Signs Your Offer Is Broken and Preventing You From Scaling

You're listening to the PT Profit podcast, episode number 307. Today we're breaking down uncommon signs that your offer might be broken and preventing you from scaling. Are you ready? Let's dive in.

Hi, I'm Beverly Simpson, former fitness manager turned online personal training business owner. And this podcast is where smart fitness professionals, including trainers and clinicians, discover how to increase client performance in movement, package and position their product, products and services and get out of their own way so that they can increase their revenue to live a life that they love without sleazy sales. Welcome to the PT Profit Podcast.

What's up, coach? Thank you so much for pushing play on another episode of the PT Profit Podcast. I'm your host, Beverly Simpson, and if this is the first time you're hanging out with me today, welcome. I'm sorry. Super pumped that you're here and can't wait to dive in. So just a quick interruption, I suppose, before we dive into the episode. If you've been following along for the last couple of weeks, you would know that I am in the middle of a series, the three part series of how to get from 0 to 10k, from 10k to 50k. And then people might be anticipating and you might be anticipating the 50k to 100k consistent per month. Now, I decided to put a pause on that episode for two main reasons. Number one, while we did have an 80k month in January, which technically is a million dollar projection, we were not able to sustain it for a lot of the reasons that I'm about to dive into today. So get excited about that. But we were able to maintain that. So for me, integrity is just such a huge value. It is a core value inside of my business. And I felt that I could give you, you know, I could use some magic marketing language and talk about it and, and give you some of my ideas, which I do have. These are the things that we're going to implement into the business in 2024. So I do have those in place. I just, out of integrity, I did not feel like I could record that episode in a way that felt aligned. And so I have two thoughts around how to proceed with that final episode because it's really important. Number one, I'm gonna bring to you a guest who can actually speak to it from a place of this is what I did, not from a place of this is what I plan to do. And then the second thing I'm going to do for this phase is I'm gonna give you an episode not today, because I wanna talk about why this episode is coming out the way that it is. But I'm going to give you an episode of what my plan is in terms of setting up to get to those consistent 100k months. I'm going to share with you what my plan is there and I'm also going to share with you some of the mistakes or some of the missteps that I made in order to hit 100k months and how we are reverse, reverse engineering the downfall from those, those decisions. And then I'm going to give you another episode for what actually happened, for when we actually do hit that, that third phase of business growth. So in terms of today, if you've been following along, that's those are the reasons and those are the plans and the intentions for what we plan to do for the final phase of the business growth. So if you haven't already, definitely check out the first two episodes of Building the Bill, how to go from 0 to 10K and then 10K to 50K. And then let's dive into signs your offer is broken and preventing you from scaling. Because this is what I would attribute to being the core reason we have not yet gone to 100k months. Okay, so let's dive into that and I'll say, you know, seven figure 100k months consistently. So let's just look at some of the uncommon conversations around how to determine what the breakdown actually is. So first, I know I'm giving you a lot of context in this episode. I promise it will be worth it. So stick with me on this. But first, let's just talk about some of the common things that we need to look at when it comes to deciding where a breakdown is. And the first is always, always. The first and foremost is always, always, always going to be in the data, making sure that you are making data driven decisions. I mean, I've talked about this since I've been blue in the face. And yet even knowing better doesn't mean that I don't have areas of opportunity inside of my own business to work on that core component. So, you know, we often hear business is simple and it is simple. Business is simple in a lot of ways, but that doesn't mean that it's always easy. So it's just like working out. We know what the main fundamental core movement patterns are that every program needs to have inside of their business. And yet we're constantly trying to reinvent the wheel or we think the basics are too basic. And there's gonna feel like some paradoxes inside of this episode. Too. But so just, I'm prepared for that. So I wanna prepare you for that. But the point is, is that there is this, this sense that, oh man, I need to make it more complex and that the truth is the more simple you can create your business or give the more simplicity you can put into your business, the easier it's going to be to communicate to your clients, which therefore will be to actually get results. Complexity can often be at the expense of results. Now, that's not to say, by the way, that we need to be so simple at the expense of complexity. It's nuanced, but the people who are truly masters of their craft and their ability to actually produce results are the people who can take the complex and communicate it in a simplistic way so that people can actually adhere to the changes and the behavior changes and identity changes that are required to get those desired results. So what often happens, one of the common mistakes that I see both in myself and also in my clients is that we know this. Oh, I just need to make data driven decisions. And yet we don't actually put pen to paper and actually look at the data that matters. So I carried my clients, my accelerator clients and my formula clients through a really powerful goal setting exercise at the beginning of the year. And honestly, I did it myself. I'll never ask anything of my clients that I won't do myself. And I did this exercise myself. And I was so blown away by what I found because I know, you know, I know this stuff. Data, data, do this data. But one of the things that I tend to, to trick myself into believing is true is that, oh, I don't need to write it down because I already know this. I have it all in my head. And the truth, plain and simple, does not matter how amazing you are at multitasking. You do not. And so I realized that I was making decisions and I made decisions in 2023 that I tricked myself into believing that they were data measured. But they weren't. And I kept telling myself, oh, I just need to get better at sales and marketing, better at sales and marketing, better at sales and marketing. When the truth was actually that I'm a master at sales and marketing. The issue wasn't messaging. The issue is we need to take a closer look at the offer. That too will have some nuance. So stick with me in this episode. This episode is worth listening to and re listening to it, because it will. It can sometimes feel confusing. Is that offer or is that messaging? Because we often hear these like, oh, you want to make a, you know, you want to grow a business, we need an offer, we need a message. And people, myself included, will say, oh, it needs to be, you know, your messaging's off. Communicate the message, message, message. But what you have to understand about messaging, period, is that you are facilitating a conversation, a value proposition to a client about the offer. At the end of the day, you are using messaging to communicate to a potential client to buy this program, to buy this coaching. And so you, your messaging is a direct reflection of the value proposition to eventually buy this offer. Whether you depend, it doesn't matter whether you're trying to grow an audience, nurture an audience, or do a drive for, for customers. If you are creating content that is not in the context of business growth, then that's great. But recognize that that's not doing anything for your business. People are not buying from you because you're a mom. They're not buying from you because you love tacos. On Tuesday. People get this twisted about the truth about what it really means to build, know, like and trust. Because the no factor is not you as a person. The like factor is not you as a person. We need to grow our visibility, but the like factor. Sometimes being a good coach means that you have to speak to people's potential and that you have to say things to people that they don't necessarily want to hear. It's just like being a parent. And then that that trust factor is not even necessarily in you. It's in your offer. Can your offer do what you say that it is? It can do. So it's easy to get bogged down into, oh, I just need to build no like and trust. I need to build a community of people because then they will buy. But that's just. If that were true, then wouldn't your mom and wouldn't your partner be the number one customers in your business? Because I don't know about you, but my mom and my husband were my number one fans throughout my, from the start of my business and they loved me the most and they never bought a single thing from me. So by the way, it's not that those people don't matter in the business, it's they do. They'll help build your character. They'll help, they'll help you start to position as. They'll start to help support you as an authority and your expertise, even though they're not a customer. So I'm not saying, saying that they don't matter, but what I am saying is that people accidentally focus on popularity metrics without even realizing it because you can't take Likes Comments shares to the bank. Those Likes Comments shares are not going to pay your bills. So then the question becomes what are the data metrics that your business can be tracking? And so what I like to track inside of my business and what I invited my clients to track inside of you, their business was to look at well, what are the number of you know, well the first thing you need to look at is your offer stack. So we're going to be talking about this signs that your offer might not actually be working. So look at the offer stack and look at how you're selling it and then look at the data meaning how many for us we do calls, we do we have two customer journeys, two funnels if you will. Where we are, we have a low ticket to a call or we have a live event to a call. And so we have to look at well how many calls did you do? How many of those calls showed? Then we also need to look at well, how many customers did you bring in? A customer might be different for you than a client. It is for me. A customer is someone who has purchased from me now this So I it's not that I necessarily treat my customers and my clients super differently. I'm still giving them a ton of value but value in a, in a equal energy exchange. My clients get way more access to me, way more of my insight, way more of my eyes so that I can help identify blind spots. They get way more of me in a done with you or done for you capacity where my clients or my customers rather they get to experience the actual step by step organized way of saving time to build an offer to create content to begin the foundations of growing a business. And so we need to look then at well, what was our client ascension model, meaning how many of our clients customers have send it into clients. We also need to look at how well did our clients perform in this year. What were the breakdowns? So once you have that data and you are understanding the surface level of oh, here are some of the initial responses as to why my business isn't where I want it to be yet. So for me when I I saw in that experience was oh, I kept thinking I had a sales and marketing issue but that's actually not what happened. I had an offer problem and I also had an offer communication problem meaning the presenting of the offer. Now people will say oh, isn't that messaging? So this will speak a little bit to what I was saying earlier. And, and while I understand that idea, for me, all messaging is in the context of the next step, whether it's growing the audience, whether it's growing, nurturing the current audience, or doing a drive for customers. And it's always, or customers or clients. And it's always in the context of what's the next step. So for me, if there's a messaging breakdown, that means that there oftentimes I'm going to look at the offer. What am I communicating about the offer that is quote, unquote, putting the wrong people in the wrong offer. So let's look at some of the most uncommon things that are not often talked about when we are dealing with is this an offer problem? So number one, one, let's just take a look at how happy and excited you are to work with your clients. And so if you're listening to this and you're a client of mine and you're like, oh my gosh, Beverly's unhappy with me, I'm just going to go ahead and tell you right now it's not true. If you are thinking that, oh my gosh, Beverly's unhappy with me, I can guarantee you without a shadow of a doubt that it's not you. It's always the people that don't think it's about them that it's about. Okay, so let me just. I want to put your worries at ease. If you are a client of mine and listening to this, okay, it's not about you, but if you are, are unhappy with how with your clients and, and unhappy with. With and feeling the like the Sunday scary and recognizing and realizing that, oh my gosh, I have built another prison, okay, or built another job, or I'm dreading talking to that client, then there are some things that we need to look at here. Number one, it's either going to be that you are. And it might be some of the next. It might be some of the next things that we're going to talk about. But if you are unhappy with your clients for whatever reason, then we need to look at the parts of you in them that we haven't healed. Okay, so that's number one. Right? So because everything that you are hating is oftentimes a reflection of what you also are hating about yourself. So that's some of the deep work that would definitely be worth looking into. Not get stuck in, but definitely work a look into. What are the things that you're saying about your clients that are a reflection of you that we need to, to really look at. Okay. The second thing, if you are feeling unhappy with your clients, then we need to, you know, then, then we need to look at it from this perspective as well. Then also let's look at it also from this perspective of what specifically is it about your clothes client experience that you are dreading? Because it could potentially be an communication error of the offer. So let me give you a tangible example. Something that happened to me inside of my business, right, Is that I wanted to talk about fat loss, but I didn't want to talk. I didn't, I. And, but I didn't want it to be, you know, food obsession. So I was, my messaging and how I was communicating, communicating my offers was always focused on like loving yourself from the inside out and that we needed to heal relationships with food. And, and I'm saying that I didn't talk about healing because I'm definitely not, I'm not an expert, but this is, this is worth talking about is be. Is that I never wanted to, to run that fine line of like, listen, I'm not a psychotherapist. I'm not a, I am not a registered dietitian. I am not qualified to diagnose and to heal. So I'm very sensitive about using that word. So I, what I mean about. But, but just like looking at your relationship with food, like, that was a lot of the language that I was using. So when you are using that type of messaging and then bringing them into a world and then wanting them to completely change their, their habits and wanting them to actually make a change, and then I would be surprised or frustrated that they were struggling or that they were not willing to be disciplined enough to actually do the work that it takes to make change, that was a direct reflection of how I was communicating the offer. So if I'm saying do this, don't do it without dieting, you know, do it from loving yourself, that doesn't mean that you're not going to work and that there won't be change required. And so I was bringing in a lot of people that were struggling with like emotional disordered eating. I was bringing up people that like, couldn't even talk about food. And I was wondering why is this happening? Why am I calling this in? And it was because of the way and the messaging I was using to communicate my offers. Now I did the same thing similar to, to in business because I think that it's important is the satisfaction of client results. Now this is also a nuanced and, and paradoxical or contradiction type of experience that we have to look at. Okay, so what happens is Is. And this was, this was true for me. Okay. Is that when there is dissatisfaction or when there is disappointment or when there is dis. Ease in terms of the action that is taken versus client results, here are some of the things that are potentially happening. Number one, there is a mismanaged communication of expectations on your part. This is. People will say, oh, this is a messaging problem. But it's actually. And it. For me it's an offer problem because it was the promise. If you look at the actual components of an offer, we're looking at promise, we're looking at process, we're looking at price, we're looking at guarantee or the risk reversal, we're looking at urgency, we're looking at scarcity and then the context of you. Those are the components of an offer. Offer. You are essentially saying and attracting people who have a problem. Hey, do are you're hungry? Okay. Want an apple? An apple is the best way to stay satiated throughout the day without and be afternoon snacking. I just made that up. And I don't think that that, I mean like, listen, this is not, this is not about being scientifically correct. Okay? So don't at me on this. I'm just giving you an example. If I was someone who was making a case for offers, now if I were making a case for an orange, I'm not going to say that. So at the end of the day, I'm not going to promise you an orange and then give you an apple because if that happens, there's going to be dis ease. And so, so that's why I'm saying it's an offer issue. And at least it was for me. And it's definitely worth looking at it and what, and what happens. Oh my gosh, there's so many things that happen. So for me, when I was looking at my clients and I was looking at the dissatisfaction components of my clients and feeling like, oh, there is a miscommunication and of expectations to get to desired outcome. So one of the things that we do inside of the accelerator program is we set up really amazing funnels in my opinion, my humble opinion, but I really help people build fitness funnels that will carry customers through a journey of never hearing of you before and turning them into happy, excited customers and clients. And do it in a way that is pressure free. Meaning there's no high pressure sales, there's no high. It's, it's. It's literally a making and the offer so good that it sells itself. Do you want this? Yes or no? Are you in? Are you out? Communicating through resistance still needs to happen. But that's an episode for another day. However, it's a pressure free sales to system that literally takes what it takes until it takes so that you are not feeling this urgency of I gotta make money. Because any type of urgency is going to kill your business. It's going to kill the joy. And you run the risk of burnout, you run the risk of hustling harder, you run the risk of at all costs, it's just not worth it. And you run the risk of building your own job, prison. And that's just as someone who's done that, it's not worth it. So that process, it's so powerful. Honestly, it really can, it really, you can really generate whatever the revenue number is as fast as you want. Meaning you can hit 10k in seven days. We've had clients that have hit 18k in 30 days, 10k and with reposts, 10k in five days. We've had clients that have, you know, put together, you know, they, We've had clients that, you know, generated 20 grand in their first launch, eight grand. I mean the numbers just go on and on and on and on in terms of success rate for clients. However, when, when you start talking about those type of expectations and yet you're still communicating to people who've never had that in their context. But box before you start or I started to set these expectations that, that if they were not met, caused a deep disappointment and, and sure, I could turn around and be like, well, this is because you're lacking skill. This is because you didn't do what you said that you were going to do. This is because there, there's a whole slew of things that would cause, take, you know, this is because you have, we have to look at your relationship to money. This is because we have to take a look at your capacity and your time energy. Like there's just so many things that are at play in order to hit that, that I was dismissing it pretty quickly. Like, oh, well, you'll, you'll get through that faster. Okay. And just plain and simply some can and some won't. And so it's not that. And it's not that either are bad. It's just about that you, you have to communicate the expectations and be honest, relentlessly honest. And I was going to say realistic, but it's not. But I don't believe in realistic because anything is truly possible. But I'll say realistic within your context Box. So what do I mean by that? I mean that if you don't want to post, if you don't want to talk to trainers, if you don't want to sell, if you don't want to use ads, if you don't want to do high ticket, then, and you don't want to do volume, you're not going to have a business. There's just no way around that. And so when I kept calling in these people just consistently who were excited, expecting to turn their, their computer into an atm, I had to look at that and be like, I need, you know, there are only so many things that I can, that I can control. So, so I had to look at that and be like, what is it in this offer that I'm communicating, that is drawing that. And part of it was the, was the mismanaged expectations. And then I'd start to feel frustrated because then I felt like I was losing deals or losing sales because people were coming to me and saying, hey, this person promised me that I could get 30 clients in 30 days. This person promised me that I was going to blink and a million dollars would show up in my bank account. And I was listening to that and thinking about that and trying to be competitive in that market space, but really I took a step back and I was like, listen, I can help you get 30 clients in 30 days, but are you going to be able to and willing to do what it takes to actually make that happen? Because 30 clients in 30 days when you have 300,000 followers is going to be a lot different than 30 clients in 30 days when you HAVE two followers. If you're talking about online growth, and I'm just using followers as kind of the cause context box, but change that word to audience, because my following is small, but I have a big audience. How am I defining my audience? My email list, my podcast, my YouTube viewers? Like, I have access to a lot of eyeballs when I'm presenting offers. And at the end of the day, we. Volume matters. It matters. And I don't mean volume in terms of people. I sometimes I mean volume in terms of. Of asks. I mean volume in quality of people to communicate the right offer to the front of the right person. So again, it goes back to the offer. So we're going to talk about the volume component in the third as the third unhappy but unhappy or third sign that your offer might be off or be part of the problem. But I want to go back to the satisfaction of client results because I think this is. And I want to finish this thought up because I think that this is nuanced and it is not looked at or talked about enough because I think both exist where we can't make decisions on, based on someone else's results, whether it's the coach's results or the client's results. However, it is a metric that's worth looking at and it is a metric to evaluate. Where's the breakdown? Because people don't invest in things. Whether it's $7, $7,000, 10,000, whatever, whatever the amount of money, the money doesn't matter. The investment in action, the transformations in transaction. We hear that a lot. Right? So the action of investing, people don't invest in things and don't want to succeed. That's not, they don't, they're not intentionally like, oh, let me just throw money away on this. They're investing, vesting in this for the, the reason to get the outcome communicated and promised. So if that's not happening, let's take a look at why not now. What happens to a lot of people which hey, I do this too. You're not alone if you do this is that we're meaning making machines and we just make this mean, oh, this means I'm not good, this means I'm sucking, or this means whatever, whatever that we get into. But it's just, it's just not true. Take the meaning aside for a second and just look at the facts of okay, this happened, this was the outcome. And let's try and be discerning of why and why not. What can I change? What's in my control and what isn't. And so I already talked a little bit about the miscommunication of unmet expectations. So what would be happening is I would be attracting people that their skill set required to get to the desired outcome. There was a gap there. And it's not that that's bad. So did I. Everyone has a day one. Everyone. We just have to be honest about how many reps it's actually going to take to get to that desired outcome. Because I can. If you ask me to find 10k tomorrow, then I'm going to find it. If my business and family and, and, and life depended on it, I'm going to find it. And now do I think it's possible for you too? Yeah, but it depends on your context box. You're never going to find it. If you think of 10k as this big, huge, this big, huge milestone or, you know, mountain peak, you got to make it feel like it's the first summit. And now the other thing I want to say about this too, is that for me, my business would fall down flat if I was making 10k a month for some of my clients in the accelerator program. If your business is making 10k per month, it's going to fall flat. It's not enough to sustain the business. So context matters in how you are viewing the revenue that your business needs to thrive. And that is a miscommunication of value proposition, which is part of the offer, the promise. The second thing about satisfaction of client results. So when you can be honest about like, hey, this is an Apple, this is what, this is how fast it could take, take, this is what it's going to be, this is what we're going to do, then the faster your clients will get results and the increase of satisfaction is going to go up as a huge thing that we're looking at inside of my business in 2024. Now, along those lines, in terms of the communication, let's also take a. You know, and I'll also say too that I'll see this a lot in formula clients or I'll see this this a lot in accelerator clients, especially when it comes to offer. If you can't communicate what your offer actually does and for who, then you are likely going to struggle. Because if you're not clear about what your offer is, how can you expect your client to be clear on what your offer is? And they're not laying awake at night being like, oh man, I just need another coach. I just need this membership. I just need this question. Course they're not thinking about the facts and features. They're actually thinking about outcomes and problems. So we need to be able to communicate problems, outcomes that we deliver, intangible and tangible so that they know that they're being successful. So we can go back to the satisfaction of client results and then your offer will start to take off. And the final and the last component of offers is the offer. The problem is, do you need volume to sustain the business? So now this is going to sound like a paradox, a contradiction, because I just said earlier in the episode, you need volume. Now maybe I'm going to do a riff on this for Wednesday's episode. So stay tuned because I'm working through the series of contradictions. So this is one of them, because sometimes people will quit too soon. They're literally three feet from gold. They'll go to shiny object, they'll quit. But when you actually look at the data that matters and you're looking at it and you're like, but how can you make that decision that the offer is the problem when you haven't even presented it to 30 people yet. Do 30 conversations with direct asks to 30 people that you know are there or listening and you're having conversations about it, then tell me, then we can start looking at the, at the, the price, we can start looking at all the things that you may think about the offer. Right. So, so people will try to tell, you know, so they, they just don't have enough of the volume. But if your business needs volume to sustain, then likely we've got some mismanaged energy experiences. So what does this mean, mismanage energy experience? It means, are you undercharging for your services? Because if that is the case, you cannot scale. More revenue doesn't mean more profit. It is a common misconception. If you are laying awake, my business just needs more sales, more sales, more sales, more sales. Then likely you might mean you might need to take a closer look at your offer. Because we need to make sure that your profit margin can handle the scale. Because if in order to scale, you need to hire more people, this means that you're going to need more resources, time, energy, effort and money. And if you're already at a max capacity of I can't hire any more people because I can't afford it, I can't hire the help I can't hire, or I can't invest invested ads, I can't invest in funnels, then we need to take a look at your profit margin. And really, for a healthy Internet business, we want to look and be anywhere in the 50 to 60% range of profit. And that includes your salary as an expense to the business. And having more sales and more volume isn't going to help that. That. And then also what happens when we start to get too thin and too stretched at capacity? You will end up, you know, especially as you, you know, oh, I will just hire more people, I'll hire more people, I'll hire more people. Yeah, well, now you're going to get stretched in time and time and effort, resources, who gets what, and things will start to fall to the crack. And then as you begin to break, as you begin to scale, the machine breaks, which is part of what happened to us in 2023. So a caveat here is it doesn't mean that your business can't have volume. It can, but you need and want to have cushion when it comes to scaling so that you have the room to guest test and assess. Because if you don't, then everything will often feel urgent, then you've likely built a job and not an asset that you that will be able to grow with you, scale with you as you tend to grow. This is why we actually spend so much time in both formula and accelerator taking a really good look at offers and another component of offers that we hadn't really talked about, which is when, especially when we're hyper focused on this and being able to make our offer so irresistible that they sell themselves, is that we want to make sure also that we're not holding our offers so precious, meaning that they're not precious. Guess, test and assess and don't be afraid to make a decision. Stick with it until you get enough volume to look at it and assess it and make a change and then go back and retest it. So be sure to stick around and check out Wednesday's episode where we're going to actually talk about the truth about volume and all of those paradoxes that we sort of talked about here. But it's worth diving into and diving a deeper episode in. So we'll look at that on Wednesday. But for now, if this episode helped you, be sure to take five minutes to give us five stars and leave us a quick review because this helps us help more people. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I'll catch you on the next episode.

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