Making your first million dollars as a course creator

Hello. Welcome to her Empire Builder Show. I am your host, Tina Towler. And this is the third episode in our three part series for making money in online business. And the first episode I talked about how to get from zero to your first dollar. And then in part two about how to get from one to your first hundred thousand dollars. And here we're talking about that magical number that so many course creators dream of, how to get to your first million dollars. I love topic so much that I wrote a book on it called Million Dollar Micro Business. If you haven't read it, grab that one. It will go into a lot of depth with how to get your business from zero to a million. But today, like I said, we are talking about that magical milestone that course creators dream of hitting $1 million in revenue. But here's the truth. Scaling to a million dollars is not about working harder. It is about working way, way so smarter. There you've got to leverage systems, you've got to change your mindset. You've got to adopt that CEO mentality. Getting to 100,000, I think is like sheer brute force. That is, that is hard work. I think getting from 100,000 to a million is easier than getting from $1 to 100,000. But what it is is a different way of working. It's a different set of problems to solve. To me, it is a lot more fun, it is a lot more exciting, it is a lot less exhau, which are all really, really good things, right? And so we're going to kind of talk about today, like that shift from, from being the workhorse into being more that CEO mentality and how to actually scale your business to seven figures and beyond so that you can build as far as you want to go. Let's get into it. Welcome to her Empire Builder Show. I'm your host, Tina Tower, business strategist, course creator, best selling, unapologetic champion for women chasing big, audacious dreams. Since starting my first business at 20, I've built and sold multiple companies, traveled the globe and discovered the magic of online courses. A business model that has changed my life forever. Building a business is no easy feat. It's a long road filled with sometimes challenges. But with the right strategy and consistency, your success is not only possible, but it's inevitable. Here on the show, I'm bringing you candid conversations with extraordinary humans, practical strategies and a whole lot of inspiration to help you scale your online business, create wealth, freedom and impact that you deserve. This is where bold dreams meet proven action, where we ditch the limits and go all in on business building and we get to live lives full of fun and freedom that light us up. If you're ready to play bigger, earn more and step into your power as a fearless empire builder, you're in the right place. Let's make it happen. Okay, let's get started on how to create your first seven figures inside your online course business. So the first is talking about that shift from going from that course creator only to the person doing all of the things, wearing all of the hats, to more of the leadership role, to more of the CEO role. And so up to a hundred thousand, you can definitely hustle your way there. I do think that it's like, like sheer workhorseness that gets you there. It's sheer determination. It's doing all the things but beyond, you need systems, you need team and you need leverage. There are very few people that I've seen be able to do all of it. When I got to my first million, I had two part time team members. So not a huge team. But what I did have was systems. Massive, massive focus on systems and leveraging what I was doing. And so systems, I mean you can't beat a good system. Like systems are my love language, lists are my love language project management software. It just allows you to do so much more in such less time. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that in there as well. So today I want to share with you the four steps to getting your business to that million dollars. Step one is your office suite. So looking at your offers and your pricing strategy for growth. So you could get to a million dollars on one single $500 course. But it is easier if you have an office suite, if you have an ascension model. There is a couple of people that I know that have plot to a million dollars just by selling the one thing. But it is rare. It's not as common as having that office suite going through. So you do need the office suite so that you can have like that scalable business model. So if you want an example of what like a seven figure office suite traditionally looks like, now I want to caveat this first actually in saying that there is no right way. And I know that especially when I started her empire builder, people were, were going, yeah, just tell me exactly what to do. Like should I do a six week course, an eight week course, a 12 week course, a membership, high volume, low volume, high price, low price. Like tell me exactly what I should do. And unfortunately the answer is it depends. Right? So it depends on the market that you're serving, it depends on your wheelhouse and what you like doing. So for me, I love running a membership, I love running a high touch membership because I like knowing people, I like knowing their business, I like knowing where they're up to, I like meeting them at live events. Like, I like seeing their faces online. I like the, I like the community, I like the camaraderie that we have there. I didn't like as much running a course where you would just launch a course and then it would go for eight weeks and then people go off into the nether, you never see them again, you get a whole brand new cohort. I like having the same people that I know. It just, it's a lot more comfortable for me and it's a lot more enjoyable for me. And so that's what I like. And then I work with some people that are like, membership, hell no. I never want to know anyone like, let me go in there, let me just do my thing, move on, rinse and repeat. That's not something I like to do. So this is what I mean by you. Do you. There are so many different ways to be successful. This is the way though that I have seen the most common success with. So what that office suite looks like is having your signature course. So your signature course is something at the beginning that most people will live teach. You might then move it later depending on which thing in your office suite you're going to live launch. When you've got your signature course, that is going to be a fantastic thing to live launch. So you're going to live launch it, you're going to teach it, live in cohorts after that and then you're going to see where people are going to go. So that's your signature course. You will then often move them onto a high ticket offer. So out of the graduates of that live launch kind of signature offer that you've got there, there might be 10% or 20% that are like, you know what, I've graduated from that. What else you got for me? What can I do next? And for that you might have like a higher priced mastermind, you might have group coaching, you might have VIP dates, you might have some sort of VIP program that you can offer to your top clients, then I recommend having a recurring revenue source. So if you've got a recurring revenue source that is something like, like a membership or something that can get you that monthly recurring revenue that you've got going there. So you know, we've got a lot of our clients inside her empire builder that had their signature offer and then it's about 20 to 30% of those graduates that would then go into their membership after that, which then creates this monthly recurring revenue and a beautiful, consistent, sustainable business coming after that. And then the fourth thing in your essential model in your office suite to get to a million is your low ticket offer. So this is something that you've got on offer on Evergreen, on your website constantly so that you can get sales in every day. It is the closest thing that you can get to passive income. Now I say the closest thing because I actually don't believe anything in business is passive because if you like think build it and they will come, they're not coming, you will put it on there and unless you market it, unless you have funnels running to it, no one's going to buy it. And so I say it's the closest thing to passive income because you can get at this stage when you're, when you're at a couple hundred thousand already and you're building to a million, you can get really good ad strategy because you've built up some really good organic following and you can get that funnel going. Which what that means is when you're in the off season from launching your signature off out, you can have people coming in, you can have them doing your smaller offer, they will love what you're doing. Which means when you go to open the doors to your signature offer, then they're going, I've been waiting for this and then it's finally here. Woohoo. So that is going to work. So that is what I have seen to be the most successful for the most amount of people. If one of them doesn't work for you though, there are no rules in your business. You can change whatever you want whenever you want. What I do think is high ticket office and membership fuel long term growth. It is the easiest game to play out of all of the different game options that we have in what I can say, okay, step two is traffic and lead generation on autopilot as much as possible. I'll add the as much as possible on the end because you can have a lot of things on autopilot, a lot of things working, but a lot of it still will be like germinated by you. And so you need to have leads every single day coming into your business to scale. Like it's this constant lead generation. I don't think that ever ends. Like that's something every business needs is new customers. So three non negotiables. For a million dollar funnel that's coming in for lead generation is a proven evergreen webinar. So having a webinar or really highly converting video on your sales page, that's going to convert people on that low ticket offer again and again and again. Paid traffic strategy. So at this stage, I said earlier, I did get to a million dollars in my business without spending any money on Facebook advertising. But in lieu of that, I did very high effort organic marketing. So by that I was doing live events, I was speaking on stages, I was going on a lot of other people's podcasts. So it was very effortful. And I did that in the place of spending the money on it because I wanted to keep that money for myself. And I was far more willing to put in effort and time rather than put in money. Now I'm, I'm more like half half. So I, I am still willing to put in effort and time but not as much as what I was. So now I'm padding that difference with the money in there. So it's kind of this balancing act in how to get that done. So you're going to have a paid traffic strategy, you're going to scale with your Facebook ads, with Instagram ads, maybe with Google Ads, with YouTube ads, with LinkedIn ads. Like wherever your audience is at, that's the sort of ad strategy to start experimenting with. Definitely with retargeting. Like retargeting is Chef's Kiss. That is where it is at. I don't love advertising for cold audiences as much as I love retargeting and warm audiences. Because we've got like you can end up with all sorts of people that are just never going to be your right market. So the more niche you can go with your targeting, the better off your list. Health is going to be in there as well. The seven figure businesses, they don't rely on launches alone. A lot of it is heavily launched. So if I look at my business in her own payer builder, for example, 80% of it comes from launching. But then because we are a membership, a lot of that tail comes from really high quality service delivery over time. So you want to have an automated sales machine as much as possible with money coming in the door every single day. Every day you want to have money hitting your bank account, not just when it's launch time because then you're really operating in this like feast or famine where it's like I'm rich, I'm poor, I'm rich, I'm poor. And so we want to Pad that out as much as we possibly can there. Okay. Step three is team and systems to scale. Now, I think team building for me personally has been probably the hardest thing in my whole business journey. I love working alone. In terms of working alone, what I mean by that is I can get really hyper focused on what I'm doing. So I will go in and do that. And then I forget, oh my gosh, I have people I need to manage. Like I need to check how they were going on that project and approve the things that they're doing and not have them their wave and be that bottleneck. And for a lot of entrepreneurs, we are the bottleneck because we set the task and then we go off on our merry way and we forget we've got to go back again and look after those people. And so team management has been something that I've really had to learn and get better at. And it's something that I'm really proud of. The team leader that I am now and the boss that I am now and I have a really great team that support me at her empire builder. But I've been through some doozies to get there and sometimes it was my fault, sometimes it was their fault. But it's one of the things that I don't think you can scale to seven figures and beyond by yourself. If you can, then you probably, you're working very, very hard, way harder than what you need to be doing at that stage. So I think, you know, from that one to a hundred thousand, a lot of it's going to be your hard work. You shouldn't be giving away too much of your revenue to team. But once you get past that point, it will actually stifle your growth if you can't get the help in doing different things. And you know, I'll always say to people, like even to get it to 70%, like if you can get a VA and they can get you to 70%, you just put that top 30% on. It means you're going to be able to handle a whole lot more tasks, a whole lot more projects, a whole lot more ideas that you can put out there and start getting implemented to keep continuously growing your business without you having to put in like the sweat equity into absolutely every single thing that you're doing. So you can't do everything alone at this level. Now what you want to do is hire for growth, not just relief. So what I mean by that is sometimes people will wait until they're at peak exhaustion and desperation before hiring. Nearly every hiring Mistake I have made has been at the peak desperation where I'm like, I am so tired and so overworked and so overwhelmed and I need help so bad. I will take anyone. You know, like when you're in that stage, that's when you do take anyone and you really end up getting people that are not the right cultural fit. Or maybe they had some alarm bells, but you just didn't care because you're like anything is better than nothing. And so you don't just want to hire for relief, you want to hire for growth. You want to be like, all right, at the moment my business is at 300,000 a year. Next year I want to get it to 500,000 or 600,000 or whatever that's going to be. I mean if I digress a little here, when we're talking about growth in an online business, when I was in service based business it was very, you know, it was very managed growth because with a service based business like the ship is harder to turn and the infrastructure that you need in a service based business is so much greater than in an online business. So where I ran tutoring centers, we had 40 tutoring centers around Australia in a franchise system. And so if we wanted to grow that we needed, we needed so much more human support. So massive, massive team, not hugely leveraged because 50% of revenue went to team. We needed bigger spaces, so large portions going to rent. So like the expenses were very, very high. Whereas when you are growing for online, it's a lot more scalable and a lot more leveraged. So you can go, if you're doing a $300,000 a year, it is possible to do a million dollar year next year without breaking your business. So in a service based business you could kill the business by growing too fast because you could grow and you can't service the people that are coming in because you didn't set up the infrastructure previously in online that is much, much easier. So it depends on, you know your growth is going to depend on how much marketing you do and then how, like what your delivery is, whether you're delivering something that's more hybrid so that there's a certain number of people that you can handle or whether you are infinitely scalable and you can have thousands and thousands of people in your course and then it will depend solely on your marketing efforts that you're putting in there. But I've digressed a bit there in going, when we come back to hiring people for growth, not relief, hire people with where you want to take the business to. So where you're sitting now, say you're at 300,000, you want to get to 600,000, go, who do you need in order to get you there? If you wanted that gap filled, what activities do you need to do to get that 300 to 600? And then how can you get as much help as you can? Like, what is it that you need? One of the ways that I like to do it inside her empire builder, we have templates for like a time audit where we have every single task and role inside and online business all itemized on a giant spreadsheet so that you can go through and see every task that happens and go, all right, this is what I do currently. This is what my VA does. This is what like anyone in your team, what they do. And then you go through and go, all right, have I got all the right people in the right seats and am I happy doing all the things that I do? Then I go through it and I go, all right, as we grow to the next stage, what things am I doing that I no longer want to do? And I will highlight all of those. And then those elements are what's going to make up the job description that I put out there for the next hire that I make. And so it's a really systematic way to do it so that you're hiring for that growth and not out of that desperation. And so usually your first hire is going to be a VA. If you don't have one and you're over 100,000, get one. I'll put in the notes some good resources for where to find vas. There's. And then your next hire is usually going to be someone around marketing. So much of what we do inside an online business is marketing dependent. You know, I think probably two thirds of the effort that I put in is is marketing effort. So a marketing assistant is going to be a great next hire. Then customer support, like community manager sort of person. And then like content repurposing. Because you've got to do so much content in this day and age to keep it going, eventually you could get an operations manager. This is something that sometimes I see people do too prematurely. But then also if you are someone. I was talking to one of our members the other day and she loves what she does, she's very good at what she does. But she hates admin, she hates organization, she hates operation. So it's like she has hit her ceiling of growth unless she gets that operations manager. So if that is not you and you're already sitting at a couple hundred thousand a year and you want to get to a million. Although I would say don't get an ops manager or like a COO type of person until you surpass that million. For some people, it's right to get it at 200,000 because you won't get there without it. If you don't love that ops side, then you need to get someone that loves managing products, that loves managing projects, that loves keeping things on time, that loves doing all the organization, that loves getting back to customer queries, that can keep a handle on all of those things. Things so that you can shine and deliver and do what you need to do. It's going to cost you a pretty penny. But if it's going to stifle your growth not to have it, only you know the answer to that. So that is the next hire that I would get. And then looking at your key systems. So systemize absolutely everything inside your business, like looking at automated onboarding for new clients so that you're not doing anything laborious and anything manual. Having a really good CRM to track all your leads and your sales when you're launching. Having SOPs. So all of your standard operating procedures for your team. We have all of our SOPs built on Team workspaces. I love it. I use it more. I don't think an hour would go by that I wouldn't open it and check it. It also means that, say we lose a team member and a new one comes in. All those systems are already there, so I don't have to take the time training and doing all of that. And we are constantly refining our systems so that it means, you know, we've got launch coming up. Which by the way, if you are not on the waitlist for her Empire Builder and jump on@hermpirebuilder.com you will get access to all of the resources that I talk about all the time in actually how to implement all of this stuff is all for you inside Her Empire Builder. But as I was setting up for launch, I use all of our systems and I was thinking, like, when we go through launch, There is about 250 tasks that we do to set up for a launch. When I was going through them, if I didn't have them all documented, that takes so much brain space to remember, like, what do I have to do next? Have I missed something? Have I got something there? Like, you don't know what you don't know. And it's not until like you get into it and you're oh crap, I forgot to do this. When I was setting it up. I was like, bless past me and my beautiful systems because it means that I can save the brain space for the creativity, for the delivery, for dealing with customers, for exploring new avenues. I don't have to waste brain space on like systems and wondering what to do next and making sure I've done everything. All of that brain space is all free to do that. And so your, your role as CEO, once you get kind of that half a million to a million and beyond, your role morphs a lot more into that visionary CEO. So you are always the visionary of the company. You are the ideas gal that we have going there. But you're really focused. Like the ideal is by the time you get to million is that you are the visionary. What you're focusing on is setting the vision, setting the ideas, content like the high level content pieces, high impact sales and the leadership of the team. That is your role. And then you have your team that is managing everything else inside of the business. Okay, step four is how to scale without burnout. Now this is a really important one because because of the points I've just talked about with team and systems to scale, most people are exhausted by the time they get to the million dollars because they haven't let things go quickly enough. And I speak from experience with that. I wish I had let things go earlier because I find managing team so difficult. I was reluctant to hire more people because in my head I thought, you know what, it's easier if I do it myself, which some cases it is until you get a players. When you have a team, it is so much easier to have them doing things than to try and hold everything yourself and feel like an octopus all day, every day. So you want to scale without burnout and how you do that, Like I will say, simplicity wins. Do not overcomplicate your business. There are things that you know. I will do a time audit every 90 days. Every 90 days I have an alarm go off on my phone every 15 minutes where I simply just write down what I'm doing that way. It's very polarizing. It's not a, not like an easy or fun thing to do. But at the end of the day you see one, how much time you're wasting and two, how many things you're doing that either you don't have to be doing anymore yourself that you can give to a team member or that just simply don't need to be done. Things that you do in the business because you thought they were a good idea or, you know, they used to be relevant, but now, does anyone even care? Does anyone even notice? You need to keep doing that. Just because you've always done something does not mean you always should. And so it's a really good opportunity to look at things and go, all right, have I overcomplicated it? Like, have I added too many layers? And we need to strip things bare and we need to simplify a little bit. And that happens always. You know, I move house a lot. Hopefully we stay in the house that we're in for a really long time now. But I was moving house. I mean, we moved 11 times in 18 years. And always I was very, very surprised when we moved about how much we accumulated. Even when we don't, I feel like we don't accumulate that much stuff, but we would always have a lot of things. And you have to do this clean out. And the same thing happens inside your business. You know, you end up with so much like digital clutter and so many things that you've added onto your business or you've added onto your products that you could clean out and keep it nice and simple. The next way to scale without burnout is protecting your energy. So a lot rides on you in a thought leadership business. There is a lot depending on your energy. There is, you know, all of your team are depending on your energy. Your clients are depending on your energy. If you are the breadwinner, if your family, like your family is depending on your energy, it is a big weighted responsibility to hold. And so you need to get very boundaried over how you can conserve that energy so that, you know, if you think about, like batteries in a day that you've got, not all tasks are created equal. You know, there's a day where doing things like I'm doing now with podcast recording and video recording, it takes a lot more energy than a day sat behind my computer doing admin tasks. And, you know, creating canva, I think sometimes gives me energy instead of taking it away. But doing what you love to do in the business more now, I don't think I hear people sometimes go like, if you don't love it, delegate it. And I mean, it's true to a certain extent. Like, you want to do most of what you love doing to keep that energy high. But I would say like 3/4. If you can get 75% of your day doing the things that you love to do, then you are winning and you will be fine and you will be consistent. But 25%, I think like there's always going to be things that we do in the business that suck. There's always going to be things that we do that you know, if we weren't getting paid we wouldn't do. And that is totally fine because you've got a business to run. You know, you're not a toddler, you can, you can be a grown ass adult and you can do the things that we know we have to do to get the result that we want to get. So I think like I kind of see that 75% if I am 3/4 happy and a quarter going, oh no, I wish I didn't have to do this, that's not so bad, that's pretty good. And so you want to really focus on that and go, what is giving you energy and how can you keep that sustainable and consistent as you go? And then the other is having boundaries, not working 24 7, not being available to people all the time, not letting people SAP your energy, being really boundaried with that. And that is something that at the beginning, like in that naught to a hundred thousand I was terrible at and a lot of people are terrible at because we haven't had to develop that skill yet. And at the start you're so desperate to make it successful that you're saying yes to everything you over delivering. You're going above and beyond for everything and everyone. But there needs to be a line where you start going, I'm going to crash and burn like I am giving everything to everyone. There's nothing left for me here. And you will no longer be able to serve anyone. So if you want to be serving people and building your business as long as you choose, you need to be boundaries so that you have some of that left and you can keep going and not only serve your clients, but also serve yourself as well so that you can in turn continue to serve your clients. Okay. What I see as the most common roadblocks to getting to that million dollar magic mark is one not investing in the right team. So trying to do it all yourself really slows you down. Having the wrong people on the team slows you down. You've probably heard the saying like hire slow fire fast. That is something that is difficult to do. I have even had people say to me, gosh, you really can get rid of people quickly when they don't work out. And it's something that, yes I do. I have very high levels of excellence in our business. It's something that I used to apologize for. I used to go my expectations are high. It's probably harder working for me than it is working for someone else. Um, and I would feel bad about that. But also I go, I love my business, I love the clients I serve, and I have a certain level of excellence that I want to adhere to. And what that means is that is the standard. And if you want to go for that standard, like, it's a great place to work, I treat you really well, I pay really well. We encourage each other. Like, it's beautiful. But if you're not on that a standard, then you've got to jump off the train because you're going to drag everybody down. And so that is something that's difficult at the beginning, but you don't want to waste your money and you don't want to waste your time. There are people that I work with and, you know, I'll talk to them about their team, and they're like, it is harder having them than not having them because I have to, like, scaffold all their tasks and then micromanage them. And then, you know, for an hour or two they're not at their desk and I don't know where they were and then they won't tell me. And all these out like, like, but that I've got no time or patience for that. And so you've really got to get your boundaries around team and get the good, solid team. And if the team isn't working out, fire them and hire someone else. Like, go again until you get that 18, because that will change the game for you. Okay, the next is overcomplicating your office suite. So having too many things. So what I said previously with the Ascension model, of the four different offers that I see working, the most, um, I've seen clients that have like 15, 20 offers on their website. More does not equal more sales. Let me tell you that, like, unequivocally, I have seen most millionaire course creators that I know have around three to six offers. That is it one or two main ones, like one or two that take up 80% of their business and then the rest kind of on the periphery. But you don't want to overcomplicate your office suite. You don't want people to go, I don't know where to start. Like, there's too many things to choose from. Keep it simple. Be known for the thing that you are known for and have everything else around that feeding that one main thing that you want to be known for and that you want to do. So you don't want to overcomplicate it in there. One great offer that scales is so much better than five smaller ones. If you've got something that's not working, don't be afraid to like kill that off and put your effort and energy into the one that's working. Because every time, like we have a certain amount of time, energy and effort that we can put in and you have to go, do I put it over here or do I put it there? Like, what's going to give me the best return? Always be going for the one that's going to give you the best return. The other common mistake that I see is ignoring the data. Sometimes we can be too in love with an idea emotionally and we ignore the data from it. You need to track your leads costs, you need to track your conversions, you need to track your roi. You need to be tracking everything and following the data. Like listen to it. Data does not lie. And so we can look at that and really like see a problem before it becomes too severe so that you can course correct and you can grow much, much faster. And the other one, the fourth one that I see, the biggest problem is underpricing your expertise. Know how brilliant you are. High value courses create high value pricing. And high value pricing will get you to a million dollars a lot quicker than low value because it is often easier to sell and gives you high quality clients that are going to tell their friends about it, which is going to get you there every step of the way. So scaling to 1 million is about focus. It is about focusing on what truly moves the needle in your business and building a scalable offer, automating your marketing and stepping into more of that CEO leadership role than what you did in the early days. So if this episode like fired you up a little bit, it was like, this sounds good, I'm on the road to a million. I'm going to get there. I would love to help you get there. Go to her empire builder.com we are opening doors soon. What her empire builder is, is a whole community of women. We have 200 members inside that are all unapologetically ambitious. We are all building courses, memberships, all in the online space and are all having a big go, all having a crack. And so if you want to be surrounded by people like that and get all of the resources. When I talk about all the resources, I mean all of the resources, job descriptions for your team, all of the time audits, all of your profit and loss information, all of your revenue calculators, all of the everything that you need. You just search on our intranet that we have and the resource will come up there for you. So if you want to check that out, go to her empire builder.com doors are opening really soon and we would love to welcome you in. I hope you loved this three part series. I hope it helps you take your business and move on to that next level and make the business of your dreams that you love and that gives you a life that is absolutely brilliant. Thanks so much.