[00:00:44] Choosing Your Business Model
Hey, badass, let's talk about your best style or business model. When it comes to entrepreneurship, is it a better fit for you to become a consultant, to become a coach, to become a course creator, to sell digital products or all of these things?
And what's best for you, for business, for sales, for results, for, your clients and what they're able to achieve in life. Let's go through the different options and where they are best suited. I would say on the journey of entrepreneurship because at any one time, you can be all of these things at once.
And you'll probably end up eventually as an entrepreneur, a personal brand expertise-based entrepreneur. You probably will end up having done all of these or doing all of them at once in some kind of capacity. you can definitely imagine a successful coach who has coaching clients, sells online courses, and sells low-ticket digital products.
As a consultant for companies and gives workshops or keynote speeches, you get the point, right?
[00:01:52] The Importance of Mastering One Skill
At some point it's not one or the other, it's all of them, but the badass empire's philosophy that I will stand by 110 per cent always is that we start with one and we scale it to at least a hundred thousand dollars in revenue so that we can be sure that your entrepreneurship skill set is there.
Niche, messaging, offer design, audience growth, funnels, sales, marketing. I want to make sure that you have mastered the skillset before adding in complexity to your business. I see way too many beginners. Developing yet another PDF, yet another freebie, yet another course, yet another offer. And it's not working and it's getting chaotic and it won't work because the entrepreneurship is lacking right behind the scenes because you haven't figured out your system.
I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but the point is we start with one and we scale it and we get it working really well for us. So that we can have the capacity to receive more complexity, more messaging, more sales funnels, and more ways of working with us and our system. So where are you going to start?
What are you going to start with now?
[00:03:11] The Reality of Entrepreneurship
I always get a little bit nervous in episodes like this, because I know that I am going to tell you things today that you may not want to hear. There's definitely going to be some tough love. There's definitely going to be some reality checks in this episode because I will stand by giving you the unsexy truth of entrepreneurship so that you can have that really incredible life on the other side.
Where I'm sitting today, I am working from home, part-time, spending loads of time with my Beautiful baby girl, living between New Zealand and France, mortgage-free on my home. I know you see me five years ahead, and I want to say it is worth it, it is so sweet, and it is so incredible on the other side.
However, the truth is, you can't just skip forward to this place right now. You grow into it. You get here. Via a commitment to a particular way of working and a particular way of setting yourself up and upskilling over time so that you can use that skill set to get here. This is a really important context for the decision of, do I become a consultant.
Do I become a coach? Do I become a course creator? Do I create cheap digital products? Because a lot of people make this decision for all the wrong reasons. A lot of people want to skip ahead. To the quote-unquote passive course where They create the course once and they sell it over and over again, and they don't have to see anyone work with anyone or interact essentially with their clients.
And that's where they want to get to because it seems more convenient, right? They don't have to hop onto calls and anything like that. They don't have to, have actual coaching conversations with people. And it also allows them, let's be honest, to avoid responsibility. If their course doesn't work, if people are disappointed with it, they don't have to show up to a call and face.
A human being and help to get them results. They can imagine a course that might get results, put it together, sell it to people and almost walk away from that responsibility. If it's not done right and way too many people in the online space are doing this and people are starting to cotton onto it and that.
They will invest in courses and they won't work. They'll invest in courses and be like, Oh, okay, that's not really exciting. That's not very different to the tips they just give on their social media for free. So trying to jump ahead to that place for all the wrong reasons is not going to be sustainable.
It's not going to work and you will get found out eventually. And the best thing you can do for a sustainable business, that's going to stay profitable and be really exciting and get you to where you want to go is you want to develop something that sells and it sells really well. And we're going to talk about that.
Okay. In terms of conversion rates, in terms of cash flow, and it gets people results because that's when things start working for you on double time because It's not just your marketing getting new clients, but it's your clients getting new clients. They're recommending you to friends, family members, you name it.
So let's break it down because you can have it all and you can get there, but there is an order to it and there's a way of working that's going to get you there in integrity and also with a lot more profit and a lot more predictability and sales coming into your business as well.
[00:06:46] Building a Personal Brand Business
Zoom out for a moment.
Let's break the business model down before we dive into the details. So we are building personal brand base because it's based on who you are as a person. And it's you who's showing up in terms of your content creation as the educator is the expert expertise or knowledge-based online businesses. And we can break that down at the simplest level into three steps.
Components. Firstly, you need to figure out how you can use your expertise or skills or knowledge or a collection of all of those things to help a specific type of person to achieve a specific result. And this can be, and often is, simply your life experience. Step two is you build an online community where you can be of immense value to those people for free.
You educate them, you inspire them, you upskill them, you give them mindset shifts, you give them micro wins. You are helping people on your mission on this purposeful and profitable mission. You do a huge chunk of that work for free. And the third component to that is how we make money. You design and sell a VIP product or service to the most motivated subset of your community who want to go deeper and work with you directly to get results even faster.
And in a personalized and profound way. So our question today is, what does that product or service look like? What's best to get started with? I currently in badass careers land have had experience selling everything from private coaching, group coaching, course creation, low ticket, mid ticket course creation, and digital products.
I'm currently selling things like resume and cover letter bundles for 37 bucks. Okay. I've done consulting work through badass careers for Fortune 500 companies. I've done it all. So let's break down the options. Firstly, in terms of sales, what is going to make you the most amount of money the fastest?
And I guess within this conversation, we'll talk a little bit about simplicity as well. Now, before I get into the detail of talking about money and sales. There's a concept that I'm going to need you to understand at least from a very simple surface-level perspective. And when I share this with you, you're probably going to be like, that doesn't seem real.
That seems really fake. It seems really strange. It doesn't make logical sense. And I thought the exact same thing until I experienced it over and over and over again in the last five years of business selling everything you can possibly imagine. And launching in every single different way.
I've done live launching. I've done evergreen sales and evergreen funnels. I've done masterclasses. I've done challenges. I've done everything. And the concept or the principle I need you to understand is this.
[00:09:52] Understanding Conversion Rates
There are things called conversion rates in marketing. A conversion rate is of every 100 people who see a product.
Your product, see your offer. How many of those people will say, yes, I'm in sign me up. I'm going to purchase that offer. So for example, if you are running a live masterclass and you've done a lot of, seeding, a lot of educating, a lot of hints, a lot of upskilling, and a lot of groundwork through your content, you get people to join this live event where you run an hour-long masterclass or the Q and a.
And at the end of that, you pitch your course, you pitch your offer, whatever it is, a conversion rate is okay for the 100 people who are with you live on that masterclass, maybe five are going to buy. What's crazy is that in the marketing world, these conversion rates are really quite stable. So if you're doing everything really well, like best practice, top tier.
There is a specific conversion rate for live launching. There's a specific conversion rate for evergreen funnels where it's just automated and people are consuming the masterclass in their spare time. They're not with you live. It's just the replay. Essentially there are conversion rates for sales pages.
There are conversion rates and they are so stable and that might not be so surprising to you yet. What is surprising is that time and time again, and this is true. You just have to believe me. I could show you the analytics behind my business. And those are friends and peers in the industry as well.
What's crazy is that whether your product Is 20 or 2,000. Those conversion rates stay the same, pretty much up to about 3, 000. That's when things start to change. What that means is that the amount of effort, marketing, the skill set in terms of that content creation, that visibility, that traffic, the numbers, that's the same whether you're selling something that's 20, 200, 2,000.
So what I mean by that is if you have a hundred eyeballs on your offer and your conversion rate is 5%, five people will buy your offer at 200. They could still have five people on the offer, even if it was 2000. This is a really important concept to integrate because what it means is that to make your monthly revenue goals, just you want to make 10, 000 per month.
You are going to have to work so much harder and bust ass in terms of content, in terms of marketing, in terms of numbers, to hit that number with a cheaper product. So if you have a 200 course, it's going to be 10 times the effort or numbers that you need to make the same money selling your 2, 000
Dollar coaching program. So over at badass careers, I can make now like 20 to 40 K per month on Evergreen. I sell self-study online courses where I'm not involved. So you could argue, wow, that's pretty passive, right? I do my marketing. I get to wake up to course sales every day. I have no client work on that side of things.
They just sell and I've created these courses once and they sell over and over again on Evergreen. It's awesome. It's great. It's such a cool place to get to in business. On top of that, we run specific marketing campaigns to get those numbers up, to get my sales up, but evergreen funnels, 20 to 40 K per month, are totally consistent and have been consistent and predictable for the past three years, just steadily growing over time.
However, my audience size on Instagram for badass careers. Is almost 200, 000 people. I also have almost 30, 000 subscribers on YouTube. I've got a really healthy email list. So I have the visibility, the numbers, and the audience size to support that business model. I could never make anywhere near that kind of money with a much smaller audience, not with that model, not with it being hands-off evergreen.
It's not high touch. They don't get to work with you. And I guess that's why people will make the decisions that they make. You'd think that people are always after the thing that's cheaper, but actually what helps with the conversion rates for coaching is. VIP access, personalized advice, and working with a real human.
So I suppose it's not that wild after all, if you think about it, cause it's not just about the price, is it? When you're looking for a solution to your problem. Now to put these 20 to 40K evergreen months with core sales into perspective. Because I'm getting hundreds of thousands of views across my videos and reels over on Badass Careers to achieve that.
Hundreds of thousands of content views. Thousands of people coming into my evergreen marketing funnels. I need big numbers to hit that. However, I was actually making 20 to 40k months already. About, a year, and 18 months into my business, thanks to coaching because coaching is a much higher price point.
And so with private coaching or group coaching, you can hit really big numbers with a much smaller audience size. So if you're starting out and your audience is less than 10, 000 followers, 20, 000 followers, and you want to be making amazing money, You're much better off sticking to coaching, sticking to a higher price point.
When I launched the career glow-up first, I did it as a private coaching model, and then I quickly moved to a group coaching model. So that's where you have several people on the coaching calls. So instead of working with 15 people, one to one and doing 15 calls per week, I would do say two calls for different time zones per week.
People were welcome to join those calls with me as a group because I had also simultaneously developed all of these course materials in the background that they could get through in their own time, which provided this nice base, this cohesive base of education before people joined me on the call.
So this was in my group coaching era. I was easily making my 20 to 40 K months plus launches of a hundred grand, 150 grand. Like I had some incredible monthly revenue goals, just absolutely smashed. And my audience size was like, I'm talking about the period of my business where it was like, I don't know, 10, 000 followers on Instagram up to maybe 30 a year later.
So, we're not talking about a huge audience size to be bringing in half a million plus in revenue. And yet again, it's because the conversion rates hold. In such a stable way, if you have less eyeballs and less traffic on your offer it better be a high price point. If you want to be able to create those bigger monthly revenue numbers.
[00:17:36] Sales Strategies for Different Business Models
So looking at your different options from a sales standpoint, Being a consultant and charging out day rates or hourly rates for me, that's an easy way to get started in terms of pitching your services to businesses and to corporates. You could also do it to individuals as well, but for me, it's often, not requiring a huge audience or a huge amount of social marketing effort because you can do that sort of B2B model.
Be working directly with corporates or governments or whatever, that already have budgets for that kind of work behind the scenes. However, you're going to cap out very quickly. You only have so many hours in a day and you only have so many days in a week. And instead of just having one boss and corporate, you have lots of bosses in the form of your clients.
Okay. So that's a model that I don't like anyone to stay in. Super long-term coaching, however, really awesome because it's scalable. Yes. You can often start out in private coaching and I highly recommend that because when you don't have a lot of followers You are able to sell a premium product because it's so hands-on and so personalized and yes It takes more of your time and energy But so it should to be honest because you're working with human beings and you need to know That what you're doing does get results And so coaching's wonderful because it's a higher price point.
You need far fewer people. And then once that methodology starts to click into place and you start seeing those themes and patterns and questions that come up over and over again, you get to turn it into a group program because you can handle as a coach, you can hold space for, and have the answers for an array of different people going through your methodology.
So it's super scalable. And it's a great way to start moving away from, the problems of one-to-one coaching, which are that your calendar will be full of calls to only having one call per week, potentially, or one call every two weeks. However, the model of your program works and being able to coach everyone and do Q and a sessions with everyone at once.
So it's a really fantastic option. Like I've never made sales. I would say so easily because none of it's easy as such, but the sweet spot of huge revenue sales, massive impact, me getting to work with people and serve my clients and ensure that I'm with them getting results and that accountability and, that's, that was such a sweet spot when the career glow up was in its prime as its group coaching program.
Now, of course, there's obviously a massive advantage. You create them once and you get to sell them over and over again. However, you absolutely need the numbers, big numbers, and unless you have a huge audience, your only other option really is to pay for ads. And is it really worth it? Earning 10 K a month.
If you are still busting ass creating content all the time, plus losing six grand a month in ads and working with an ads manager I don't know, it's far less attractive to me. And then you've got digital products and this would just push that concept further to the extreme. The traffic you need. I only just introduced 37 products for the very, very first time in Badass Careers this year. Because the audience size and the traffic you need for them to be worth it and actually make sales, it's huge. That's the sales perspective. What about working in integrity and actually getting people results?
What about that responsibility side of things? Client results, client success, what's working?
[00:21:16] The Value of Coaching
This is why I would always recommend my clients if they haven't been already doing it extensively as part of their day job, or they aren't already a one-to-one service provider or coach of some kind, I would highly recommend starting with private coaching.
Even if your end game is courses, that's totally fine. Once you get your audience up, you're like, once I get my audience up, I'm definitely going to go for the course model. That's fine. That's exactly what I'm doing over at badass careers. Usually you, but my courses. Wouldn't work if I hadn't been a coach, I started out beta coaching for free, then for cheap, then doing private coaching.
And I worked with people all over the world, all different kinds of personality types, all different kinds of confidence blockers, mindset blockers. And I worked with them until a. Capacity-wise, I couldn't take it anymore. Like I was, the demand was just not possible. I could, I was losing money because I couldn't fit any clients in.
And yet the demand was there because my audience size had grown significantly over time. And B, I was confident in the results I was getting. I was there. I had rolled up my sleeves and I was in the trenches with my clients, helping them get results. I poured so much into those coaching engagements. I was helping them to write their resumes.
I was helping them to overhaul their LinkedIn profiles. If they weren't confident with the graphic design, and I'm not saying you should do this is not something you should do. But I was helping them design their LinkedIn banners. Like I was. In it and I was helping them to get results. I was really beside them and.
That caused not only this massive sense of like validation and relief that my methodology worked and that I could help them to get results and then eventually empower them so that they were able to keep rinsing and repeating what they had learned with me and get those results themselves, but it also boosted my confidence.
I knew that you could throw all different kinds of people at me. They were still my ideal clients, but pretty much whatever came my way, I could make it work. And we were going to make moves together. And that created the capacity For me to then be able to handle group coaching because when you are the coach and you've got 10 people on that call, looking at you and asking you questions in a rapid-fire format, you have a significant degree of expertise and competency to be able to hold that space and to be able to facilitate that conversation.
And yes, you absolutely get to scale your impact and you're like, amazing. I get to help 10 people at once instead of one person like this in this one-hour slot. I could have helped one person and now I get to help 10, but you need to be able to handle that and take that to a certain degree. So again, a lot of people want to skip ahead.
They want to become the group coach straight away because they don't want to be on calls, If this thing takes off and you have 10, 15, 20 people on that call looking at you, like at some point I had 80 people in the career glow up at once and I had to hire support coaches, I had two other coaches working with me, when you have that many people looking to you for the questions and the answers, are you confident in that?
Are you ready for that? And it's okay if it's not yet because 90 per cent of you probably aren't. Like we've got to start out as beginners, as coaches who are confident in our methodology that we can get results from that group coaching space.
[00:25:10] Scaling Your Business
Essentially what we built out. Is a course as a baseline. So you had all the course materials and modules and the students were completing the course materials.
And then started hopping on the calls for a Q and a. And so it was super easy because I knew that all of the questions and answers would be pertaining to the materials that I developed in the course. Before that, when you're running it as a kind of live group coaching program if you haven't built much out yet, it's a little bit scarier.
Cause you're like, okay, basically anything pertaining to careers could come up now, more or less you're able as the coach to say that's out of scope, or I don't know, there's no shame in that and go and help them figure out the answer. However, you get to a point with your group coaching where you're just like, It's the same questions over and over again.
This is so easy. And when you get that feeling, you're like, okay what if I just packaged up a lot of these questions and answers into really smart FAQs, or if I infuse them into the course materials and they're, it's already been able to answer people's questions before you know that they're going to have them.
That's when you know that you have a course that is probably able to be sold without you, without human support. There's every option in between again, at some point, I was running the career globe. I wasn't doing any coaching calls. I had hired two coaches and then I fully stepped away from it at some point.
So, there's that option, Once you get to that point and you've infused. Most people's questions that come up over and over again, those themes, those patterns in the materials. That's when you know that you have a course that's going to work and the methodology gets results. So what I ended up doing is splitting out the career globe into different courses.
So the whole career clarity, and career purpose phase is now badass. Your vision, the whole personal branding, resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn is now Badass Your brand. And then I also have Badass Your Interview and Badass Your Salary, which often gets sold together as a sort of jewel bundle that people like to buy together.
Now, breaking it down in this way helps people to, chunk down the process, and put it into chunks that are achievable, especially if it's self-study and they're actually complete the course and it's well done and it's clear. The marketing message and the funnel for that line of my business is super clear.
Instead of being like, It's everything. It's the career globe. It's a lot. It's like too much to communicate. If you're not there guiding them through it, if you're not coaching them through it, if you're not able to walk them through it extensively, it's that model that, requires people to be able to understand what it is, make an empowered purchasing decision and then get results all by themselves.
So I did break it down. This is the course again because the price point is a lot lower. I need to sell a lot more units of them because they don't get to work with Rosie and they don't get the coaching. And a lot of people will say no to that and prefer to work with a one-to-one coach because they want someone to hold that space for them.
And that's completely valid. Again, there are multiple different services and products available to people, and it's completely up to them to make a really empowered purchasing decision. And I get it. So the courses have now been broken down. On the badass careers side. And then I come full circle and I'm doing private coaching with badass empires and.
Developing an incredible group program as well. So all that to say, I got to a place eventually over a period of working in my business full time for three years to start shifting it into a course only business. Again, with an audience. It's around the 200, 000 person mark. So doing that in integrity, I've got the numbers for it and I've got the results and I've got the testimonials and it works and I know it works because I have personally seen thousands of people go through the materials and make it work.
Now, I'm not saying that as a creator, you can't develop a course straight off the bat or a digital product straight off the bat and only sell that. That's up to you, but you're going to have to reel in your expectations. In terms of either you are going to have to become an incredible content marketer that goes freaking hard from here on out, right?
Instead of spending your time on clients, it's content content, and you've got to get the traffic and visibility. You've got to get, you've got to chase the numbers. And I can tell you, it's quite scary when the algorithm changes or when something happens and you don't know why your marketing isn't working anymore or your social media.
Yeah. Isn't getting as much reach anymore that can really impact your business. So it's a valid option, but it comes with a lot of risk. And while you might say to yourself, Oh I don't have to be on calls and spend time with clients. You are going to be spending that time marketing.
Trust me. And again, my question to you would be, how do you know your course works? How do you know that your course works in integrity for a multitude of different people? Again, maybe you've been working in that area for 10 years and you've got a really good sense of a methodology and you can package it up into a course directly and you don't mind becoming the hardcore marketer.
That's awesome, but that's not everyone's story. So let's zoom out for a second. Let's look at that big picture. You figure out how you can use your expertise or your knowledge to help people and you package that up. You build an online community where you're helping people for free on that very topic and curating this incredible audience of your people, and then you're designing and selling a VIP product or service to them.
The service that you sell them, it needs to be able to get them results and you have to know that's true. And it needs to be at a relevant price point compared to your audience size. So that those conversion rates, which are very stable again, whether you're selling something that's 200 or 2,000 if you could only get five clients that month, is it okay?
That's at the 200 mark, or do you need it to be at the 2, 000 mark to meet your revenue goals? Again, that's a personal decision. It's up to you. My strong recommendation for any. Beginner, online business owner, and this expertise-based business model is this start off private coaching, prove your methodology, help people get success stories, get testimonials flowing in, then scale to group coaching where you can go one to many for every hour you spend coaching, you're coaching many people at a time.
It could be five people. It could be 10 people. It could be 80 people on that call, but you have one call and you're able to answer their questions. You're able to. Do spot coaching, but it's because you're so powerful as a coach. Now you're so good as a coach now that you can get people results in 10 minutes, giving them 10 minutes of that call instead of a whole hour.
So just say you have 10 people on the call and they each get five to 10 minutes with you. You might have a 60 to 90-minute call. So that's the kind of space you want to be in and that you want to grow into. And that's a beautiful business model in terms of being able to develop incredible course materials, being able to scale, being able to work with many people at once and have incredible revenue explosions, incredible impact explosions.
It's a great place to be, but you have to be able to handle it as a coach. You have to know your methodology is tight and you have to have, seen it all, in terms of common themes, patterns, questions, roadblocks, and challenges that you've helped people overcome. You have to be confident in that.
And then if you like, you can either add to that. With self-study digital products and courses at a lower price point or move completely towards that business model. If you've got the traffic and the audience to back it and I would do it in that order because at the end of the day, we're here to become transformational coaches to get people from point A to point B to improve their lives, to have them take action and accountability.
Over their lives and areas of their life and get the results or hit the goals that they've been wanting to hit for a while now. And we facilitate their success in that. And that's a pretty exciting responsibility. Now I sell 37 resume templates over on badass careers. Now I know that resume templates don't get jobs.
What gets jobs is your personal brand and self-awareness and your ability, the content essentially of that resume, knowing what to say, knowing your value add, knowing how to articulate your leadership brand. But I'm integrity now in selling that and knowing that we'll get results because my audience for the past four years has been educated on all those other topics.
And they've got so much content on that for free. So they can fill it up. So it's a complicated one. It's about. Price point. It's about impact. It's about getting people results. And it is a journey. I'm just saying, I would have never started out selling 37 resume templates because I know that wouldn't have gotten people results.
That's not fair on them. It's cheap, but it's not fair, but now it's okay. So you see how nuanced it is.
[00:34:37] Final Thoughts and Encouragement
In saying all of this, I would love to hear from you about where you're at on your journey, because I know that coaching can be scary. And I know that's maybe not what you want to hear because it's a lot of accountability and it is intense in terms of imposter syndrome, clicking into that call and knowing that you are that person's coach for an hour.
It's a lot, but it's something that's necessary because if you want to be true to yourself and know that you know your shit and you can get people results. That's what it takes. And in this wild west of the online world, if you don't want to be someone who's spinning false promises, I know that you're going to show up and you're going to do it right.
And you're going to do the work. So I would love to hear from you. What are you thinking about in terms of your business model? Where are you at? Where do you see yourself long term? What's your end game? Because honestly, some people just want to be a private coach, a really successful high-ticket private coach, because they love coaching.
That's also great. So again, based on your revenue goals, based on your lifestyle goals, based on the way you know that you best work with people, where do you see this going? And in what format do you want to make your impact? What will your business model look like today and how might it evolve?
I would love to have a chat with you over on Instagram and until the next episode, stay badass as hell, rain on and keep building that empire. Just by listening to this episode, you are one step closer to your very own badass empire. Now, I want to hear from you.
Tag me in your stories or send me on Instagram so I can learn what resonated with you most. Oh, and if you're the kind of badass who is willing to help us out big time and take a few minutes to rate and review this podcast and make sure you send us a screenshot of that review at [email protected] so I can send you a juicy freebie to say thank you.
Until next time, keep showing up for your future and we'll keep smashing goals in the next episode.
