The 8 Fixes Your Coaching Business Needs For Six-Figure Months

Welcome back to the show. Today is going to be a founder-forward focus conversation. What does that mean? There is something in marketing, it's actually a big trend lately called founder-forward marketing, and it's all about the founder sharing their stories as they continue to set the foundation and grow and scale What's working for them? What's not working for them? Pull back the curtains behind the scenes. No gatekeeping. What's really going on? What are they really doing and what are they not doing? That's what today's conversation is gonna be about. If you're new to my world, welcome. I don't gatekeep around here. I share everything that's working. I am very transparent. There is no question that I will not answer for you. Here's the thing. I've been making 6-figure months consistently since June of 2023. We're just diving right in. Okay? I'm ripping the band-aid off. This is how I'm starting. It's now February 2026 at the time of this recording. This episode will probably come out in March, but I wanna talk about something almost nobody talks about once they start making money, once they quote unquote made it in the online coaching space, and it's the seasons of business. January for me was still a 6-figure month. It always is. Like I said, I've been making these 6-figure months since June of 2023, but it wasn't the number that I projected for my $5 million plan. Here's the truth. I could have forced it. I could have absolutely hit the number that I wanted. I could have tripled the ad budget. I could have run more traffic straight to my DMs. I could have pushed harder. When you're at this stage of business where you are making 6-figure months, you do have the power in this kind of imaginary dial where you can turn on the faucet and run it faster. You can turn it down when you want more clients, turn it up, turn the dial up. When you need to scale back and get organized and focus on infrastructure, then you turn the dial again. So. I could have forced it. I could have tripled the ad budget. I could have ran more traffic straight to my DMs. I know how to get more clients when I want more clients. I could have pushed harder. I didn't. And I want to explain why I was okay with not hitting the numbers and my projections that I had set out for January, because this is where real CEO leadership happens. Let me give you some context. We had some major internal transitions inside of Carly Hill Coaching. 4 team members were released. I shifted all of my departments. I'm creating a more lean and mean team. Roles were absolutely restructured. New hires came in. Training obviously has to happen and re-happen. At the same time, I was also testing a new style of conversion event. If there's anything that you need to know about me, it's this: I test fucking everything. Literally, I have tested almost everything in this industry. I have made the mistakes, I have burned the money, I've optimized the funnels, I've rebuilt the backend. When most people are still thinking about trying something, I've already tested it twice. I've either doubled down and killed it, or I've took it to the grave. I've invested well over 6 figures and mentors, all the big names in the coaching space. I've probably worked with them. The market changes consistently. If you're not testing, you're slowly going to become irrelevant. I say that with love, but it's the truth. So here's the key: testing plus team transitions, infrastructure upgrades— that's not a season, in my opinion, to pour gasoline on the fire. I didn't want to pour gasoline on the fire. Revenue is not going to fix messy infrastructure. It's just going to magnify it and it's going to make it more messy. So yeah, revenue is sexy. We want to say I hit that XYZ month, but if you don't have the proper infrastructure, that XYZ month that you had, it's going to magnify the chaos that's already going on behind the scenes. There are seasons in business. Let me expand on this for a second. I mentioned it earlier. If you don't understand what season you're in, you will sabotage your success. You will maybe scale too fast. You will lose team members and the turnover will be high. You're gonna burn yourself out. So there's different seasons and I want you to recognize what season you're in right now. There's the building season. So this is the foundations. You're getting scrappy, the, you're getting proof of concept. You're making your first $10K month, very much founder-led, messy momentum. You're wearing all of the hats. You're creating your first offer. You're signing your first clients. You're in the DMs. Again, you're wearing every single hat. So speed matters much more than structure at this point. Because you're wearing all the hats. You don't need all the perfect SOPs. You just need proof of concept that people want your shit and it works, and you're getting testimonials. It's a little bit chaotic, but it's productive chaos. It's exciting. You're getting that proof of concept. Oh my gosh, somebody wants this, and the next person wants it, and the next person wants it, and whoa, I'm getting good feedback. This is actually beautiful. Then you can move to the growth and the scale season. Now you know, okay, what I have really works. You increase your ad spend, you build sales volume, you increase your volume, you need more eyeballs on your stuff, and that's going to increase your revenue. You can up your price. But here's what's happening behind the scenes when you start doing that. Your team is in Slack, it's not organized, it's going to get messy. Your Google Drive maybe is a little bit messy. Your CRM tag strategy, a little bit messy. SOPs are just living in somebody's brain, or they're like half-ass documented. There's no process maps. Fulfillment is depending on one or two people, and now you're double, tripling the amount of clients who are coming in. And client fulfillment is always number one in my eyes. So you need to add more support. You need to add accountability. So not only support, but are people actually showing up to the coaching calls? Are they actually logging in and doing their quote-unquote homework? So you as the founder would still be the bottleneck in this season. Most coaches stop evolving here. They think, all right, well, if revenue is growing, everything's fine, and Maybe it is for now, but it won't be as you keep double tripling. It's just gonna be chaos that's hidden behind the scenes. So then there's the stabilizing season. So this is where I am. I've built the foundation, I've gone through the growth phase, I've gone through the scaling phase, and I'm going through another scaling phase. But before I go through the other scaling phase, I need to stabilize. I need to pull back strategically. It's not that I'm stopping selling. I make sales every single day, but I, I'm not panicking. I'm organizing. I'm process mapping everything. I'm reworking SOPs. I'm clarifying departments. I'm redoing my org chart. I'm restructuring roles. I'm having internal meetings. I'm upgrading my client fulfillment. I'm implementing and infusing AI in, in every area to help my clients get faster results. I'm training my sales team properly. I'm training every other person on my team properly. I am building true leadership and company culture inside the company. So to me, this season feels a little bit slower, but it's very intentional. This is the season that is gonna allow me to scale in a very clean way. I think I've talked about this in a previous episode. I have a Google Drive folder. That is called scaling smart. I'm very, very intentional about how I scale the infrastructure that I hold because I do have big goals and ambitions to hit million-dollar months, but I don't want it to feel messy. I want it to feel easy and clean and organized. Most people are addicted to expansion, just expanding, next revenue goal, next revenue goal, and Listen, I love me a next revenue goal. I love collapsing timelines. Quantum leap is my middle name, but few people respect the stabilization it takes to scale in an organized way. When you're in the expansion season— blah— when you're in the expansion season, after you get organized, this is when you can hit the motherfucking gas. Ad spend increases, sales are starting to scale, volume is increasing. But here's the difference: the backend, the automations, the team, the infrastructure— it can handle it. The team can handle it, the infrastructure can handle it. Expansion without infrastructure is just stress. You didn't start a business to have more stress. You started a business to to have more freedom and to impact lives, but we start businesses to have freedom, right? The byproduct is all of the beautiful lives that we get to impact. We get to do it simultaneously. Expansion with infrastructure is leverage. This is where you can double down on what's actually working. I keep using the word infrastructure. Some of you may be wondering, what does that actually mean? Coaches throw this word around a lot and it can mean a lot of different things, but what I'm referring to when I'm talking about infrastructure here is clear process mapping. Okay, Carly Hill, what, what is even a process map? Let's take your onboarding process, for example. You have it almost, imagine like sticky noted out every single step that happens when the step happens. How it happens. If it doesn't happen properly, you have arrows everywhere. You have if-then conditioning. So if something quote unquote breaks, you can go back to the process map. If you need to clone it, duplicate it. If you're a business coach and you're teaching somebody else your process, it's quite literally process mapped out where they can copy and paste it. You have SOPs. Standard operating procedures. Your team knows if you are to take a sabbatical or whoever's in charge of something is sick and they can't step in, well, the job can still get done because there's a standard operating procedure in place. There's defined departments. So you have your sales department, you have your marketing department, you have your client fulfillment department, You have defined departments, you have the head of the department, and sometimes that's still you. Maybe you have a sales manager, maybe you have a marketing manager, maybe you have a director of operations, maybe you have an online business manager, but then you also have people that fall underneath of that. You have client support coaches, maybe you have copywriters, you have an EA or a VA. Then you need to have weekly structured meetings for all of those departments. When you get on those meetings, what is your marching orders? What are the KPIs that every single role needs to hit? What is the company incentives? What are the hiring pipelines? When you hire somebody, what training do they go through? How do you even run a hiring campaign in your business? Sales training systems. When somebody comes on and is a new hire in your sales team, what training are they getting? Fulfillment quality control. How are you monitoring how your coaches are coaching your clients? AI integration to increase speed, not only for your clients but also your team, so your team doesn't have to come to you all of the time. You don't have to answer. They can just go to the SOP library that's AI infused and get the answer. This is what I mean by infrastructure. This is the badass shit that I am building out behind the scenes. So when I do, mark my words, hit the million dollar months, it's gonna feel easy. It's gonna be clean. If I could go back in time, I would have created a process map for everything, an SOP from everything, every single funnel, every single onboarding step, every single launch workflow, every hiring process, every client experience and milestone. When somebody leaves, and they will on your team, you don't want all of this knowledge walking out the door. Everything needs to be documented. Oftentimes there was just Band-Aids put on things to put out fires in the moment, and then as you keep building and you keep building, it starts to get a little bit messier. So you need documentation, you need clarity. You want continuity. What got you to multi-six figures, maybe even seven figures, it's not going to get you to eight. And I knew that. I'm making six-figure months consistently, but I know getting to million-dollar months, that wasn't going to happen with the systems that I had in place. I had to clean up shop. The level of clarity required is gonna increase as you scale. You need to be more organized. You need to have everything documented. With all the team changes that I had, releasing 4 team members, that was a lot. It was also over the holidays, starting a new year, but it was business decisions. It was very strategic. It's something that most founders struggle with and they keep members on for way too long. Sometimes you outgrow team members, sometimes they outgrow the role. Sometimes the infrastructure shifts and the company evolves. For me, I was just creating a more leaner team. I had way too many hires. I got hire happy for a little bit, and so I needed to reorganize my departments. And instead of having a million different people communicating with each other, I gave one person more roles. If you keep somebody because you're comfortable instead of them being completely aligned in the business and aligned actually with the next level of your business, this is going to stall your growth. You absolutely have to have A++ team players as you move from 7, multi-7 to 8 figures. Scattered contractors, they stop working. And so Your people on your team can still be 1099, but they need to be dedicated operators. They need to be dedicated to your business. I wanted more people fully in-house, fully all in Carly Hill Coaching versus just contractors, back and forth communication, agencies. That wasn't the vibe as I'm continuing to scale. So your people on your team And P.S., you've nailed down client acquisition at this point. If you're scaling with me, you're pacing with me. Team acquisition becomes just as important. This is your friendly reminder to hire before you need to hire. Have the hiring campaigns set up, running, have people submitting applications, review applications, and then if and when you need to hire, which you will, it's not going to be an emergency situation in your business. Business, you're already going to have people on backup. Let's recap. Most coaches believe that more clients is going to fix the stress in their business. They're just chasing that next revenue goal. They believe that more revenue is going to fix the chaos. More revenue is the answer to quote unquote making it. They believe that bigger launches is going to fix all of the burnout behind the scenes. And none of this is true. This is miss that most coaches believe. More revenue is going to magnify whatever you already have. If your backend is messy, more revenue equals more mess. If your sales team is untrained, more leads equal lower conversion, and that's just wasted money on client acquisition. If your fulfillment isn't optimized, more clients equal a higher churn and your reputation rate going down. Scaling isn't always sexy. It is very intentional. It is structure. And sometimes leadership means not pushing harder, knowing when to pull back, being okay with pulling back, recognizing that you're not behind, you're actually ahead because most people skip this step and you're organizing better and faster than anyone else, so that when you do move to that sexy scale, it's going to be clean. Again, if I could go back, I would document everything sooner, process map, implement those weekly department structure meetings, real org chart, have those defined departments, step into that CEO role. I would step into the CEO thinking a lot faster. I would have stopped thinking like just a coach making money and trying to hit the next revenue goal. And I would have started thinking like an operator building a lifelong asset. The goal is always sustainability, not just the next revenue goal, the shiny object syndrome. There is a massive difference. So there are seasons to push, we love that. There are seasons to organize, we love that even more. And the wisdom is knowing which season that you're in. Again, I could have forced bigger numbers. I chose stability instead. Carly Hill Coaching is building something that scales clean and mean. So if you are in a stabilizing season right now, don't panic. You're not behind. You're building foundation. Foundation is what lets you expand without breaking. It's the building blocks of your house. I hope this resonated with you. It's what you needed to hear. My love is with you, and I will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening to the Thriving Therapreneur 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.