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Dr. Erica Jordan-Thomas
She Joined TSP in June. She Hit Seven Figures by November.
She Joined TSP in June.
She Hit Seven Figures
by November.
Dr. Erica Jordan-Thomas had publicly committed to making 2022 her first million dollar year, and she is not
someone who sets a goal without building the plan behind it. What she was missing was a room of people
who had already done it. Here is what changed once she found one.
Dr. Erica Jordan-Thomas had publicly committed to making 2022 her first million dollar year, and she is not
someone who sets a goal without building the plan behind it. What she was missing was a room of people
who had already done it. Here is what changed once she found one.
At a glance
Founder
Dr. Erica Jordan-Thomas
Business
Seven Figure Educator: coaching, training and a live event for Black educators building businesses
Before
High school math teacher, then middle school principal. Doctorate from Harvard
Business founded
October 2017
In TSP since
June 2022. TSP Mastermind, upgraded to the TSP Collaborative that November
Also
A real estate portfolio of five properties, and a book published this year
Founder
Business
Before
Business founded
In TSP since
Also
Dr. Erica Jordan-Thomas
Seven Figure Educator: coaching, training and a live event for Black educators building businesses
High school math teacher, then middle school principal. Doctorate from Harvard
October 2017
June 2022. TSP Mastermind, upgraded to the TSP Collaborative that November
A real estate portfolio of five properties, and a book published this year
The numbers
Point in the journey
First months in business, 2018
Revenue
About $20,000, enough to clear all her credit card debt
Point in the journey
The month she graduated from Harvard, May 2021First months in business, 2018
Revenue
$63,000
Point in the journey
2022, the year she joined
TSP in June
Revenue
$1.08 million
Point in the journey
2023
Revenue
$1.8 million, including her first million dollar sales event
Point in the journey
First months in business, 2018
The month she graduated from Harvard, May 2021First months in business, 2018
2022, the year she joined
TSP in June
2022, the year she joined
TSP in June
Revenue
About $20,000, enough to clear all her credit card debt
$63,000
$1.08 million
$1.8 million, including her first million dollar sales event
Her first live event came three months after she joined. The goal was 50 attendees. She ended with 78 in the room.
Where she was when she walked in
Erica was a middle school principal until a school board decision she had no say in pushed her out. She started consulting in October 2017, got into a doctoral program at Harvard, sold everything she owned and drove thirteen hours to Cambridge, and ran the business straight through the degree.
By the month she graduated in May 2021 the business made $63,000. The job offers coming her way were $120,000 to $150,000 a year. She turned them down.
On December 31, 2021, she posted publicly that the following year her business would make a million dollars.
By June 2022 she was halfway through that year, she needed a strategy rather than a slogan, and she was planning a first live event she had no idea how to run. That is the state she was in when she walked into her first TSP event.
How she decided
Thirty minutes into day one, at 8:30 in the morning, a live performance of a song she had loved in college came up on stage.
What actually closed her came later that day. Ariel and Pastor Dee told their story from the stage, and then Lamar and Ronnie came on and announced they had sold Black and Married With Kids, to Ariel and Dee.
"You selling it to people in this room? If you can make that happen, you can help me figure out this event. You can help me figure out these seven figures."
Erica runs two questions on any room before she joins it, and they are worth copying:
"Do you have the information that I need, and I need evidence that you have it. But then the second question is: do we have the same values? Information is important, but if we aren't values aligned, I just morally can't say yes."
Both answered, she went to the table at lunch with three questions: what's the price, when do we start, and what's the process to upgrade to the TSP Collaborative. She still intended to hit seven figures within six months, and she had already run the math before the price was announced.
"If it's this number, this is how much I've got in reserve, this is what an average client is, so I probably need one or two more clients. If it's this number, I need three. Are there at least 30 people I could reach out to? A 10% conversion gives me my three clients."
What the Wednesday night calls did
Sixty days out from her first event, Erica had about 30 of her 50 seats filled and an AV quote she could not read.
"I didn't know how big my screen needed to be. I didn't know if I needed rear projection or front projection. I didn't know how many mics I needed."
She brought both problems to a Wednesday night call and shared her screen. Lamar went through the AV quote line by line, telling her what she needed and what she did not. On filling the room, the advice was unglamorous: take a one on one approach and pick up the phone.
"When I get the play, I'm gonna run the play."
Goal of 50. She ended with 78, and a new problem, because the room was now too small and they had to open an air wall into the space that was supposed to be lunch. That went to the next Wednesday night call.
She finished 2022 at $1.08 million, hit the goal she had posted publicly a year earlier, and upgraded to the TSP Collaborative in November. The first TSP Collaborative retreat was in Anguilla three weeks later, and she went.
There she sat through a session on acquisitions and mergers that reframed how she thought about growth entirely: find the largest expense on your P&L, then ask what it would look like to buy an asset that replaces it.
"It's higher level conversations, and then there's authentic family reunion. The spades table right after acquisitions and mergers."
The rebrand the room made her do
Her 2022 event was called Six Figure Educator. Having crossed seven figures, the name had become a problem she could feel but had not acted on.
"I don't feel comfortable standing on a stage anymore that says Six Figure Educator. It's not in alignment. To me, that's pulling me backwards."
The company became Seven Figure Educator. But the name change was downstream of something the TSP Collaborative did to her first.
Four months in, at a TSP Collaborative field trip in Palm Springs, someone asked her to run through the cities she had lived in. She got to graduate school and said what she always said: I went to grad school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He stopped her. There are only two universities in Cambridge, and he wanted to know which one.
She said Harvard. He turned to the entire room and announced it.
"And I'm like, I mean, nobody really asked me. And Lamar looked at me and said: you need to say that. I knew you had a doctorate, but you actually need to be more forward with that, especially given your audience of educators. You need to claim that."
The room spent the rest of the evening masterminding her personal rebrand. She had been hiding it on purpose:
"The moment I say it, people start treating me differently, or projecting their insecurities. Oh, so you went to Harvard. Let's ask Miss Harvard what to do. And I'm just trying to chill."
What she walked out with:
"Going to Harvard isn't a flex. It's a fact. So what does it mean to lead with facts?"
"My business is a reflection of me. So I actually had to rebrand me."
The rebranded event ran in 2023 with a rule attached: if it is called Seven Figure Educator, the conversations on stage have to be seven figure conversations. She brought in a speaker on the strategies of the top 1% and watched a room of teachers, principals and superintendents learn what the Augusta Rule was, something almost nobody there had heard of.
That year: $1.8 million, and her first million dollar sales event.
What the room handles thata course cannot
Seven figures brought problems Erica had not been warned about. Her pastor's phrase for it is the backside of the blessing.
"The front side of the blessing is the seven figures. The backside is what comes with it. More people. More clients. More tax liability. Most of the time, someone tries to take your intellectual property. Shifts in relationships, because your identity evolves and some people are more comfortable with the former version of yourself."
The reason this matters for a room rather than a curriculum is who you can take it to. Well meaning peers answer this kind of problem with but you should be so grateful, you've built a seven figure business.
"I know that. But that ain't the topic of this conversation."
At a TSP Game Plan she and three other women slipped off to dinner and she put it on the table.
"I was able to process through it and feel held through that conversation, knowing I wasn't running the risk of 'well, you should just be grateful.' They already know that."
"I left that conversation lighter. That was the leading domino in me being able to unlock a habit that would better serve me in this chapter."
The same thing happens on smaller problems. On a bus in Orlando, Erica sat behind another member and talked through a real estate deal. She wanted to buy her mother's house to renovate it and kept getting denied a fix and flip loan because buyer and seller were related. He scripted out her options, showed her how to wrap the renovation cost into the loan, and worked through the after repair value on a property with no comparable sales nearby.
That conversation was in February. She closed in April.
Your Turn
Erica walked into TSP a strong operator with a public goal and a private habit of playing herself down. The room fixed the second thing, and the first took care of itself. June to November: seven figures. The year after: $1.8 million and a company named after what she had actually become.
What she brought was the willingness to be told.
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