The EXACT Path to $100K/mo (75%+ profit margins, lean team)

Right team, we need to talk about what's happening in the online coaching industry right now. So if you are a coach, consultant, or expert who's trying to scale from 6 to 7 figures a year, the entire game just changed. A complete reset is happening and most people haven't figured it out yet. So here's what I'm seeing. Most coaches who are doing really well on paper, they may be making $15K, $30K, even $50K+ a month, they're actually really struggling when you look under the surface. And it's not because their businesses are failing, it's because they've built businesses that are keeping them trapped and keeping them miserable. And here's the kicker, it's getting worse. Meta keeps changing the rules, ad costs keep rising, and the whole model and economics that worked 2 years ago are now completely broken. I talked to one coach last month who does $135K a month in top-line revenue, but after paying his team, his ad costs, and his overhead, he was barely breaking even. Just think about how mad that is. $135K top line revenue and almost nothing left. And I get it because 2 years ago I was in exactly that situation. I was doing really well, making $100K a month in my business, and then suddenly Meta changed their entire ad platform and my ads went from super profitable to bleeding cash and I was suddenly really struggling. Trying to figure out how I was gonna pay my team every month. Everyone else got paid, but I was actually ending up earning less than I was even in my 9-to-5 job before. So the whole model was broken. So I tore the whole business down and rebuilt it from scratch. But this time I built a business that I actually love, and I did that based around 3 core design principles. The first one was profit first instead of revenue first. So no more vanity metrics around revenue, That doesn't count for shit. I wanted to build a business that had great margins, lean team, and lean cost base, so it actually paid me rather than me simply working to pay everyone else. The second one was simplicity over complexity. That meant one system, one product, one small lean team. And then the third one was building a boutique business rather than an empire. No more being some kind of full scaling bro. This is all about building a business where I work with the best people who can get the best results, who pay me the most, so it's actually a wonderful relationship that everyone enjoys, and the result is a business that I truly love, one that gives me the impact with my clients, the profit in my business, and the freedom with my time that I always wanted. Now, in this video, I'm gonna show you exactly how I did it, and how you can do it too. So whether you're at $10K a month right now or even at $100K a month, I'll show you the exact system that I use because the principles don't change no matter what. So let's dive in. So the truth is nothing beats how amazing it feels to wake up every morning knowing you help people transform their lives. That feeling that the work you do really matters and genuinely makes a difference. And yes, look, we're experiencing a massive disruption in the coaching industry right now. But the good news is that with every great disruption comes insane opportunity. And going into 2026, a new era of online education is opening up, and I'm genuinely really excited by what it means. I'm actually really pumped about what's happening because this evolution is filtering out people who were in this business for the wrong reasons. So the gurus who were chasing quick cash The agencies that were just doing cookie-cutter copy and paste funnels, the coaches who had programs that they didn't put any thought or care into, they're all getting washed out. And that means that if you're in this business because you can really help people, you care about your clients, you can create that genuine transformation, there's more opportunity going into 2026 than maybe any other time in the coaching industry's history. Because the coaches who not only survive this but come out of it way stronger with way better businesses are not the ones with the biggest teams or the fanciest funnels or the biggest ad budgets. They're the ones that create genuine transformation, who actually give a shit about their clients, and who can create the results that their clients love. For those coaches, 2026 and onwards is going to be the biggest opportunity of their careers. So let me show you the maths that fundamentally changed about 2 years ago, and most coaches are only catching up with it right now. So this is really the model that broke most coaching businesses over the last couple of years. Let's say your goal is $20K a month and you have a $5K offer. That means in order to generate that $20K a month, you need 4 clients. And I'm just working on the assumption that they pay in full for now. I know that's not always the case, but just to show what's going on. In the old funnel approach, you used to have to look at what your cost per qualified call was. So today that number is often somewhere in the region of $300. So for every person who's truly qualified, who can actually buy from you, the cost of getting them on a call is roughly $300. Well, a few years ago, that was closer to $30. So you're looking at almost a 10x increase in the cost of getting people on the calls. That's partly a result of competition, changes in the ad algorithm, Meta's pricing, it all adds up to this big change. Now, the average close rate people work on, 30%, is kind of industry standard, but if you're getting 25 to 30% through, you're generally doing all right. So to get those 4 clients, let's assume 25% to make the maths easy, you need 16 qualified calls, right? That means if you have 16, you close at 25%, you're gonna get 4 people buying. So 16 calls at $300, that is $4,800 in ad spend that you need to be working on in order to get that number of sales. But really crucially, that's actually for the calls that show up and you close, because not every call you book is going to show up. In reality, you need to put more in at the top of the funnel to get there. Okay, so let's just say you're actually spending closer probably to $12K to $15K just to get those 4 clients. So let's say you have a 70% show-up rate, let's say not everyone is qualified because the ad system has changed a lot, you can easily up your ad spend to this kind of level quite quickly, right? Now, let's say you have to add in your team costs, right? So if you have a setter, for example, typically you're gonna be offering them, you're gonna be paying them roughly 5% of your revenue, right? So call that $1,000. Let's just say you've got a closer and you've gotta pay them 10% of that $20,000 sale. You are gonna be talking about $2,000 a month on that. Let's say you have some kind of client success manager or maybe a content manager, maybe a coach that helps you, any of those things, that would be easily another $2,500 a month. So you add all that up and you are suddenly starting to look towards $18,500 to $20,500 In order to generate that $20,000 of target revenue. Okay, so potentially you're finding yourself in the place where you're making either nothing or a very small amount of money before paying yourself, before taxes, and before any other business expenses. And you're often working 80-hour weeks managing a sales team. And this is why most coaches are really struggling, right? The math simply doesn't work anymore. You gotta remember that old funnel model was built around and built during the gold rush era of online ads, which was kind of 2013 to 2018, extended a little bit into 2019 and 2020. But this was really the gold rush era. This was when Facebook ads were really just being discovered and the ad costs were super low. But now you are competing against every massive brand with an almost unlimited budget. You can't win that game. So what you've gotta do is pivot and play a much smarter game that recognizes the new model and the new economics so you can make it work. And the good news is when you do that right, you can actually achieve way higher profits, way better revenues than ever before. Now, here's what makes that even more urgent. Alongside all of these changes around the model and around the ad system is this broader AI disruption that's having a profound impact on the industry. What that's leading to is that AI content is flooding the market. Organic reach off the back of that is tanking because the barrier to entry of doing it, of producing decent quality content, has suddenly reduced massively. But also people's willingness to engage with a lot of that content is less because people don't actually necessarily enjoy being bombarded with, with that AI content. It also means that those ad costs that were already high they're skyrocketing even higher because big brands are using AI to create thousands of ad variations each and every day. So you're no longer just competing against other coaches, you're competing against this infinite army of AI-powered content running 24/7. So the brutal truth is there's a big split to become— there's a big split in the coaching industry coming up, and you need to be on the right side of that split in order not just to survive but actually thrive. Okay, now here's what that looks like. So on the one hand, you've got coaches who are going to be staying in the old model of $1K to $5K programs where they offer stuff where they simply tell you what to do. They offer all the kind of standard, here's 20 videos, here's a simple video program, or here's some, you know, Google Docs or what have you. AI is replacing all of that. You can have that easily replaced with a $30 a month ChatGPT or any other AI bot subscription, right? And it's gonna do it faster and cheaper and better and more personalized than any of your videos can do, right? So that model is dying. People aren't paying for that anymore. And the more that's what your model's based on, the more you're gonna struggle. The coaches who are succeeding are building what I call this amplified authority, right? So they're offering what AI can't replace. That means true transformation. First of all, you actually have a way of getting people results. Information isn't the only thing that gets people results, and rarely is it enough. Whilst it's more easy to access information now, a lot of that information has been out there on YouTube for a long time. If you have the ability to turn that information into transformation, it's a lot stronger. If you can create accountability and belief, you can offer strategic thinking for the situation of your clients, and crucially, you can create an identity shift that leads to that successful outcome. So you're going from being someone who creates, uh, just, or offers information to someone that creates a transformation. So the question is, how do we win in 2026? Because I want to show you the path by which you don't just survive this coming change and move into this new era of online education, but actually thrive and become one of those coaches who sits in that top 10% with the biggest profit, the biggest impact, and the most freedom. And that change is fundamentally based on one key shift, which is moving away from funnels and start building ecosystems. Funnels were amazing for the gold rush era of online advertising between 2013 and 2018. The system that's gonna work from 2026 onwards is ecosystems. That is the fundamental shift because in funnels, leads die. In ecosystems, those leads compound and you maximize your leverage, your impact, and the value of every dollar of marketing spend. And it also gives you platform-independent growth rather than being entirely dependent on Meta's latest change or YouTube's latest change, you have a system that means that you've got a strong pipeline of warm and being ever more nurtured leads coming into your sales pipeline, coming into your ability to work with them. The second is you need to build your ICP brand and audience. So ICP being your ideal client profile and audience. So again, in the old world, it was all about the number of followers that you had. So the typical rule was the more followers, the more you were perceived as an expert, the more you could actually leverage that to get all of your marketing outcomes, all of your business outcomes achieved. But now again, that game has changed. It is far less about the volume of followers and more about having the right followers. It's way better, way more efficient, way more valuable to have that targeted boutique ideal client profile audience than a massive following of people who are not really right for you, your offer, or your business. So this is all about focusing on quality rather than vanity metrics. It's way better to have 5,000 followers who are your ideal client profile than 100,000 followers of people who are never going to buy, right? One is a vanity metric, one is a business metric. I see people who have a million followers who make no money, and I have people with a couple of thousand followers who are making $10,000, $20,000, even $30,000 a month because all of their followers are the right people, or at least the majority. The third, and this is how you lean into building that scalable business that doesn't erode your profit and you shift towards that much higher profit margin that is the biggest probable opportunity of this new era of online education. When you embrace AI to scale your operations, you can reduce your operational complexity, you can automate a huge amount of your fulfillment and your client delivery and your backend systems in your business, and you can start to operate at these much higher margins, in some cases up to 90%, almost being a solo operator, or 75% if you want to build that small team. And that allows you to strategically leverage your time with your clients to provide that personalized strategic service and then use AI for that much more on-demand service and 24/7 support. Okay, now with those elements in place, that means you can start to build marketing systems that do the heavy sales lifting. So again, in funnels, it was more sales-based conversion, so calls, sort of the more traditional high-pressure sales tactics, whereas now you're using marketing to do that. You're nurturing people, and you've got that pipeline of people who are coming into your sales effort to actually becoming clients when they're ready. You use your marketing just to kind of harvest the fruit when it's ready to be picked, as opposed to picking it too early or too late. So you're converting through trust rather than pressure, and you're pre-selling people before the call so that those calls become way more enjoyable, way better, where people are going, I'm ready now, let's get started, as opposed to you having to do every trick in the book to actually get them converted. And then lastly, off the back of this, and I think this is by far the biggest win, we're gonna shift away from this era of when you've got the scale bros bragging about the top line revenue numbers, and there's gonna be much more focus on the profit you're making. So you're gonna be building for profit first, not revenue. You're gonna be shifting to these much higher profit margins. We're building for 75% versus 30% with that lean team that gives you that high freedom. So again, rather than being trapped in your business, your business is working for you. So this is the new model. So we need a completely different model, not a funnel where leads die at the bottom, but an ecosystem where every system, where every component supports and strengthens the others, where your leads don't disappear, but they compound and the value of them compounds over time and where you're not quite so dependent on the vagaries of any platform algorithm. So that's how we win, not by playing the old game better, but by playing a completely different game, the one that's right for the era we're now in. And that game is what we call the Ascension Ecosystem. Now, the Ascension Ecosystem is built on one core principle, which is about scaling profit, not revenue. Okay, so you're not trying to build something bigger. You've got to step away from the kind of scale bro mentality. You're trying to build something better. You're trying to build something more boutique. Think about it as the difference between building the sort of big scalable retail bank and building the small private wealth management firm. Okay, it's actually being much more efficient, much higher profit, working with the very best clients. And what that actually means when you do it right is that you can shift from being at the 30% profit margin that most coaching businesses operate at, where you can actually start to shift towards that much higher 75%. Rather than having to have a lot of clients, you can actually work with a much smaller number of better clients that creates that positive kind of flywheel where you're working with the best clients who are most committed, who do the work, who get the results, who create the positive case studies that feed back into your marketing results, your marketing material, and your ability to charge the highest prices. Okay, so rather than now needing lots of clients, you can actually work with that small number of the best clients. Rather than needing to manage big teams, you can actually start to work optimally with a small lean team and AI systems doing lots of the work that previously required you to manage lots of employees. And off the back of that, you can have that business that gives you the freedom rather than a business that keeps you trapped. And the way we do this is said is by having an ecosystem not a funnel, right? Here, the Ascension Ecosystem has 4 components. Each one is really simple, and when they work together, that's when the positive flywheel, the compounding effect, really happens. So the first component in the Ascension Ecosystem is having strategic paid traffic. So what I mean by this is, in order to have a real business, you need your lead flow to be predictable and scalable. You need to be able to control it. So organic is great for getting started and it's great for building a brand. But if you want to have a real business, you've got to know that if I spend this much, this is how many qualified leads I'm going to get back. This is roughly how many of them I know in a reasonable time period I'm going to convert into clients. So I know my numbers, I know what my cost is, and I know what my revenue is, and I can figure out whether what I'm doing is profitable and making sense. Now, particularly with some of the changes that Meta's made in terms of their ads platform with Andromeda now, You can use paid traffic to get high-intent prospects on demand. The system is actually super smart now if you use it right, if you use the right kind of ads and you pass back the right kind of data to Meta. But really crucial here, the way we run ads, this is why we talk about strategic scientific ads. We're not trying to reach millions of people. We're right, we're trying to target very closely the right hundreds or thousands of ICP people on the platform. It's kind of much more that boutique thinking of quality over quantity. 100 right people beats 1,000 kind of low-quality leads, right? What that means is targeted ads that are right for the way the ad platform works today, really important, speaking directly to the specific pain points of your ideal client profile so the algorithm can find them. It's a focus on the quality of the lead rather than the quantity. That means feeding back to Meta only qualified data. Too many coaches are feeding back crap data to Meta and then wondering why they're getting bad leads. It's ad spend that generates positive ROI. I don't care about your lead cost, I care about your lead quality. You want to be focused with your ads on one platform. Meta is still, even for all the things that people bitch about it with, and I get it, by far the best platform. Now there's a kind of simple tax you want to do here, roughly 15 to 20% of your revenue. You need to kind of consider it your scale tax, for want of a better phrase, for ads, right? So if you collect $30K in a month, you need to be reinvesting $4.5K to $6K into ads for the next month to keep the system working. So that keeps your ad budget flexible and tied to results. When you can turn on qualified leads on demand, You are less at the mercy of the kind of organic algorithm or going viral. You just know you're working with some numbers. That's how you build a predictable, profitable business. Okay. Now, the second element of this, really crucial, and this is why it's an ecosystem, is you have to have a trust bridge, right? You have to have the ability to get those people who are leads into the place where they know, like, and trust you. And are ready to put their hands up to buy from you. Okay, so a lot of coaches get this wrong by thinking they need a massive audience. That is old way thinking, not true today. What you do need is an ICP audience, your ideal client profile audience, right? Way better, as I've said before, to have 5,000 ICP followers than 100,000 randoms, right? Okay, the way you do this is by being really focused on those trust content assets that you create. So use one platform for your short-form content. I recommend Instagram, posting daily. One long-form platform, YouTube, posting ideally weekly. But again, you build up those content assets over time and that's it. You don't try to be everywhere, just master those 2. You need to communicate through that content your world. You've got to share your life, your beliefs, your philosophy, get people to kind of know you just like you would when you were getting to know someone in the first place, right? Let them see who you are as a person, not just what you teach. You need to share your conviction. Teach your unique mechanism, kind of as I'm doing here, consistently. Have those clear opinions about why what you do works. Be willing to share why you understand why others are wrong. Take a stand, hold a position, and then share stories. Share your transformation or your journey. Share client transformation stories. Remember, people don't buy information, they buy transformation, okay? Show them what's possible. When you nail all those things, you are building these really powerful relationships where people feel like they know you before they ever buy from you, okay? You've got that authority-driven content, empathy-driven messaging, social proof, your unique mechanism, and email nurture sequences that warm prospects for sales conversations. This is what makes you AI-proof, right? So rather than just being easily able to be replaced by a $30 a month chatbot, this builds the relationship because people still want that. The human element is actually gonna become the premium element in that AI-driven world, right? Now, the cornerstone of all of this, element 3, is your premium offer, okay? Now, you wanna be shifting away from building a mass market business into much more of a boutique, coaching or consultancy business. Okay, now why this matters is when you target the right people, we know from behavioral science that when people pay premium prices, when they pay more, they value things more. Okay, they're more committed, they take it seriously, they get better results. So your premium pricing is not just a profit strategy, it's actually a positioning strategy. Now, you've got to be able, at the core of any business, to be able to deliver the transformational result that you're promising. That is the ticket, the entry price of the game. So if you're one of those coaches that can do that, if you can stand behind what you're sharing, you should be charging the maximum price possible because it positions you in the right way with that boutique consultancy business to get the best clients out there, right? Rather than everyone. The best clients who pay you the most, who get the best results, okay? When you do this right with one signature offer, clear pricing, simple payment options, you have a way simpler and more scalable business, okay? So you can have 5 clients that say $8K when you're creating $40K profit with minimal overhead and much higher profit margins. You can serve fewer clients, give them better attention, they'll feel way better about it, you'll get better outcomes, And that's how you get impact, profit, and freedom at the same time. And then the last element here, and again, one of the biggest opportunities of this new era of online education, is about using high-ticket scale systems, how you can use the new technology with AI to deliver great results for your clients for lots of the kind of day-to-day stuff, and then you leverage your time at the more strategic level. Okay, so most coaches destroy themselves at the moment in the name of growth, but again, it's revenue growth, not profit growth. So we're scaling profits, not revenue vanity metrics. Okay, it's about building those lean systems, those boutique operations that maximize profits whilst maintaining or improving client results. Okay, that means leaning towards this more hybrid delivery, which is strategic one-to-one touchpoints as opposed to just having it by default. Systematized client journey with consistent results. Think of it, the more you have like almost a deterministic system, which means if you do X, you get Y, you're gonna get way better results. Community and peer accountability structures, leverage points that multiply impact without multiplying overhead, and you're building your team strategically, right? So you're only actually adding to your team where there's a clear need and where the ROI is there. You want to keep your team small. There is nothing beneficial by having a big team. I promise you that, having been through that pain. Okay, so you want one core delivery model. You want to have really simple onboarding with your clients, a simple tech stack, a minimal team, and systems that run without you micromanaging. So in that boutique model, This is how you get the most profitable businesses around. Again, think, shift away from scale. You want to be the most profitable business, not the biggest business. Okay? The boutique law firm with 3 partners and 2 assistants often makes way more profit than the 50-person firm down the street because they've got better positioning and higher prices, better clients who they actually enjoy working with, lean operations without all the bloated overhead. Simple systems. That's what we're building here. Okay, when you do this, you can grow from $10K months to $50K months to even $100K months while keeping 75% plus of your revenue as profit, having a life that goes with it, delivering those amazing results, and avoiding that kind of complexity trap. Now let me be brutally honest with you because the window for this opportunity is only going to be open for a short period of time. Right now in late 2025 into 2026, the window is open. You can create an unfair advantage where you're way ahead of 90% of coaches. Most of them don't even understand that this change has really happened and certainly don't get what's coming down the line. But if you make the shift, you go from funnels to ecosystems, you get things set up right, you are going to be in that top 10% of coaches who can create those 6 and 7-figure businesses with 75% plus profit margins and have a life that really makes sense off the back of that. It all comes down to building that boutique business using ecosystems instead of funnels, so you've got the foundations set up right. So if you're a coach, consultant, or expert and you want to scale to your next $20K a month milestone, go to my Instagram. I'll put the link in the description below. Drop me the word freedom and I'll send you the full breakdown of this system I'll show you how you can figure out your profit margins and how you can start to put in place this boutique business model working with ecosystems. If it's something you'd like help with, we can talk about that, but only if it's right for you. As I've said and tried to make clear in this video, I'm only interested in working for people who feel like the time is right and the approach is right with them. This was great. Really looking forward to this change. There's a ton of opportunity, probably more than I've ever seen. If you'd like to take advantage of it, drop me that DM and we can have a chat. Take care, and I'll see you in the next video.