Evergreen Funnels vs Live Launches: The Hybrid Model That Actually Scales [Ep 79]

Welcome to the Thriving Therapeneur Podcast. The show for ambitious therapists who are ready to unapologetically make more money, scale.

Their impact and build their dream coaching business. I'm Carly Hill, therapist turned coach turned.

CEO of a seven figure online business. I created the Thriving Therapeneur Podcast because I'm obsessed with helping big hearted therapists outgrow the office and build successful and sustainable online businesses. So if you are wondering how you can continue to make an impact without sacrificing the life you love, welcome Therapreneur. This is exactly the place for you. Think of it like the business school we never had.

I am so excited to dive in with you. Let's get started. Welcome back to the show, my friends. Today we're talking about one of the biggest questions I get from coaches and service based entrepreneurs. Should I be running Evergreen funnels or live launches? There's a lot of noise out there. Some people swear by Evergreen, which is it lives on forever, make money while you sleep. And then others say that live launches are the only way to create excitement and momentum and consistent conversions. And here's the truth. I've done both, both work and you may be wondering, well, which one should I lean into? And this deeply depends on your offer. Entirely on your offer, your audience and the stage of business that you're in. And here's my take. I believe in a hybrid approach using both of these models strategically in harmony. This is my secret sauce. My program is not a cohort that opens and closes a few times a year. It's open year round. People can enroll at any time through my Evergreen systems. But my live launches, those are the fuel, in my opinion, that ignite all of my cash infusions. It deepens the community. It skyrockets my conversions. Today I'm going to break down everything. The difference between Evergreen and Live launch models, what this actually even means. If you're unsure what a cohort model means, how I personally combine both of these strategies, why I don't recommend cohort, and how you can layer conversion events on top of Evergreen funnels to scale sustainably. All right, let's dive in. Let's start with definitions because I need you to have clarity as we get into speaking about all of these things. Evergreen. Maybe you've heard this word before, Evergreen. It just simply means your program is or offer. Whether it's a program or not, whatever you're offering, it's available year round. You can enroll at any time through funnels, through ads, through automated sequences, leads come in Consistently, you have sales happening daily or weekly. It's predictable, it's scalable. It is a great way for building reoccurring revenue. Now we have cohort, cohort based programs. This is open cart, closed cart. It only opens every three months or six months. When enrollment happens, it happens a few times per year. So, for example, January and September, that's it. Everyone goes through the program together. It's structured, but it also means that you're only making sales during those specific windows. So let's say that you wanted to get 15 people in in your January cohort, but you only got five people in. Well, you gotta go until you launch again in September. It's not good for business and you're going to have a wait list and then people are going to go work with somebody else. I don't believe cohorts are the best. However, it depends on the type of program that you're running. There is a time and a space and a place for cohorts when you need all of your people to go through each part of your program together. Most people come to me and they're like, well, everybody does need to go through this part of the program together. And I usually push back. And then we find a way where their program can be evergreen because there's so many cons in the cohort model. Moving on to live launches. Live launches are different. They're real time conversion events, challenges, webinars, workshops, summit. This is where you open your cart, you build excitement, and then you close doors within a defined period. It creates a ton of energy. It uses sales psychology with urgency. There's a beautiful community aspect. When you're doing challenges and webinars and workshops and summits. There's always a community aspect involved and people love that. So each one of these has their own purpose. The evergreen, the cohort, the live launches. But when you combine them together, this is what I was talking about, my hybrid model. This is where the magic happens. This is the secret sauce. Why choose one when you can do all of them? Let me be honest. I don't do cohorts because I don't like restricting opportunity. I want people to be able to join when they're ready, not when. My calendar says, okay, you can join now. When somebody's in alignment, they're ready to go, they're hot, they're ready to make a transformation. Now I want to meet them in that moment. I don't want to be like, oh, we'll get on my wait list and then I'll see you in Six months. That's not serving them, that's not meeting them where they are. That's why my programs do stay. Most of my programs stay open year round. I have a book writing program that opens once to once or twice a year. That is the only cohort program that I have. And then everybody writes their chapters together. Evergreen allows me to serve consistently and scale sustainably. It gives my business this baseline predictability. Where I know sales are coming in every single week, leads are being nurtured every single day automatically through funnels and through sequences. There's a beauty in this. But here's where most people go wrong. They build up Evergreen systems and then they go completely hands off. They just think Evergreen is it and then they can wipe their hands clean and their hands off. They stop showing up live. They stop creating energy around their brand. This is where Evergreen flatlines. Because they think that it's the end all, be all and then this is going to be their saving grace and they don't have to do anything else. And that's not the truth. Even though my program runs year, year round, I still host multiple live launches throughout the year. Because I call them my conversion accelerators. They are a pop of cash. They're conv. Conversion events. I have buyer activation events. I call them bays, baes, buyer activation events, conversion events, live launches, pops of cash, whatever the hell you want to call them. My Evergreen systems are always running in the background. Ads, email sequences, you've probably seen me all over your feed. Nurture funnels, all pointing people towards my program. But even when I do a live launch, I layer it on top of my Evergreen funnel. This is where I see massive spikes in sales and engagement because I have that community aspect. It's the perfect synergy. Evergreen builds awareness and it builds trust quietly in the background. But live launches, they activate that urgency and decision. The people who were a silent lurker for months, they're on the edge of their seat. That live launch is what's going to push them to finally make the decision that they've been thinking about for months or even years. Live launches for me are like turning up the heat on an already warm audience. They move from cold, they've been silent, lurking, they're hanging around, they're warm. And I'm going to turn up that dial. I'm going to turn up that heat when I run a live launch, whether it's a five day challenge. I love challenges. Summit an event. It's not about starting from scratch. It's not about starting from zero. It's about taking the audience. That's all already been nurtured through all of my evergreen systems, which again are not the end all be all. It's the beginning. They're being nurtured. It's activating them. And then my conversion events, AKA my live launches, bring them in. It seals the deal. Let's talk about the hybrid model and kind of pulling all of this together, just as I alluded to. Let me recap this for you. My evergreen engine, this is what I'm calling it, is always running funnels and ads. I didn't always run ads. I built my business to 100k months without all of these funnels and ads and email sequences. I didn't have all the bells and whistles. So I'm not saying you need to have all of these things, but it does make life easier. These do become assets in your business. And this is just personally what I do, I run funnels, I run ads. I have email nurture sequences. These are bringing in leads daily. Again, people can join my program at any time. This gives me baseline revenue. I have a steady cash flow every single month. I know the bare minimum of what I'm bringing in and that's at least six figures. It's predictable growth. Then I layer my live launch on top so I have this evergreen engine. It's consistent, it's sustainable. And then I have the live launch layer on top of that. A few times a year I add in big conversion event such as a challenge or a summit. I add in that live conversion event on top of these evergreen systems. These events are going to bring in urgency, community. It's going to bring the emotion back into the buying process. I offer limited time bonuses, incentives, fast action rewards. This gives people a reason to join now and then. What I like to do is so I usually do those once a quarter, those big ones, and then I do smaller versions of that once a month. Those are my buyer activation events, my base. So these launches act as a cash infusion always. It's like rocket fuel for the business. It's so fun. It's so exciting. It's so predictable. The combination gives me the best of both worlds. It gives me steady, consistent evergreen sales. Yay. That's exciting. But then I also have the high energy live conversion spikes. I'm always on such a high after doing challenges and events. It makes me feel excited about the work that I'm doing. And then I always get more ideas. It just fuels back into my business. People can feel that energy coming from me. It keeps Things exciting and and new. Now, not every live event has to be this huge production. I feel like that may be what you're thinking. Oh, this sounds like a lot of work, Carly. It doesn't have to be like that again. I host both small and large conversion events throughout the year. And once you have a SOP process in place, it's just rinse and repeat. It actually becomes kind of boring that you're just doing the same thing and everybody does their job and it's just consistent. But you get to make it fun because you get to choose the topics that you're going to be teaching on. There are monthly or quarterly workshops, and then there are bite sized experiences in between that. And all of these are meant to warm up your audience. They're meant to convert your audience without needing to do this huge full blown thing. They're just perfect for testing new angles, testing new content ideas, testing new offers if you're launching something new. And then your large conversion events, those are your challenges. These are your big moments. They happen a few times a year. I like to do mine once a quarter, at a minimum, twice a year. And it serves as your main launch vehicle. This creates huge momentum. It attracts brand new, cold, fresh leads you put a pretty penny towards your ad budget. Typically results in my biggest enrollments every time I do a challenge, hands down. And P.S. i teach my clients all of these strategies that I'm teaching. Not only do I use them in my business, I share all of this with my clients. But these challenges are in bigger live events, huge pop of cash, and then my monthly buyer activation events. That's just like the smaller pop of cash on top of my already baseline six figure Evergreen funnels sequences. Each event is carefully planned, with bonuses, with deadlines, with incentives. We're reverse engineering the whole entire launch plan so we're not scrambling at the end. It's not from pressure. We're using sales psychology. Ethically, people need a reason to take action and these events are just providing that container. The key is balance. To me, Evergreen creates this stability, which is why people love it. But again, they think that they can just do Evergreen and hands off. That's all they have to do. So Evergreen creates that stability, but then live launches create that velocity. You get to expand on the foundation that you've built in Evergreen together. When you do this hybrid model, it makes your business unstoppable. Evergreen Bayes big pop of cash conversion events. The hybrid model of Evergreen live launching. This is it. This is the secret sauce. This is how you scale the hybrid model works because it honors both the science and the sales and the soul of connection. Everything is built on connection. Sales is built on connection. It's built on trust. It's built on a conversation that then equals a conversion. You get the automation without losing your authentic vibe. You get systems without sacrificing your soul. It's not soul crushing because it's just systematized, but it does also require leadership. I must say that you have to know when to push and when to pause, when to automate, when you should go live. For me, live launches aren't just about revenue. Like, yes, it brings in a great pop of cash, but they're about relationship and building that community, which is why I feel such a high after I do these events and do these challenges. I get such wonderful feedback and I'm reminded of why I'm doing this work and why I got called to this position in the first place, why I had to struggle personally to even get to this place of teaching this. Every time I launch, I reconnect with my audience in real time. And it's so beautiful. I'm always telling my husband, like, oh, my gosh, listen to what this client said. Listen to what this client says. Like, it sharpens my message, it deepens my impact. It keeps my brand alive, it keeps it evolving. As I scale from seven to eight figures, I am doubling down on this hybrid structure. Like I said, this is my secret sauce. I am elevating my systems and expanding the team. I'm fine tuning the rhythm between Evergreen consistency and this live energy. But this is what it comes down to. This is the core of what I'm doing. Scaling isn't about doing more. It's just about being smarter with what you're doing. It's often just about simplifying everything and sometimes just stripping things away and going back to the basics. So if you've been asking yourself whether you should go evergreen or stick with live launches, that's how we began this episode, right? What is this, you know, question and debacle about evergreen or live launches? Just do both. That's my simple answer. Do both. But do both strategically. Use Evergreen to create that baseline stability and then use live launches to spark that momentum and connection. And if you want help mapping this out, you want help mapping out your hybrid launch system, this is exactly what we do inside my mentorship. We help you build the funnels, the content strategy, your offer suite, the live event structure, the SOP that keeps your business generating sales year round without the burnout. It's predictable. So predictable it almost gets boring. How cool is that? So if you need help, check out the show notes. You can book a free 45 minute call with my wing woman and we can just discuss what this looks like for you. If it's a fit, cool. If not, no pressure, just clarity. Either way, my love is with you. I am cheering you on and I will see you in the next episode. Foreign.

Thank you so much for listening to the Thriving Therapy podcast. I hope that this episode has inspired you to reduce burnout, work smarter, and see the freedom potential you have as a therapist. We would love to have you inside the Therapist to Coach Accelerator Facebook group where we have live trainings and cheat sheets on all things marketing, sales and adding coaching ethically and legally. I am here cheering you on and I'll see you around.