Why Most People Fail at Doubling Their Revenue

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hey everyone, this is Julie. Welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today I want to talk about something that sounds simple, but is a spot where a lot of entrepreneurs derail, and that is how do you break down a big revenue goal into something that's actually executable? And the idea of saying to yourself, I wanna go from $200,000 a year to $500,000 a year is inspiring. It's bold, it's growth, but it's vague. And once you start down that road, if you do not have action steps, you might find yourself doing the spray and pray method or getting super distracted. I want to talk about a client of mine. I'm going to keep her anonymous, but I think she's a great example of how to go from like, here's my revenue goal, to how do we actually execute on this. So she came to me because she had plateaued around $200,000 a year. Solid business, right? Profitable, but she was stuck. She wants to get to $500K. That's doubling a business, by the way, and that's not a small task. Most businesses grow 3, 4, 5, 10% a year. She's asking to grow 100% a year. And in online business, you know, we do have precedents for this happening, but don't, you know, don't understand— I mean, don't misunderstand— it's a big ask, okay? Most people in this situation would say, let's run ads, increase traffic, let's launch more, harder, let's post more, let's create new offers. And honestly, none of those things are wrong, but before you do any of it, you need to stop and ask yourself, is the offer or the program even built for the scale that you want? It would be like saying, like buying a Kia and expecting it to run, you know, go 200 miles an hour in a race. Before you step on the gas, you must ask, do you have the right vehicle for that speed? And that's really about the offer. We did go back and forth on her offer. Offer's $2,500. She's tempted to lower the, uh, price of the offer. That's very common when you come up against price objections. You think, okay, maybe it should be lower, or maybe I should rearrange my, my value ladder. I should put that at the beginning, focus on that, sell something higher ticket. You know, you can get really like stuck in indecision. But what we wanted to really, the fundamental question that we wanted to answer was, can $2,500 program actually support $500,000 in revenue? Is it positioned correctly? Does it have a painful problem attached to it? Is it different? Is it compelling enough that, you know, strangers would want it? And we determined that it was worth, you know, focusing on and that it could actually be the scaling mechanism. It wasn't quite positioned correctly, and that was a problem that we had to fix. So we started to fix that. And if you are thinking about doubling your revenue and you're like, well, I have a, you know, $200 offer and a $50 offer, do the offers, can they really carry the weight that you're asking? And in this case, we determined that she had the right car for the journey and we had to look at the next bottleneck. And honestly, if you think about it, when you think about revenue goals, like you're at $200,000, you want to get to $500,000, there's just a bunch of bottlenecks in the way. It's not, if you think of it that way, you'll have a tendency to remove move stuff and simplify versus add stuff. And it doesn't mean that there isn't stuff to be added, but it just is a slight reframe in the brain so that it's not you just building all this new stuff over and over and over and over and over again, okay? Versus saying, what's, what's actually stopping me from getting here? And it's just a series of removing bottlenecks. When we looked at her sales mechanism and her offer, there was a bottleneck, and that was that she was primarily selling this $2,500 program on a sales call. And there's nothing wrong with a sales call, and $2,500 is kind of in that weird middle where a lot of people do need to use a sales call, but those who are really good at selling can, can get away with not. And if you're doing sales calls to a $2,500 program and that $2,500 program actually is costing you time, right? You're a coach. You're actually doing the work. You have a bottleneck because you're doing the calls, you're doing the fulfillment. You're going to get capped, right? And if you, you know, back into that $500K number, is that really going to be pleasant for you? And people will say, well, I want to, you know, I want to have a sales team. Okay. But that's going to create another bottleneck and another expense. It doesn't mean you can't get to $500K, but if you get to $500K and you hire a sales team, you're not really going to have as much profit. So you just have to weigh all this stuff out. We decided that the sales call was a bottleneck and you can't, you know, expect her to be the sole coach, the sole salesperson, et cetera, et cetera. So that made us ask, can we sell this offer without a sales call? And probably not to strangers, not to cold traffic, but maybe we could to her warm audience. We determined that the sales mechanism was going to be a webinar, and we started talking about the choreography. We did a bunch of, uh, positioning changes, worked through some of the objections, and then she ran this webinar to her email list, and she did sell some spots live with no sales calls. That was a huge win. That was a signal to us that the choreography and the positioning was slowly getting better, that her warm audience would buy without a sales call. Okay. But then we had to see if the removal of the bottleneck of sales calls would work for, uh, ads, right? She had tried ads in the past. Ads are definitely difficult because she has a very small niche. It can be hard to find those folks and it's much lower trust, much lower show-up rates, different psychology. We decided to go ahead and try it and we ran some ads and we had a few things that we immediately noticed, you know, the show-up rate was very, very low. We did get some great, um, cost per lead, but we also wondered if maybe those folks weren't quite ready. However, we had someone who joined the, like, the funnel in the end of February and purchased, paid in full, no sales call. And that is another signal, another signal That says, okay, we're removing the bottleneck of time, right? We're getting rid of those sales calls. We are, you know, consistently improving the webinar so that that choreography is doing a lot of that heavy lifting. We have proven that the choreography and the positioning of the offer does convert high-trust cold traffic, right? Hyperbuyers. Okay. And now we continue to optimize. Our engine is working. It's not scaled. There's definitely still problems. We have issues with show up, right? But the engine works. And I, what I want you to see in this whole thing is that the $500K goal doesn't really get attacked all at once. We didn't try to solve all the traffic problems. Uh, we didn't try to solve delivery. You know, we focused on one constraint. At a time, one constraint, one rock that's in the way on our way to $500K with the positioning of the offer, then what the sales mechanism is, then the removal of time bottlenecking, then the cold traffic. And big objectives like doubling your revenue are inspirational and they can give you that like hit of dopamine. But you, you need to be able to break it down into these micro objectives that are very much operational. Because that's what's going to build momentum. And the funny thing is, is, you know, even though this has been hard to do and it's small numbers and we're building slowly, she is now not doubting, oh, should I lower the price? Should I do this right? She's getting more and more confident that, confident that, okay, yes, this is the right vehicle. And that architecture is forming. And a lot of people miss this and they chase the revenue. They think about adding things and then they don't think about their destination of revenue as removing constraints. Revenue is always going to be a lagging indicator of the work that you're doing. It's constraint removal. If you are sitting here and you're listening to this and you're like, I have a big goal, I want to hit $300K, $500K, $1 million, the question is not how do I make more money? We ask what are all of the current bottlenecks and constraints that are in the way of getting to that goal. And then you realize, wow, okay, maybe this is actually possible if I can get the right vehicle, the right sales mechanism. And again, you know, if you have a constraint that says, oh, well, you know, I don't have enough traffic and you determine, well, you need to start a YouTube channel. Yes. Are you adding something? Yes. But you're adding something strategically to remove a constraint rather than just adding something and being like, well, that seems like it's a good idea. And that is how you build a business that can actually hold the number that you want and that you see. That is the work I do. That is the work I absolutely love to do. And it really is the difference between building a business that's going to like chain you to your desk and make you feel like you're grinding and hustling, and one that's going to get easier and more streamlined over time. If this is something that you need help with, I want you to reach out to me on Instagram, Julie C. Chenell. DM me, or you can email me julie@juliechenell.com. I'd love to hear what you're working on. Talk soon.

And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, Harness your grit and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.