When Barry Rosenberg was nearing the end of his working life as a Chartered Accountant specialising in family business and farm succession planning, he began to think about what came next.
Meanwhile his son James, a former representative rugby player and now Lifestyle Village Manager, was thinking about how some of the people he’d seen come into the Village for retirees that he manages were needing help.
The business, 65 Not Out - Reinventing Retirement, was started over a cup of coffee and a chat between the father and son. The duo had a light bulb moment when they realised that through their joint experiences, they could help people with their retirement planning on a much larger scale than their one-to-one interactions.
Of the belief that life is for living - regardless of age - Barry and James set about channelling their knowledge, experience and expertise into a Nine Step Booklet and Companion Workbook that aims to inspire soon to be retirees to enjoy their future years in retirement.
But the pair’s first attempt at marketing what they’d put together didn’t go so well and they realised they needed a little help along the way. Enter Rocketspark Design Partner Kath Boyd from OMG Solutions.
"In a nutshell, the disappointment of the lack of subscription uptake with our first attempt at 65 Not Out online had us looking at alternatives but we didn’t know what to do.
“After hatching the idea in late 2016, we still had total faith in our product, but the 'clunky' subscription model and difficulty people had finding their way around the site, meant we had to change.”
Barry decided to approach Kath, who had been a client of his, to see if she could help. Kath’s business OMG Solutions offers website design, digital marketing training, consulting, and coaching. Kath prides herself on providing outstanding customer service, ensuring clients understand the process fully, and get results.
Not long after they chatted Kath set to work creating a new website with a different approach for Barry and James.
“The new site is simple to look at and looks fantastic. It's easy to follow to subscribe to the material we are now offering. It’s totally different from our first site.
“We have been proactively led quite brilliantly by Kath. She suggested the new way of presenting the product, now in two books. One, a content book of 52 pages, the other, an interactive companion book of 32 pages.”
Barry said Kath also set up a Facebook and Instagram for the business which were channels they did not have in the past.
“We hope that a combination of the new website and the powerful media channels will bring us success. We have a certain figure of the ultimate number of subscribers globally we would like to achieve, which is exactly the same number that Kath has in her mind also.
“Kath has created a fantastic website for 65 Not Out. So from our perspective, there was nothing I can think of that could have been improved on throughout the process. She has a network of skilled support businesses closely aligned to what she does. We are absolutely thrilled with the outcome Kath and her support team have achieved."
Kath said the previous digital marketing/website design company had set up the business using a subscription model where people paid an annual cost to join a website which gave them online access to all of the nine steps in the programme.
In the time up to 2020 membership subscriptions were slow.
“In 2020 I began working with Barry on a new concept, whereby we ditched the membership model, repurposed all of his content into a downloadable book and a companion workbook, that customers pay a one-off cost for via their Rocketspark website shop.”
Kath said the biggest factor in contributing to Barry and James’ success was moving from a website that had people hitting a wall every time they went to read ‘member only content’, to an open website, with lots of free information, as well as the book being available to purchase, no strings attached.
Alongside Facebook and Instagram accounts, Kath also created a Google My Business page, LinkedIn company page, the website itself, and she updated Barry’s LinkedIn profile.
“Along with article writing, Barry does all the content writing himself, a content plan was created and I designed posts based on the content from 65 Not Out’s book, and scheduled these across the platforms.
“We intend on keeping this content plan going. By creating the content in three monthly lots it does save on a lot of time. James responds to comments and engagement on the Facebook and Instagram pages. Barry takes care of LinkedIn. We have used Hyperdigital to run Facebook ads, and are working on video content so we can begin to run YouTube advertising. Google Shopping is another pathway we will look at,” Kath said.
