Observe Connect Influence

Shari Alexander built Observe Connect Influence to help entrepreneurs master persuasion across every profit point of their business. Her core insight was simple but powerful: most entrepreneurs aren't taught how to be genuinely persuasive in sales conversations, public speaking, copywriting, or marketing funnels. She decided to build a coaching and speaking business around this gap, positioning herself as someone who brings "the dark arts of influence into the light."

Shari didn't wait for a perfect product. She started offering one-on-one coaching immediately, structuring packages into three tiers: three-month ($5,000-$7,500), six-month, and twelve-month ($20,000-$35,000) engagements. Each package included weekly video calls, email/text access, and personalized attention. Simultaneously, she began accepting speaking engagements from organizations and associations, charging $5,000 for keynotes and $7,500 for full-day workshops. She added an ancillary course revenue stream and smaller products like e-books, though these remained minor contributors.

Her customer acquisition method was refreshingly unglamorous: she called people. When she wanted to fill one-on-one coaching slots, she reached out to people in her network who knew her target market (particularly entrepreneurs in health and wellness). Her pitch was direct: "I've had great success with entrepreneurs in the health and wellness space. You might know a few people I should connect with—want to hop on a call?" Many leads came from these warm introductions. For her email list, she built it organically through contributing articles to Entrepreneur magazine and running monthly webinars, achieving a modest but highly engaged 3,500-person list. She avoided chasing large vanity metrics, instead focusing on people who actually showed up and engaged.

What worked was ruthless simplification. Shari described wasting years trying to execute every tactic every marketing guru recommended, resulting in scattered effort and mediocre results. Only when she narrowed her focus to three core activities—one-on-one coaching, speaking, and course launches—did growth accelerate. For speaking engagements, she developed a clever negotiation strategy: when organizations had no budget for speakers, she'd ask sponsors to underwrite her fee in exchange for stage mentions, turning budget constraints into sponsor relationships. She also developed a qualifying email template that immediately established whether an organization had real speaker budgets by asking past speaker names and budget ranges outright.

What didn't work was trying to chase every opportunity or maintaining a massive email list for vanity. Her insight: "People aren't numbers. I can tell you who is on my list because they show up on my webinars." By paring down to highly engaged subscribers with low attrition, she built a sustainable foundation.

As of January 2016, Shari had built a profitable solo business generating $15,000 monthly ($150,000 annually in 2015). Her revenue diversification—coaching, speaking, and courses—provided stability while she prepared to launch a new course called "Persuasive Profits" in May 2016. She was intentionally scaling by leveraging webinars (one per month in launch mode, then five-part series at launch), building her email list strategically, and maintaining her core one-on-one coaching practice at premium prices. Her philosophy was clear: focus on what she did best, reach out to people directly, and maintain quality relationships over vanity metrics.