The Team Shift Behind Seven Figures Growth

Hey, hey, my friends. Welcome back to the Thriving Therapreneur Podcast. I'm about to jet off to the Bahamas, but I wanted to come on here before I left for a few days and just talk about breaking founder dependence because it's not casual that I'm leaving and going to the Bahamas, although it feels very casual to me. It's not unlike me to just hop on a plane. I have friends that have places over there and We take the kids and we just all go have a grand old time in the beautiful blue water and white sands. But it's not casual in the fact that I can just, you know, hop on a plane and go over to the Bahamas, leave the country, and I'm not working, I'm not on calls. It's not just a weekend either. And my team is managing and running the business. The show goes on. Everything will be just fine.. And as I was getting ready for this trip, also not working, not on calls, not in my DMs, just packing, running errands. I went and got a cheap pack and play from a thrift store cuz I'm just gonna end up leaving it there. Here's what's happened in my business the last 7 days. Okay. Without me, $37,000, over $37,000 in revenue, 47 sales. Sales, and not a single one of those sales were directly made by me. That's $37 that came from low ticket, mid ticket offers moving through my funnels, emails doing their job, my sales team managing the DMs and closing consult calls, my client fulfillment team, even getting new clients started, reactivating current clients. We've actually had a ton of alumni come back recently. I don't know what's in the water, but that's been part of those sales as well. And it's all happening without me. And this is not luck. This is what happens when you build an intentional business, when you build a business that does not depend on you for being present every single day for every single thing that happens inside of it. And this is what I'm talking about when I say breaking founder dependence. This is what is possible. So I wanna pull back the curtains and just shed light on what this actually looks like in my business in more detail, what it actually means, the different departments in my company that really allow me to have real freedom, and something that you can mimic in your own business as well. So I want to start this episode by first just asking you an honest question. If you were to take a week off right now No laptop, no DMs, no calls. What would happen to your business? Would it keep running? Would sales still come in? Would your clients still be supported? Would your team know exactly what they need to do without you if you didn't have service, if you went off the grid? Or would everything grind to a halt because it either all lives in your head or you're running a one-man show? And if the honest answer is the second one, that everything would halt, I need you to hear this episode because if your business cannot function without your constant presence, you do not have a business. You have a very demanding, expensive job, and the ceiling on that job is your own energy, your own time, your own capacity, which means that you have permanently capped your growth. Hey friends, quick pause. Because you're listening to this episode, I wanna give you something special, completely on me. I'm gifting you my 23-page Cash Infusion Playbook. This is the exact playbook I use in my own business, hand directly to my clients. It is packed with money-making, needle-moving activities you should be doing every single day to generate revenue and make easy sales. Too many entrepreneurs are spending their time on the wrong things, busy work that feels productive but doesn't pay. And this playbook cuts through all of that, gives you the exact revenue-generating activities that actually move the needle forward in your business. Click on the link in the show notes, drop your email, and I'll send it straight to you. It is my gift to you for showing up, doing the work, and listening to this episode. Let's get back to it. Now, I wanna also just put myself back in your shoes when I was wearing all of the hats in my business. Okay? And I was at this place where I didn't have complete founder dependence. But I was absolutely always working towards it. Every action step that I took in my business, every hire that I made in my business was to buy back my freedom, buy back my time so that I could break founder dependence. And it doesn't take that long to do it. Yes. Is it always a little bit scary to make the next hire, to let team members go that aren't doing their job so you can replace them with an A+ team member? To have automation set up. There's learning curves, but it's important for you to take those steps to break the founder dependence. And it's one of the most common reasons that coaches plateau is when the business depends on them. They build something that runs entirely on them, their energy, their decisions, their daily presence, and then they wonder why scaling feels impossible, why they can't take a vacation. Why possibly even maternity leave is terrifying instead of exciting, why maybe they feel exhausted all of the time inside of their business. So breaking the dependence, it's work, okay, but it's gonna pay off tenfold. And I'm going to show you exactly how it's going to pay off and exactly how I did this. So let's even talk about the definition of founder dependence, and I'm sure you can probably guess by now, it's exactly when your business requires you to specifically you to be present and active for it to function. You are the founder of your business. That means every sale goes through you, every client question comes to you, every decision lands on your desk, every piece of content gets created by you, every fire gets put out by you. If you're the only decision maker, you're gonna drive yourself into a hole. You will be crying at your desk. You will wanna burn the business down. And this is normal in the early stages when you're just starting out. You're the marketer, you're the sales team, you're the delivery coach, you're the content creator, you're the customer support, you're the tech support, you're the CEO, you're all of them at once. I get it. That is the reality of building from scratch, and it works until it doesn't. So do not get stuck in the trap of wearing all of the hats for longer than you should. That's the point I'm trying to drive home here. Maybe you're long overdue for a hire. Maybe you're long overdue for putting some SOPs in place. Maybe you're long overdue for putting some automations in place to buy back your time. The problem is most entrepreneurs never make this shift. They stay in that operator role long after it stops serving them. They keep doing everything themselves. It's faster. It's easier than training somebody else. They're afraid of letting go, of delegating. They don't trust that anybody else can do it the way that they can do it. And I get it, I've been there too. And I have cried in my office multiple times scaling to 7 figures because the weight of holding everything was just too much. And there were moments where I genuinely fantasized about burning it all to the ground and starting over with something simpler. However, on the other side of me crying was me making a hire, training them, Creating automations, creating SOPs, and getting it off of my shoulders. That's it. So I had to make decisions over and over and over again in the business to move out of operator into owner, into CEO, into visionary, from doer to CEO, from controlling everything to building a team I could actually trust to make decisions and actually do the thing that I want them to do. And that decision changed everything. Thing for me. And I talked a little bit briefly, I mentioned the word SOPs, standard operating procedures. If you don't know what that is, I know it sounds very corporate and unsexy really, but you have to have SOPs in place because if the knowledge of how to run your business only lives in your head, your business is not scalable, it's not sellable. If anything happens to you, if you get sick, maybe you are going on maternity leave, hey, maybe you want to go to the Bahamas, Nothing can move without you. So every single role on my team has an SOP. Every department has documented processes. This means that if somebody's sick, somebody can step in and somebody else can do the job. This means that when I onboard a new team member, they're not starting from scratch either. I don't have to explain how everything works. It's already written down. There's videos. This means I could quite literally be in the Bahamas and the team can be operating because they don't need me. To tell them what to do next. It's all built in the SOPs. It's not something that you just do once and you forget. It is a living document that does need to be updated every time a process changes, every time something new launches, or every time we identify possibly a better way, we update it, especially in this era of AI. So once you create these SOPs, don't forget about them. And if you don't have SOPs in your business, start. It can be so simple. It could be as simple as you creating a Loom video of what you're doing, and Loom actually even transcribes it. Then you can plug it into Claude and it can spit out a beautiful SOP for you. It doesn't have to be that complicated. Even if it's just you on your team, create the SOPs. If it's just you and your VA, create the SOPs. Have the VA help you. Document some of your processes now before you need to actually hand them to somebody else, because creating them in the middle of hiring, training, middle of chaos, that can be a bit of a nightmare. So I would encourage you to be proactive in this process as much as possible. Okay, real quick, if you are still struggling trying to figure out your coaching niche, I'm hosting a workshop July 14th to help you find your perfectly profitable niche once and for all, one that passes the high ticket test, one that is going to 3x your therapy income and help you build your dream coaching business. No more guessing. It's not a reason to not add coaching. I'd love to help you figure out your niche once and for all, one that is actually going to make you money in the online space. Join us July 14th. Link is in the show notes. Okay, let's move into the team. Let's move into behind the scenes of what is actually happening with my team behind the business that did allow us to make $37 grand over that in the past 7 days and 47 sales and none of them coming from me. What is this structure? And people often assume it must be a massive operation, multiple offices, dozens of people, huge payroll. And then I tell them the actual headcount and they're genuinely shocked. Okay. A 7-figure team can look exactly like this. This is what mine looks like. It's lean, it's smart. I will tell you, I've had almost double the team members that I've had probably in the past year and a half, 2 years. And I scaled back and I slimmed down my team to make it meaner and leaner, not adding, adding, adding somebody for everything. So let's first break it down into departments. The first department is operations. This is your backbone of everything. This is where systems, automations, funnel buildouts, technical infrastructure, all of it lives here in your operations department. I have a director of operations. He oversees the moving parts. He keeps projects on track. He makes sure basically the whole company and machine is running the way it's supposed to. And everybody is doing their jobs the way that they're supposed to. So I know that I can lean on him most heavily, especially when it comes to knowing what's happening in the business at any department at any given time. I also have a GoHighLevel expert. GoHighLevel is the CRM system that we use. We actually use a white label version of it, but all of our automations, email sequences, pipeline management, funnel infrastructure all lives here. And so having somebody who Lives and breathes the platform and can execute and troubleshoot and build inside of our CRM. It just helps us execute and pace faster. Now I also have an executive assistant. Her role spans across all of the departments, so operations support, customer support, project management, keeping things from falling through the cracks. She really is the connective tissue of the business. When I need something communicated across the team, when a client has a question that needs to get routed to the right person. When somebody needs something done and they don't know who to go to, they go to my executive assistant, and she is an absolutely incredible— one of the best hires I have ever made. Then I have my marketing and content department. This is just one person, believe it or not. Copywriter, email marketer, written voice of the brand, email campaigns, copy assets for funnel buildouts, content that goes out to our audience. And having somebody who understands my voice, my brand, who can execute the marketing side without me having to write every single word has been a game changer. Now, I didn't hire a copywriter for quite some time in my business so that when I finally did hire a copywriter, she had enough verbiage to go off of where it could be my brand. And oftentimes we're just repurposing my voice and old content and sprucing it up. And so this is why it's very much still in alignment with me and it doesn't feel like somebody is taking over my voice. The next department is sales. This is exactly what it sounds like. And my sales department manages my DMs, runs my consultation calls. This is the piece I feel like most coaches can't wrap their heads around at first. Oh my gosh, the idea that somebody else is gonna close your clients for you and talk to them for you. But a well-trained sales team working from proven scripts and frameworks and SOPs that you give them, as well as previous recordings of calls that you've taken, this is just as effective, honestly, if not more than you. They're not emotionally attached to the outcome. They're focused, they're consistent. This is their only job. They're following a process that works, so not being involved in every single sale, this is how you scale. You cannot close all of your own calls and build a 7-figure business. The math just simply doesn't work. I remember I was hitting 6-figure months. This was probably 3 years ago at the time. I've been hitting 6-figure months for 3 years and I was still taking all of my calls and it was a huge bottleneck. I was burnt out and I was long overdue for hiring somebody to help me with my calls. I mean, the math just simply doesn't work going to a 7, 8-figure business and trying to make every sale yourself. Next department is client fulfillment. So as you continue to grow your client caseload, you will need more coaches to help support them. Usually they're called client success managers. They're the people who are gonna be in the trenches with your clients, supporting them through the program, answering questions, providing accountability, making sure every single person is getting a real experience and a real result. And this department is not just a nice to have, in my opinion. It is a non-negotiable as you're continuing to grow, because client fulfillment is always number one in my eyes. And 90% of my marketing is testimonials, and that's by design. And that is also proof that our clients get the best-in-class experience. We love to spoil our clients. Testimonials come from clients who get results, and clients who get results are properly supported. So you have to have this client fulfillment team, and my client success team is absolutely the backbone of all of that proof. I mean, we have hundreds of testimonials at this point. And then of course there's me. Okay? I'm the CEO, I'm the visionary, I am the content creator. I am the person who is living this experience of even going from therapist to coach and continuing to scale the business from $0 to 6 figures, from 6 figures to 7 figures, from 7 to multiple 7. And now I'm on my journey and I am here for the 8-figure dream. So my energy, my conviction, my IP, my thought leadership, this is the whole thing. That this company is built around is me and my thought leadership and my conviction and my energy and my story. And my whole team, they back me up. And if you count all of the people on my team, okay, 6 people including me, that's it. That is my 7-figure team. It's not a massive team of 17 people like I used to have. So there's a beauty in scaling back, not having a super large team. You don't have to. And just making sure that everybody has their marching orders and everybody is communicating properly within your team. And that's a huge thing is communication. So for us, we communicate all day pretty much on Slack. We also have ClickUp. Those are our main two channels. Of course, we have a million different other platforms, but Slack is how all of the different departments are communicating. Sales has its own thread. Client success has its own thread. Operations has its own thread. Anytime we do a launch, we create a new thread. Thread for that, then we shut it down. We do voice memos, we do end of day reports. We're doing quick check-ins with each other. We even have a thread for just general stuff. We send pictures of our kids and we just kind of check in with the culture of the team and keeping each other's spirits high, especially if like something is going on personally with one of the team members. It's really just a family is the best way that I can describe it. And I do check Slack throughout the week, even when I'm not at my desk. It's not hours of my day. It's, you know, 2 minutes here, 15 minutes there, a voice memo here, reply there. I'm just staying in the loop. I'm not being the bottleneck for anything. The team doesn't need me to make every decision, but I'm keeping a pulse on everything. They are absolutely empowered to move within their own lanes, and I could not respond for days Slack and the show would still go on. Okay. But I like to stay informed and that's just the rhythm of how I operate as a CEO. So where do I go from here, Carly? This is lots of information. Where do I start if I'm just a team of one? And that was me back in the day. Okay. Perhaps you're like, well, I can't afford a team like this. Okay. And I hear you and I wanna tell you every client who says this I just wanna say back to you, you don't have to build this all at once. We build it in order. There is very much an order of operations, but I'm here to future pace you. Your first hire should solve your biggest bottleneck. So what is your biggest bottleneck right now? What is the thing that is eating your time that somebody else could be doing? Is it admin? Is it operations? Is it customer support? Is it sales? Usually this is where a VA comes in first. Or possibly a sales team member who is only commission-based. Okay, you can get a sales team member for 5% commission, so it's no money out of your pocket actually unless a sale is made. Or you can hire a virtual assistant for less than $1,000 a month who's going to be full-time in your business. That's a no-brainer. Your second hire should also protect your revenue. Okay, so as your business grows, you need to hire revenue-generating hires. I have a whole episode on the order of operations of how you should hire and how they really need to pay for themselves, essentially. But your sales department is gonna become critical. You cannot scale if you're the only one closing clients and you're the only one making sales. Your third hire is gonna protect your clients. That's gonna be your client fulfillment. As your client count grows, you need support coaches, you need client success managers. You have to ensure and protect that the experience of your clients stays best in class, stays excellent. So you're building one layer at a time. You're possibly hiring a VA first, then you're possibly hiring a setter, which is a sales team member. Then you're hiring somebody to help you with client fulfillment. And if your hire doesn't pay for itself within a reasonable timeframe, then you possibly need to reconsider the hire. Or you need to reconsider training. Sometimes it's just about training them up to be a better team member. That comes through SOPs like we talked about earlier. So document before you delegate. That's important to remember. Document before you delegate. And the clarity of the documentation is really what's gonna make the delegation and hiring and training a lot easier and actually work. Hey friends, I wanna tell you about something really special I'm putting together for August. I am hosting a small intimate 2-day business coaching intensive right here in beautiful Jupiter, Florida on the beach at a resort. I'm only taking 10 people. That is it. Just 10. This is a marketing implementation edition, which means we're not gonna talk about what to do. We're gonna sit down, we're gonna roll up our sleeves. We're actually gonna implement it together. Me, my team, you, one of the most beautiful settings I could think of. I did this last year. The results and reviews were insane. These small curated rooms where real breakthroughs happen because you have proximity, real accountability, real momentum walking out the door. This is what it's all about. So if you want one of those 10 spots, do not wait. Click the link in the show notes, get your name in, get all of the details. August is gonna be here before we know it. All right, let's get back to the episode. So let's recap. We covered a lot today. I want you to walk away with a few things. Number one, breaking founder dependence is not about building a massive team. It's about building the right team, lean, aligned. Each person is clear on their role. Every role is backed by documented processes and SOPs. The business can function at a high level, whether you're there at your desk or you're in the Bahamas. The goal is not to remove yourself from the business entirely. You're the CEO, you're the visionary, you're the energy, your conviction, your thought leadership. Your lived experience, that's irreplaceable. That matters. That's what your clients are coming for. The goal is to remove you from being the operator, from the day-to-day decisions, from the bottlenecks, so that your presence in the business is reserved for the highest leverage things that only you can do. It's reserved for your thought leadership and your IP and your visionary brain. And this is exactly how you're gonna move from a 6-figure business to a 7-figure business. This is how you're gonna take vacations, how you're gonna take maternity leave, how you're gonna come back to a business that runs just fine without you, if not even better, because you set it up for success before you took your little sabbatical. So build the team, build the SOPs, break the dependence. You will not regret it. And this is how your business can thrive and you can be happy while you're actually running. The company of your dreams. If this episode gave you a clear picture of what's possible, what you need help building, I wanna hear from you. Tag me on Instagram. Let me know you're listening to the show. Shoot me a DM. I am in my DMs. I scan through them. I reply back. I often voice memo. So let me know what you're up to. If you have a question, reach out. I do not bite. There's tons of ways that you can work with us. You can check the show notes for mentorship options. I am here to support you. My love is with you, and I will see you in the next episode after I get back from the Bahamas.