Kylie: Tracy, welcome to The Email Growth Show. I’m so excited to have you.

Tracy: I am so excited to be here, Kylie. I have been listening to your show and I thought, “This gal, we have so much in common.” So I’m so glad that we’ve been connected in summits and stuff, because it gave me a reason to reach out and go, “Hey, I want you to be on my show, and I wanna be on yours.” And thankfully you said yes.

Kylie: I’m so excited. I feel like I know you pretty well, but for everyone listening, why don’t we give them a little bit of an insight? Tell us a little bit about you and what you do.

Tracy: Yeah, so I am Tracy Beavers, and I’m located in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the US. I am a business and sales coach. My background is from corporate. I had an over-25-year, award-winning sales career in corporate.

I never thought I would leave. My dad worked for himself growing up, and he made it look awful. I was like, “Oh no, I’m gonna go get a job and I’m gonna be real happy to work for someone else.” Well, fast-forward through a few toxic bosses, and the final straw was a CEO that wanted to monkey around with the commission structure for our sales department every time I started to make traction, and every time other people did, too.

And I was like, “Wait a minute. You’re supposed to be able to make as much money as you want when you’re on commission.” Well, evidently not if you work for someone like that. So I was like, “Man, this stinks. What am I gonna do?” And some of my friends were like, “Tracy, you’re really good in sales.” And I’m like, “Well, isn’t sales easy?”

And they’re like, “No, it’s not easy.” It was so funny, Kylie. You know how when you’re good at something you think everybody else is good at it too, or it’s easy? So they’re like, “No, you really need to think about helping people build their businesses.” And here in Arkansas, we’re slow on the trend. Name a trend, we’re slow. We’re the last ones to know about it. So they said, “You should be a coach.” And I said, “That’s a thing?” And they were like, “Yeah, it’s a thing.” I looked it up, got myself familiar with the online space, and my mind was blown. I was so excited. So I started this about eight years ago alongside a corporate job, and it took me about a year and a half to fully be able to exit.

But here I am. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve got clients all over the world, and that just blows my mind.

Kylie: Oh my goodness, I love that. I often talk to my husband about this, because if we go through a hard season, the thought comes in like, “Oh, I should just get a job.” And then we’re like, “Hang on. No, no, no,” because we can never make as much money in a job as we can on our own when we’re actually in control of that. So I love that you said that.

Tracy: Well, not only that, because I’ve had this discussion with my girlfriends too. I have to remember that I actually can wake up when I want. I can’t sleep till 10 o’clock in the morning, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t have to get up at 5 o’clock anymore to get my workout in, pack my lunch, leave the house, fight the traffic, put on pants. I can go walk the dog in the middle of the morning.

Like today, I took my mom to the DMV to get her driver’s license renewed. My sweet little 84-year-old mom. I went and picked her up and I’m like, “This is the best. I wouldn’t be able to do this if I was working for somebody else.” I do understand where you’re coming from, though.

But when I walk myself back through the reality of it, I built this business so that I could be there. At the time I started building it, the kids were in high school and middle school, my dad was still alive, and everybody was doing great. Mom’s still doing great, but Dad’s passed. The kids are 27 and 23. And now what we’re looking at is me taking care of my mom and John’s mom, because he has a full-time job. And our kids, knock on wood, I’ve got grand-dogs right now, but I hope to have some grand-babies soon. Wouldn’t it be so fun to just be able to go and stay with them and take care of the grand-babies and do some work?

Kylie: Yeah.

Tracy: Don’t get me wrong, 2026 has been weird.

Kylie: Oh my gosh, I wanna talk about that, because I’ve felt the same, and I’ve heard it a lot in the online space. Tell me about 2026 for you. How has that looked?

Tracy: It’s different. Here’s what’s crazy. I started noticing pretty early in 2024 that the market was starting to get cynical, and we ended up in this trust recession, trust deficit thing that we’re in now. And I couldn’t blame people for being that way. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of people in this space selling a lot of stuff that have no business selling any of it, and they’re taking people’s money and not helping them.

So I don’t blame people for being cautious. I was like, “Okay, I need to help people understand that I truly do help you when you hire me. I’m not the person that’s gonna take your money and run.” So I started doing that messaging. Then we got into 2025, and everybody was saying, “Nobody’s buying anything. The market is down. It’s my worst year ever.” Well, I had the best year I’ve ever had. So I came into 2026 feeling great, and Q1 was good, but then the wheels kind of fell off the bus at the end of Q1. A dear friend of mine reminded me, and I don’t wanna get into politics, but at the end of Q1 is when we went to war with Iran.

So our country is at war, our gas prices have skyrocketed, groceries are exorbitant, and people are getting laid off. There’s a lot of chaos energy, at least here where I am, that’s unsettling people, and it’s having a trickle-down effect. One of my neighbors was like, “What do you mean that’s affecting your business? You work for yourself. You’re a business coach.” And I was like, “Yes. However, if I’m coaching a woman whose husband is the breadwinner and their safety net while she gets off the ground, and he just lost his job, she’s not gonna have as much money to spend in her business, right? She’s gonna have to rethink some things.” So that’s kind of the way it’s been for me. Even though my sales have been good, they’re down compared to last year and even 2024. And I’m hearing that too. Tell me about you. How are you feeling about it?

Kylie: For me, it was hard to get the market temperature in a sense, because I pivoted my business. I went from a high-ticket kind of place, and my capacity changed again. I’ve got family drama, two little kids, so suddenly I couldn’t hold the high-ticket clients to the standard, to the depth, that I like to.

So the integrity part of me goes, “Okay, we need to change this. You can’t keep selling that if you can’t actually do the thing for them, so let’s sunset that.” And now I’m moving more into low-ticket, high-volume instead, which is great, but with any shift, my income is absolutely down.

So I didn’t have the true market sense, because I was already going through a bit of a business shift. But I will say that unease is global. It’s the same here with petrol, with groceries, with all the things. What do you think is the key to withstanding changes? Over the eight years I’m sure you’ve had ups and downs. What’s the key to withstanding that?

Tracy: For sure. Well, you know what’s weird? For my business, I’ve never had a down year.

Kylie: Wow.

Tracy: Yeah, my business has just gone up and up and up every year, until this year.

Kylie: Tracy, that can’t be the norm, surely?

Tracy: It’s not. Evidently it’s not. I’m talking to other people and I’m like, “Well, my business has never had a down year,” and they’re like, “You’re kidding.”

And then I was talking to my financial advisor. We visit with him every six months about our investments, and he was like, “Your business isn’t normal.” And I’m like, “Okay. So what do I do now?” He goes, “You ride it out. You put on your pants, you go to work, and you ride it out.”

And I was like, “He’s so right.” So what I’ve chosen to do, and it’s so cliché to say this, is control what I can control, which is the leading indicators. I cannot control the lagging indicators. I can control being on a podcast. I can control speaking on a summit or on a stage. I can control making sure I have enough content in the online space for people to find me, and that my website, even though it needs a refresh, don’t go there, is there.

And make sure that people know about my offers, and that I am having conversations with people. The lagging indicator is the most important part, and that’s whether or not people buy. Are they opting in for my free lead magnet? Are they joining my list? Are they opening my emails? Are they replying back? Are they answering me in the DMs and having conversations? I can’t control that, but I can control my part of it. So I’ve chosen to focus on that, and then get a little creative. Like you were mentioning, because you had a capacity issue, you had to change your offers.

This summer, I had a higher… it wasn’t a high ticket, it was about a $4,000 investment to do what I call Elite one-to-one with me for three months. And that has not sold very well this year, for two reasons. One is the chaos energy, and people are afraid to pay that much right now. But also, I removed myself from a community that I was really heavily involved in for the last few years, for a variety of reasons, and a lot of my one-to-one prospects came from that community. So I got to the summer and I was like, “I need to do something. I need to shake this up a little bit.”

So I did a 30-day Summer VIP one-to-one with me: two 30-minute calls on Zoom and Voxer access. It sold really well. It was about $650. Thankfully it was a feeder into people joining my eight-week group coaching program, which I launch three times a year, and that’s more of my focus now.

So to answer your question, it’s controlling what I can control, putting out some different offers just to see what people are interested in, and then staying the course. What about you? How do you handle it?

Kylie: I feel the same. It’s focusing on what we can control. I definitely have to spend more time on myself, on my regulation, my breathwork, all the things that keep me okay through things like this. But especially now, with AI and information being everywhere, I’m focusing on showing and not telling. Recording more coaching calls, showing that I’m the expert and that I know what I’m talking about, rather than just saying it. Previously, yes, there were a lot of people selling things they shouldn’t have been. But now with AI it’s even more, because you can get AI to quickly write a sales page and make you sound fantastic.

So it’s like, okay, if that is filling up the online space, let’s get more of my face. Let’s get more of me showing what I’m doing. I’m focusing on that kind of content, and I think that’s gonna build a lot more trust with the people that are following us.

Tracy: Yeah. I think the more we can bring the human into things, the better. People complain about AI, and I actually really like ChatGPT and Claude. It’s really helped me dial in my messaging, and it’s helped me be a better listener when it comes to my clients. Not that I’m not listening to them, but when you’re in a session with someone, I’m fully focused and immersed in what they’re saying. Then I run the transcript through AI, and it helps me see nuances I couldn’t pick up on at the time because I was paying such close attention to that person, which has been really cool.

What I love about this AI era, as much as people wanna complain about it, is that it’s put the humanity back into our online space, because people are craving community. They’re craving time together. They’re craving conversation. And when you show up as a human, and when you go live, mistakes and all, they know that’s not AI. So I think those of us that love to truly connect with our clients as humans and really help them are gonna be fine.

Kylie: Mm-hmm.

Tracy: It’s the people that want to hide behind a course. I’ve been in some of those big-name programs where I was one of thousands of people, and live Q&A was promised and it was not delivered.

Kylie: Mm.

Tracy: You know? Or you’ll get time with this coach or that coach, and it just fell flat. But people like you and me who really care about our people, I think we’re gonna be fine.

Kylie: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I love AI. I’m such a geek. You might not know this about me, but I am nerding out big time. As somebody that has no team, it’s just me, myself and I, I’m building agents to do things, like helping produce the podcast.

I’m building this shop of digital products, and I was like, “Oh, I wanna make sure they’re always up to date, that they’re always really good.” So I’ve got an agent now that goes through every week, looking at one product at a time and finding gaps. Like, “Hey, you need to update the sales page,” or “This is missing,” or “Have you thought about this tool?” Things like that make me so excited, because it’s just helping me be better and give better things, which is so cool.

Tracy: I wish I had your brain, because tech is not my love language. Give me a microphone and a stage and some words and some marketing and some sales, and I’m all over it. I geek out over stuff like that. But this AI stuff is blowing my mind, with the agents and the things they can do for you. Could you come to my house and sit with me?

Kylie: Oh my gosh, I would love that.

Tracy: Yeah, I think that would be really cool. I do have an assistant, and until just recently I had an online business manager and a project launch manager. For a variety of reasons, those have been trimmed back, and AI’s gonna help me with some of the stuff that person was doing.

And you know what, Kylie? I’m gonna sound like such an old lady. When I was pregnant with our daughter, I brought home the ultrasound tape. The VHS. This is how old I am. I put it in the player and turned on the TV, and my grandfather looked at me and goes, “That’s the baby?” And I was like, “Yeah, Grandpa, that’s the baby.” Can you imagine if he were alive right now and could see what we’re doing with AI?

Kylie: I was saying to Nick the other day, it’s crazy to think, but I think we’re the last generation that grew up pre-AI to now have AI. I remember not having the internet at home when I was in primary school, but our kids will never experience that. Obviously there’ll still be changes, but it’s kind of crazy to think we’re the last generation to experience the before and the now.

Tracy: Well, this’ll blow your mind. I made it through college without the internet. I’m that old. I’m 56. We had to go to the library and look in the card file and use the Dewey Decimal System and index cards. We had computers, but they were the big black and green screens that you were coding on. I had to take a coding class, and I still don’t understand it. If it hadn’t been for the really smart football player sitting next to me, I never would’ve graduated out of that class. And then we had these word processors where you had to buy the ribbon, turn it on, and feed the paper through. If you had a 20-page paper, you were there all night just watching it go. It was ridiculous. We didn’t get the internet until I was in my 20s, in my first job.

Kylie: Gosh, I’m feeling my age. I’m 41, so I’m still getting there. But it’s that whole “it was so much harder when I was a kid” thing. I can imagine myself saying that to the kids as they grow up. “When I was a little girl, when I was in school…”

Tracy: Right. And the other thing I find fascinating is watching our kids grow up through middle school, high school and into college, and there were so many things they weren’t taught anymore. Our son didn’t learn cursive handwriting, because they didn’t teach it anymore by the time he got to third grade. He goes, “How am I gonna sign my name?” I’m like, “I have no idea. We’re gonna have to figure that out.”

I always had our kids write thank-you notes, and when he was writing his first ones, he brought me the envelope and goes, “I don’t know what to do with this.” And I thought, bless your heart. So I wrote one out for him like a template and said, “Keep this. This is your example,” where you put the return address and the stamp and all that jazz. And how to write a check. And they’re texting all the time, so when they had to make a phone call, they’d go, “What am I gonna say?” I’m like, “What do you think you’re gonna say?”

Kylie: It’s so crazy, isn’t it?

Tracy: Yeah.

Kylie: So let’s go back to 2026. We’re in October now, with a couple of months left. Do you have goals for the end of the year? How are you approaching the end of 2026?

Tracy: Oh, so funny. If you’d asked me this three weeks ago, I would’ve said my goal for the end of the year is to survive it and not burn this whole thing down. But now I have a new coach, and I’m putting my entire launch funnel into their system and having them and their copywriters review it. I wanna make sure it’s as strong as possible for when I relaunch the group coaching program in January.

When my students go through the eight-week program, they’re invited into the alumni masterminds, which is kind of a back-end membership offer. I have a lot of people who’ve gone through the program where, for whatever reason, the timing wasn’t right or they weren’t sure if the mastermind was right for them at the time. I’m going to raise the price on it, so I’m making a very concerted effort to go back to them and say, “Look, before I raise the price, do you want in?”

So I’m going back to the people who are already in the room with me: on my list, in my free Facebook group, the ones who have raised their hand. I wanna make sure I’ve followed up with everybody possible, because they’re all warm leads. It’s a lot easier to serve them again than for me to go turn cartwheels in front of my house for the last bit of Q4, trying to attract cold traffic and warm them up by the end of the year.

So that’s where I’m at. And I’m not even sure I wanna do a… you know, people are all about Black Friday right now, and I’m like, “I don’t know. Do I even wanna do that?” What are you doing in Q4, Kylie?

Kylie: Very similar. At the moment I’m working on a signature course for email. I want it to be a one-stop shop: start, grow, nurture, sell. My people need that, and I’ve sold pieces of it, but I haven’t put it all together. So if anyone’s listening, that’s a little spoiler alert.

But very much closing loops. I wanna start 2027 with that fresh feeling of the loops being closed, so we start the new year from a really good place. I love to ask myself, when I’m thinking about my goals, how do I wanna feel? And I know at the end of the year I wanna feel calm and relaxed. We have a big December. The boys’ birthdays are both in December, and then Christmas. It’s always a really fun month, and I wanna have energy for that.

Tracy: Yeah.

Kylie: And with Black Friday, I always like to remember it doesn’t have to be just for sales. I can use Black Friday to grow my list, or to nurture. So I’m still thinking about what I wanna do. I’ll do something, because it’s a pretty visible time, but I’m not sure it’ll be a big sales moment for me this year.

Tracy: Yeah, it’s a very visible time. I’m not a person who thinks I should do something just because everyone else is doing it. I have students that’ll say, “Well, shouldn’t I do Black Friday, because everybody says we need to?” And I’m like, “Who’s everybody? And no, if you don’t wanna do it, don’t do it.” But to your point, you’re right. It doesn’t have to be about sales. I really like that.

Kylie: And it’s a beautiful way to stand out, right? I did a Buy Nothing Black Friday once.

Tracy: Oh, I love that.

Kylie: Yeah, it was literally some freebies I’d revamped and some things I was giving away, and I included other people. They shared it, so it grew my list a little bit. But it stood out, because everybody else was going, “10% off,” and I was like, “No, come and buy nothing.” So I think we can take advantage of it for different reasons.

Tracy: Oh, now my wheels are turning on that. That’s kinda cool.

Kylie: Okay, I want everyone listening to hear about your conveyor belt, because regardless of whether people have had great years or hard years, there’s a part of it that’s gonna speak to them. Can you tell our listeners about the conveyor belt analogy?

Tracy: So this just flew out of my mouth one time when I was talking to the alums in my mastermind, and they were like, “Wait a minute, what did you just say?” It took me a second to remember, because my brain gets going and stuff starts coming out. I’m like, “I’m not sure. I’m recording this. Let’s go back and get the replay.”

It was the client conveyor belt. I like to look at our businesses as a conveyor belt. Some people call it a pipeline. Some people call it a funnel. The funnel was always hard for me, because I felt like people came in the top and then nothing moved. But a conveyor belt, like the kind you put your groceries on that moves them to the cashier, or that people mover at the airport, the walking sidewalk, moves you. People come onto your conveyor belt when they’re aware of you.

That’s your visibility. I’m a Visibility and Client Acquisition Strategist, and it’s important that we have enough visibility in the online space. Not too little, and not so much that we exhaust ourselves, but just enough that people are aware of us and attracted to us. That’s what brings them to step onto the conveyor belt. Then we wanna make sure we’re giving them a next step, so they know how to move forward. Okay, they’ve landed on my conveyor belt and they’re aware of me. Now they’re gonna opt in for something I’m giving away, and now they’re on my list.

So now I need to think, “How could I get into conversation with them?” Through weekly email, with fun ways to say, “Hey, reply back and tell me X, Y, Z.” That gets you in a conversation so you can start to uncover their needs, and that moves them along the conveyor belt to opportunity.

Because once you start having a conversation with somebody, whether it’s in the inbox or in the DMs, you can start to uncover opportunity. And by opportunity I mean it could be that they need to hire you, but it could also be that they wanna be a referral partner, or a collaboration partner, like you and I are doing right now.

You and I aren’t gonna hire each other, but what we’re doing here in a collaboration is super valuable. I’m talking to your audience, and you’re gonna come on my show and talk to my audience, and that benefits both of us. That’s an opportunity. And opportunities lead to clients. Even with a collaboration like this, there’s the possibility that when you’re on my show, somebody hears you and wants that signature course you’re selling, and that leads you to a client.

So our job is to make sure that when someone steps on that conveyor belt, we’re moving them through, and showing them and giving them the opportunity to do so.

Kylie: I love that visual, because I hear a lot from the members in my Skool community and my greater community. They’ll be in collaborations, because I’m always talking about relationships and collaborations, but then they don’t know what to do next. Or they jump straight to sales, and the sales don’t go the way they wanted. So I love the visual of moving along. Let’s keep people moving down that conveyor belt.

Tracy: Yeah, and this comes from my corporate sales background. The whole reason I had such a great career and was so successful gaining market share and building businesses for other people is because I didn’t focus on the sale. I focused on the person in front of me, getting to know them as a human being, building a relationship, and then figuring out what the opportunity was.

Kylie: Mm-hmm.

Tracy: Is the opportunity that they need what I’ve got, in which case I’m gonna offer it to them? Or is the opportunity for me to serve them when they say, “Hey, I need to find a VA,” or “I need to find an OBM,” or “I wanna be on another podcast,” and I can connect them with that person? That doesn’t lead to money right then, but it leads to a deeper relationship, and that connection will lead to something down the road. It always does. So if we lead with service and building relationships and having conversations, we’re gonna be fine. Everybody will move through our conveyor belt.

Kylie: I love that. One of my favourite questions to ask when I’m on a networking call or I meet someone is just, “How can I help?”

Tracy: Oh my God, me too.

Kylie: We’re twins. It’s such a simple question, and yet so much comes out of it. I genuinely wanna help, but it also benefits my business and our relationship. I think so many people make it so much harder than it needs to be. They practise their elevator pitches or their three-minute spiels, but it’s like, “Hey, let’s just be human and connect. How can I help?”

Tracy: Yeah. “How can I best support you?” I’ll end a DM or an email that way: “Is there anything I can do to support you?” And people are shocked, which makes me sad, because this is the way we should be in the world. What can I do to support you?

Kylie: So everyone listening, take note of that. Write it down. Make sure it’s the next question you ask anybody that’s part of your world, especially thinking about that conveyor belt. Thank you for sharing that. That was perfect.

Tracy: You bet. Thanks for letting me share.

Kylie: So good. As we wrap this up, Tracy, should we leave the listeners with a little bit of encouragement? I feel like we need to leave it on a high note.

Tracy: For sure, especially heading into Q4. I wanna come back to what I said earlier. I want us to control what we can control. I want us to not allow ourselves to look around and compare. I said this to my students the other day, and they were like, “Oh, that’s so good.” Everything you hear in our Zoom room as a student, on our alum mastermind call, on a podcast you’re listening to, or on a summit, everything you hear is not necessarily your assignment.

I want us all to think, what do I want to do for my business? Just because Kylie’s gonna put together this offer or that offer, or maybe no offer for Black Friday, or maybe she’s gonna start a YouTube channel, doesn’t mean I need to do that just because she’s sitting in the chair next to me and we’re similar. No. I need to think, what do I want? And then be confident that you can develop it, and control what you can control. The leading indicators. Make sure you’re visible in the online space. Make sure people know about your free lead magnets. Make sure they know about your paid offers.

I have so many clients who say, “Well, I think I need to create a new offer.” And I’m like, “Wait a minute. Why?” They go, “Because nobody’s buying my $97 thing.” And I’m like, “Well, tell me about your thing.” And their $97 offer is great. So I’m like, “When was the last time you promoted it?” And they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know. I told my list about it 30 days ago.” And I’m like, “Oh my stars in heaven. Nobody knows you have it.”

So make sure people know what you have and how you can help, ask them how you can help them, and keep having conversations. Keep having conversations with people, because it will explode your business growth, and that’s what you can control. We can’t control whether somebody says yes to anything we offer, but we can control our activity so we can get to more yeses.

Kylie: Perfect. Mic drop. Amen. I love that so much. And have faith that everything will stabilise, that it will come back. All we can do is what we can control. And I think this is the perfect place to tell them about your Visibility to Client Workbook, because it’s the perfect next step. You can control this, so go and get the workbook.

Tracy: Exactly. Here’s something you can control. Go opt in for this. It’s a Visibility to Client Workbook that I developed over the summer, and it goes along with the client conveyor belt we just talked about. It’s gonna show you where people are getting stuck in your conveyor belt, or maybe where you’re stuck in your own conveyor belt. Because remember, it’s our job to show people the next step, and if we’re not doing that, that’s on us. Sometimes we’re stuck, sometimes the other person is stuck. Either way, it’s totally fixable. You can grab it at tracybeavers.com/visibilitytoclient.

Kylie: Amazing. I’ll put the link in the show notes as well, for anybody driving or folding the laundry. Tracy, thank you so much for being here. I’ve loved this conversation.

Tracy: Me too. Thanks so much.