Hey, badass. So it's time for you to buckle up because we are going into a full on story time about a time that I almost broke my business, like things were going so well. And I made a series of decisions while really doubled down on one strategic decision that started making. Business and life feel really tough and a lot more complex than it needed to be.
My sales started declining. My profit margins started tanking and. It's what I like to call the kind of business lesson that is a million dollar lesson because in avoiding making the same mistakes as I did, you will either be able to make a million dollars a lot sooner or save yourself millions of dollars in wasted time and energy and income sacrifice by avoiding these kinds of decisions that I've had to learn the hard way along the way.
And. The million dollar lesson in a nutshell is that more does not equal more. So having more offers, more products, more ways of working with you, more price points, more choice. We often think that we're giving this massive service to our community of giving them options and making sure that a huge variety of different people are able to enjoy and invest in what we do.
And you're going to learn through my story and, experience of others that this is one of the worst things you can do in your business. And in this episode in particular, I want to tell you why from the perspective of sales psychology, buyer behavior, and what to do instead. So it's going to be very much related to a journey that I've been on with badass careers, but we'll be drawing out lessons along the way that you can absolutely take with you on your very own journey.
But firstly, I'm going to need to give you a little bit of context so you can understand why I thought that more was a good idea, because. I know a lot of people speak about the importance of keeping business simple to scale, and that was 100 percent the wavelength that I was on as well. And yet, I still fell trap to this ideology that more equals more, okay?
When I started Badass Careers, like a lot of service providers, coaches, freelancers, consultants, entrepreneurs, I offered people lots of different ways of working with me. Essentially, they could book me in for one call, three calls, six calls, and we could cover anything careers. Resume, done. Promotion, done.
Career purpose, done. Toxic boss, done. Whatever they wanted, they got, okay? And I will tell you, I have never worked so hard. In business to earn so little every single person had a different separate personalized approach personalized workbooks custom made solutions designed for their particular problem everything was from scratch and so it wasn't just the one hour on the call all the three hours on the three calls no it was a lot more work than that and of course Whatever came up on the calls, I was very hungry to prove that they got value from that.
And so I would go away and do some research and pull some things together again from scratch for that person to make sure that they had their problem solved. And working in this way surprise, even though I was booked out, I made about 15 grand in six months. And that's because when you're working in this way, it's not just the time you spend on the calls, it's everything around it too.
So it's a lot of work and yet you're charging these transactional price points of this hourly rate kind of model. Because if it's a one hour call, three hours worth of calls, six hours worth of calls, people tend to calculate that based on hourly rate versus the promise of a big result or a transformation that you can offer them in a signature program.
So it was. Such hard work for the return on investment. It really wasn't it. And luckily at the time I had other revenue streams like my personal YouTube channel, not even French. I was consulting for L'Oreal still because obviously I could not live off that. It just wasn't going to be a sustainable, lucrative business model.
I had the smarts and I had invested by this time and education, coaching, business strategy to realize that what I needed to do was launch one signature offer and get really clear on one way of working with me in a way that provided a very specific result, a very specific transformation.
And it was the roadmap every client would follow. They'd come to me at their point A and I'd get them to point B. That's what they wanted from me. That's what I was able to offer. And for those clients that didn't need that service or, were at a completely different starting point they just weren't my ideal client.
Okay. And a lot of scarcity comes up when you narrow down on just one thing because you think I'm losing out on business. I'm losing out on the clients that I can help. But what happens is your messaging, your content, your community gets so strong, so aligned that you end up making. far more money than ever.
So that's what happened. I ended up creating the career glow up and I launched my signature offer and surprise, surprise. I passed a 100 K mark in my business in the four months that followed that period of six months where I made 15 grand. So I knew that clarity led to profitability. And yet, despite learning that lesson, at some point, my offer was humming.
It was making hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I decided that I had the space and time and energy to cater to different needs and different budgets. And I wanted to give people more ways of working with me. I also wanted to diversify my office suite to explore more passive income products. So more so things like self study courses where the client delivery side of things was very minimal.
If not, So no coaching calls and community support, but really maybe some light touch Q and a, or, resume review or something like that, but I'm not on calls and there's nothing wrong with wanting to explore different types of products and ways of working. And it was actually a pretty good idea.
So I created the course badass, your resume, Which was a self study course all about resumes and cover letters, and you could upgrade VIP option. And I would review your resume and cover letter for you, but you had to have completed the course. So in theory, the review was pretty light. Now, of course, compared to the career glow up, it was at a much lower price point as well.
And people could get a result in a faster timeframe. Because it was for the people who already knew what they wanted. The career glow up was very much like clarity, branding, landing. So point A to point B was figure out what you truly want out of your career. Get that clarity, find your career purpose, really understand where you want to go.
That's where we started. Then you brand yourself, resume, cover letter, LinkedIn, then we land the role. Okay. We execute and we make that career defining move happen for you. Badass your resume was for those people that were like, you know what? I already know what I want. I just want to land the job and I'm pretty good at interviews.
I'm pretty good. Once I get my foot in the door, I just need to be generating those interviews. I need to be able to sell myself on paper. So it absolutely served a purpose. And these two offers together allowed me to make my first million dollars in business after just 2. 5 years. Which was obviously an incredible milestone.
Mostly that revenue came from the career glow up, but the compliment of having badass your resume and being able to launch that and make that base level income without much work on my side, it felt pretty sweet as well. So logically I thought to myself why stop there? Why stop there? When I have learned how to package up my knowledge into a self study course that gets amazing results and build out the funnel that's going to generate those sales for me, those evergreen sales in my sleep, why stop there?
I go forth and I build out my knowledge. A LinkedIn course with LinkedIn profile reviews. I build out an interview course. I build out a salary negotiation course. I build out a career clarity course. I offer private coaching with an career coach that I hired. I gave people. I gave people variety and I can tell you something had never, ever been so hard for me to make sales.
My audience was bigger than ever. I had far more people in my community and my audience than I had ever had before. In fact, my audience tripled throughout this time of all of this product and offer development. But there were less and less people buying. And don't even get me started on the proportion of people in my audience that were buying.
Everything became slower, harder, watered down, and it became quite clear that the only reason I was still making good money, solid money, is because of the internet. Is because of the sheer audience size and because I was getting so scrappy, innovative, strategic, trying to figure out how our team could do more, produce more with the same hours in the week just to make it work.
But I can tell you, I know of a lot of entrepreneurs making far more money than I was at that point with much smaller audiences because they kept it simple, because simple sells. And really this complexity almost broke my business. Because when sales start declining and your team expenses and software expenses stay the same or keep rising, guess what's happening to your profit?
So let me share with you the five reasons why this happened and why it happens, not just to my business, but to many different types of businesses and entrepreneurs out there who try to offer more and end up receiving less. And then I'll walk you through based on these lessons, what I've done to turn things around.
So the first reason why more is not more. Is that too many offers leads to your messaging getting watered down to create a strong sense of community, to attract an ideal buyers, to be able to warm them up and educate them and allow them to see why your offer is going to be the solution to the problems that they're currently facing, you need strong messaging.
Now, when. I just had the career glow up. The messaging was simple. It was a transformative program, career coaching program that covered clarity, branding, and landing. It's an A to Z transformation. So I knew my person's starting point. I knew that this was a person who wanted more from their career. They were someone who cared about career purpose.
They wanted their career to mean something. And they were stuck in a situation right now where either they felt stagnant, underemployed, maybe even a bit miserable at work. Either way, they were not fulfilling their potential. And they were seeking a career upgrade. They wanted a transformation, they wanted to make a career defining move.
And that could have been to a new profession. A new industry, a new country, it could go as big as they wanted it, but they wanted a career glow up. And because my messaging was speaking so clearly to that person and all around the transformation that I was an expert in providing. I stood out and the community resonated with what I was saying.
They could see themselves in my content. They felt like I was reading their mind, like I was in their head and they could see themselves in the other people within my community too, which made them feel like they were part of a movement, part of a club, part of a corner of the internet that was disrupting the status quo around careers, rejecting the notion that they had to hate what they do for work.
And actually wanted to love their work and have really exciting, fulfilling careers. So to make sales, essentially, you need to attract people in, you need to nurture them, and you need to communicate with them on how they can work with you. So you can see when I had the career glow up. It was pretty simple.
I'd create relevant content for one specific audience. They would do my free mini course, find my why, which explored a career purpose and allowed them to get a sense for my expertise and my methodology and what it was like to work with me. So that was nurturing them. And then they could apply to work with me or sign up directly to the career glow up whenever I launched the program.
Now when I introduced Badass Your Resume, it was a little bit of a step away from my core messaging in that I needed to tweak the messaging whenever I spoke about resumes or cover letters. And I was trying to attract leads for Badass Your Resume, the course in particular, to really speak to the person that already knew what they wanted.
They wanted a result quickly. They wanted to change jobs quickly. They just needed help on the self marketing side of things, on describing who they were and what made them awesome and their accomplishments on paper. So this was very much a subset of my audience. It wasn't my main audience, and I was already having to tweak that messaging so that it worked for a chunk of people within my community.
Now, the people who were more so career glow up profiles, they wouldn't resonate with that messaging as, as much because they don't even know what they want yet. They haven't figured it out. They haven't found their purpose. They don't know Where they're going next. They know that they want change, but they don't know what that looks like.
Already, they're less likely to get into that kind of content, engage with that kind of content. And vice versa. The people who just want a resume, just want a cover letter, they're not going to be into my content around mindset shifts and career purpose and all of that deep chat. Now imagine having five different courses with five different lead magnets or ways of nurturing these people, masterclasses, whatever it is that I needed to drive traffic to, because you get people consuming your lead magnets.
You increase that sense of know and trust, and that's when you usually pitch your offer or your program so they know how to work with you. I wanted people into my funnels, but I had five different funnels now because I had five different programs, five different courses. And on top of that, I was still offering the career glow up the full A to Z experience plus private coaching.
So I needed to create content about career clarity, resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn, job searching, networking, interviewing, And salary negotiation and the benefits of private coaching, et cetera, et cetera. And I started speaking to all different kinds of people at different stages with different needs.
They were all interested obviously in making a career move. That was the only thing linking them is that they might want a new job right now. Fundamentally, they're actually quite different profiles at different stages and different phases. If you're on Instagram and you find me through a salary negotiation script and you're like, Oh, this career coach really knows her stuff.
I'm currently at the interview phase. I'm going to need to negotiate my salary. She's really good at the salary negotiation side of things. This will be really handy and useful for me right now. I'm going to follow along. And then the next few posts were about mindset. We're about career purpose. How uninteresting would that be?
It's not what that person needs to hear right now, or if they're already interviewing and getting lots of interviews, how irrelevant would the resume content be? Their resume is already fine. It's already doing the work for them, right? And so as you can imagine, trying to cater for all of these different people at different stages on their journey with different messaging and different pain points and different things that they could relate to and then others couldn't relate to, my engagement really started to tank and it's still less than ideal on Badass Careers.
Because there's such diversity in that community. There's people who came to the community for a multitude of different reasons. And that means that some content pieces really resonate and others, not at all. I was actually developing this confidence course at the time. So confidence at work, boundaries at work, avoiding burnout, all that kind of stuff, and I ended up scrapping it.
Because I knew that if I developed that course fully and launched it, it would add another layer of complexity to the whole system. The big lesson here is that strong, spicy, specific messaging for a specific person who wants a specific result, a specific methodology, a way of getting there. Will absolutely lead to stronger communities, more engagement and more sales with far fewer followers.
You need less audience members because your offer is the obvious solution for them. And they're all there for the same reason. So that's the first reason that more doesn't equal more. Because it waters down your messaging. The second reason surprise, you're confusing your customers. I remember feeling a little bit funny when I actually needed to create an explainer video for my website on how to work with us.
And at the time it was very clear to me, but the fact that I had to create this video to explain it should have been a little bit of a hint, nudge, nudge that it's maybe a little bit too much information to take in for my potential clients. So for me, it was quite clear. It was like, I've got a course on career clarity and vision, so you start there if you don't know what you want.
If you do know what you want, but you need to market yourself and start landing interviews, you do Badass Your Brand, or buy the resume course separately, or buy the LinkedIn course separately. You do some branding courses. If that was all good, and you wanted to You know, master your interviews and really turn those interviews into job offers.
You could do bad ass your interview. If you wanted to negotiate your salary or negotiate your end of year pay raise or gun for a promotion, if it was anything to do with increasing earning potential and money, you do bad ass your salary. And if you just wanted the entire offer suite, every course we have at a discounted rate, plus get coaching support on your journey, you could do the career glow up.
Oh, but in addition to that, with every course, for example, the interview course, you could get a mock interview upgrade. Or with the salary negotiation course, you could get a mock salary negotiation conversation, or with the branding course, you could get reviews. So you could access some support via the courses if you don't want to do the full glow up.
And maybe if you want to do like badass, your brand and badass, your interview together, there's a discount and you get some reviews and you get your mock interview, but you don't get any other coaching. So if you wanted to upgrade on your coaching support, you could get one to one private coaching with my head career coach.
Looking back, I'm like, okay, I understand what's happening here. And the lesson here is that a confused mind won't buy a confused mind. That's unsure on, okay, how do I know exactly where I'm at? How do I know which program is for me? How do I know which option? Is needed. Do I need to go all in?
Should I just get started with a more accessible option and see how I go? Oh, that's not necessarily giving me the results that I wanted because it's not the right needs assessment for me. But where do I go from here? If you're confusing people, they won't buy. And yet I had a very clear A to Z in my office suite.
It really, for me, it made sense. You've got clarity, branding, landing. It's basically the career glow up deconstructed made accessible for the people who want lower price points for the people who want to do a self study. And you can still do the full career glow up as well, in case you want to, but it was cannibalizing my office suite.
Because people were hesitant to go all in on the career glow up. I had never had, now the career glow up was my revenue maker and I had never had signups decline so rapidly when people had cheaper, lower or smaller transformation options available to them. It's like they could avoid going all in.
They could avoid taking the risk quote unquote by starting small. And so I had less career glow up of signing up than. Ever in the history of badass careers, despite a much larger audience. And ultimately it was just too confusing for people. And the third reason that more is not more is that ultimately when you work in this way and you're confusing people, you're actually just warming people up to work with your competitors.
Because I like to pride myself on putting out some of the best careers content in the world on badass careers. I go deep. I make people problem aware. I illustrate the gap between where they are today and where they want to go. I'm very good at helping people to understand. I see them. I have a lot of empathy for them and I know where they need to go.
But because I was creating this content on so many different topics, I became the generalist and that meant that I wasn't the expert. And so people might follow me for example, my salary negotiation tips and they enjoy my other content and I help them to become more confident and shift their mindset and realize that they're made for more and realize that they have a lot more earning potential in them.
But then they come across an account and that career coach is the salary negotiation girl and everything that they create and everything they speak about is win after win around salary money. And what's happening is that there's a massive risk that I warm them up and they appreciate me.
But ultimately when it comes to buying, when it comes to purchasing, they want to go and work with the expert. They want to have their specific problem solved by the go to person in that space. So more messaging, more content, more topics may give you the illusion of appealing to more people, but being liked by many.
Will never, ever be as profitable as being loved by some specific people. You'd rather be loved by fewer people, your raving fans, the people who were there with that sense of community and on the mission with you, then have a lot of people who find your account generally useful. The fourth reason that more will never equal more is that developing another offer, yet another offer, can absolutely be an excuse to procrastinate or not solve the real issues happening in your business.
Why? Because developing new offers is fun. Developing courses is fun. Coming up with names and launching something is fun. And if your business is declining, your sales are declining, cool. Let's try this. Let's freshen it up. If your sales are coming on too easy, like they were for me, boring, next challenge, what else can I do?
If you don't have enough buyers in your community instead of loving on the people you already have and learning the skills of nurture and relationship building and trust building I'll just create more ways of working with me. Which will make me have more buyers, which we know is not true, right?
And the reality is one good offer can be scaled to the millions. And I believe that in any niche, any industry, any price point, one strong good offer can absolutely be scaled to the millions alone if you stick at it. And that's why at Badass Empires we focus on scale. One offer for one ideal client avatar with one core message.
You're selling one result, one transformation and that, that mastery of entrepreneurship. It's prove to me that you have the niche, you have the messaging, you have the brand positioning, you have the entrepreneurial mindset and the scrappiness and the resourcefulness to figure it out, to meet this challenge and problem solve.
so much for joining us. And get that course, that program, that offer, get it to multiple six figures. Prove to me that you have what it takes to rewarm your audience, to re engage your audience, to nurture people, to allow that know and trust to flow in. Prove to me that you can fix it. Prove to me that you can scale that offer, which is proven to work, up to the multiple six figures.
It doesn't mean you can't iterate within that offer. It doesn't mean that you can't start it out as a private offer, private coaching and go to group coaching, for example. But I want the messaging and I want the positioning of your brand and the positioning of this offer. Offer in relation to audience to grow and evolve.
Only then will I know that you have the level of entrepreneurial mastery to take the complexity of adding another offer. And even then I'll be challenging you on why you want to do it. And the other offer needs to have a very unique and clear place within your value letter. Okay. So for example, if you're a business coach, And you have your main offer, your signature offer, which is a group coaching program for entrepreneurs making zero to 20k per month.
And you have people graduating from that program or more sophisticated entrepreneurs who are making easily 20 to 50k plus per month and they need somewhere to go and they're asking you to create something for them. Then yeah, okay, maybe you can develop a next tier offer, perhaps a mastermind or private coaching or whatever that looks like for those people, but it cannot cannibalize the other.
It has to have a very separate reason to exist. Because if you can't problem solve to the point of scaling one offer within that simplicity and that clarity to the multiple six figures, you're not ready and it would be doing your audience and your business into service to add something new into the mix.
Okay. Do not use this as a tool to procrastinate. And the fifth reason that more does not equal more offers does not equal more sales is that you actually risk cheapening your brand. And this is because when you start out doing your business, your online service based business, the Badass Empire's way, we recommend that mid to high ticket price point for people starting out with smaller audiences, because even if you're only landing four or five clients per month at a 2, 000 package, You can still achieve your first 100, 000 in the first year of business without needing a massive following.
You don't need a huge following, a huge audience to sign four or five people per month, right? But the thing is obviously that there's higher price point offers come with more involvement, more support, more accountability, whether that's calls, whether that's done for you, done with you. Developing services for that person, whatever it is, it comes with much more time involvement and client delivery on your side.
Okay. So you start to think to yourself, Hey why don't I add some passive income in here or ways to work with me for the people who can't afford me, or just things that people can buy that they'll find useful, but I don't have to do anything. And so people create little templates or they create, that 97 ebook or whatever it is.
And the fact is these cheaper offers may cannibalize your signature offer or reduce your price anchoring on the market. Because if you've always been an elevated price point, people will see you as an elevated price point. If it's 5, 000 to coach with you, but now you're selling 27 eBooks and 197 courses, what might happen is because these are lower price points and there isn't that follow up or that transformation or that, that big shift and accountability that comes from a dialogue that comes from support, that comes from coaching, that comes from accountability.
Usually people get a taster of the results and they will get results, but there'll be smaller results, more minimal results, right? Teaching people how to build their own resume is a very different result to helping people design and execute a dream career defining move. Very different, but that will be people's taster of you.
So they may not get the genuine taster of how transformational working with you can truly be, and therefore they can lose trust in your larger program. And honestly, sometimes people just, they don't know what they don't know. And so if they buy my 37 resume template, They may not actually realize that the template in and of itself isn't going to make the difference.
If they haven't done the deep dive self awareness leadership development, personal branding work that you'd get within the badass, your brand course. So they think that what they need is a prettier looking resume, a fancier resume, and that sort of distracts them and provides what they think should be a solution to their problem when actually.
They really do need to go deeper in and do the work most of the time if they want to get the results that they're truly craving so it can really do your business a disservice, but it can also do people a disservice by giving them the cheaper option and that discrepancy. Between, 37 to get her resume template or 3, 000 to work with her in the career glow up, I think I know which one I'm choosing.
It makes your higher level price point seem Really outlandish and really sky high compared to other cheaper things that you sell within your ecosystem as well. And I can tell you all of these factors coming together can absolutely impact your core revenue maker, which is usually your higher ticket signature offer program.
So what happened with badass careers is that essentially I knew that I was going to be building and launching badass empires. I knew that was where my private coaching energy and my coaching energy in general was going. And so I actually made the decision to adapt badass careers entirely to becoming a self study course business.
We removed the career glow up from the office suite. We removed private coaching and we tidied up our courses. For example, we put all of the personal branding things, so resumes, cover letters, and LinkedIn into one personal branding course. So now we have four courses, career clarity, personal branding, interviews, negotiation.
And it means that the cheaper lower ticket self study courses aren't cannibalizing our coaching, our career glow up our signature offer. But I only decided to do this because my audience was so large that I knew I could still make really decent revenue from self study courses alone, because you need thousands and thousands of eyeballs on your funnels to make sustainable sales.
When you only selling lower ticket items. And it was because I knew that revenue wise that signature offer income was going to be replaced by Badass Empires, both private coaching and group coaching program. So because we had the history, we had the audience, we had the funnels, we had the know how.
Badass careers sales are stable. They're really healthy, especially for an evergreen business with almost no backend client support and delivery. Things are selling on autopilot pretty predictably, very consistently, and I don't have to do a lot of client support and follow up work. Okay. But it's because we had four years in the making to get to that point.
But 100%, if I had just doubled down on the career glow up. I know that badass careers could easily be hitting like three million dollars a year with the career glow up. It was a scalable offer. It was designed to take more and more students. I had support coaches in the mix. At some point I had two separate coaches supporting me.
We could have added more calls like. We absolutely could have scaled career glow up to multiple six figures per year if I had stayed focused. So it's not a regret. It's not a bad thing. I tweaked, I shifted. I'm really happy with where I am now with my humming evergreen business, which is bringing in a consistent, healthy revenue.
And then I've got my very profitable lucrative playground over at Badass Empires where I am following my purpose and my direction in a way that feels so aligned and so good. And so I'm really happy with how things turned out. But it was not going in a direction that was leading to success. It was complex for myself, the team, my audience, my clients, and that ultimately will always affect your bottom line.
So the key takeaway from all of this, learn from me, don't repeat my mistakes, become the master of one. Okay. Scale one offer to multiple six figures before even thinking about diversifying. And that one offer should be for a specific result for a specific person. And it be incredibly clear. If someone in front of you is an ideal client for that specific journey or not.
Okay. No custom programs. No. Oh yeah, but I could help them too, or I'll develop something over here for them to focus so that when, and if you do add another offer, it's going to be so clear, so simple and make so much sense. Based on what your audience is consistently telling you that they need and demanding from you that the second offer is going to sell.
And it's going to sell on top of your signature offer, your original signature offer and compliment it. It's not going to take Anything away from it as always badass. I love hearing from you. So flick me a message over on Instagram. Let me know if these behind the scenes million dollar lesson episodes are resonating with you are interesting for you because I've got a lot more where that came from.
And as always, Keep the momentum up, stay badass, and keep building that empire of yours. It is so worth it. It is absolutely life changing when you do it right. And with all that said and done, I will see you in the next episode. We'll speak soon. Bye!
