How Coaches Build Consistent Leads WITHOUT Relying on Referrals or Instagram

Everything feels terrifying, everything feels scary, and it's really hard to make business decisions and really hard to make investment decisions. Let's talk about what unproducibility actually looks like in a coaching business. It kind of looks like one month you might hit $15,000 a month and then the next month you hit $5,000 a month. You can't really plan a holiday because you don't know where the leads are going to come from. You don't know if you're going to be able to afford to take a break. You don't know if you can hire somebody because you're unsure whether the amount of money you're earning is just a fluke or if it's going to continue for the next few months. Everyone thinks they've got a leads problem when most of the time they've actually got a conversion problem. So you're listening to this right now. If I actually gave you 100 leads that were qualified, how many of them would become clients? And if the answer is less than 5 or 10, then you've got a conversion issue, not a lead issue. Welcome to episode 134 of the Success School podcast. Today I'm talking about building a predictable business that grows with a step how you feeling? Comfortable. This is a whole new kind of setup that we have going on today if you guys are watching on YouTube, hello. And we are in our literal lounge room. This is our lounge room of our house. We're joined by Luna, who's lovingly looking her pores. Love this. Yeah. Love's looking shit. What's your personal thing? Well, we're sitting in this beautiful home and it's very clean. Yeah. And that's because we just hired our first staff member in Thailand. Yeah. And her name is you, which is confusing because they're going to go to speak to you about you. It's a bit confusing. But she's just whipped our house into shape today. Let me tell you why we need somebody to kind of house manage for us here. In Thailand, they love shiny things. And what they mostly love is shiny floors. And we have these almost porcelain tiles across this whole house that are so shiny and so white. And our dogs are so hairy and so black and so dirty that it was becoming a nightmare for us to like every day. We were losing like two hours a day, just vacuuming, cleaning, mopping the floors. And so, you know, when you're an entrepreneur, you don't have time for that. And so it's been really nice to get some help around the house. She's been great. Yeah. And what I'm excited is we're just settling in with Chills Nice. I think I probably underestimated how challenging it was to move country. Not from like all the things you would expect. Just all the little things like you don't have your appliances. You don't have your like modern conveniences. You don't have a phone. You don't have SIM card. You don't have car. You don't have like a motorbike. You have no merge of transport. You can't speak the language like there's quite a bit of stuff that I just completely underestimated. But two weeks in, I'm feeling sad or I couldn't even think about moving back to Australia would be shit at the moment. Yeah. If anyone who's considering moving country, it certainly takes a little bit longer to settle in than you expect. Like it took a little bit longer than I expected. Yeah. So today's episode, Steph settled in for two weeks of sales calls, gave us heaps of market research. And one of the things that a lot of people are struggling with. So probably 20 of the 30 calls was they struggled with the predictability in their business and growing it with ease. And before we get into this, I don't mean to say that business should be easy, but it should be ease full. And if you've got systems processes team, SOPs and it's not relying on the founder, I like to think business can be pretty easy and simple. Yeah. Not easy, but simple. I think it's it was doing it being easy and it having ease. Like easy means like, oh, it comes to me easily and everything is easy. That's not necessarily the case. Businesses typically quite a hard push, but it gets to be ease full, I think, where it's like, you know, it doesn't actually have to be a push all of the time. So let's talk about what unproduced ability actually looks like in a coaching business. It kind of looks like one month, he might hit $15,000 a month and then the next month, he hit $5,000 a month and you know, you can't really plan a holiday because you don't know where the leads are going to come from. You don't know if you can hire somebody because you're unsure whether the amount of money you're earning is just a fluke or if it's going to continue for the next few months and you don't really have a predictable way of knowing that the leads are going to come in and a predictable way of knowing those leads are going to turn into sales. And so because of that, everything feels terrifying, everything feels scary and it's really hard to make business decisions and really hard to make investment decisions also. Yeah. So the first teaching point today, we're going to talk about like a, you know, successful we do marketing like obviously. So we're going to talk about marketing. And in particular, I think a lot of people really just get locked into the referral only type business model like that. They really don't do marketing. They don't have a marketing strategy. It's a really dumb idea when you're trying to create an useful business because referrals are random, they're not unpredictable and they might dry up for months at a time. So building a business on that is really just a dumb move. I've had a lot of conversations this like week with people and I've been like, how do people typically find you? And they're quite proud when they tell me that they found on referrals and I understand why because obviously, you know, it means they're doing great job and their clients love them and that's awesome. But like, there is going to be a stop to that. Like, a client only has so many friends that they can refer you to. They only have so many people that they can refer to. So unless you have a front end load unless every single client is going to refer three or five people, which again is unpredictable because you don't know how many they're going to refer you. You don't know when they're going to refer you don't know how that's going to come about. It's just a really stressful way to rely on leads. So in terms of building a marketing funnel, generally you want these things to be predictable. You want them to be consistent and you want them to be not relying on you all the time. Yes, some marketing funnels do rely on you, like making organic content typically. But things that generally work on auto pilot, Steph, want to get in some questions. So what's the difference between posting and hoping versus actually having a predictable marketing system? So when I asked this question to the people that I've been jumping on, say I was called with, I was kind of asking like, when we look at doubling your revenue, so some people like I want to get to $30,000 a month, I'm like, cool, do you confidently know that you have the demand and the lead generation to be able to do that? Now, every time the answer is no. And so if you're listening to this episode and you don't know how to get to the number of clients that you need for your goals, then it's probably because you're relying too heavily on organic. And I know that we beat on and bash on about ads all the time, but I cannot tell you how freeing it is to know that you have constant leads coming in that you can wake up to an inbox full of messages from ideal clients who have come in off the back of a lead magnet who now want to have a conversation with you instead of spending hours and hours, you know, stalking other coaches online, trying to make content that's interesting, trying to think about like is and really having no strategy like most people were just copying other content they see online. They don't even know if it's even actually working often then likes an engagement, you know. So that method of just hoping that today is the day that somebody reaches out to your near inbox is just, it's really unreliable. It's really stressful. So we preach ads because ads is the number one way and it doesn't have to be hard like we're not talking about really complicated ad funnels, but ads is the number one way to guarantee that every single day you're going to get a contact point or somebody to reach out to and have a conversation about signing up in your program. Yeah. And ultimately that's how you make it predictable. If somebody is relying 100% on let's say Instagram right now and hoping that one of their breals goes viral. What are the two funnels that they should build first and can you walk us through like paid ads versus SEO? So let's talk to the funnels first. Yeah. So in terms of the funnels, the simplest way to just get some reach here is just to boost your posts. It's really simple. You just press the boost button, follow a few prompts and then go from there. You know, typically in, well, in success, we would call that a follow a funnel. So essentially, just trying to get your shit seen by people that don't know where you're at right now. It's a really easy way to start. The second way is like actually with some DM ads and what would happen there is you would give some kind of lead magnet value download in exchange. They would start a DM conversation with them and then you could offer to help them in an extended way. This is not like you're going to sell them a 15,000 dollar offer like immediately in DMs because they don't really know you. Most of these people are cold. So that's quite hard to do. But they are two of the most simple ones and then you've got a lead magnet funnel as well. A magnet funnel is basically the DM funnel just without the DM. Essentially, you're giving a lead magnet away in exchange for contact details, name your number and then you can mark it to them from there, which is just a great thing to do. All three of those I would tentatively say you could learn how to execute in a couple hours, like not super challenging, not hard to do. I think where the bug bear there is for a lot of people is like it costs money. Do you just want to talk about the time and money? Yes, sure. A lot of people will make organic content spend hours on a piece of content. It goes fucking nowhere and they're okay with that. Yes. I think a lot of people think that they don't want to spend money on ads and they're happy to just continue investing their time in content that doesn't perform because they think that they're not spending any money. But what they're not equating is the fact that your hourly rate is probably somewhere around and I would hope so around the $150, $200 mark if not way higher than that. So every hour that you spend on a piece of content that doesn't perform and doesn't bring in leads, which I mean, you may have five or six pieces of content go out and not generate a single lead and you might spend 30 minutes to an hour on that content. That's three to five hours a week on content that's $1,000 at $200 an hour. My math was good today. [BLANK_AUDIO] content that doesn't perform, but you won't spend $5 a day on ads that's guaranteed to bring you in leads and contact details and even further than that if you're on a DM funnel, actually start conversations with you. Like it's insane. It blows my mind that people are still sitting in that paradigm. So, Steph, everyone's terrified of paid ads like two degree. I think 95% of people you've had calls within the last two weeks were like, had to try ads absolutely sucked at them and didn't want to do it anymore or just haven't tried it because there's some fear in there. Typically people say ads are too expensive or SEO takes too long. What's your response to that? I don't think ads are expensive, personally. Like, and so, first of all, I think it's an investment. I, one, it's an investment. Two, it's not expensive. We have Shandy in our program. She's been running $5 a day ads. She's got not only herself fully booked, but she's got one of our team members fully booked as well running $5 a day ads. We have Georgie who's been running $5 a day ads, who has been getting hundreds of leads and signing people up into a membership. Like this does not have to be expensive, you know. And even us, we spend a tiny portion of our revenue on ads. You know, like we spend less than 10% of our revenue on ads in a year, which is why you would like, I would spend that 10%, in fact, I would spend way more. I spend 20% to generate the revenue that we have. So people who say they're expensive just haven't learnt the skill. They don't get the game. They don't understand you have to spend money to make money. They're happy to just toil with their time and that's exactly why they're broke. And so if you really, truly want to scale your company, it cannot be with your time. Like, eventually, you're going to have to make an investment that scales your business. And it adds as the fastest way to do it. If you were to give one of our clients, let's just say that one of our listeners joined Success School tomorrow. What's the one funnel that you would get them to start with that would generate them leads within 30 days? I would say lead magnet funnel, to be honest. I think building your email list and getting people's contact details so you can remark at them as key. How you go about that is essentially you want to pull your audience and actually speak to your audience of ideal clients, not just like TaiKey, because they're never going to pay you. Find out their top three pain points and build a solution for that. And then download PDF template, whatever it is, get them to download it and then you've got to follow them up. I was actually writing some organic content yesterday and it was everyone thinks they've got a leads problem when most of the time they've actually got a conversion problem. So you listening to this right now, if I actually gave you 100 leads that were qualified, how many of them would become clients? And if the answer is less than five or 10, then you've got a conversion issue, not a lead issue. So you could get all the leads in the world. But if you don't know how to convert those leads, then it's not a marketing issue, touch to your conversion or a sales issue from there. So we've spoken about building a predictable business. The first part of building a predictable business is having a predictable pipeline of leads and clients, which you've spoken through. We highly recommend ads for that and it is just a skill like any other skill in business that you just have to spend time to learn. But there is a second part of building a predictable pipeline that comes down to profitable pricing for stability, so making sure that the amounts that we charge and the way that we build people actually continue to make things feel predictable for us, so we feel safe. So on this topic, why can someone make $50,000 a month and still feel broke or stressed? Because what's the difference between, like, I guess, like talk through revenue profit, all that sort of stuff? Yeah. So like most people who listen to this podcast are in UK, Australia, Canada, USA and you've got this thing called tax as well, which is crazy. So you get to the end of the month, end of the quarter, whatever, and then you get your pass or your vato, whatever it is. And then that just literally drains whatever profit you had left over. Because people aren't equating for that when they're doing their numbers as well. So I think like especially as you're just scaling up, you just, you know, you kind of stoked just to get a client or any clients and then you get 10 clients, 2,800, whatever it is. And you scale up to a 50k a month business and then you never actually look at profitability or pricing or anything like that. And I think that's where this goes wrong is people just don't have a grasp on their numbers or what it takes to be profitable. And this is obviously like the major thing for me. Steph, how do you figure out what to charge based on how many clients you can actually handle with the, like, give us some info on pricing and how you should be pricing things? Yeah. So I guess like, you know, every single person that's listening to this podcast has a completely different pricing strategy. And the thing that blows my mind is that so many people just pick their price out of their ass like they have no structure, no strategy to pricing. They just pick another that sounds good and God forbid if they do angel numbers. And so there's this process that, you know, you really have to go through to understand. And it's so personal like pricing is such a personal game. It's not just what everyone else is paying in the market or what you're charging. Like it's so dependent on what kind of business model you want to run. Like are you doing high ticket one to one consulting? Are you doing one to one fitness coaching? Are you doing a group program? Do you have a low ticket funnel and product like pricing for individually for those things? Obviously going to make a difference. And then additionally to that, you need to price based on your capacity. Like if you are doing one to one and you can only take on 10 clients and you want to make $50,000 a month, then you're going to have to figure out how to make that from 10 clients. And then you're going to have to factor in tax and all the other costs that come with running a company. And so pricing should definitely not be something that is just kind of whipped around and figured out. And like honestly, you can price whatever the heck you want for anything. You just have to pick the right positioning in the market because like we've worked with fitness coaches who charge upwards of $50,000 for services because they work with people who are really rich and they offer really optimized services. And so it literally doesn't matter which business model or which business you want to run. Your pricing is just something that should be structured around you, your lifestyle, your goals, where you want to be and who you want to work with ultimately. Let's talk about payment plans versus upfronts. I'd love to hear your take on it. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, there's two camps to this. This really likes the payment plan or like in coaching terms they call it MRR. So monthly recurring revenue. So essentially you just divvy out the cost of whatever it is over weeks and months, which is great for cash flow and it makes sure you're getting paid at all times. Then the other school of thought is like if you get tons of upfront payments, that's obviously great for cash flow as well because you're getting an upfront payment. So it's quite hard to scale a coaching business on reoccurring revenue because you just not getting typically, you guys are listening to this coach or service based business. You typically not getting that much money cash collected upfront, which means you can't really reinvest in team and ads and systems and that type of stuff. It's very like a bit of a slow grind. So if you were in a hard scale season and you're going to push it and you were ready to spend money on ads and you're ready to do all those things, depends on the type of business you run. But I would be pushing more for upfronts and giving people an incentive to do that. Typically, you know, we give a 20% incentive for someone to pay upfront for like a piff or a painful versus a reoccurring just because we want to reinvest that money back into growing the business and building the company from there. So I hope that answers it. Steph, what's the biggest pricing mistake that people make when they're trying to scale revenue that causes instability? I think the biggest pricing mistake that people make is they just don't price it based on the avatar they're trying to sell it to. So they pick numbers that just feel good or they price based on what other people pricing in the market. And so usually what we see when we work with clients is either either wait over charging because they feel all self inflated or they saw someone else charge that price and they feel like they're worth it or they're well and truly undercharging because they actually don't feel worth it. And they're basically pricing based on how they feel about themselves at any one point. And when you price just based on you and how you feel about your price then I can guarantee you're going to have a really hard time. So once I'm successful what we do is we actually work with our clients kind of in a bit of a backwards model. We focus first on the person that we are trying to sell to the problems that they have. Then we work out an offer that uses your unique skill set to solve that problem. And then we pick a price point that makes sense for that offer for that particular avatar and makes sense to help them scale. And I think that yeah, the number one mistake we see is that they just kind of pick a number out of thin air and usually they attach that worth to the number which makes it even worse. So the third main thing here when building a predictable business that does grow with ease is team. And I know in the podcast a couple weeks ago I did talk about a couple of analogies around teams. There's donkeys, the horses and the camels. But team is the biggest unlock if you can unlock it. It opens up a whole nother kind of issues, especially if you're hiring in like first world country is in terms of like legal tax compliance insurance, all that shit. So I can understand why people are hesitant to hire team. There are many workarounds and we're going to talk about obviously we're probably going to talk about hiring a VA in a second anyway. But team honestly guys is the biggest unlock. Also it's the hardest skill to learn in terms of management and leadership. If you're not a natural born leader or you're not a great manager, you're not a great people personal, you don't deal with conflicts well. Team can be challenging and it can be it can be the great unlock. You know that 89% of coaches earn under $100,000 a year. And I truly truly believe and we actually see that in the successful applications. Right. Like we see so much of it. And I truly believe that the reason that they're kept at that income, the reason that so few coaches actually make it past $100,000 a year is simply because they learn the skill, skill. because there is only so much that you can do on your own. You're going to get exhausted, you're going to get sick, you're going to get burnt out, you're going to start going, maybe it's not worth it, maybe I'll just, I mean, we have had coaches come through a successful, there have been phenomenal coaches, but just didn't have what it takes or not, not even to say they have what it takes, because I think that everyone has what it takes, they didn't have the desire to learn the skill. And I think that whatever story you're running in your head will manifest true. And so if you tell yourself you're not a good leader and we've seen this in multiple times in a size successful, then you're never going to be a good leader, you're never going to try and learn the skills to become a good leader. And we end up seeing some coaches just go on and end up working for other coaches. And that's just breaks my heart because they had everything at their disposal to do it. But now they're going to go earn under six figures, work over someone else and, you know, and it's kind of heartbreaking to see. So let's just get into it then. What's the first hire that they somewhat you make? So, you know, I've spoken about the hiring later a bunch of times, I've actually changed my order on it. So for me, any type of like EA, VA would be typically the first hire for you. You just want to take yourself out of all of the admin stuff, build S.O.P. systems on that. Second to that's delivery, which, you know, we change with sales. So previously I did talk about sales as the second hire, but delivery to help with delivery. Since we've hired our client success team, success was gotten better, the service has gotten better, and it's been easier for us as well. And the results have gotten better. Results for the clients have gotten better as well. And then from there, we've got sales. So this is kind of the level we're at at the moment, which just hired two new sales dudes. Sales has been our Achilles heel for a very long time. And then after that, I'm going to be looking to get some support with marketing, which is the thing I'm in at the moment. So it goes, VA or admin, delivery, sales, marketing. And then from there, you've got like operations and someone to help with running the team. So they'll probably be our next couple of highs after we've got this sales team locked in from there. And it just depends on like really where you're at from a revenue perspective. If you're making five-k at a month, I think you should have a VA in some capacity. And then scale it up from there. You just really want to think about this in terms of like your time is the most valuable asset. So you need to free up your time of all the bullshit that you are actually doing. Yeah. Steph, someone just lost their VA and their whole business fell apart. How would you prevent that? Like what would happen there? What would happen for you? So one thing that we're really big on, look, this has happened to me like full disclosure. This happened to me many times actually. I remember the first time it happened to me. I feel like it always happens at the worst time, right? Anyone who's experienced this will know. But the first time it happened to me, I had a VA that was running pretty much my entire business, which was my events business at the time. And we had taken God forbid we'd taken a holiday. And we were a noose. I remember this. We were in this cute little Airbnb. Why is this happening to us when we take a holiday today? She hit the fan. Yeah, always. Team members will like fuck you. Yes. We'll take it a holiday motherfucker. I'm quitting. I'm quitting. Yeah. Clients would mass walk out of the gym like it was a whole thing anyway. So we were very triggered. It's probably why we never took a lot of holidays for a long time. But this one particularly time we were in Noosa. And I remember, you know, we had I think 12 events on that week in my events business. But I was on holidays, you know, so I had my team and you know, they were doing things that we had this one admin who was kind of like critical to the entire company. And when I say critical, I mean like she did all of the backend admins. I had always team members going out to all these events. But this girl did all of the back ends. So she was doing all the organizing, all the paying at the bills, all the structuring, all the links, all the customer inquiries, all the payments, all everything, right? And she just went offline. And so day one, I'm like, yeah, yes. So day one, I'm freaking the heck out. Like I'm like, fuck is going on like, where is she? She's on day two. I'm like, okay, well, I've got to step in now because like, and so I've taken on someone's 40 hour a week admin job whilst also doing like the CEO job because we're on holiday, but we're like not really on holiday. You know what I mean? Never holiday. Having the worst time of my life on this trip. And the worst part was I didn't know what the fuck she did. Yeah. I didn't have any of the documented. I didn't have any of the processes. I just, and I learned my lesson hard and fast. And so please take it from me. If you hired this person, you get them to document their processes along the way. So she had a foul payments process as an example that like now, our team member is the minute they run the process, they now document it as an SOP. And when we say SOP, we mean they either create the SOP, like no one reads written SOP guys by the way. So just do a video of SOP, but like they document the whole process, they walk them through themselves doing it, they say a bit in a file. Just make sure that when you hire these VA's and they're doing these processes for you that they're documenting them and they're saving them somewhere. That's like at least if shit hits the fan, you can jump in and you can do it. Yeah. All right, let's talk about the big one. Most people hire VA's and they delegate tasks. But that doesn't really delegate the responsibility or the stress of managing the task. Yeah. Talk me through the difference between hiring for tasks, the first delegation. Yeah. Great question, great topic. So I'll give you a look at a work example here. So our VA is very like it's very task oriented. Typically the less you pay someone, the more task oriented, it will be like follow this SOP type system. On the other hand, we just hired a full-time content guy, who's basically going to handle content for us. When hiring a content guy, I've never hired a content guy. I can't build SOP. I don't know what the fuck an SOP is up. So how the hell am I going to build an SOP for something I've never done or I'm not an expert. We're not the media guys. So what do you do in that situation? So we've hired someone great. Fingers crossed, he comes with batteries included and everything works out incredibly. But we had to outsource essentially like the outcome of what we want. And what that looks like for us is we say we want daily short form content and a weekly piece of long form content each. And that was kind of the job description. And then from there, it's like we want growth, but we don't know how much growth because we don't know how much is possible to grow when you give this thing full time. So I guess the job description right now is he's going to do 14 pieces of social media content for us a week, handle it and start to finish posting and everything. And then we're going to do a YouTube each week on our personal accounts. And then we're going to scale it up from there. I guess after a couple of months, we're going to know if we're on the right track, if it's working, and then we can probably systemize and SOP some stuff. But it's very hard to SOP shit if you've never done shit before. Okay. And I think this is what probably were a lot of people come on stuff with it. Like it's all well and good for us to be like, you're a fucking document, you V.A. Shit. But if you've never had a V.A. And you've never, like, what are they going to document? Well, it's totally and the problem with that is though. But then then you're trying to hire someone for five or six dollars an hour. Yeah. To document a process for you. Like this is not a fight. But yeah, but they like, they don't know that well either because they're also not that well trained. And so, you know, we are hiring this person. It's a it's a high six figure role that like, you know, it's a multi six figure role. So it's not five dollars an hour. It's not even 10 dollars an hour. It's not even 40 dollars an hour. It's so much more. And so the intention of paying that much is that you you get someone who truly comes batteries included in the interview process is really extensive. And you know, we made sure that like there's a lot of initiative and you know, that he is really a student of his craft. But if you are truly wanting to take a process and completely outsource it and you don't know how to do it, then you got to hire someone good. And so with that in mind, for someone who's listening to this podcast, what I actually would recommend for someone something like that. Like with this couple of times, a lot of coaches in our program use go high level. It is not that straightforward system to set up. It's a little bit tricky clunky, techy, a lot of integrations, a lot of stuff. If you don't like that stuff, it's going to be a bit of a bitch to set up. And so we recommend for people like you can get a VA off of, you know, upwork or fiber or whatever to set up for you. But they're probably not going to be able to do it exceptionally well because potentially maybe they don't know how. So I typically recommend that people get them set up onshore and then get the person who's setting it up onshore to make SOPs for you so that then you can bring someone into manager long term. And so sometimes if you truly really don't know how to do something, you do have to get an expert in first. Steph, just to wrap this up on the team, how do you know it's time to hire? Like, is there a sign from God? What kind of happens? So I can, how do you know? I think the sign from God is that when you feel, damn, it'd be really nice to have some help with this. Yeah. That's the time to be honest. And most people push it so much further past that point that they get burnt out, they get exhausted and then they go to hire, but now they're just so tired and they can't even be by the training and they're all disillusioned with their business higher away before you need it. Yeah. All right, guys, so if you want some help with your marketing finals, if you want some help with your profitability, if you want some help with building a team, they are all things we do inside successful in our mastermind program. So I'd like to open up the invitation to book a scout session with our team. We'll find out your goals. We will tell you how to grow your business on that call. And then we'll see if we're a good fit from there. But all you guys need to do is go to makemoreprofit.com and then just scroll down to the bottom and do your details in book in a session and we would love to speak with you. That was a great podcast, guys. If you got some value from it, hit the like button on whatever platform you're at or subscribe. Hmm. Guys, life's too short to not have a predictable business. Yep. You need to be able to take holidays. You need to be able to take days off. And I think it's crazy that people delay on running ads completely. So get into it guys.