Intro (00:01):
Pixie Dust & Profits is a podcast for small business owners who love Disney and want to sprinkle some of that magic onto their own businesses. Join your host, Nicole Boucher, and Yasmine Spencer. As they explore the mouse’s $12.6 billion operation and break down exactly how you can apply these big scale concepts to your own business.

Yasmine (00:26):
Hi, and welcome to this week’s episode of Pixie Dust & Profits. Last year, Disney announced that it was getting rid of its beloved Mickey shaped plastic straw. Now, if you’ve been to the parks, you’ve seen it. It’s a straw with a, in the shape of a Mickey head. It’s super cute. And you can get it as an add on to a lot of your beverages. And Disney’s gotten rid of that in favor of replacing it with paper straws, which are more environmentally friendly. So this week we’re going to be looking at the steps and changes that Disney’s making to its parks across the board to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 20, 20 that’s next year. And we’re not gonna just be talking about straws, even though we could probably go on length. Over there, we’re gonna dive into some of the other changes Disney’s making throughout the parks and what you can expect to see if you attend in the coming like weeks, months, and years,

Nicole (01:20):
I will say that I was there in August and, and paper straws were everywhere and they’ve actually made it a little bit difficult to even get one. So you have to, at some restaurants, go up to someone and ask for a straw. Now I am huge in sustainability. You might not know, but I’m on the recycling committee for my town. So this is like a big topic mirror and dear to my heart that I can talk about at length. And we’ve just gotten used to not using straws to where we go. And so it was amazing to see an initiative from Disney because plastic straws are one of those. Like you don’t really need it. It’s just single use plastic that often ends up in our oceans. And I think it’s estimated that like 500 million plastic straws are used a day across the world. And I, in a place like Disney world, that’s a significant impact they have just by switching to paper,

Yasmine (02:07):
They actually banned plastic straws in Animal Kingdom because of the animals there. Now, obviously it’s being spread out throughout the other parks, but what’s interesting is I recently found out that if you go on a Disney cruise line, I can’t guarantee that everyone gets a, but on a recent cruise, they gifted people on board with like reusable steel straws. So they can take that straw, reuse it over and over again. So when they’re enjoying their many beverages and cocktails on the cruise, they don’t necessarily have to purchase or they don’t necessarily have to use plastic straws and contribute more and more to that waste.

Nicole (02:43):
So it’s some of the other things that Disney’s working on to try and hit this goal of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2020, they have replaced those little toiletries that you get in the hotel rooms with ones that are in the shower and they can refill. So that’s a little bit less plastic being used a little bit less going home in your suitcase too. Probably they’ve also installed a 50 megawat solar grid. You see it when you’re on the buses. If you can see it air, you can see it’s actually in the shape of a Mickey head. Of course it is, you know, no one will ever see that unless you’re in an airplane or on Google maps, but it is in the shape of a Mickey. They also have reduced their food waste by 54%. Well not reduce the food waste.

Nicole (03:31):
They have diverted 54% of the waste from the parks from landfills. So what they actually do is they turn all of that food waste into fuel to help power the parks, the hotels, the buses, they use it for fertilizer. I recently went on a behind the scenes tour at the operation side of things in the making of the magic. And we actually went to the laundry facilities and it was really fun because we got to talk about some of the sustainability topics. And they said, you know, if a towel is out of commission, because it has a hole in it, or it just isn’t like usable by a guest, they actually cut that up. And the janitors who are cleaning everything to get ready for the rides or after a rainstorm, you’ll see cast members out there making the benches nice and dry. So that way you can sit on them and that’s all done with the old towels that they had or the sheets that ripped up. And so they do a really good job at trying to reduce their impact for how much space they are. So you’re probably wondering if I don’t source products, I’m a digital business. What does sustainability have anything to do with my little operation here at home?

Yasmine (04:39):
And yeah, and I promise we’re not recommend that you shut off your laptop at night, even though that is probably something I should do,

Nicole (04:45):
You should definitely do that. And not just from a sustainability standpoint, but just to turn your brain off.

Yasmine (04:51):
That’s fair. That’s fair. So what can we learn from Disney? Well, in addition to having a really positive impact on the environment by reuse and reducing Disney saves a lot of money and not just money, but time, effort, resources. So how can you apply that to your own business? Well, let’s look at the content you create. Let’s look at the products you create. You don’t necessarily have to create something once and then be done with it completely. You can reiterate, break things apart, basically reuse content and items and products that you’ve already created and package them up in new ways to sell them, to give them more life, give them longevity and to make more money in your business.

Nicole (05:37):
Yeah. I mean, you’ve probably heard reduce, reuse, recycle. I mean, it’s no different for your business. Like reduce the amount of time you spend writing or creating a new content, like reuse what you’ve already done, whether it’s something from a week ago or a month ago and then like recycle it. You can use it again in a year or six months from now. And we’re not saying that it has to be like word for word or anything, but let’s take your marketing. For example, choose a hub for yourself. If you are the YouTube person and your hub is YouTube, that is your primary source. You make your content for that audience for that medium. And then you turn those into little pieces for, or every other one. So if, if YouTube is your thing, then you would make a blog post based off that video and embed that on your website, you would make a couple of Facebook posts or Instagram posts that would send people to your YouTube video or to your website with the embedded video.

Nicole (06:31):
And it’s all based off that original content piece that you created, you would send out a newsletter and your email, and you’d take a couple of the bullet points from what you discussed in that YouTube video and send people to it. So you’re not creating 10 different pieces of content for all of the different platforms out there. You’re creating one piece of content that gets distilled down into the others, and it’s based on your hub. So if YouTube is not something on your radar and you’re the blogger to do the opposite, write the blog post, and then distill it down for all the other mediums that you want your business to appear on.

Yasmine (07:04):
And my favorite trick for making this even easier, if you do leverage video or audio, for example, if your podcast is your main hub of content, get it transcribed, save yourself the trouble of having to jot down those notes. If you go to a service like te.com and we’ll include a link in the show notes, it’s a transcription service, that’s basically run by robots. So it’s an algorithm that does it. It’s super fast and pretty accurate. You can upload your video or audio file. It’ll transcribe it within the next like 15, 20 minutes. And then you can use that at is a starting point. So instead of writing those Instagram captions from scratch or trying to transcribe it, you have that like little nugget of content that you can just tweak and modify, and it gets things going a lot faster.

Nicole (07:50):
And this also goes like hand in hand. It doesn’t necessarily have to be free content that you can do this with. You can even do this with paid content. So let’s say you had a work shop that you taught something at, and it’s, you know, a 45 minute, one hour long workshop. You can take one small section of that workshop and make that into your next blog post or YouTube or whatever your hub is. And you can just take one small section of it and have a couple of bullet points. So if you think of, in terms of like one of those upside down pyramids, you have that giant thing at the top. That’s like, this is what this content is. This is what I’m talking about. And this is how I can distill it down into all these different mediums. It doesn’t mean that it’s not going to take work or time, but it’s gonna significantly reduce all of that time that you’re spending, creating new content coming up with new ideas.

Nicole (08:40):
Probably reinventing the wheel. Every time you come to a blank cursor to write an email, it’s going to reduce all that time because you’re recycling and reusing and honing in and making better the content that you have, you’re gonna make it of a higher level of quality. You’re just going to be talking about it so much that you’re gonna become even more of an expert in it than you already are. You’re gonna become an expert at speaking to that topic because you have written it so much or you’ve delivered it so much that you could meet someone in that elevator deliver that elevator pitch we talked about before and go right into your best content, because you know, so well

Yasmine (09:17):
Looking at your paid products as well, if you have like a big course or you know, a multi module like workshop or offering, if there’s like a specific piece that you think your audience could benefit from, you can like similar to taking content from a workshop and distilling it into a blog post. You can that like one module package it up a little bit differently and sell it as a standalone product for a lower cost. Again, sometimes people aren’t necessarily ready for that bigger investment, but throw things back to our last episode, you can create that value ladder by basically taking, you know, two modules out of your eight module program and selling those at a lower price to help people get their foot in the door and to become more familiar with their services while helping them at the same time.

Nicole (10:00):
Yeah. And I mean, another thing you can do to that realm is that if you have the type of offer that like is stacking where you have that ladder, where you’ve got some people who are like maybe baby business owners looking to you or the newer customers, and then the people who have been with you for years, like what one on one or private clients, you can take something that you’ve made for those like entry level clients and give it to your private clients and just say here, you know, I made this for others, but you’re my private client. And I wanna treat you very specially. And so here you can have access to this. I, you’re not charged. You’re just part of the family. I want you to have this and you’re delivering extra value without doing any extra work. And so that’s another way that you can reuse this product or course, or content in a different way to deliver more value to your customers

Yasmine (10:48):
And if anything, and makes them want those higher level packages, because they’re getting quite literally so much bang for their buck, but it’s no additional effort on your

Nicole (10:57):
They about this from like the product business standpoint, from a product business standpoint, you’ve got like one pen. If you’re on a website and it gets redesigned with different skins, I just bought a new planner and there are six different covers you can choose from. They didn’t reinvent the planner. They just decided to change the cover art on each of them. And if they sell it to, to different people. So, you know, some of these things, that product businesses just is part of it. You have variations and sizes for everything that you make. We can apply this type of thing to our thinking for our service based businesses, right? So you might have, like Yasin said, this course that’s got eight modules in it. Well, you can, you can change to the cover up and change the insights to just be two of those modules and sell it to a different person.

Yasmine (11:44):
There are so many opportunities existing within your own business where you can really recycle, reuse and reduce one last tip that we’ll share. And this is another throwback to last. You wanna say last week’s except episode one last tip we’ll share. And this is another throwback to last episode is leveraging products that you already use in your business. Things that you’ve created. If you’ve created templates, forms, workbooks, things that could exist as a standalone product, rather than save them for your one on one clients or your group coaching clients, or your program clients take that item and sell it as a standalone piece again, for lower cost. It makes the barrier to entry a lot lower to work with you. It delivers value and it primes them for working with you on higher level projects

Nicole (12:31):
Before we close out. I want to encourage you that even though we didn’t focus on like the green and the sustainability side for your business, I would love for you to make a personal mandate, to not use plastic straws. It’s an easy thing that you can do. And you can think about Disney now, every time you forego that straw. But I also want you to think about like how you can use less or consume less in your business. And this isn’t a mandate. You don’t have to make a 50% emissions goal for yourself, but if each of us makes one tiny little difference, then the animals in the ocean will be living much happier lives. And we won’t be ingesting microparticles while we eat our seafood.

Yasmine (13:08):
You know what I’m gonna do? Nicole only invest in one planner per year instead of the five that I usually by.

Nicole (13:15):
That is a good plan. I will stick with my planner for the year,

Yasmine (13:18):
Right on. All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us for another episode.

Nicole (13:24):
We can’t wait for the next one and make sure you sign up for the email list. So you can get those extra goodies that we give only to them. With this episode, they will be getting a PDF to show them how to break their content down into different mediums. So if you would like to receive stuff like that in the future, make sure to sign up for the list.

Yasmine (13:43):
See you real soon.