#9 - My biggest lessons from my first year of business PLUS baby!

Dialing it in, getting one great funnel working is important and spending the time and making sure that works is important. But then how quickly you can scale up by clicking in these next bits and how these, you know, these pieces and these little funnels can work together. As I said in this nice, like little just. I'm kind of making an infinity sign with my fingers if you can kind of get what I'm saying.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your Host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7ft 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 it.

Hey. Hey everybody, and welcome to episode nine of the Doing It Online podcast. I am Kate McKibben, your host and today we're going to pull back the curtains and get a little bit personal. So today I'm going to share with you behind the scenes, the stats, the figures, the nitty gritty of what happened to my business after I had a baby. So basically I kind of can't believe it, but when this episode goes live, which is not that far in advance, I'm really not that organized. My little man, my little nugget will actually be a whole one year old. I mean, how did this happen? It has been both the longest and shortest year of my life, I think, and more than half of it has been in lockdown thanks to good old COVID 19. It's been such a year of ups and downs, personally and in my business. But even with the homeschooling or trying to stay out of the way of the homeschooling of my step kids, the lockdowns, and the newborn who very quickly became a very fast moving little man who wanted to get into all of the things. Despite all of that, I actually had one of my best years in business ever. That's financially, client, results wise and just my own personal enjoyment of the business. So in today's episode, I wanted to break it all down for you, show you exactly what that all looked like, what worked, what didn't, and all the nitty gritty numbers too. Because I know, you know, we all like to know what really goes on in someone's business. So this is it. This is my first year as a working mum and yeah, funnily enough, it was actually my most profitable year in business ever. So if you're one of those people who loves to Get a bit of a big brother style behind the scenes, look into someone's business, then pour yourself something fancy because this episode is for you. Okay, let's jump straight into the good stuff and let's start with what worked. So first of all, I need to caveat this whole thing off by saying my bub was and still is a champion sleeper. At the start, he was napping two hours out of every three. He slept through the night from six months and he still does two good naps of around one to two hours each most days. Although we are dropping the second one currently and it's making me very sad. So I had more time than I thought I would. That was pure luck and I am so, so grateful for it. Especially as thanks to our lockdowns here in Melbourne, we pretty much had no access to any childcare whatso like not even a grandparent. So it was, you know, just. It was just us now. I had actually planned and set up my business assuming the worst. That's me. I'm hope for the best plan for the worst kind of gal. So I had set things up so I pretty much didn't have to do any work for the first six months if I didn't want to. And everything would have kept rolling, you know, financially we would have been fine. I paired everything way back. All my sales ran and marketing around autopilot, obviously, and I'll chat more about that shortly. I had batched a whole ton of emails and videos, although not as many as I had hoped. And I had a small team, very small team that were there and ready to keep the rest just sort of ticking along. But as I said, my little one was an amazing sleeper. So I was actually back tinkering away after less than a month because I was sitting around and I was bored. I'm so used to working all the time, I'm no good at just twiddling my thumbs. So this brings me to the first thing that worked this year. Number one, I actually created two whole new offers this year. One was a high ticket and one was a low ticket and they both were worked really well. And we get into the numbers, you'll see and we're really, really crucial, I think, in the growth of my business and also in sort of us continuing to grow through COVID 19. So I'll break them down slightly. So first of all, high ticket offer, it's a $5,000 offer and to be honest, I've never even really considered doing a high ticket offer before. I've always been about, I Want a funnel friendly offer. I want an offer I can sell on an automated webinar or you know, from a really simple low touch launch. Because I'm just not about the big old singing or dancing launches and because I never ever want to have to do sales calls. So when I'm setting up, you know, my offers and what they look like and what price points they're going to be and who they're for, I always have that in the back of my mind that I want it to be able to sell in a funnel because that's what I'm about.

Hey guys, it's just Kate here. So first of all, I just had to quickly stop by and say thank you so, so much for listening to and supporting my brand new podcast. It really means the world to me. And to help kick this puppy off with a real bang, I actually have an amazing free bonus just for you guys, which is I'm giving away to my 5 day mini business accelerator workshop worth $97 totally for free to everyone who leaves a 5 star review of the Doing It Online podcast on itunes right now. This five day workshop walks you through creating your own killer online business plan for your online course business one that is scalable, profitable and enjoyable too. It's chock full of my very best lessons and strategies from over 13 years online and today it's yours for free. All you have to do is step one, open up iTunes, click on this podcast, click write, review and then click those little five stars and share what you love most about the show. Step two, head to katesbonus.com that's K A T E S B O-N-U S.com Kate's bonus and pop in your contact details and itunes account name so we can know the review is from you and we can send you your login details for your bonus. It's that simple. Step one, leave a five star review. Step two, head to katesbonus.com and send us your details. And that's it. And as an extra little thank you, I will be choosing my favorite reviews every week and sending that lucky reviewer an exclusive I do it online mug so you can sip along in style while you listen to your favorite show. So what are you waiting for? Hit pause, go, leave that review, then head over to katesbonus.com, pop in your details and claim this amazing five day workshop for yourself. I'll see you inside.

However, with a new type of funnel that I have now learned which is called an application funnel, you can actually sell high ticket products completely automated and without a sales call, it's actually blew my mind that this works. So I've worked with a coach. That's another thing we'll talk about later this year. I signed up with him about a month after Little J was born and he really pushed me to make a high, you know, to come up with high ticket offer. And he said, you know, you, this is a really crucial part in your business. The people you work with, they need this. You know, what are you doing and you know, not having this. Basically, yes, it's going to make things hard for you with the way that you've set things up to kind of get to where you want to go. And I'm like, look dude, I've just had a baby. Like I don't like doing sales calls normally, but right now they're just not going to happen. So we came up with this way, which was sort of through a. Yeah, through an application funnel, which is kind of like taking a normal funnel and turning it on its head. And I might talk about more of it in another episode, but this, this funnel, and it's really, really simple, converts so well even from cold traffic. I have had people who, they're not on my list, they don't follow me anywhere. They see one ad and I was running this like really, some of you would have seen it. It's the most low tech ad you've ever seen. They see this ad, they click through, they go through the really simple funnel, they apply it, they join in under 24 hours. They've made a $5,000 investment in a total stranger to them. That's how well this thing works. So it's currently converts around about 20% from application to, to, to client. And that is unheard of. So awesome. So that blew my mind. That really made a big difference to our revenue as well. And it also blew up a lot of limiting beliefs that I had around what you could and couldn't do on autopilot. It was really like, it was a real game changer for me and also for a lot of my friends. But you know, that that's another story for another day. On the complete flip side of that, I also created and launched a low ticket offer, a $27 offer. So a $5,000 offer and a $27 offer. And between these two, they've made up the bulk of my revenue, probably around about 30 to 40% of the revenue for the year, which is amazing. And the best bit, the thing that I really liked about both of these offers is, you know, one of Course, they all run on autopilot. That's, you know, I'm not going to do them if they don't. And two is how they actually all kind of work together to build this nice little ecosystem. So I've got, you know, my main product, 5K Funnel Formula. It's a 997 offer. I've been running it now for nearly two years. It's my signature offer. It gets great results. I love it. It's really, really dialed in. The funnel for it works beautifully, but on its own, I feel like, and again, this is probably another topic for another day, but I feel like, you know, there's a lot of merit in staying focused on one product for, you know, six to 12 months. I said, get it dialed in, get it working well, get it running. But I think once you've got something rolling, just to sit back and stare at it and go, no, you will be the thing, the thing that scales me to seven, eight figures, whatever. Because, you know, you've heard of a couple of unicorns who have done that. I think it's going to hold you back. And I think it was holding me back by introducing these two other products which actually feed into each other. So people who purchase $27 products from them go on to then purchase the $5,000 product and people who've purchased the, you know, and vice versa. And they all kind of, you know, it's this really lovely little ecosystem, but it means I now have three things working together, working really well on their own, but also working really well to help make the other, the other products sell better as well. They said it's like this ecosystem that kind of feeds on itself, creating this lovely snowball. And, you know, I think that's, you know, again, sorry, I've gone off track here. It's not my lessons. I'm giving lessons to everybody else. But, you know, it was really great to see how, you know, dialing it in. Getting one great funnel working is important and spending the time and making sure that works is important. But then how quickly you can scale up by clicking in these next bits and how these, you know, these pieces and these little funnels can work together, as I said, in this nice, like, little. Just I'm kind of making an infinity sign with my fingers if you can kind of get what I'm saying. So that was, you know, that was what worked career, adding in a low ticket offer and a high ticket offer alongside what I'd call maybe my, like core, you know, middle of the road offer. And how well they all worked together. The second thing that worked really, really well was particularly for my, you know, for where I was in business and life right then was I set up a system for my ads that basically let them run on Autopil. So when I went on maternity leave, I had a system set up. It's basically like a funnel for Facebook ads where, you know, you take people through, you know, you attract cold people in, take them through a warm up sequence on Facebook and then the warmest people, you know, you then invite them to webinars, et cetera, et cetera. So there was like four stages of ads that people sort of went through because of the way it was set up. You didn't really have to be out there constantly tweaking and optimizing and creating new ads and finding new audiences, which is the stuff that takes a lot of time. So. So yes, you know, it could have been doing better and I could have been spending more and earning more, but to be able to literally just have this little engine running in the background, ticking things over, you know, making a sale here, a sale there, keeping my business rolling while I was on maternity leave was amazing. So that worked really well. And I'm glad I spent the time, you know, about three, four months out, that became like project number one was getting that in place and making sure those ads and everything was optimized and dialed in as they could be. I think that worked. Number three was investing in my dream team. When it was, I was ready to ramp things back up again. So I kind of feel like this has been a year of two halves. Like the first half was, you know, the sort of the newborn days, just survival. And in that phase I was creating a lot of stuff, but I wasn't really stepping back, looking at anything big picture. I wasn't really, you know, so thinking about team, it was just like, let's just get this done while I've got the energy, while he sleeps so much. Second half of the year, I'd created these massive things. I think they're all working really nicely. Everything was kind of plugging in together and growing and it was great. And I'm like, okay, now is the time to take a step back because I want to keep on growing. I need to put some more pieces into place, otherwise this is all going to come to a grinding halt. So that is when I decided to ramp back up with team. So when I was on maternity leave, I had a really, really paid back team. So I had my va, who's been with me forever, who does customer service and, you know, some admin tasks. I had a friend who's a blogger come in and take over my Instagram and he probably would. I don't know if anyone even noticed, but we basically swapped from having any content to do with me or funnels or anything to just posting four to five quotes a week. So she had a template in Canva. When I was scrolling on my phone, I just sort of like ping her them and send DM her ones that we like and she'd go out and find some others and that was it. Every week she'd just get those up and running. And then I also had another friend who is also a sort of funnel and Facebook ad strategist come in and take over my monthly Facebook calls for the first couple of months, just because, you know, as I said, I didn't know what times I was going to be able to jump on. I didn't know if I'd be breastfeeding, all that kind of stuff. So they kind of came in. I was still jumping into the Facebook group and answering questions. I just didn't want to commit to any kind of live call because, you know, babies are not very good at adhering to what's in the calendar and what's in the diary. So that was the first half of the year, super paired back then the second half of the year where I'm like, right, it's go time, you know, I rebranded. I sat down to a lot of work around our vision and where I want us to be over the next three, five, ten years and who needs us to get there. And within a really short period of time, I had this realization, like, right, I need an A team, I need dream team, I need unicorns. And then they all just arrived. So now my team, I have two amazing VAs looking after customer service because I never like the customer. I always, it always makes me nervous when there's only one person doing customer service because if they get sick or want to have a holiday or whatever, I think it's way too important a part of your business to just sort of let go. So two people doing customer service. Excellent. I've got an obm, Zoe, who's amazing. So she's, you know, project management, doing some of the tech setup stuff that I don't really have time to do, even though I could. I've got amazing Taryn who has come in and is doing all of the content, so social emails, everything. And I'm also working with a copywriter to make sure the upcoming launches and Things that we've got scheduled, they're sort of taking over from that. Plus we've got a podcast editor, you know, plus a bookkeeper and bits and pieces. So teams scaled up really quickly with a couple of really key players and it's just feels like it's night and day, it feels so different. And even though it's only been a couple of months and we're still just finding our rhythm and our groove, I can see like the amazing potential that we now have as a unit for what we can do. So that is super exciting. All right. And last thing, what worked really was being forced to focus on what mattered and what mattered only. Like, you know, when you're trying to do six to nine months worth of work in advance, which was, that was my aim, was to have six to nine months worth of your content, videos, whatever, done. I fell way short of that. But that was the goal. And then, you know, sort of out the other side, it's. Even though the, you know, he naps a lot, it's still snatches of time and it's not guaranteed. So some days he doesn't nap. So you kind of, you know, you always have to make the most and make sure that what you are doing is the most crucial, is the most important thing. So now that I have this, you know, great team, I'm able to really focus on two things and that is the revenue generating activities and serving my clients. Everything else, I'm, I'm delegating like a mofo. And even before the team came on, you know, things like content and stuff like that. Like as I said, we got that so paired back when I was doing, we never, we didn't really do any launches, but we reran email promos that had worked well previously.

Which is a matter of taking an email sequence and basically pouring people back in the top again. So we, you know, kept everything super light and it just allowed me, you know, over these last 12 months to really focus on the important stuff. And I think it has really, really all added up to moving the needle. Okay, so what didn't work so well because of course not everything is rosy and this year has definitely showed me that. Okay, so first of all, right at the start I had a. So originally my plan when I went on maternity leave was to have a VA and a ea. So a sort of, you know, more advanced VA, I guess you could call it, that makes my original like long term VA not so advanced, but you know, but someone who was doing sort of a bit more sort of upper level kind of tasks. And I had someone who'd been working with me for a long time. Coming up to my maternity leave, I just had this niggling feeling. I'm like, you know what? She's not. I. You know, she's a great girl, super smart, but she's just not quite clicking. There's something going on with her. I can feel it. But I was like, gosh, it is going to be inconvenient to try and replace her right now and try and train somebody up. I'm like, no, we'll just, you know, we'll just ignore it for now. Push through out the other side. You know, maybe it'll go away, maybe it won't, but we'll address it out the other side. I just, you know, it's too gonna be too inconvenient to make that change now. And lo and behold, I think it was a week, maybe two after my little one was born, she emailed me to say that actually she went mia and then she emailed me to say that she just didn't want to be an EA anymore and she was going off to pursue a different career. And she was really sorry for the timing, but, you know, too bad, too sad kind of thing. And I was like, oh, I knew it. Like, my gut, I felt it, but I just sort of. I didn't want to do the inconvenient thing, even though it was the right thing. So that's definitely been a lesson because I know that there's been a few times when I've avoided doing that, and it's definitely bedded me on my ass. Second thing was, we had planned to run this, you know, big or singing or dancing live launch not that long ago. And then all of a sudden, we got locked down again. As I said, childcare got taken away again, and I'm like, I can't be doing live webinars. I can't be trying to, you know, I can't be showing up the energy I need to be showing up to do this. So we pretty much just dialed that in, and the lodge, it was fine, but, you know, we probably got 50% of our goal with really doing, you know, probably about 15% of the effort. So that was great. But, you know, I feel like this year it has sort of taught me to, you know, to be okay with being flexible with plans and to be okay with, you know, goals and things shifting. So, for example, I had a goal set for our financial year. A weird thing happened with our Facebook ads. Just I seem to have A lot of accounts around about that time, but for two weeks, our Facebook ads just all got shut off and we ended up being $2,000 off our goal for the financial year. And I was like, oh, if we just had our Facebook ads on for like two days, even we would have, you know, smashed our goal. So that frustrating. But again, it's just, you know, that's what this year is. You kind of have to take it on the chin. Go. It's not a big deal. Get up, carry on.

The third thing I think is probably the biggest thing that didn't work this year is I didn't look after myself enough. So, you know, we've actually, I'm pretty proud of us as a family. We've been going for big long walks every day. We've been trying to eat as healthy as possible. We've been trying to go to bed at reasonable hours and try not to drink every day of the week. You know, we've. We've managed to keep it together pretty well. However, me coming out of having a very large baby, a C section.

And then sort of jumping straight into caring and picking up this large baby with absolutely no core muscles anymore, what whatsoever. So this is probably going to be a bit of an overshare.

And working all of the free hours that I could find. And then, you know, I didn't really prioritize building up any sort of strength. My flexibility was already pretty shot from being pregnant. And then I basically spent, I'd say, eight months out of the last 12 taking Nurofen and Voltaren and, you know, having to do back stretches every night. And even though I'm doing them, still having, you know, quite constant back pain because I'm just. I didn't prioritize that enough. And I keep not prioritizing it enough, getting it sorted, getting that strength and flexibility back. So that is definitely something that I need to work on. Okay, so now for the juicy bit, the numbers. I know that's what you're all really sitting here waiting to hear. Okay, now for the juicy bit, the numbers. I know that's what you're all really waiting to hear. So. Okay, now these, just so you know, these are actually based on the Australian financial year. So that's July 1, 2019 to the end of June 2020, rather than August to August, just because I have these in more detail, thanks to us doing our taxes. And my lovely bookkeeper had it all prepared. So, you know, there. It's not 100%. The numbers aren't 100%, year of baby, but they're pretty damn close. And now just for a little bit of context as well, so my revenue for the 2018 financial year was just over 710,000. Then for 2019 it dropped right down to 321,000 because that was the year I basically shut everything down and rebuilt from scratch. And then this year with COVID and a baby and working really irregular hours and no big launches at all, it was 566,000. And if we actually did the proper year of his birth, it would be closer to 650 because our last couple months were epic. So how does that all break down? Well, obviously all my revenue is, I would say 99% of it's from courses and then like a tiny little bit from affiliates. So we had around about 250k from our 5k funnel formula, 150k banked from eCourse Empire. But because it is a 12 month program with monthly payments, there's another hundred or so thousand of which is, what do we call it? We call it booked revenue. But I know that there's a more official term for that.

About 50k from our mini but mighty offer and that we only started end of April, start of May. So that was pretty much a month or so for that 50k. And you know, we've continued to grow up from there. So the rest is dribs and drabs from programs and like payment plans that I no longer offer. And as I said from a little bit from affiliates as well. Now, expenses wise, well, I am my biggest expense and rightly so. So I pay myself a salary of 140,000. Next up was my marketing spend which was 102,000 for the year. So that's Facebook ads and also my marketing contractors are included in this. I don't know why. That's just the way that my bookkeeper does it. So it's probably closer to about 75,000 for ad spend. Then the rest of my team expenses were 57,000 coaching and education. I spent almost 40,000 SaaS. As in all the software and the tools. This one shocked me a little, although it shouldn't have. That was 37,000. And the reason for that is most people do not need a SaaS bill that big. But because we teach multiple platforms and we have to have templates set up for multiple platforms, it means we have to actually have multiple platforms. So you know, I've got like four different email services and five different webinar platforms and stuff like that. So my SaaS bill is definitely larger than it needs to be well for a regular person not teaching people how to use them. Another one, which really kind of was a bit of a slap in the face was our bank PayPal and transaction fees were almost 30,000. This one stunned me and I'm definitely going to be looking into how we can get that down.

Then donations were 5,000, which again is a bit, is definitely lower than I would have liked. I think it just slipped my mind this year, to be honest. So that is something that I'm putting into my monthly tasks going forward is that we donate a percentage of our profit and then profit for the year. So that is what was left after all that and a bunch of other little things was 115,000. So now I'm not a financial planner, but someone much, much smarter than me once said that a good aim for my type of business should be to have this is after tax and you know, fees and stuff. But about you want about a third of your costs being operating expenses. That would include staff, that's what your tools, rent, anything like that. Another third is marketing and then another third, you know, is your take home plus profit. So we weren't quite there, but we're close. In fact, I think our take home is actually more than a third. So that's not a bad thing. But it probably means we could probably spend a bit more on marketing too. So I'm going to have a play with those numbers for this year. But you know, that's it. That is in a nutshell, my first year as a mumpreneur and it feels kind of a bit scary and awkward sharing this with the word. I'm sorry, with the world. But I hope that it has been useful. Seriously, this year was such a roller coaster and I count my lucky stars every single day that I was able to set up my business how I did before I had my baby. Because I didn't miss out on a single adorable spit filled second this year. I really feel like I got to be there and I got to be present and he got to be my priority and I still was lucky enough to be able to grow my business and to keep working with my amazing clients at the same time. So I am, I know that I am lucky. Even though, you know, I worked my butt off to get here. I'm so, so grateful. So anyway, that was my little big brother style peek into the back end of my business. That sounds rude. I hope it's not. I do really hope that it was helpful to you. I hope it gave you a bit more of a you know, real world view of, you know, what growing an online course business looks like. And better yet, I hope it gave you some clarity or some inspiration or maybe you had a little aha moment about something that you're going to go and try or tweak or change for your business. So if you liked this episode, guys, and I really, really hope that you did, don't forget to subscribe because we've got more awesome episodes coming at you weekly. And I would love it if you know someone who you think could benefit from this if you could share this episode with them. It is my mission to demystify, you know, online business to help people to do what they do, but better. And so the more people who can hear these messages, who can hear these episodes, obviously, the better, the faster I'm going to be able to help more people. So if you could share, it would mean the world. But that's it, guys. I'm going to stop rambling now. I hope you all have an excellent week and keep doing what you do and I will see you all next week. 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@Stealmyfunnel.com.