarily niche business.

Then, we launched. We went home for the holidays to take a breather before hitting January 2021. To my absolute surprise, people started to buy. I was home resting and sales were coming through. In the next month alone, we did more than we had in any previous month. The best part? That was just revenue from one month, let alone the fact that they were on a 12 month payment plan. We would be seeing that revenue grow month over month over month.

It’s not that there aren’t times we need to quit. I think it’s important to know what those check-in points are because you don’t want to keep muscling something through that isn’t giving you feedback that you’re on the right track. My first startup failed within three months and it needed to end. There was no way to go forward with it because I wasn’t solving a clear and articulable problem.

It is a little hard to sometimes know the difference, but I knew this online course business had potential. I was just missing some key skills, strategy, and knowledge to unlock a solution. I am so glad we did because we went from a loss of $20K in the month of December 2020 to $98K monthly recurring revenue in December 2022, meaning we became a 7-figure company within 2 years of nearly folding.

In terms of key takeaways for our scaling, I’d summarize it to three key strategies:

First, is what we just described getting the customer, pricing, and offer correct. By focusing on a customer we loved and providing a life changing offer at a higher price point, we were able to unlock huge success. Still to this day, our primary strategy for scaling up is to focus on the customer journey. We conduct exhaustive interviews, transcribe and study our customers’ language, their fears, hopes, and dreams. This allows us to build an ever-more effective offer that resonates with our customers evolving needs, driving our growth.

Second, we are forever grateful for what we learned from business mentor, Dan Martell, author of Buy Back Your Time. He taught us how to build an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) playbook. An SOP playbook is a series of instructions on how to do repeatable tasks in your business. It’s how you hire and onboard at lightning speed, minimize mistakes, and scale quickly. Thanks to our SOP playbooks, Alex and I can take ample time away from the business without operations being impacted. Reach out if you want more information on our playbooks!

Lastly, we hired strategically by buying back my and Alex’s time. I don’t hire for roles I think I need or I hear others have. I hire specifically to free up my time once I have mastered the task (and have a solid SOP for it!), so I can spend more time on higher revenue generating activities. The hire I could most not live without is my inbox manager, and I wish I had hired for that position when I was just hitting 6-figures in business.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m an Alaskan adventuress, entrepreneur, and visionary. I grew up 5th generation on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. The ranching lifestyle instilled my value system. One of my favorite stories was when I went to work in the hayfields as a teenager. I was put on an old 1956 tractor and told to drag the hay into windrows. My job required staying ahead of the stacking crew (the team that put the hay into the haystacks). They kept catching me, and I was growing frustrated. You can only bounce around so fast in a hayfield!

My father flags me down. He explains that there is a pattern in the hay if I look for it. His advice was to “make each move count.” Once I started looking for the patterns, I could see them. I became more efficient and the gap grew between me and the stacking crew.

I apply this concept to everything in my business and life. When you look for patterns and make deliberate choices about where you go, you pull ahead.

Years later after quitting my corporate job, I decided to launch a sexy software startup. I had $5,000 in company stock which I sold to use for startup costs. I won 2-months free at a coworking space. I took a coding course online for $300. What could go wrong?

Not much thankfully because I failed fast. I affectionately call that period of life when I earned a 3-month MBA. I learned that having an idea doesn’t mean you have a business. There has to be a clear and succinct problem to solve that someone, preferably many someone’s, are willing to pay to have solved.

Without a clear problem to solve, I realized my venture was not going anywhere. I was rapidly running out of money. To survive, I started grant writing consulting – the exact job I’d pledged to never do again!

But this time, I did it on my own terms. I charged a pretty penny. I had firm boundaries. I got outside a few hours every day (which is especially important when you live in Alaska in the winter!).

Pretty quickly, I was being asked for coffee or to teach grant writing workshops. Pro tip – never ask someone to “pick their brain!” I realized I wasn’t transplanting my knowledge effectively over coffee, and not even over a few days workshop.

Not because I was bad at teaching – quite to the contrary. I noticed that it takes working on a real world project, getting stuck, and then having someone to ask that made all the difference between an aspiring grant writer and a full fledged grant writing unicorn.

It occurred to me, what if I put this information into an online course so I could reach people well beyond my community? This idea actually occurred to me while working out in the fields while home at the ranch one Spring.

That’s exactly what I did, but I did not seek any expertise from anyone besides one guy I hired on Upwork. Every bit of advice he gave, I resisted. “Why would I have a free grant writing course as a lead magnet? That’s giving away my knowledge!” or “Why would I have a blog? That’s also giving away a ton!”

Now I give away so much people write me daily thanking me for how much is available for free, but at the time, I struggled to understand this new way of doing business.

I built the original course, and it failed epically. Within one year, I’d only made $2,000 in sales. Finally I had to get a coach. I needed to actually learn how to build a quality course and more importantly, how to reach people who would want to buy it. I needed to learn how to launch successfully.

Now there were a lot more ups than downs to that story, which I’m sure I’ll get into later, but the long and the short of it is that eventually I turned that one course into a seven figure business.

In the early days, I wish I had known to find a coach. It is imperative we learn from others who have gone where we want to go. The top performers in any field or industry have a variety of coaches and mentors. Don’t try to figure it out yourself like I did.

I didn’t realize how differently we run our business from the industry until my co-founder and I started attending masterminds and conferences. We discovered everyone else was working a lot harder than us!

One of the things that sets us apart is our wicked focus on a single offer – the Global Grant Writers Collective. By pouring all our heart and energy into perfecting one experience for our customer, we have built a transformative product that is irrefutably the best in the industry.

We are also very grounded in our values to make decisions. We believe in soul-care and celebrating wins. We built a sales machine that generates leads and customers on autopilot. We don’t burn ourselves out with live launching or showing up on social media. We literally spend about 4% of our budget on marketing which is 3-4x less than the industry average.

We are most proud of building a business that provides a remarkable place to work, for our employees and coaches. We take extreme care of our people, and that generosity is returned in spades.

Our members’ lives are changing. We get gratitude posts weekly. We see them meeting up on their own in real life, forming friendships that never would have existed if not for the Global Grant Writers Collective.

If there was one thing we want known about our brand it is that we are here to show other women that they too can try their hand at entrepreneurship to build a life they love. We are building the next generation of business owners writing a new playbook for what it means to be successful and vibrant.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I have two books that I hand out at any opportunity to influence another business owner’s life for the better. Victoria Song’s book, Bending Reality: How To Make The Improbable Probable, has been pivotal for releasing fear and leaning into success. Truly, everything in our lives will come forward with so much more ease if we can recognize if we’re in a contractive state trying to force things or come from a place of expansion where our wildest dreams can come so much easier than we thought.

Most of my life has been accomplished by forcing my way there, pushing hard, and hard work. That was certainly something I picked up from the ranching upbringing. A handful of the things that have come into my life absolutely effortlessly like my husband, for instance, expose me to the magic of not gripping everything so tightly to get what we want. In turn, it comes much faster.

I am against pushing your way to anything anymore. It is a product of whiteness. It is a system that no longer and does not serve us. It is designed to wear us out so that we don’t have the time or energy to push back on other things that radically need to be changed in our society. That hustle culture is very deeply embedded and very hard to break, but it simply doesn’t serve us. We all know it. We just haven’t figured out how to stop that cycle. I have thoroughly enjoyed Victoria’s book and her subsequent online group programs for moving into a higher state of consciousness.

The other book I’m a huge fan of and even bought 500 copies to give each of my customers is Dan Martel’s book Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire. The principles taught in this book are one of the major reasons we have been able to scale to seven figures. We somehow managed to talk our way into his SaaS accelerator even though we really weren’t quite a SaaS company, though we operate like one to the best of our ability. In that program we learned all about time buyback, the concept of putting your time and the tasks that you do into these different buckets. Is it a $15 task, $50 task, $100 task, or $500 task? Then, we worked to hire out help for the $15 tasks. We hired our first assistant and started writing our first SOPs, standard operating procedure playbooks.

That prompted one of my biggest lessons learned: that your first hire won’t be the right hire because you yourself are learning the important skill of hiring and what to look for. Learning how to systematically hire someone to help take things off my plate and off of my co-founder’s plate freed us up to work on higher value, higher impact activities. If I was completely bogged down, then I would not have been able to build the business that we built.

That only became truly accelerated by the fact that in 2022 I was significantly and severely sick. I lost my voice multiple times and was fatigued beyond reason. I thought I had cancer or some sort of autoimmune disease. It was very scary. I was forced to give up more things including the tasks I really enjoyed like marketing. What a blessing that was because by learning the process for how to hire for buying back my time, I’ve been freed up to look ahead and figure out how we chart ourselves from a seven figure business to an eight figure business.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Oh yes! It’s a great story. Alexandra (Alex for short) landed her first job out of college in my little hometown in Wyoming. She was my sister’s college counselor, knew my Mother, and was roommates with my cousin. Classic small town stuff! She even met her (future) husband that year.

My cousin put us in touch when she discovered Alex was moving sight unseen to Valdez, Alaska on the darkest day of the year. I helped her prepare, but nothing could prepare her for arriving after receiving 8 feet of snow. I’m not exaggerating. Average snowfall in the town is 25 to 50 feet annually!

Alex came to me when we were in the thick of COVID and I had hired a bunch of my students to fill several current writing consulting contracts. She’s a project manager as well as great with culture and skill building. I asked her if she could give me five hours a week of her time (on top of her two other jobs).

She quickly moved us to Asana so we were using actual project management software. She took everything that was in my head and truly systematized it. That formed the basis of what we teach today, which is how to run a consulting business and make great money doing it.

A few months into our journey she asks to talk. If you’re a woman and somebody tells you we need to talk, it means one of two things: you are getting broken up with or you’re about to get some very harsh feedback. We went down to the lake, which is where we’d worked in this little remote town in Valdez, Alaska. Through tears, she said, “This is the best five hours of my whole work week. What can I do to come work with you full-time?”

She hadn’t talked to her husband about quitting her job and coming to work for my fledgling little startup, but we worked out a plan. I told her I could pay her what I was paying myself at the time, which was $50,000 salary and I offered the rest of her compensation through equity using the slicing pie model. (Look up Slicing Pie by Mike Moyier if you are interested in this fabulous model for equity sharing.)

Fast forward a few months and things were looking grim. It was ultimately Alex who had found the solution on how to dig ourselves out of our conundrum. She has built the best parts of our business: the systems, the culture, the intentionality, and the focus on equity. I don’t know where we would be if it weren’t for Alex. She’s been by my side through all of life’s roller coasters (including nearly getting blown up in a gas leak explosion). Through it all, we built an incredible business. She’s not only the best co-founder I could ask for, she’s also my best friend and a total soul sister.

We finalized her equity ownership in the company two years later, and celebrated with a “work wedding.” It was our way of celebrating and taking seriously the commitment involved in forming a business partnership.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/learngrantwriting/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/22meredith/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-edwards-lustig-09220644/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/learngrantwriting
• Other: Depending on when you go live, we are releasing a new website for Alex and my thought leadership work that we expect to go live with July 5th. If it works to include that link, we would love it!