Gemma Bonham-Carter is an online course strategist and digital marketer who has helped over 5,000 entrepreneurs and hundreds of students launch and scale their businesses. She believes in simplicity, with a focus on building scalable, sustainable digital businesses with a long-term vision and effective strategies that don’t rely on traditional working hours or social media fame. With her two signature programs, Course Creator School and The Passive Project, Gemma coaches clients on how to monetize their ideas using online courses and digital products. Her core business principles include: sharing your story and skills, doing good in the world, building a business that supports your version of a dream life, and making money while you sleep. Her model allows for freedom and using business as a vehicle to spread awareness and support causes you care about. Gemma also hosts her own YouTube channel and podcast, The Passive Project, which is a no-fluff, action-packed show that pulls back the curtain to truly show listeners what it takes to create, launch, and grow a successful digital product business.
Gemma’s online career started with one of her many creative side gigs, a DIY home decor blog, which she monetized, spoke about at a number of conferences, and was featured in many of Canada’s top publications, including a 6-part series in The Globe & Mail. She graduated with a master’s in public health, studying global health initiatives in both Canada and abroad in England. When she’s not building her latest training or coaching inside of her student communities, you’ll find her chasing after her two young kids, traveling, or tackling her next room makeover.
What is your business all about?
I’m Gemma Bonham-Carter, the Founder of Course Creator School and The Passive Project. We teach entrepreneurs how to create, market, and scale online courses. To date, we have worked with over 7,000 online business owners through our paid programs.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
After my undergraduate work, I got my master’s in Public Health. I envisioned devoting my entire life with international charitable organizations, but after 5 years of working in that field, I realized that what I thought was my dream, didn’t provide the flexibility and lifestyle I wanted.
It all came to me in one powerful moment. I had just worked a 40-hour workweek in the office and I was sitting in my car, 9 months pregnant with my first daughter, with sweat dripping down my face in the July heat. There I was in that traffic jam and it just hit me — I don’t want this to be my life anymore. I didn’t want to have a baby and then go back to a career I wasn’t in love with. I told myself “I’m going to create a different story”.
From that moment on, I knew that I wanted to figure out a way to make entrepreneurship work for me. I had already been dabbling with a side hustle as a home decor blogger and knew I had everything it took to turn it into a full-time career.
Fast forward 8 years from that traffic jam lightbulb moment, and I have now built a company that teaches and empowers other ambitious go-getters how to create incredible businesses leveraging online courses and digital products. I have made my own version of a dream life come true, and that’s what I get to help others now do too.
It’s the most rewarding career I ever could have asked for.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
I’ve come to notice a pattern among the students and clients I’ve worked with who have had a lot of success with their businesses. They often share a few really key qualities:
- Ambition and drive → There are inevitably going to be bumps in the road and if you don’t have the determination to keep moving forward, particularly when it feels hard, you won’t make it as an entrepreneur. The business owners at the top of their game are the ones who had a vision of where they wanted to go and kept putting in the work, even when the results didn’t happen overnight.
- The belief that you will be successful → Having an unwavering belief in your ability to figure it out and create that successful business is key. If you let yourself get overwhelmed by imposter syndrome or negative thoughts about how “maybe you can’t do this”, you will get stuck in it. Entrepreneurs that see failures as lessons, and use those lessons to give them clues about what next move to make, are the ones who rise to the top.
- Data driven decision making → I see this a lot: Entrepreneurs have a course that flops or something that they deem as unsuccessful in their business and they scrap that idea. They get wounded emotionally and let that emotion drive their decision making. Do you think the CEO of a huge corporation like Target lets one bad refund request dictate their next moves? Absolutely not. You need to step into your CEO shoes and make decisions in your business based on real, true data and numbers. It will help you stay focused on profit, ROI, and growth.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
There were many mistakes that I made in getting my business off the ground, but when I look back on them now I feel really grateful for the lessons learned along the way and the grit and determination I had to keep going.
- One of the biggest lessons for me was in truly discovering my niche. I pivoted many times and have tried all kinds of different business ideas – from decorating weddings, writing a blog, hosting craft workshops, selling handmade art prints on Etsy, creating custom websites, and about a thousand other things. Although none of these ended up being “the one”, testing and trying so many different options gave me a really good sense of what I liked doing, taught me a lot about marketing strategies, and got me one step closer to what I was meant to be doing.
- When I did finally realize that I wanted to teach online, I launched my very first course (it was for bloggers). I made all the mistakes with that first launch! I didn’t have a very specific problem I was solving for my target audience. I hadn’t focused enough on growing my email list first. I created all of the course content before I did a founding student launch. That first course didn’t go on to be a huge success, but I made a few thousand dollars from it and it cracked open the door for me on how incredible the online course business model could be.
- I think it’s important to have a vision of what you want your business to do for you – offer more flexibility, financial security, and be fulfilling – but you don’t have to know all the steps to get there. Take one action at a time and the road will appear. You’ll make mistakes along the way (we all do!), but they will actually be the best learning opportunities.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
As the Founder of a few educational programs for entrepreneurs, I’m always looking to expand my reach and audience. I have used many strategies to do that – from social media, content marketing, blogging, press, partnerships, and paid advertising.
From a speed perspective, nothing can beat paid advertising. I can set aside a budget to test a new offer, a new lead magnet, and put money toward scaling a program really successfully by using ads.
However, I strongly believe that paid advertising should come only once you have a proven offer in the marketplace and once you understand how to build an audience organically yourself. I like using it to pour gasoline on a fire that’s already burning.
From an organic perspective, my favourite and best marketing strategy has been to leverage partnerships and collaborations. If I can get myself in front of my ideal audience through someone else – say a podcast host who has a show for online entrepreneurs – that can be an incredible opportunity to grow your audience and sell your offers. I like to get onto podcasts, offer guest expert training for other people’s audiences, and be featured in things like virtual conferences. Those collaborations have resulted in thousands of new audience members who are quick to buy my programs, because they already have a level of built-in trust with me.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
We are all looking for ways to get more done in less time. Especially as a business owner who also has two small kids, my work hours are incredibly limited! After trying many different methods and schedules, the thing that has worked best for me is to work in sprints. This means I focus on one main project at a time, instead of trying to juggle multiple tasks. Sure, I might need to be in my email inbox or spend some time on social media in any given week, but I try to mainly work on one project until it’s complete. Typically these sprints are 1-3 weeks in length. It might be recording YouTube videos for 6 months worth of content all at once. Or creating a new offer. Or developing a new funnel. Or putting together a new training or set of resources. Focusing on one main project at a time keeps me from feeling scattered, losing time to task-switching, and ultimately gets projects done more efficiently.
If you started your business again, what things would you do differently?
In the early years of entrepreneurship, I tried a lot of different things. I tested and played with different ideas, business types, and industries. I didn’t have a clear vision and so used my skillset in whatever way I could.
Although I now appreciate the lessons learned that came along the way, I know that being scattered and trying so many things at once meant that I didn’t give myself fully to any of them. If I could go back, I would tell that version of myself to have more focus. That success will actually come sooner if I stayed in one lane and saw it through.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
What I love about being in the industry of creating and selling online courses and digital programs is that the start-up cost is already so low. I teach my clients and students how to get started on a shoestring budget so that they can quickly see profits coming into their business. Selling an online course has nothing to do with the tech you’re using, and everything to do with creating trust and connection between you and your audience and offering them a solution to a real problem they are facing!
With that $1000, I would invest in the basics like a domain name, creating a website using a premade template (these are often so inexpensive and beautiful!), investing in an email marketing platform so I could start growing my email list right away, and an online course platform so I could start selling digital products right away.
Together those things would come in at around $500-$600. Whatever was leftover I would use to invest in my first course or coaching program! The first time I ever bought a marketing course, I realized how much faster I could get the results I was looking for because someone was there to teach me how to do it. Often my professional development purchases are the best investments I make!
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
My biggest piece of advice to new entrepreneurs is to start before you’re ready! Start publishing content, putting your offers out there, and get visible. The struggling students who come to me are the ones who are sitting in that analysis paralysis and just can’t break through their fear. If you can put that fear aside and just start taking action, the clarity will come and everything will start to feel easier. You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going or how you are going to get there – the path will reveal itself over time. There is never a better time to start than right now!
How can readers get in touch with you?
If creating and launching a course is one of the next steps you want to take for your business, I invite you to register for my free class.
In it, I’ll teach you how I turned what I knew into a $500k/year course business, and how you can use the same methodology to launch your own.
If you’d like to come say hello over on Instagram (where I hang out on the daily), come follow me @gemma.bonhamcarter.
Learn more about my programs and services at www.gemmabonhamcarter.com.
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