#44 - 3 changes I made to grow from 0 to 7 figures in sales in under 3 years

The last year in my business, hello Funnels, we actually made over a million dollars in sales.

This is the Doing it online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben, where every 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.

Hey, hey, guys. It is Kate McGibbon here from HelloFinals co. And welcome to the Doing it online podcast. Episode number 44. So you guys all know that I'm an oversharer and I always believe in sharing the good, the bad, the ugly, and the exact steps of how things happened, because I think that's how we all grow. I'm not a big fan of people giving vague advice. I think you need to see behind the curtain. You need to see the nitty gritty, because I think that is one of the best ways to be able to see, you know, when you see really how things happened or didn't happen, how that can then possibly impact you and your business and your growth as well. So today is one of those episodes, guys, and it's almost a bit of an embarrassing one for me. I'm probably actually better about talking about when things go wrong versus when they go right, because today I'm actually going to share something that went really, really right for us. You know, hello, imposter syndrome, money blocks and all of those little scary things popping up as I'm saying that. But the last year in my business, hello Funnels, we actually made over a million dollars in sales. So not revenue, guys, not cash in the bank because we do have a lot of payment plans and, you know, we've really ramped things up second half of the year, but in sales. And we've never done this before. And, you know, and I was really, really excited. Like, that was a big milestone for us. And especially when you think about that, basically I restarted from scratch about two and a half years ago and then throw in having a baby, having a, you know, a pregnancy where I was wanting to vomit for half of it, Covid and all that stuff. So I think, you know, we're. I would say we're pretty proud of ourselves. I'm pretty proud of myself and my team and. But, you know, this didn't happen in my other two businesses. Nowhere near. Like, we never got to the seven figures mark. And, you know, those other businesses were running for a lot, lot longer. And you Know, I actually met up with a girlfriend the other night and over a wine, she said, like, so what do you think was different this time? Like, besides just having run two businesses previously and, you know, probably knowing it, you know, having a few more, you know, a bit more knowledge in the older noggin, like, what else is what, what did you do differently this time? And that's what I want to share with you today. This is three things that I did differently in this business from when I started it to now that really I think probably made the biggest impact and helped us to grow as fast as we did and to get that, you know, really awesome result. So the first one is let's like, let's dive on in. No, no mucking around. The first one is that I really switched my focus from individual funnels. Like it was obviously always going to be about funnels, guys, because that was the business. But I switched my focus from, you know, trying to make a couple of individual funnels work to actually building an evergreen ecosystem where we had just a couple of key funnels and we built these one by one. And this is actually what we take people through inside Ecourse Empire now is like, it's how this, each one of these little funnels and how they, they work on their own and how that kind of just on their own helps your business kind of, you know, jump up to the next level. But when you have you build the each of them and connect them together, it's like that's, you know, 10x like it's just insane, the impact that it has. But you know, so we went from previously, it was like, okay, I've got this one funnel and this one webinar and all I need to do is scale it. And then you know, kind of kept hitting these like ceilings on Facebook ads and stuff like that, where we could only sort of get to a certain amount of spend per day where otherwise things would start getting really expensive and not profitable anymore. And I used to get so frustrated by that. So we sort of started solving some of these problems around scaling around profitability by having these three funnels to that all kind of work together. So we have our, you know, our front end funnel or our mini but mighty funnel. And that's the whole purpose of that is to mean that our, you know, our ad spend on all of our ad channels doesn't actually cost us anything. And then we have our core funnel, which is getting as many people into our programs as possible. But again, it's all profit by this point because the Facebook Ads are paying for themselves. And then we have a profit funnel, which really enabled us to kind of go to the next level and also to go to be able to invest in the next two steps I want to focus on. But really, I think having those three pieces and having them working and setting them up in the way that we did is what made. Because if I'd just been trying to go, you know, just core funnel only and launches, I think I would have stayed stuck. I would have stayed in the same position, or if it had been just funnel or just launches, I would have been even more stuck. So it was taking the time, being kind of stubborn about being really obsessed about getting these things working right, testing all the things, seeing, you know, which things did work and which things didn't, ignoring a lot of the big shiny claims that you're seeing of people on, you know, Instagram and stuff like that about their one new amazing method and being like, no, no, no, I know this works. I just know I gotta step into a place of mastery here rather than just like testing one new thing once and then going off to something else. So, yeah, switching that focus and staying focused and dedicated to creating this ecosystem, this engine which now runs our business made a huge, huge difference. So the second change that we made, that I made, I love using the royal we is that I invested this time. I invested in what I call a grown up team. Like I've always had team, but it was, you know, in the past it's been really piecemeal or when I've hired, I've hired friends because it was easier or I've just found like someone who I, you know, seemed like cheap and cheery off like a fiverr or you know, off upwork. And it was never a team. It was always like a bit here, a bit there. And they were all sort of relying on me. And these were not people because they weren't team. They were, they were. I'd have to tell them what to do. I'd have to check everything that they were doing. And I was like, no, no, no. To be able to do this, like, get where I want to go, I need, I need a proper team. I need a grown up team. I need a team of people who can probably do the things that they're doing better than I can. And I think it really took me actually being a mom to really force me to go and do this properly. Because previously the trade off was just my time. And really I had infinite time being a childless single person or a childless person with partner Even but now it came down to okay, well my trade off is now time with my son. And that was very, very different. And not just time with my son, but the energy that I bring and how tired I am and me being distracted around him when I am spending time with him. So I realized I had a choice to make. I could either. Cause there's not enough time in the day to basically have a full time business, running a full time business and also looking at being the primary carer for a toddler or an infant. So I was like, well you know, there's, you've got to make the trade off here. Either you can pay somebody to look after your child and miss out on that time. And you know, yes, that was always going to be a part of that. But how much is that? Like if I need to get more stuff done, do I pay someone to look after my child more and see him less or do I pay someone to come in and take some business stuff off my plate and do that instead? And yes, it's probably going to be more expensive but the, you know, values wise and what I actually get out of it, which one is a better investment and for me spending more money to get a really great person in to come and take that stuff off my plate so then I could then have that more quality time with my kid with was the better investment hands down every day of the week. And you know, it's about, and obviously everyone's situation is different and, and I scaled this, I didn't do this all at once. It was like person by person, like take one chunk off, one chunk off, particularly as. And it seemed to correlate really well with how the naps decreased. I was like, okay, now I have less time again great, well now I need to get someone else in. But really what I did was I, you know, I sat down and I looked at my most time consuming tasks and I was like, okay, if I can find someone. And this is like what I kept telling myself. There are people out there who are better at me, better at this than me. Like it's not my core function in the business and all I need to do is find that person who's going to be better at this than I am and then they'll be able to do it and they be able to do better. Like it wasn't about going, oh, I'm going to have to find something not going to be as good as me, it's going to have to manage them. It's going to be useless. I'm like, no, I'm going to find an amazing person who. And I did it properly. And I might do another episode later about how our hiring process, because we've always sort of had a pretty even back in the day when we used to have interns who were part of a university program for my first business. So we'd have interns coming in as part of their coursework to work with us. But we still had this really full on hiring process even then. And it's always sort of worked really well for us. So that might be another time for another episode. But you know, I think as I said, one of these things that made a big difference is having these amazing people joining my team, being on the team, not just someone who is ticking off tasks, investing in them and you know, that's, it's just made so much, so much difference. And then thirdly, the third thing that we really sort of or that really invested in. I really need to stop saying we. Even though it is, you know, the whole team has done it. And as the team's grown, there's been more of us doing. It was a real switch, like a mindset switch I think that I made early on in that I've never been one. And I, and I noticed this actually I was at a mastermind years and years ago. Like amazing, amazing people in the room. And you know, part of it there was someone's like, you know, set a big goal, all right, double it. Like, let's go do this. Like, yeah. And they're like hyping up about this, like monetary goals. And I was like, I mean, yeah, you know, they'd be nice, but that's never been my motivator. So I was like, okay, well what is my motivator? Like how can we set goals that are going to push us to go that extra mile and to do the stuff that's a bit harder. And when just making more money kind of doesn't do it for me, like it's, you know, obviously it's like I said, it's always nice. It helps the business to grow. You know, it affords a lot of things. It's a very privileged. But it's not my, as far as my core values, it's not the one that gets me out of bed in the morning and it never has. I think once you get past the point of being able to pay your bills regularly, you have to dig a little bit deeper and go, okay, well what now that I can afford to be alive? Well, now what? Like, what's the thing that really motivates me. So this is the thing that we really changed in the business was went from focusing on and setting, you know, the goals and our things that we were tracking in the business. Like it used to be around sales, used to be around revenue. Like I said, we were tracking that. We made seven figures in sales last year and I was kind of like, kind of hit it. I was like, oh, cool. Next. It didn't sort of excite me as much as I wanted it to, but the other things that we've been tracking excite me a whole lot more. And they are that we switch from our focus from, as I said, success measures being about making sales to actually being about the epic results that we can get for our client. Like, we actually have our KPIs and we have a dashboard which shows us how many of our clients are hitting certain points and hitting, you know, different milestones and achievements. And we now celebrate as a team every month how many of our clients have, you know, they've hit their financial freedom checkpoint, which I've talked about another episode, or how many of them, you know, have now added X number of thousand people to their email list or how many of them now have a six figure revenue stream and things like that. Like that is what we now celebrate. That is what we now focus on. And I think that's made such a big difference because I care so much more about that. Like, these are humans, these are human beings whose lives we can change. And I think, I don't know, I mean, everyone's motivators and values are going to be very, very different. But I think figuring that out for yourself, like beyond the money, because obviously, you know, more money is always nice. No one ever says, oh no, I've got too much of it. I mean, maybe Bezos or someone might. But you know, once it's as I said, like once you have, you know, and this is what, why I love funnels. But once you have your systems in place, you know, bills are always paid, you're always paid. Like, once you're sort of at that point, you have to figure out, okay, what is, what am I actually motivated by? Because I no longer have that fear motivation of my gosh, can I pay the bills? So, okay, what am I actually now motivated by? Once you've taken away that, you know, that sort of, it's the hierarchy of needs kind of thing, isn't it? Like, it's the, okay, I've got shelter, I've got food, I can pay my bills, I'm healthy, Now what, what is going to be that thing that kind of moves me along? Those are the three things, guys. I said that's what we really I think when I look back at it over these last like two and a half ish years of what was really different, it was that it was that switching the focus from just trying to make like one funnel work here or one launch work here to really focusing on creating like an evergreen ecosystem, like a proper, solid, reliable engine that just fuels itself. And that's been epic for us. Second thing is that investing in a grown up team and thirdly is switching that focus, like figuring out like what is the real motivator for me and hiring people who also have that same motivator. That was really important too. And switching it from being about tracking financial things to being about tracking the stuff that actually really matters to us, which is our clients and their successes and their wins. And yeah, I hope, guys, as always, I hope you've managed to get at least one gold nugget out of this that you're going to be able to go and apply into your own businesses. I'd love to hear what that is. So hit me up over on Instagram at hellofunnels. Let me know what was your biggest aha or biggest gold nugget that you took away from this episode. And as always, if you have any business BFFs you think would get something out of this episode, please please share it with them. It means so much to us that, you know, you guys help us get the word out and can help even more people to create their own epic online businesses. That is what we are here for. That is what lights us up. So thank you so much in advance for sharing this around. But that's it for this week guys. I hope, as I said, hope you got a lot out of it. Can't wait to share another juicy, juicy episode with you next week. And until then guys, have an epic week. Keep doing what you do and I'll see you online. Bye.

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