Scale Like A Girl Ep 2 - The 3 Things That Break The $20K Month Ceiling (Number 3 Got Me To My First $1M Year)

$20,000 a month for years. That was my number, the one I was completely convinced would fix everything. And then I got there and I was working harder than I had ever worked in my life, and I wasn't keeping much of it. I could not seem to push past it no matter what I threw at the thing. I'd have a good month, tip over, feel amazing, and the next month it would slide right back down again. For years I sat there, years. And it turned out there were 3 things missing, not one shiny silver bullet. Now, two of them I've talked about in this podcast 100 times. The third one I have barely scratched the surface on publicly at all, and it's the one that tripled my business. And that's what I wanna get into today. 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 there. I am Kate McKibbin from hellofunnels.co and welcome to a very special pop-up mini series of the Doing It Online podcast. This is Scale Like a Girl Episode 2. If you are just joining, go back and listen to the previous one because I explain what this whole series is and why I'm doing it. You don't have to, stands on its own as well. So today let's talk about getting stuck. And getting stuck at a really particular point, the $20,000-ish point. Because honestly, there are certain ceilings in any business growth people just can't seem to get past. Different levels for different types of businesses, and there's some wiggle room depending on your pricing and your niche. But one of the really big ones, if you're an online coach or course creator, and one people can sit stuck at for years, is around the $20,000 a month mark. And here's the funny part. When most of us started our business, $20,000 a month was probably the dream. That was a number we thought every problem would be solved at. This was gonna be it. We'd made it. And you got there and it is not. You're working flat out. Pretty much everything is manual. Nothing is dialed in. Nothing feels reliable or repeatable. And on paper it looks like a really successful business because it is a really successful business. It's more successful than most businesses will ever get. But that doesn't mean it lets you also have a really successful life because you're stuck here in a really hard place and it just won't move. And I'm sure it doesn't feel like anything that bad if you looked at it from the outside, and that was me. I was just above that number, bouncing around like 10K up and down for a very long time. Looking good on paper, was not feeling good on the inside at all. Very hard, very stressful, not very profitable. So why does this happen? Because there's a real crossover point right about here. The stuff that got you to $20,000 a month is what I call startup mode. You're testing everything, you're doing everything manually, trying strategy after strategy after strategy, throwing things at the wall and staying in that really scrappy experimental phase. You're running on adrenaline and it works, by the way. Eventually enough of those things land and you build a real business out of it. That's how you get to this point. But here's the problem. If everything stays manual, nothing is locked in and nothing is reliable, it's pretty impossible to move past it because you are still personally the engine that makes everything happen. And startup mode, it has that ceiling. I said it's about $20 grand a month. You cannot outwork it because working harder is actually the thing that is capping you and is going to end up burning you out. The way out isn't through sheer determination, through just pushing through. It is structure, which is going to feel very counterintuitive at the time because that's not what you've seen work so far. But if you wanna grow, it's so damn important. So there are 3 specific pieces of structure you need, and I'm gonna dive into each of them. Okay, so here they are, and I wanna be really clear about something before I start. You do not have to do all 3 of these to get unstuck. If you put in 1 or 2, you will move. You'll get to $25,000, you'll get to $30,000 a month. But you'll probably get stuck again. But if you want rapid growth plus locked in profitability, reliability, which is my absolute favorite combination in the world, you do need all three eventually. So number one, you need to have control over your traffic and your eyeballs. So you're not just promoting to that same tired group of people over and over again. Being able to constantly grow your list and your audience and doing it in a way that isn't you having to hustle daily, spend hours trying to go viral, posting 4 times a day, or, you know, begging and praying to the algorithm. It has to be a way that feels almost hands-free, that actually frees up your time. And here's the other half of that, which people skip right over. It also can't be eating all your profit because there's a version of this where you technically automate your audience growth through Facebook ads, for example, but then you are handing over every dollar you earn straight back to Mark Zuckerberg. What's the point of that? That is not an audience engine. That is a monthly donation to a man who has enough money. So this phase has to grow your audience and it has to pay for itself. Both, not one. This is what we call your audience engine. I've done so many episodes on this one. I'm not gonna go deep here, but the ability to keep your audience growing all the time without you being the one physically doing it changes everything. All right, number 2, making money every month, ideally every week, even better every day without having to launch. So systems in place that are bringing in sales. All the damn time. That is what we call a profit engine. Again, I've talked about this endlessly. It's the core of everything I teach. Those two are the ones people know me for, and those two are what got me from like $20,000 slump to up to $25,000, up to $30,000, then $40,000, then even $50,000. I wanna be honest about that word, slowly. It was slow and it was hard and it took a while. And then there's number 3, the one I've barely talked about publicly. The one that's about to become a very big deal on this podcast. You need to have MRR. So MRR, and no, before anyone emails me, that does not stand for Master Reseller Rights. I know some people came along and tried to steal the acronym, but that's not what it stands for. MRR already existed, people. MRR stands for, and has always stood for, Monthly Recurring Revenue. And what I mean is a really healthy baseline of money that is just locked in at the start of every month. So you begin the month knowing that even if every single one of your funnels fell over, there is still a really strong number coming through. That even if you didn't launch a thing, you still had most, if not all, of your expenses covered. You are not starting from zero on the first. And I cannot overstate what that does to you as a business owner because you are now making completely different decisions. When you're not starting from zero. You take better swings, you wait for better clients, you stop panic launching, you can breathe. Layer that on top of an audience that's constantly growing and systems that are constantly converting on evergreen, and now you've got 3 revenue streams working together all at once. They're feeding each other. One on their own, not that remarkable. 3 together, bloody life-changing. And that is when it stops being hard. Now, When most people hear MRR offer, their brain goes straight to mastermind, right? High ticket, high touch, very fancy. And yes, that's an option. It's a good one for some people, but it's not the only one. And for a lot of you, it's not even the best one. So see, the thing is, whatever your MRR is, it has to fit you and your business and what actually makes sense for your people, for how you like to show up, to deliver, and to market. So let me give you the 3 most common ways to do this. Option number 1. Is the mastermind, of course. High ticket, high touch, usually involves either in-person stuff or getting on one-on-one calls, and also definitely comes with a much higher level of sophistication for how you're going to sell it. But here's the upside: you don't need that many people. 10 to 20 people paying you $1,000 to $2,000 a month is a very, very real and business-changing number. For a lot of people, that alone doubles or triples their revenue, and it's pure profit. And all you have to focus on for those next few months is is locking on, is locking in those 10 to 20 humans and then absolutely serving your heart out to them. Now, masterminds personally were never my bag. I don't want to have to organize in-person events. My audience is all over the world. Where would I even host them? Plus, I am hugely introverted, and one of my actual non-negotiables when I design my business is a free calendar. That is what I enjoy. That's what makes me happy. That's what gives me energy. And that's what lets me show up for my family without being completely drained. So it's a no for me, but if it's for you, amazing. Option number 2, the next most common one, is the membership or the community. This is the other end of the scale, right? Low ticket, usually anywhere from $27 a month to maybe up to $200 at a stretch. But realistically, that $27 to $97 is where most memberships live, which means this is a pure volume play., and you need to be prepared for that. So you need numbers, you need a lot of people in, and you need to keep a good steady amount of them there. And because memberships usually have no minimum commitment, people will churn out usually 3 to 4 months. That's just the deal. But the upside is significant. Memberships can be sold completely automated and completely evergreen, and you usually don't need anything that fancy to do it. They slot in beautifully behind your audience engine, your profit engine, and any of the other core funnel types I teach. No sales calls, no DM conversations. You probably don't even need a webinar, and you can normally get quite a few people in quite quickly. Plus, your launches are easy, but the downside of that is your focus now becomes creating content every month and trying to keep a big container of people happy. But again, this might be the right fit for you. Okay, option 3, and this is my personal favorite, the premium group program. To be honest, it's the best of both worlds. It is a smaller number than a membership, which means you actually can get more involved. You're not trying to know the names of 600, 700 people, which is very bloody hard, but it is bigger than a mastermind. You might have maybe 100 people in it. I've had up to 200 and it's worked beautifully. Yes, at that size, you'll probably need a couple of people supporting you to help answer questions, do some extra calls. But if you've got 100 or 200 people paying you a few hundred dollars a month, you've definitely got the budget for that easily. And then you structure some calls, you run some virtual events, you keep people engaged, excited, and you absolutely deliver an amazing experience. That is a fantastic MRR option for a lot of people. And that's what I did because remember, I already had numbers 1 and 2. I had the funnels, I had the audience piece. They'd taken me from 20 slowly to 30, 40, and 50. Then I built an MRR offer on top. Roughly $500 a month, and I still run a version of that today, 7 years later. It's still part of my core program. It looks completely different now. We've redone it a bunch of times, but is the same core piece. That one addition sitting on top of the other two, that was the year I almost tripled my business. That was my first 7-figure year. And staying focused on those 3 things is how I've held 7 figures reliably through every bit of chaos the last 7 years has thrown at me. Now, let me tell you about one of our amazing clients, because this isn't something that just works for me. She did this and I freaking love her story. Now, she came to us and she got those first couple of pieces in place over a few months. Audience engine in, sales coming in every day, week by week, scaling that up. But it wasn't as profitable as she wanted. Look, some markets, some offers just aren't. So she needed that next piece. And here's my favorite part. When I suggested a membership, She fully rejected it multiple times, actually, even though on paper it ticked every single box and it suited her business perfectly. She just had a bit of an ick about it. So she went away, she thought about it, and she worked out a way to make it her own. Then she built a premium level membership, almost a group program, not quite, priced at nearly $200 a month. She now has close to 100 people in it. And here's the bit I really want you to hear. Same promotions she was already running. Same types of ads, nothing else changed. She had the other pieces in place already. She just clicked this one in behind them and people upgraded through fairly automated channels without her chasing anybody. Her business looks completely different now. So that's the shift. $20,000 a month isn't a milestone that you failed to beat, is a ceiling built into the way that you got there. Two engines will get you moving. The third one is what makes it compound. Now, before I go, I've got something to tell you, and you are officially the first people to hear about it. So this is something I've been sitting on for a while, and I am very ready to stop sitting on it because I've been building something behind the scenes for months, head down, properly, intensely, telling almost nobody. It's a brand new program and it's called Scale. This is a brand new high-touch program for coaches and course creators who are parked at that ceiling and want to get properly past it. Not nudged up to an extra $5,000 or $10,000 extra a month, well past it. And it's the first thing I've built in years I've been this excited about. So here is how it works. We start with your offer stack, getting it right, right size for you and your business with the right offers in it. Not just a pile of random things, a simplified strategic profitable offer stack. So if you spent this whole episode quietly thinking, I don't have that third one, this is where we'd start with you. Then I show you the upgrades, upgrades to your content, your funnels, your ads. How you sell, how you convert, your DMs. We've got a little upgrade engine for every one of those pieces of your business, and you click them in one at a time, the same way you click in a sales engine. You are never rebuilding your whole business in a weekend. That's the entire point. Now, the most important bit. This first round is a pilot program. We are capping it at 20 people. 20. That's the whole room. And everyone in that pilot program gets the best price this program will ever be, and they get to keep it locked in for as long as they stay. It is a slightly ridiculous price, and that's completely deliberate because I want the 20 most brilliant humans in there. I wanna get them extraordinary results, and I want their feedback before we open this up to the world. So if you wanna be in the running for one of those spots, the link is in the show notes. Pop your name down on the waitlist now, then keep an eye on your emails because that's where the details on how to save your spot will land over the next couple of weeks. All right, that's it for today, guys. I'll see you in the next episode. 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.