Nagging her way to a million
An interesting business concept that was emailed my way this weekend. Marla Cilley doesn’t just sell millions of FlyLady-branded products - kitchen timers, license plate holders, ostrich-feather dusters, books, calendars, mouse pads, T-shirts, tote bags, sink stoppers, water bottles, and lapel pins. She also sends out nagging emails to over 400,000 of her subscribers - almost exclusively female middle-aged homemakers, who call themselves FlyBabies.
They convene at occasional Flyfests around the country, where Cilley gives personal encouragement. And every day they send her about 5,000 grateful messages - so many that Cilley has had to hire a team of six offsite readers to help respond to the deluge. “You are the mother I never had,” one recent e-mail read, “loving, caring, understanding, available with a big hug and a kick in the butt when needed.”
Yet Cilley says she didn’t set out to become a guru. The FlyLady juggernaut began innocently enough, after Cilley married her third husband in 1996 and found that neither of them knew how to keep a tidy home. When the mess became unmanageable, Cilley turned to the Internet, finding clutter-busting pointers on a website called Sidetracked Home Executives (shesintouch.com).
Before long Cilley started posting her own tips on the site’s message board, eventually building a grassroots following with her no-nonsense, country-girl wisdom, along with her unbridled joy over her newly uncluttered life. She began individually mentoring other slobs in the group, and in 1999, FlyLady’s listserve was hatched, with just ten women as subscribers.
Cilley attracts new subscribers by writing a self-syndicated column that appears weekly in 225 newspapers and doing a live weekly call-in satellite radio show with Leanne Ely, a nutritionist and cookbook author, on worldtalkradio.com, where “The Fly Show” is rated No. 1 among more than 70 weekly shows, drawing about 140,000 listeners. Ely has also launched a successful Internet enterprise (savingdinner.com), with no small thanks to Cilley, who promotes it to her subscribers.
So we can all learn here to not just sell a product but also give a service or advice as a value add!