Episode 79: Striking Balance When Scaling To A Million In Revenue

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs, and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie, and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life.

Hey, everyone, this is Julie. Hope you guys are doing amazing. Today's podcast episode, I wanted to share with you a discussion that I had with a friend on Facebook. And she reached out to me and she asked me about my journey to making a million dollars in revenue, but specifically about balancing your drive and your hustle to reach this goal that you know that you're capable of with being a wife and a mom and having that balance. And what should her trajectory look like? Where should she double down? Where should she stop and say, okay, wait, maybe this is not worth it? She's really very much wanting to do it the right way and the best way for herself, her business, and her family, of course. And so I told her, I said, you know, this is a big question. I think I'm just going to answer it as a podcast because I bet there's a lot of people, moms and dads that listen to this that have this same struggle. So what I want to say, first and foremost is there really isn't just one way to do this game. Now, I do think that women, more so than men, but, you know, I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule, struggle with a tremendous amount of guilt, especially if they're moms of young children, because there's a lot of conditioning that we've taken, you know, just from society, that we are, you know, of course, supposed to be there for our kids. But there's a guilt. There's like a guilt gland that seems to be dialed in much stronger with moms than even dads. And so if we take the child sort of discussion out of the matter, it's hard enough to figure out how to scale to a million dollars without any extra guilt, never mind adding that in. And so I kind of want to separate the two issues a little bit. So from a real strategic standpoint, how do you get to a million dollars that requires you to look at what you currently sell, how much of it you've been selling and compare that to the audience that you currently have. So, for example, if you are making $20,000 a month and you have $1,000 program, and so you basically get 20 students a month, what you want to look at is how many leads did I need to get those 20 students? Okay, so maybe, maybe you need. Maybe you have 5,000 leads a month and it gets you 20 students at 20k a month. So what you can do is look at, well, the first thing is what do I have to do to scale my audience, right? So in order to get 20 customers at $1,000 each, I need 5,000 leads. Well, how many customers would I get with 20,000 leads? And how much would it cost me to get 20,000 leads? And then you can look at, does this make sense to do with joint venture partners, where I find people who already have my audience? Does it make sense that I scale with Facebook and Instagram ads? How expensive would that be? Do I turn on some organic traffic Strategy? Whether it's YouTube or Pinterest or Instagram or SEO, those are longer plays, so it takes longer. So you have to think, okay, well, if you're trying to reach your goal by, you know, December, that's going to be hard to do with SEO. But it is a long game that sort of builds over time. So that's the first thing you want to do is look at your current revenue, what your current revenue looks like, how many leads you're needing to get that current revenue, and how much it would cost for you to double or triple the amount of leads that you're getting. The second thing that you want to look at is lifetime value. This is a, a term, a KPI that a lot of marketers talk about. How much is your customer spending with you over the lifetime of them being a part of your company? And if you only have one product, it's very easy to figure out what lifetime value is. If you have an E commerce store, you have multiple products you kind of want to look at. Well, how much are people spending over time? There's actually a whole formula inside of FG society. For any of you guys who are in that program, I actually teach you how to calculate lifetime value. So, for example, in Funnel Gorgeous, which is the brand I run with Kathy, we have a lot of products, right? We have a lot of little products. So we figured out our lifetime value and we know that it is about $170. So the average customer spends that. So think about it like average cart value, which is another KPI acv This is what the person, the average person who comes through a funnel spends. This is what the average amount of money a customer spends with you. So we know for every new customer we get, we can assume about 170 in revenue. So then what you can figure out is, well, how many customers, new customers do we need in order to hit a million dollars? So we could say, okay, well, we need 10,000 more customers. How do we get it? And that's just getting new customers. Now the other thing you could look at when you look at your lifetime values, you could say, well, gosh, my lifetime value is low. We want people to spend, spend more. So maybe we need to introduce a new product line to the existing customer base. And this is the second strategy. So the first strategy is looking for new customers and figuring out how many new customers you have to hit a million. And then the second strategy is how do I get the customers that I have now to buy more frequently or to buy something more expensive. And so there's, there's two ways to do that. The more expensive is to figure out some set in time events, things that you can do that help them ascend to that next offer. Especially if you, if you have an offer, this is easy. So for, let me give you an example. Funnel Gorgeous, we have Launch Gorgeous that's going to launch in the fall. We can do a launch or we could possibly do a virtual event. And at that event we could sell it and then get people into the program. And so the virtual event would double. Number one, it would be a low ticket event so it brings some revenue. But number two, it would be designed to ascend people into that higher ticket offer. If you don't have a higher ticket offer, that would be the time to create one. So the, the second strategy is really looking at all of that, what you have to do to get more traffic and to get people to buy more often, which is like a continuity play, even if you're not selling a membership, but they're buying more frequently because of the, the type of things that you're, that you're selling or to buy something more expensive. And once you look at that, and I have a free strategic planning worksheet that really can help you. It's on my Facebook page at Julie Stoyan Live. You just look for the video that says strategic planning worksheet. So you can do that and that will help you back into a million. It is hard to go to a million dollars in sales with just one product if that product is less than $1,000. If it's $1,000 or, or more, you can get to a million pretty easily on one product. But a lot of people still need to figure out how they can create another offer in there. So once you have figured that out, and I would back into it with a spreadsheet and look at the various scenarios, the second thing you want to look at is the ease with which it's going to take you to execute on all the ideas. Because probably you're going to come up with a bunch of ideas, oh, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this. And you want to look at the ease. I got this from my friend and fellow insider, Dave Lindenbaum. He got it from somebody else who I can't remember, but he rates all of his ideas with impact, confidence and ease. Impact is how much of an impact is this is going to have on my goal? How confident am I that it's going to have that impact? Meaning like, am I reasonably sure that this is going to help or am I just kind of just thinking about it? And then ease is how easy is it to get off the ground? So if you have a couple of ideas and one is like, oh, I'm going to create a high ticket offer, you know, one on one and I'm going to sell it to existing customers, that's relatively easy. Versus I'm going to create a certification program that's going to be much more difficult. So you want to look at which projects are going to be more quickly because you want to be able to move the projects that happen a little bit more easily to the front of the line. Because especially if you have a high confidence score that you know that it's going to make a difference. So sometimes our best ideas are super complicated ideas like, oh, well, I need a brand new website and I need a new branding and all this kind of stuff. But then it requires you to like roll that branding out through all of your products. And is that really going to. Is that really what is impacting your revenue? If the answer is no, then you don't want that to be a high priority. So back in the fall, Kathy and I were talking about trying to hit a million dollars. Cause we really wanted to walk the 2 comma club stage. And that was sort of a goal. And so we were very much up against the wall with a time frame. So everything that we did in our business in probably a six week period was very much driven by we'd like to reach that goal. Whereas if that goal was not there, we probably, we would have maybe done things a little bit differently. And so when you're thinking about your goal of hit a million dollars by a certain date, is there something behind that that's important to you? Right, because this was really important. Kathy, this was Kathy's first two comma club. And it was really important to her. And so we knew because it was important, we reprioritized. But had that not been there or had it been further out, we might have rearranged things. So you want to, you want to make sure your goal isn't arbitrary, like, oh, I have to make a million dollars by this date, otherwise I don't know what's going to happen. Right. You want to make sure that that date, that there's some meaning behind it. And sometimes when you make goals like that, you get close to hitting it, but you don't quite hit it. Is that going to be okay? You know, so you really want to look at your motivation behind it. When I, my first million dollars in business didn't come through just one product. It came through two products. I had a membership and I had a signature program, tdg. And so those together created that, that million dollar mark for me. And so I, you know, for Funnel Gorgeous, a million dollars came through. Again, a funnel stack which was like two offers kind of put together. So. But yet I have helped lots of people hit a million dollars with just one offer. But again, it's hard to do if the offer is less than $1,000. I have a couple people who did it with a $500 offer, but most people do it with a thousand dollar offer or higher. So just keep that in mind based on your business. Now, I want to transition a little bit away from tactics and talk about being a mom for a second. I believe that there is a time and a season for everything. I also believe that momentum and creativity come in bursts. This is always a little bit of a hard thing to explain to people who aren't entrepreneurial, especially spouses and children who don't quite understand. But I know enough to know that the balance that I enjoy today, the lifestyle of, you know, gardening and going to Disney World when there isn't coronavirus and all that kind of stuff I enjoy today because of the hustle that I did. And so it's very tempting. And you'll see, you'll see business owners do this where they make a lot of money and then they create this lifestyle for themselves and then they sell this lifestyle and almost kind of, you know, talk badly about what they did in the past. Or talk about it as it was less than forgetting that that was a really legitimate stepping stone to them being where they are now. There are seasons of hustle in business and sometimes it's hard to see where they start and stop. And the danger is that sometimes you don't know how to stop. And this is, you know, the analogy that I talk about is like a tiger is chasing you in the woods, right? And I know for me, in 2015, when I was really trying to get my financial feet under me and I had just, you know, come out of a divorce and it was very stressful, there was a sense of a tiger chasing me. I was, I was hopped up on some adrenaline for sure. And. But I'm glad, you know, I don't, I don't regret what I did because I was riding the momentum and the adrenaline and the. And sort of that passion. And that was a season where I would not. That season doesn't hit all the time. And I used it. I used that sort of crisis to my advantage. And, you know, the tiger of poverty was chasing me, right. And so it created this drive. I also had a period where I wasn't with my kids as much. And that was painful. And I took that pain and that grief and I used it right? And I used it to create something. And for me to then sit and look back on that and be like, oh, my gosh, that was such. I made such terrible decisions or I didn't do it right or whatever. I would judge about myself in the past would be so short sighted because I was doing, I was using what was in front of me to the best of my ability to create something that now I get to enjoy. And so I just, I kind of scoff a little bit when I see influencers who talk badly about their hustle past because it's short sighted. Hindsight is always 2020. But the danger, the danger is that you may not realize that the tiger has stopped chasing you and you won't know how to stop. And I think that was something that I sort of ran into once I hit that, that revenue goal that I was looking for. And I started to feel that financial security and I was working like a dog. I had Funnel Gorgeous. I had Digital insiders. I'd create your laptop life. I had, you know, I was working with Russell at Clickfunnels and it was just, you know, my life was suffering. I did not realize that the tiger had stopped chasing me because I was stuck in this pattern. And it took a real strong. I mean, it took Therapy, it took, you know, inward reflection to really look and be like, oh, tiger's not there anymore. Like, I don't have to. I don't have to run at this pace forever. And I was able to start to unwind and untangle some of the, you know, the habits that I picked up along the way and say, okay, what do I want this to look like now? And so that's the thing that you want to be mindful of when you create, when you know there's a season of hustle and, you know, there's a season of drive. Number one, understand your motivation. Number two, get really clear on what things you will need to do to make that happen. And then number three, watch for signs when it has happened so that you can sort of unlearn some of the things that you might learn in the process. And that's what I had to do. And so now I have a little bit of a different vibe with my life. But I recognize, I recognize where I came from to some extent. You're never going to be rid of the guilt. The guilt is always going to be there. I've never figured out how to get rid of it. I have learned to live with it. I've learned to just accept that as a mom, there's always going to be this tug. And I have to just do what I know is best for me because if I'm unhappy and I am miserable, I am going to be a terrible mom. And I know that I care so much about my children that I don't have to worry that I'm going to irreparably harm them. Because what's best for me is also, as an extension, what's best for my children. Because I love them. I would jump in front of a train for them in a heartbeat. And so I just have to trust that my instincts as a mom will guide me. And as far as spouses and friends and all that kind of stuff, I think that when they, you know, if they're not entrepreneurial and they're worried and they see, oh my gosh, you're burning the candle at both ends, it's important to have the discussion of, like, this is the goal, this is what I think it's going to take to get there. And this is the timeline I think it's going to take to get there and creating boundaries around it so that they don't feel like it's this never ending thing that's never, ever going to stop. I think you can mitigate a lot of spousal disagreements about that. So I hope that helps for those of you guys who are working towards a million dollars and feeling the pull of where do I, where do I start? What do I double down on? What do I let go of? And how to manage that as a wife and mom. I hope this was helpful for you and thank you to the person who reached out to me because it's a great topic and I hope you guys have an amazing day.

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Sam.