Last summer, when Meredyth suggested, "I think we should participate in Lizzy's Christmas Party®," I was baffled. "What the heck is Lizzy's Christmas Party®?" I questioned.

Meredyth had been quite taken with Elizabeth Goddard's work. She'd invested in several of Lizzy's programs and was rather enthralled by her ideas and insights. It was almost a daily ritual for her to mention something new she learned from Lizzy, which made sense. We're all for being influenced by someone who already has what we want, and Lizzy definitely fits that bill.

But I had no clue why Meredyth cared about this woman's holiday plans.

She explained to me that Lizzy's Christmas Party® is a collaborative bundle of epic proportions and that she thought it would be a great opportunity for us. And I was immediately skeptical. I had participated in several small business owner bundles over the years, most of which made little if any contribution to my coaching practice.

But then, Meredyth presented a case for why this collaboration was special. She showed me Lizzy's page about the opportunity, highlighting this was her fourth year hosting this extravaganza and her impressive year-over-year stats. And Meredyth also pointed to Carly Jo Bell's experience as a contributor last year - the other expert Meredyth quoted frequently while completing her Marketing Magnified program. Carly Jo had reported incredible success as a Silver Sponsor in 2022.

So, with a mix of excitement and a little what-are-we-getting-ourselves-into, we jumped on board.

Complicating matters, we were planning to rebrand our company from the one-woman show of Coach Jennie, my business name for over a decade, to something that better captures our dynamic duoness, Jennie + Meredyth. That decision was already made, but the enormous undertaking of a total rebrand was something we honestly planned to tackle in mid-2024.

However, participating in Lizzy's Christmas Party® and introducing ourselves to a whole new audience as Coach Jennie before the change would have been really dumb. So, even though we were not remotely ready, we decided it was smart to use the submission deadlines for Lizzy's Christmas Party® as a deadline for completing our rebranding.

gulp 😳

And if that wasn’t challenging enough, we also decided that - y’know, while we were at it - this change was a good opportunity to reconsider our tech choices. Why not move our website and course delivery platform from Kajabi to something less expensive with less limits. And leaving Kajabi would mean we’d also need a new email marketing platform. oof.

We really do have a knack for complicating things.

To make a long story interminable, by the final submission deadline for the party, we had:

It was a colossal project, and Lizzy's standards and deadlines were crucial in keeping us on track. Honestly, we’re really grateful for having the party as a motivator to get all this done.

If we were gonna do this, we wanted to go all in. That’s kinda our style. So we applied to be Silver Sponsors (the highest level allowed for B2C businesses). Initially, we weren't accepted at that level - which was disappointing, but understandable since Lizzy didn't know us at all. We knew it was a long shot.

So we happily signed up as Bronze Sponsors for $500 and got to work on all the things.

But when Lizzy posted in the contributors’ Facebook group that a Silver Sponsor slot was possibly opening back up, we leapt at the opportunity. Thankfully, we had already submitted our information on what we were contributing, which (we assume) helped Lizzy decide to upgrade us to Silver Sponsors!

We were never that excited to send someone another $2000 before.

Investing that $2,500 in the online bundle added some delightful pressure and incentive to make sure we made the absolute most of this experience. We worked harder to make our work stand out, our opt-in pages gorgeous, and our email sequences as fun as humanly possible. It also gave us the push to fervently promote the bundle to anyone who would listen - something I honestly didn’t do in those past collaborations.

We contributed two of our most popular programs to the party. Initially, we planned to contribute only to the Premium Goody Bag with our Make It Happen Method and weekly Power Hour, a key service providing weekly access to us.

As the deadline neared, we realized it was silly to not also participate in the free bundle. We decided to add an abridged version of our Get Out of Your Own Way course, renamed the Get Out of Your Own Way Mini-Workshop, to the Regular Goody Bag. This provided a glimpse into our inner critic thought leadership around "Hilda" (since I literally wrote the book on her) and offered tangible tools for overcoming self-doubt, procrastination, perfectionism, and second-guessing. Basically, it's a great introduction into our world.

Our results blew us out of the water. We added a total of 2,411 confirmed subscribers to our list, with an additional 524 unsubscribing later - a very typical practice for people who sign up for bundles. In total, 2,935 people had the chance to learn about us and our work!

Breaking that down by offer (as of January 19, 2024):

We're also super pleased that 44 people signed up for the Regular Goody Bag and 17 people for the Premium Bundle using our affiliate link - and we received a 75% commission for each Premium Goody Bag purchased with our link as a perk for being Silver Sponsors. We weren’t sure what to expect on this front and these numbers made us quite happy.

Ooh! And based on something brilliant we noticed Carly Jo was doing in her community, we gave all of our premium affiliates a $100 credit to use towards an upcoming No Matter What virtual coaching event…effectively making the Premium Goody Bag “free” for them. Four of the people who jumped on that offer already redeemed their $100 credit for the January event (though we are not counting those sales as partygoer sales below since all four were already customers of ours before the party - no cheating the numbers).

So here’s the math that matters to us…

Bottom line: At the close of the party, we effectively spent $630 to get 2,411 new subscribers.

That’s 26¢ per lead. 🤯

And we have another 13 people holding a $100 credit toward their next No Matter What ticket.

The intangible bennies are a little more difficult to calculate, but they definitely count! Participating in Lizzy's Christmas Party® turned out to be the exact right accelerator we needed at the end of a super challenging year. It provided the motivation and deadlines we desperately needed to finally move our rebrand and big tech move from our LATER List to our NOW List - and then we made it happen!

Along the way, we also made a few new business buddies and learned a ton from Lizzy and her team about how to run a really tight ship when leading a collaboration of this size.

Yeah. Meredyth was very, very right. Thank you, Lizzy! 🧡