#302 - The REAL numbers behind a Seven-Figure-a-Year Coaching Business

Want to see something almost nobody in this industry will show you? The actual numbers, not the screenshot of the best day ever, not the launch highlight reel, the full unfiltered breakdown of where every dollar in a 7-figure-a-year business actually came from across a full 12 months. Because the financial year here in Australia just wrapped up end of June, and I've just finished going through all of ours, every offer, every funnel, every promotion. And some of what I found surprised even me. So today I'm opening up the books and walking you through all of it. Build it, automate it, scale it. This almost feels too easy. Time to build a grown-ass business. The Doing It Online podcast. Here's your host, Kate McKibbin. Hey, hey, I'm Kate McKibbin from hellofunnels.co and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. So the financial year just ended a few weeks back, which means tax time, my favorite time of year. You know, that's sarcasm in case you couldn't tell, but it also means I've just spent time inside our numbers going through everything, analyzing everything, and I want to share the breakdown with you for two reasons. First, because almost nobody shares this stuff. Everybody shows you the wins. No one shows you the structure underneath them. And I think that's a real problem because it means people out there are designing their businesses based on false assumptions, copying what they see, which, as you're about to find out, is usually the smallest piece of the pie. And second, because I want you to see how close this actually is for you. I personally believe really strongly that every coach and course creator with the right strategy and the right offers is somewhere between 12 to 24 months away from a business that looks like this or even better. This isn't a lottery ticket, it's a structure, and structures can be replicated. Now, one more thing before the numbers, and this matters. This was not our best year ever. This was not a freak launch event. There was no viral moment, no lightning in a bottle. We have done 7 figures reliably every year for a really long time now. This was just what a regular boring year looks like when the systems are in place. And that's exactly why it's worth showing to you because boring and reliable is the goal. That is the real flex. Okay. Onto the numbers. Now, the first breakdown I want to share is revenue by offer category. So where the money came from, offer by offer. Number 1, our low ticket front end offers. We call these gateway offers. Now, some of these run with ads behind them. Some just sell through our organic promotions, upsells, cross-sells, social media, and that's kind of all lumped together. Okay. So 42%. Of our sales and revenue for the year. It's nearly half came from the small stuff. Let that sink in for a second. That's from Next, our main signature program, 37% of revenue. Now hold on because I know how that number can read. 37% of 7 figures from one program. Some of you are already thinking that kind of feels impossible, right? So here's what that actually looks like from the inside. With the right offer, the right pricing, the right funnel behind it, an average week for us is 2 to 3 sales of that program. That's it. That's a standard week. And that gets you 37% of 7 figures. Not big massive spikes, not big giant launches, just 2 to 3 sales week after week, all year long. How doable does that feel? That's the bit nobody tells you about numbers like these, about a structure like this, is you don't need them to arrive in dramatic chunks. You need them to arrive reliably. Then our VIP tier, another 10%, and this one deserves its own little myth bust. That tier is literally 8 people. It's waitlist only, and they are the only people I do one-on-ones with. Because here's something else I want to disprove today. The idea that a 7-figure business means a calendar packed wall-to-wall with calls. Mine is not. My calendar is ridiculously clear, and it's clear on purpose because that's what gives me energy. That's what I've deliberately designed and engineered my life to look like. 7 figures and a clear calendar are not opposites, not with the right structure, or the right offers. They come as a package. Then we've done a few little pop-up offers live throughout the year, little one-offs, and they added another 5% only. And the last few percent, those are offers that we've wound down, final payments still trickling through from things we don't even sell anymore. So yes, even the stuff we've retired is still politely paying us on its way out. That is what evergreen looks like. Now, here's the one thing I think is really interesting and also very stealable. So So grab your pen and paper. Upsells and order bumps. Now, last financial year, we made almost $200,000, $196,000 to be exact, purely from in-cart upsells and order bumps on our low-ticket offers. That is a very big chunk of revenue for quite literally doing nothing. No extra traffic, no extra launches, no extra content created. Just the right offer at the right moment while somebody's already in the buying mood. And half of that, half of that was just order bumps. You know, those little tick a box things on the checkout page. Now, how did we get them to work that well? Partly it's knowing how to structure a great, juicy, irresistible order bump. And partly is we have AI skills that will write a killer order bump for us. Basically, out of the box, same for our upsell pages. And yes, we share those exact tools with our clients, of course. Now I call this the low-hanging fruit for most businesses because most people either have no bumps and upsells at all, or they have one that's not working very hard for them, or they just don't have enough of them. This is an area you can absolutely max out and it makes a difference on every single sale. Plus it keeps paying off for years. Okay, next breakdown. Which type of traffic did the sales come from? Now, this is the one we watch the closest because it maps directly into how we build our evergreen sales engines. We've got 3 buckets. Bucket number 1 is immediate revenue from our Facebook ads funnels. This is our audience engine. That's sales landing within about 24 hours of of someone coming through from paid traffic, if not less. That was 32.8% of total revenue. Nearly 33% of our total revenue was from people who had never heard of us before. They clicked on a link and they bought that day. And here's a context that makes that number even more interesting. The funnel and the offer driving most of it We only launched it in December. So literally almost half of the financial year didn't even have this running, which means next year's version of this number will look quite different with a full 12 months on the clock. It also didn't start big. That funnel launched at about $100 a day in ad spend. And it's since scaled up to where we usually sit now at roughly about $1,000 a day. And since we're opening the books properly, our total ad spend for the whole year was just $214,444. That's Australian dollars, by the way. Also worth knowing, a big chunk of those upsells and order bumps I mentioned earlier live inside this bucket. Without them, it would be a very different number and we probably couldn't have scaled it the way we have. Now, traffic bucket number 2 is our funnels. So everyone who came in through our ads or socials ended up in our evergreen funnels. And the sales from those funnels, that's a big one, 56.1% of sales. If that doesn't turn you into a funnel believer, I do not know what will. Okay, next, bucket number 3, our live promotions. We call this the Momentum Engine. These are pop-up regular cash campaigns we run throughout the year. Are you ready for this one? 11.2%. Now, on that last one, because fair's fair, it is obviously the least automated thing we do. It still takes about an afternoon or two a month of actual creation to do this, but from that afternoon, we still get an extra 11% of 7 figures. So it's still worth it. But if we didn't have the funnels, if we didn't have the audience engine, our business would look very different, even with the exact same offers. And the exact same list. Now, small side quest, because this might be the most important bit of the whole episode, because I know some of you look at that 11.2% and thought, that's your smallest number. Why not cut the promotions and just focus on funnels, right? Simplicity is king. I hate to break it to you. That would destroy our business because those live promotions actually feed our funnels and vice versa. So if you follow the journey of a typical customer of ours, and if you haven't done this with your own customers, I highly recommend that you do. So one of our typical customer, they come in through our audience engine. Maybe they buy something small, maybe they don't. Then they go through our funnel and they end up on our list. Then she usually jumps into one or two live promotions that we run. These naturally flow into our other funnels, and that is how those funnels end up converting at about 56%, because all of the other pieces are pushing people into them all year long. That's what I mean when I say ecosystem. You cannot pull these pieces out and judge them one by one. They all work together. They all build on each other, and they're all part of one bigger system. If I was to cut that little 11.2%, that wouldn't just give me back that time for free, it would actually quietly shrink everything else. Promotions may be the least fun thing we do, but they are still the icing on the cake. Never the cake on their own, the funnels are the cake, but we definitely don't throw out the icing. So biggest lesson out of all of this, lesson number 1, The behind the scenes strategies are the business. The majority of our revenue comes from things you cannot see from the outside. The funnels, the upsells, the cross-sells, the sequences, the ecosystem. If someone tried to replicate our business by copying what's publicly visible, they'd be replicating the parts that make just 11% of our sales. That's what I mean about false assumptions. You have to understand the full structure, not just the surface. Lesson number 2, you need the right strategy for your level. We are in a scaling phase now. We are upgrading and upleveling each of these pieces to get to our next level, but that only works because every foundational piece is already installed, locked down, and working, which, as you can see, they clearly are. Next financial year is looking very exciting, by the way. And lesson 3, and this is my favorite thing about these numbers, nothing is holding the whole business up on its own. That 56% from funnels, that's not even one funnel. That's multiple funnels inside a bigger system. One of them could stop working tomorrow and it might cost us 10, maybe 15% while everything else keeps running. That's the difference between an ecosystem and an all-in-one strategy. An all-in-one strategy is a single point of failure with good branding. An ecosystem just keeps going. Boring, reliable, every month, every year. And I'll say it again, that is the goal. A business boring enough to depend on, funding a life that is anything but. So if you're listening to this thinking, okay, but how do I actually build that structure for my business? I've just recorded a video that walks you through the entire framework behind everything you heard today. All the pieces in order, shown visually so you can see how they fit together and work out exactly which piece your business needs next. It's called the 7-Figure Framework. It's totally free and it's shorter than an episode of Friends. The link is in the show notes. Click through, watch it now, and then send me a DM at HelloFunnels with your biggest aha. All right, that's it for today, guys. I'll see you all next week. That's it for this episode. Now go build it, automate it, and scale it. I love the show, guys. You're awesome. For more strategies and resources, visit hellofunnels.co.