#148 - The biggest mistakes people make trying to scale to 7 figures

If you do already have a course and it's already making six figures in sales, but you find that growth to that next point is either slow or frustrating or not happening at all, it's like two steps forward, two steps back, then chances are you might be making one, if not several of these mistakes and hopefully this episode will help nix that for you.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your Host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and Kate McKibben where everyone week. We're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hey. Hey guys. And welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. I'm your host Kate from hellofunnels Co and today we are talking about the other side of scaling to seven figures. A last last week we talked about the things that you do need to do, the things you need to make sure that you are doing or it's going to be a really hard, slow, long road. If you haven't listened to that episode, go and check it out. But today we're talking about things you need to be not doing. You need to make sure that you are avoiding. These are the really common traps that people fall into that slow their progress down or keep them stuck entirely. So lots of juicy things in there today. I hope you've got a pen and paper ready and let's go. Okay, guys. Now before we jump into today's episode, I just wanted to take a second to invite you to our brand new live totally free training which is actually running in a couple of days. It's called the seven figure course formula. And inside it we're going to pull back the curtain on what exactly we've done in our business, what we've been helping our clients with, the shifts we made, the steps we took and the systems that we've installed that allowed our course business to grow from six to seven figures to get unstuck at that six figure point and to keep on growing through and what we've been helping our clients to do to get them scaling as well. So we're going to cover, you know, obviously parts of that today, but we're going to be able to go into a lot more detail inside the masterclass. And best of all, the most fun part, well, I think at least is at the end we are going to have a live Q and A slash coaching session so you can come along, ask all of your questions, get them answered live by myself and my team and it's going to be a lot of fun. So if you want to come along, if you want to make sure you are on that call and ready for that live coaching, then you just need to go to hellofunnels. CO7. It's the word 7s, e v e N Or grab the link out of the bio. Grab your seat. As I said, it's coming up just a couple of days. Depending on when you're listening to it, you may have already missed it. So make sure you jump in, get your seat, and I will see you all there. So now, guys, let's get into the meat and potatoes of today's episode. As I said, these are some really, really annoying mistakes that people make. And that is totally just fine. I can see why people make them, but people keep on making them. So I wanted to do this episode so that you could, if you are in that point, if you do already have a course and it's already making six figures in sales, but you find that growth to that next point is either slow or frustrating or not happening at all, it's like two steps forward, two steps back, then chances are you might be making one, if not several of these mistakes and hopefully this episode will help nix that for. So first of all, common mistake, slash common incorrect belief is that a lot of people think that the way that you grow, the way that you scale, like once you've sort of ticked those first boxes of, okay, coming up with an offer. Yep, people like it, selling it. A few, yeah, good people getting good results, great, got a good sales page, blah, blah, blah. Like, okay, so this is, this is working like, you know, I do a launch, people buy great, ticked all those first boxes, right. And they'll get you into the six figures, mid six figures. Now you want to grow. Well, surely we just need to get, pump more people through that system. Right. And the best way to do that is to spend on ads. Like, that's kind of usually what people's plan is. It's like there's like 15 steps to get to there and then just one step to get to from, you know, mid or low six figures up beyond that. And sadly, that's not the case. And actually this is where, you know, as I said, a lot of people get stuck here because they do that. And it's part of it, like, you know, scaling up, spending more on ads. It's absolutely, you know, how you a piece of the puzzle of how you grow. But you'll find there is a point and it is different for everybody. It's different for everybody's offer market, et cetera. But there is a point where you will just max out, where all of a sudden spending more on ads actually costs you more. I mean, you're getting less profit, even though you might be making more sales. So, you know, just basic. It might have. Maybe at the start, you had to spend $100 on Facebook ads to sell your program, and then you started, you doubled your ad spend, and then it was $200 to sell a program, and then you increase it again, and all of a sudden it's $500. It's, you know, there's a little bit of black voodoo magic going on with Facebook. The best way it's been explained to me is that, you know, think of Facebook like a dog, a puppy dog, and they want to please you. So they usually serve up the best and most likely people to purchase first. So you kind of get that pool first. And so those people most likely to purchase, which means that they're going to be cheaper to purchase. And then you go, great, get me more. They then need to go to a bigger pool, and those people are less likely to purchase, might be less ready, less ideal. So then all of a sudden you have to spend more to probably get the same kind of pool of people. So we could go down a whole rabbit hole talking about that. But basically, you may have already experienced this yourself, or if not, it's highly likely you will soon. If your only strategy for scaling spend more on ads. So that's mistake number one. Number two, and this is what people usually then do, right? So they've gone, just spend a bunch more on ads. Okay, that's hit a point now it's costing me lots of money, but I'm still not making any more sales. Obviously, they go back and they think, oh, there's something wrong. Something wrong with what I've got set up. It's obviously I need to optimize. Like, they jump on that word. I've just got to start optimizing things. And they start getting really obsessed and going down this rabbit hole of, okay, which button color is going to change things? Should my button be orange or red or blue? And they start getting really obsessed with these tiny little tweaks, thinking that one of these little tweaks is going to make the difference. And sure, it might. You know, doing these kind of tweaks and doing this kind of optimization, it's never a bad thing, but it's usually it's going to start increasing things by like 1% here, 1% there. And that's not going to get you doubling tripling your sales. Like that's just going to again have you spending months getting frustrated and you know, hyper focused on small, small tweaks when what you need to be doing is doing things and putting things in place that are going to make a big impact, get you a big jump. So that's number two. That is the getting obsessed with the subject lines and the open rates and stuff. Like, I'm all for. My caveat on that is I'm all for benchmarks. It's part of what we teach inside our program. It's like for each step as you're setting it up, you know, there, there are certain benchmarks.

Yes, you could tweak and optimize more, but as long as you're hitting in that range, it's good enough for now. It's good enough to move on and start focusing on a bigger thing because I think it's more important that you go, yep, I've got that piece working, it's working well enough. I'm going to now get the next piece which is going to now make it work twice as well rather than spend this work fractionally better. So know your benchmarks, know that you know this is a good open rate, that this is a good click through rate, that you know this is a good opt in rate. Like know those. And if you're hitting those, stop obsessing and start focusing on what is going to be a bigger needle mover. For me, the next thing that I see again is people kind of get really hung up on this idea of they just need to be perfect at launching or spend more on their launches or go all in on their launches and then they're going to have this like one launch that changes everything. Like. And because you've heard stories about this, right? And again, often those stories are what I call unicorn stories. They're the if it was going to happen, it would have already happened. That are like the 1% of people, but they get bandied around the Internet because they sound so lovely that like someone just accidentally did a thing one day and it made them a million dollars. That's not what happens for most people. Most people who you look at, who you admire, who are successful in your industry, they've been chipping away at it for years. There's very few people who have some meteoric, you know, rise from one launch. Usually what happens instead is again similar to that, getting obsessed over the button colors or the open rates or whether you should have emojis or not, or whether you should use ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit because it's going to get you a fractionally better open rate or whatever, right? Same with spending all your time obsessing over your launches is again, it takes up all of your time, it takes up all of your energy, your resources, your team, and it doesn't leave you the time, the headspace, the potentially. I said resources you need to invest in the other pieces that are missing that are actually going to grow you. So we are all about what we call evergreen launching here. That's one of the things we take our clients through. It's almost like weaning people off this addictive thing of like the rush and the stress of a big launch and getting them instead to do smaller, more regular, more dialed in, very repeatable launches. And it doesn't have to be for everyone but for like, for, for the majority of them it's going to still turn over, similar amount of sales, add a funnel in there, it's even better. And you can do then one or two big launches a year and just have it be a fun thing that doesn't have the stress behind it. But when you are just stuck in that cycle of quarterly launches, when you're spending, you know, two months setting up the launch, one month running the launch, another month recovering from launch and then doing it all over again, it will, it will keep you stuck and maybe you will luck out, maybe you'll be a unicorn and you'll find that magic combination of everything that comes together and your launches go from making you 50k a launch to 500k a launch. Most people, it's not the case. It's 50k, 55k, 40k, 30k, 50k. Like you kind of stay in this similar kind of range, just getting more and more frustrated and again not having the time or the resources to actually spend on the bigger picture stuff you need to be doing. The next mistake that I see a lot of people making is that they expect it to happen overnight, that they start looking for the magic bullets because again, they've probably gone through this process, they've tried scaling with ads, didn't work, tried getting obsessed optimizing everything, didn't work. Tried spending all this time, you know, doing all these launches over and over again and they're like, well there must be something, I'm clearly doing something wrong. There must be some magic thing that I'm not doing. So they start looking for the overnight. They take their focus away from so Doing the boring foundational unsexy systems, that actually is what helps you to scale. And they start looking for a magic bullet. And so then they start throwing, you know, so it means that then they kind of go almost back to beginner mode because they're just throwing out untested thing after untested thing after untested thing, looking for that magic unicorn bullet and usually don't find it. So again, people kind of get stuck in this phase. It can last a while. And this is where I kind of usually ended up stuck with my previous businesses before I figured out the pieces that you actually need to scale, which is what we talk about in the masterclass. So if you don't have your seat for that quick and get it, as I said, link is below. And that is where for me at least you say gone through these things and seen stuck in all of these phases for long enough, you kind of go, bugger it, maybe I'm no good at this. Maybe I'm never going to figure this out. Everyone else must be smarter than me. You know, blow it all up, start again and then you go back to the start and then you have to do it all. So this is, you know, if this is a loop that sounds familiar, I would love it. You know, come share the, share the pain, like, cause I understand it, I was in it myself. DM us over at hello Funnels or leave a comment below if you're watching the video. Does you know, have you been stuck in any of these loops? Have these been strategies that you've been using which actually ended up being mistakes? And then the final thing that I think a lot of people get really stuck on and is a bit of a mistake is this mindset of, you know, really being overly protective of their profit. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but you might have heard someone say that, oh, you know, a good business in this industry should be doing 30% profit, 40% profit, 50% profit, whatever, right? The problem is when you are growing, the, what actually usually happens is the, the way businesses grows, it's kind of, it's not a straight line, it's kind of goes up and down and blah, blah, blah. But when you are in a growth phase, you usually have to, if you're, you know, if you're getting more clients and things like that, you might need to bring on more team to help to service those cl. So there's usually a phase as you're growing where your profit percentage is going to go down. You need to invest more to do that growth and then you're going to hit a little plateau and things are going to even out and you're going to then be more profitable and you're going to systemize everything. And then to get to that next phase again, you'll have to invest some more and jump up and have again a less profitable phase. Now, I'm not saying spend money you don't have. I'm not saying get yourself in debt. I'm talking about is when some people get just really, really scared to spend anything. They're like, well, I've only ever spent this amount so I, I shouldn't have to spend more to grow. And just that is crazy. Like you do have to invest more to grow and you can either invest more time or you can invest more resources or you can invest more money or you can invest a combo of the both. But you are not going to be able to jump up to that next level unless more investment is made. And usually at this point, if you are at that mid, you know, low mid six figures, you're probably investing all the time that you have. Right. Is usually a very time intensive place to be. So to think that, okay, the way I'm going to grow is just to work twice as hard is insanity because you're going to burn out, it's not going to last. So there's going to need to, you're going to need to find the balance that works for you. But not investing is again, it's going to keep you stuck. And we talk about some of the ratios that I recommend around investing for your marketing and other things inside that masterclass which we're going to be jumping to in a couple of days. So if you haven't got your seat, head to hellofunnels. CO7. That's the word. 7s e v e N. Grab the link below, get your seat. I can't wait. It's gonna be super fun and I will see you all there. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing it online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today and stealmyfunnel.com.