#301 - The $5K Month vs $5K Week vs $5K Day Funnel (What's Actually Different)

Okay, quick question for you. What is the difference between a funnel that makes $5,000 a month and a funnel that makes $5,000 a day? Most people would give me the same answer. Just more traffic, right? Same funnel, spend more, put more people in the top. No. And honestly, that answer is exactly why so many good businesses get stuck and stay there. Because here's the thing, more traffic on the wrong setup doesn't grow your business. It just makes everything more expensive and stressful. Things start breaking, your costs go up, your stress goes up, and your results, they don't. And a $5K a day funnel is not just a $5K a month funnel with a bigger ads budget. They are completely different strategies and completely different levels of business with different pieces installed in a different order. And today I'm going to break down all 3 levels for you. 5K months, 5K weeks, and 5K days. Hey, hey there, I'm Kate McKibbin from hellofunnels.co and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. So before we get into the 3 levels, I need to explain how we actually look at funnels around here because it's probably not what you're picturing. When most people hear the word funnel, they picture one of two things. Either one massive inverted triangle funnel where everyone comes in at the same point, goes through the same flow, and pops out the other end having had the exact same journey. Or the opposite, some giant complex spiderweb where every single person gets their own completely unique customized path, which sounds lovely in theory, but is completely unbuildable and unscalable in practice. So please just don't. Personally, here at Helen Funnels, we don't do either of those. What we build instead is an ecosystem of mini evergreen engines, and each of these engines is its own little evergreen sales and marketing system, its own mini machine with one clear job to do, and it does it well. The beauty of building it this way is you build them one at a time. You don't need to build everything at once, and you don't need to be everywhere at once. Each engine starts working and earning on its own as soon as it's installed. They're all designed to work together, to build on each other, and to compound your results. And the more of them that you have, the better they all work. Every engine you add makes everything else work harder. This is how we teach our clients to automate their sales. Automate their marketing, automate their business growth, even automate their delivery. Well, mostly automate. And I say mostly very deliberately because the goal is to automate the important repeatable stuff and then keep a few high-potency human touches in the places where they really count. That combination, automation underneath, humanity on top, is in my experience, the best prescription for success there is. So with that in mind, here's the common mistake people make. People assume the difference between the levels is volume and ad spend. More traffic, more content, more everything, more budget. It's not. The difference is which engines you have installed and whether you built them in the right order for the phase you're actually in. Because I see it all the time. People reaching for the advanced shiny strategies and engines when they're missing the fundamental ones underneath. Wrong engines, wrong time, wrong order equals stuck. Right engines, right order, that's when it all takes off. So let me break this down. Level 1, getting to $5K months mostly on autopilot. So first, let's be honest about what life actually looks like at this stage. You are being pulled in a thousand directions at once. You're trying to grow an audience. You're trying to figure out and master your offers. You're trying to get good at sales and marketing, two entire professions on their own, by the way. And you're usually doing all of it on your own for the very first time with zero support, having never done anything like this before. That is a lot to figure out all at once, and almost all of it is being done manually by you. So at this level, you don't need 10 strategies. You need one thing that gives you serious bang for your buck. One thing that solves the biggest problems of this phase. All at the same time. And the biggest problems are clear. You don't have enough people to sell to, and you don't have enough money to go and find more people to sell to. Your audience just isn't big enough, and your budget is even smaller. You need eyeballs on your offers, and you need your audience growing every single day without you having to become a professional influencer to do it, because that's not your job. That was never supposed to be your job, unless actually you want to be an influencer. Alongside that, you need to also making sales. You need to be paying your bills, right? So what could possibly solve both these problems at once? This is what we call the audience engine, and it's a genuine 2 for 1. Actually, it's almost like a 5 for 1. While your audience engine is running, it is growing your email list. It is growing your social media followings. It's letting you test different offers, different price points, different problems to solve. So you find your winners faster. It's polishing up your core marketing skills in the process, and the whole time it's making you sales and revenue. Every single one of those is a problem you were otherwise gonna have to solve separately, manually, on your own, but not anymore. Now it's just one engine, solves all of them all at once. Now, a bonus tip for this level. The really smart business owners, the ones who wanna grow fast, They do one very specific thing here. Once their audience engine is in place and through its initial testing phase, they take the revenue it's making and they reinvest as much of it as they can straight back into the audience engine itself. So back into more traffic, more eyeballs, more growth, which means more sales, which means more money to reinvest, right? Because this is how it snowballs. Okay, numbers time, because I want to give you real numbers for each level. And I know paid ads make some of you very nervous. So a well-built audience engine should be running at a minimum of a 1.5 to a 2x return on ad spend. That means every dollar you put in comes back is either $1.50 to $2 or more, usually within days, not months. And in this first phase, the goal to hit that number of $5K months is to get to a place where you can spend $50, $60-ish a day in ad spend, comfortably and profitably. Now, I know for some of you that number might sound scary. For others, it might be revolutionary at how small it is. When this is set up right, you know you're getting that money back. You see it in your bank account that day or the next day. And once you've seen that happen a few times, it stops feeling like a scary spend and just starts feeling like investing. And you don't even have to start at the $50. You can start at $20 a day if that feels better. More doable. Prove it to yourself. Work your way up. At those starting numbers, you're looking at roughly $75 to $120 a day coming back. And because it's profitable, you keep feeding it, it will keep growing. That is your $5K months, mostly on autopilot, done. And this level moves fast when you do it right. We're talking starting with a $20 a day ad spend, getting to that $50, $60 a day ad spend in a matter of weeks after switching this on. Okay. Level 2, 5K weeks on autopilot. Now, now, could you get part of the way there by just upping your ad spend? Sure. Part of the way. As long as your ads stay profitable, you absolutely should keep increasing that spend. And that will make up a piece of this and a piece of every layer that you grow. But it can't be the whole plan for 2 reasons. One, it's not the most stable way to grow. You're building on rented momentum. And two, it won't let you grow beyond this level. There's a ceiling on it because here's the thing about audience engine sales. You're handing 50% or more of every sale straight back to Mr. Zuckerberg. That's fine. That's the deal. It's the way to grow an audience. But long-term, you want sales where you get to keep all of it, pure profit sales. So at this level, bring in two more engines, the profit engine and the momentum engine. Let's do the profit engine first. This is what most people picture when they think funnel, a proper old school automated sequence. And you know what? It works. That's why these strategies are still here. Now, what goes inside it depends on your offer. And here's a sweet spot we usually recommend, a signature offer that's more DIY in style and usually priced between $200 to $1,000-ish. It can go a little bit less, a little bit more depending on your niche, but that's really the sweet spot. Delivered pretty hands-off, 100% pure evergreen, very, very leveraged. The test is this: could hundreds of people go through this offer without it eating the rest of your business? If yes, you have a profit engine offer. Then we install an automated sales sequence on top of it. And exactly what that looks like depends on your price point, your niche, your audience, how much time you have, and what's historically worked best for you. It could be as easy as our Type 10 email sequence, which is one of our new favorites. Our clients are loving it because it is so quick to set up. It could be a more traditional video sales letter. It could be a webinar. There are a few options here, and this is one of those decisions we usually help our clients make because picking the right vehicle matters. Now, benchmarks, real numbers again. So your profit engine should be converting 2 to 5% of any traffic coming into it straight from a lead magnet. That's pure cold traffic. And up to 12 to 15% of anyone coming through your audience engine. Two very different numbers, same funnel, just different traffic. Now, why are these different? Because people from your audience engine are buyers. They've already pulled out their credit card for you once. They've already seen what you can do. And while we're here, a mini rant. This is one of my biggest pet peeves about this industry. You'll hear people in this industry say, my funnel converts at 15%, other people's convert at 2%. But the thing is, they're comparing a style of funnel that always converts at around 15% against a completely different style of funnel that's doing a completely different job. It's apples and oranges dressed up as genius. Don't fall for it. Okay, rant over, moving on. So now every single person coming in through your audience engine also flows through your profit engine, which means on top of your daily low ticket sales, you're now adding sales of your signature offer every single week on autopilot. Then alongside all of that, we bring in the third engine, the momentum engine. Now this one is not fully automated, it's systemized. There's a difference. This is basically our way of doing live promotions. You run on a cadence, usually roughly monthly, a mini, very light touch promotion. And when I say light touch, I mean these are planned, written, created, and scheduled in a couple of hours, not weeks, hours. They're designed to give you an extra cash spike over and over all through the year. And here's where the compounding I talked about earlier kicks in. Your audience engine is making sales every day and growing your list every day. Your profit engine is converting that growing audience into signature offer sales every week. And the more you scale the audience engine, the more of those sales you get. And then your momentum engine kicks in, landing on a list that is bigger and bigger every single month than it was the month before. So every promo outperforms the last one, and you didn't have to work any harder to do it. 3 engines, all running together, all feeding each other. Or compounding. Those three done right are what get you to $5K weeks and beyond. And by the way, those exact three engines are precisely what we help people install inside Funnel Club. Every template, every tool, everything you need to get all three up and running. That's the whole job of Funnel Club. Okay, now the fun part, scaling. Here's how I'd frame the journey so far. Getting to $5K months was about figuring things out, your offer, your audience, what works for you. Getting to 5K weeks was about stabilizing and systemizing, taking what works and putting systems underneath it so it keeps working without you personally doing everything. And getting to 5K days, that is about pure growth, growing your sales, growing your profit, growing all of it deliberately. Quickly and strategically. But same trap as before, now just one level up. It is not just about pouring more money into the top of your audience engine. Yes, that's part of it, as I said, and it always will be. But on its own, it's very fragile and usually pretty unprofitable at this point. So at this level, we layer on more engines. We have 5 of them that we recommend for scaling from 5K weeks to 5K days. And no, you don't build them all at once. Just like before, you install them one by one and each one adds another layer of revenue on top. But before we get to the engines, there is a crucial side note. Something you need before the engines really matters. At this level, you need a really strong recurring revenue offer. Look at what you've already built. You've got a baseline of revenue coming in from your paid ads. Another baseline coming from your profit engine, another coming from your monthly promotions. 3 revenue streams. That's already a genuinely stable business, more stable than most. But to get to this level, you need the 4th stream, recurring revenue. Now that could be a community, a mastermind, a more premium group program, which is one of my personal favorites, or a subscription offer. There's a version of this for every single niche. The point is this: on the first of every month, before you've made a single sale, there should be a strong baseline of revenue already sitting there. And the reason this is important is because with that level of certainty, you can make completely different decisions. Better, braver, smarter, more long-term decisions when you're not starting every month from zero. That piece is non-negotiable at this level. Okay, now the engines. So first up is the upgrade engine. These are multiple strategic sequences whose whole job is to organically, gracefully upgrade people from one offer to the next. And there are different strategies depending on the move. Upgrading someone from a low ticket into your mid ticket looks one way, cross-selling someone into something more premium looks another. But the point is these sequences are always on, always running and humming away in the background, always naturally inviting people up to that next level without you lifting a finger. At this stage of business, that is a must-have. Next is the content engine. Now, this is your upgraded, far more strategic content strategy. It's not just about having systemized content creation or even content that gets eyeballs. This is content deliberately engineered to rapidly build trust, to shrink the time between someone discovering you through your audience engine and being ready to buy your higher investment programs. At the earlier levels, this matters less. The traffic simply isn't there yet to justify it. But as your traffic scales, this becomes the lowest hanging fruit in your entire business. So you slot in a very deliberate strategy right here. And then there are 3 more, the messaging engine, the activation engine, and the application engine. We don't have time to do them justice today, but they're all part of our scaling system. And they're each a whole episode on their own. Okay. So here's a shift I want you to take away from today. The difference between 5K months, 5K weeks, 5K days was never just traffic. It's which engines you have installed and whether you built them in the right order for the phase you're actually in. Now, if you want to see all of this properly, if you're more of a visual person, I've actually recorded a brand new mini masterclass video walking you through the entire framework really visually. I know sometimes it can be hard to see exactly how these things flow together. When you're just listening to a podcast. So I've mapped it all out. And this is how it really clicks for most people when you can actually see how the pieces fit together. It's called the 7-Figure Funnel Framework. It's totally free and it's shorter than an episode of Friends. If you want to watch it now, the link is in the show notes. Click through, check it out, and then make sure you DM me with your biggest ahas. Okay, that's it for today, guys. I will see you all next week.