Your Fastest Path to Cash

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Yo, yo hello and good evening, everyone. I'm Katie McManus, your practical business coach coming to you live on the Facebooks, on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and over here on my phone on TikTok. Good evening, everyone. Just a little housekeeping before we get started with tonight's topic. I love this to be interactive. So any questions you have about, you know, your fastest path to cash, how you can make money, how you can get one on one clients, or anything to add to the conversation, please do put them in the comments. I love to interact with everyone. However, sometimes the technology doesn't show me everything in a timely manner. So if you comment something and I don't respond to you, it's just that I'm not seeing it. So I do try to go to every single platform after the fact and just make sure that I saw it. So anyway, welcome. Thank you for being here. Happy Wednesday. We had some very, very good news last night. With all the elections here in the United States, if you're upset about any, about the vast majority of the election results and maybe this is not the right place for you, just, just a suggestion. Anyway, super excited for tonight's topic because this is something that I see so many new business owners kind of screw up when they first start. And, and I'm not casting any judgment here. Okay. When you start a business, it is so appealing to say, okay, well, I'm just going to put together a virtual project, a product, something digital. I'm going to sell it online and I'm going to create like some kind of online course and I'm going to sell it. And that seems like something that's going to be a big money maker and you're going to put all this work into it and sell it. It's going to be an amazing success. And the reason everyone is convinced of this is because there are a lot of gurus online who make a lot of money convincing you of that. Right. Because they have a course that they are selling. Now I have some good news and some bad news. Okay, so like if you were to start a course that goes gangbusters, let's say you start a course and you sell it for $97 and you sell 10,000 of them, that is a ton of money and that's amazing. Good for you. However, the likelihood that you will actually do that is Very, very low. And that's not something that these gurus who are trying to sell, they're like, make a course and sell it online. You'll become rich that way kind of scheme. They don't want you to know that because then you won't buy their course. And I can tell you from my almost eight years of doing what I do that doing an online course or launching a group program, while it seems like something that is going to be really sexy and fairly simple or easy and, you know, could be a big moneymaker for you, if you start there, I pretty much guarantee you will not sell much and you will have to either stay in your 9 to 5 job or you will have to quit the business to go back to a 9 to 5 job. Unfortunately, I've seen it so many times and it's really depressing. Um, and oftentimes the people who, you know, try to launch a digital course or a group program and then flop, they don't realize that the mistake that they made was like a systemic one. It wasn't like it was a foundational one. They think that there's something wrong with them. They, they genuinely, they, they launch the digital course or the group program and then it doesn't go anywhere. They don't get any signups and they think, oh my God, I'm not cut out for this. There's something inherently wrong with me. Or, you know, maybe people don't like me or maybe people don't want to hear from me. Maybe people don't see that I'm credible. And it's honestly an ego hit that a lot of people don't recover from. And it's heartbreaking because oftentimes these people who are starting these courses are brilliant, but unfortunately they're following bad advice. They're following the advice that is honestly a little predatory, a little. A lot predatory, and is really banking on the fact that they have a lot of hope. They have a lot of hope and they're very optimistic. And those are great qualities as an entrepreneur. Honestly, like, you cannot be an entrepreneur and be successful if you don't have a certain level of optimism. However, starting off with digital program or group program is the last place you want to start. If you're starting a business where you're providing a service, the first place you want to start is with one on one client. One on one clients will always be your fastest path to cash. All right, the reason for this, I want you to, I want to play this out for you. So I want you to think through like if you were to start a group program that say, starts in January, right. We're at the end of the day. I'm sorry, we're in November already. We're in the beginning of November. You have a group program that starts in January. And let's just make up that it is all about getting a new job, right? You're a career coach. You are launching this program. You're going to help people get new jobs. It's an eight week group program and it's $2,000. And you're going to help people with everything from their resume to how to interview to, you know, networking. Anything that has to do with finding a job, you're going to help them with that. But it starts in January. That means that in order to sell each one of those seats in that group program, you're going to have to have anywhere from 16 to 24 different sales calls in order to fill it. That's a lot of people you're going to have to talk to. Okay, that is a lot of people. And then when you're on those sales calls, you're gonna have to be really good at sales for one. Hello, Sadie. Hello. I'm to our. Welcome. Hello. Welcome. Thank you. And you're going to have to convince them that starting in January is going to be the right time for them. Not right now. And I can tell you from all my experience in doing this and you know, all of my experience in being in sales, when someone wants to buy something, they want to buy it. Start now. Generally it is really hard to, you know, fill up a group program. And that's assuming you have a massive following. That's assuming you have enough people either on your email list or that follow you on social media that you're going to be able to sell those seats. Most of the time when you're starting a business, you don't have that yet. You haven't built the following. And even if you do have a large following, if you haven't sold anything to that following yet, they're not trained on you being the type of person who can help them with this thing. They're not queued up, as you might say, for you being the person who could help them with this problem, right? So you're starting with no one to sell to. You have to sell a lot of them to make you the same amount of money as you might make working with one on one client. And you're going to have to do just way too many sales calls. And especially if you're first starting Out. And you've never done sales calls before in your life. That's going to be soul crushing for you because you're going to, you're going to hear no a lot and that's normal. No is not a bad thing. When you hear someone say no to you on a sales call, that just means they're not your right client. But when you're first starting out, each no is devastating. Okay? You're going to have to go through this so many times to be able to fill up this program. But realistically, I have never, ever had a client who started off with a group program who got anywhere with it, okay? Because it just doesn't work. Right. Likewise with a digital course. Now the digital course is actually way more work on the front end and while the rejection is invisible, it still feels just as bad. Right? So let's say you wanted to start with doing a digital course, some kind of like online course where you're teaching people what you do, maybe you're teaching people how to like build their resume, go network, find a new job, what have you. I want to think about all the time and energy it takes for you to film the videos, to create all the PDFs, to write out the landing page, which is going to be long, to do all of your promotional emails, to create all the content that you're going to have to use to sell this, to upload everything onto a learning platform like Kajabi or thinkific or Heartbeat Chat, where I am, and I love it there, the amount of time and energy and money you are going to have to spend to put this whole product together in order to sell it. Most of the time when people do a product like this, it doesn't go anywhere because you have not built an audience for it. You have not made sure that there is a market for it. Right? You didn't do any market research to, to make sure that you're using the words that your ideal clients would be using. And also like, you know, why would someone buy from you when you don't have any proven track record? Why would someone buy your expensive course if you have no proven track record that you can deliver on what you say you can deliver on? Right? When it comes to buying something online, testimonials are king or queen. Let's, let's say testimonials are queen. People don't buy without social proof that what they're about to buy works. And if you've never worked with a client before and you're saying, here's my course, it's $500. A thousand dollars. Buy it online? No. And of course like you're never going to fake that. You're not going to make up testimonials. That is illegal. For one, you could get in big trouble with ftc. And also you have integrity. You're not do that. That would never even register in your, in your like realm of ID idating. So that is not a good idea. And honestly like you could spend a lot of time and money and energy building this online course and it's not going to turn into clients for you. Where you want to spend time, where you want to really devote time is to find one on one clients in the very beginning. And when you find, when you start going after one on one clients, you can make so much more money so much faster than you can with other things. Right? So I want you to think about it. If I just need one client, then I need to have like, I don't know, two to four conversations. That's way better than 24 conversations, right? And I'm talking to people one on one. So if they want to start right now, they can start right now. There's no start date where the program commences and they have to go along with it. Also scheduling is way easier, right? If you have a group program and you have group calls like every Tuesday at 4pm and they can't make it, they can't make it. They're never going to be able to sign up for this no matter how much they want it versus if they are wanting to sign up with you one on one, it's so much easier for them to sign up with you. You know, in, in addition to all this, you charge more for one on one clients. You can ultimately make a lot more money working with one on one clients when you first start out than you will doing a group or digital program. Right? So I want you to think through this. If you are an executive coach and you work with people who are, you know, directors, VPs, you can vary, you know, it's, it's very acceptable for you to charge between 1500 and 3000amonth for people to work with you, okay? That's what they expect to charge or that's what they expect to pay because that's what other coaches charge in that space. If you are, say more in the life coaching arena, you can absolutely charge anywhere from like 500 to 1200amonth. Okay? That is what other life coaches charge. And if you're signing just one client, think about the impact that would have on your income, think about how much more money you would make in addition to your 9 to 5. And then of course, let's say you do some consulting for a company and let's say you get, I don't know, a contract where you're on retainer for $5,000 a month for, I don't know, 10 hours worth of work that is so much easier for you to get than to roll out some kind of group program or digital product where you're teaching people how to do it on their own. All right? So if you are starting a business, your fastest path to cash is always going to be one on one clients, okay? It's always going to be that. Now once you get a certain amount of one on one clients, you know that you have a verified idea, you know that there is a corner of this market that you work really well with who has money, who' willing to spend that money on something like the thing that you provide, right? And once you've worked with a certain amount of clients, say like 10, 15, 20, and you have an idea of the things that they all have in common, the problems they all struggle with, the pain, the frustration that they're all dealing with, and also the common goals that they all have. That is when you can parlay what you do with clients one on one into a group program. Okay? And so when you launch the root program, I want you to remember you have just spent the last six months to a year promoting your one on one work, right? And so you have built up a social media following, you have built up your email list, you've had sales calls with people who are probably really interested in working with you, who could not afford to work with you one on one. But when you are at the point where you can launch a group program and you can turn around and say, hey, listen, I know we talked like four months ago and you couldn't afford to work with me on my one on one program, but I'm rolling out a group program. I think this is going to be great for you. That's when they can sign up for you, right? So you have so much more ability to make more money with your group program after you have done one on one work. You also have a lot more testimony testimonials, right? You've worked with, you know, a couple handfuls worth of people and I hope several of them have been happy enough to give you a good testimonial. So all those testimonials get to go to your website and you can use them to sell Your group program. Once you have launched the group program a few times, once you have sold it out, once you have gotten really happy clients from it, that is when you want to leverage it into a digital product. Okay, you don't want to start with a digital product. You want to go down this path. This is the path in which you make money as you go, right? What I hate seeing for new business owners is when they front load all the work with a bunch of guesswork, right? And that's essentially what happens when you start a digital product. When you try to launch a course, for example, you're front loading all the work with a bunch of guesswork. You don't know if any of that work is going to pay off. Okay? Most of the time it doesn't, right? But when you start with a one on one offer, if you go out and try to sell it for a couple months and no one bites, you know it doesn't work, right on to the next. But you haven't devoted all that time in building it, in filming it, in creating all the content for it, in landing pages, so on and so forth. It's so much more simple to sell a one off offer. So I want you to remember as you're thinking through building a business, I know there's a part of your soul, it's like, well, what if I'm different? What if I, what if I can do this? What if I buy the course and I do every single thing and I launch my digital course and what if I make millions? Like, yeah, that'd be amazing. But I can tell you from experience, it's very unlikely to happen. I wish that weren't the case. I wish that it was, you know, something that often happened, that people were able to take their expertise, put it in a course and then launch it and make a ton of money, you know, but then there'd be no use for people like me. So maybe I don't wish that. Anyway, if you're in the beginning stages of your business, if you're starting out and you haven't made any money yet, or you have a couple clients and you know you're undercharging and you're not sure how you can start attracting those high ticket, one on one clients, your fastest path to cash then. I have opened up five spots in my calendar for this month where you can book a 90 minute session. Now I never do this, almost never. I've done this a couple times. It's very rare that I open up my calendar like this. And in those 90 minutes. What we're going to do is we are going to identify what's the service that you can charge the most money for that actually has need. We are going to design what your high ticket offer will be so you know exactly what you are selling when you talk to your potential clients. And we are going to come up with a very simple lean marketing strategy so that you can go out and sell it. Okay, if you want to grab one of these spots, then you want to go to the description of this live and go all the way to the bottom. I've shared a L to go and buy one of these sessions and like I said, I'm only offering five of these because it does take up a fair amount of time for in preparation, preparing for it and then doing it and then following up. In addition to the 90 minute session, anyone who buys this will also get two weeks of support on the back end. And the reason I'm doing this honestly is because there are so many small business owners who are are trying to get their business off the ground right now and especially with all the added pressure of everything that's happening in our world. Like, yeah, you can spend the next six months guessing about what's going to work or I can open up my calendar and help you create a roadmap for yourself. And honestly, like, I want to see as many business owners succeed right now because the more you succeed, the more you become ungovernable in this world that we live in, the better our world will become. Right? Because your voice, you'll be able to use your voice in a more powerful way. Wiggy Smalls. Oh my gosh, I love that name. That's so funny. Hi, Sophia, welcome. Hello, Mimi. I have to be careful on, on TikTok because sometimes people have weird names. I say hi and then I realize after the fact what their, what their name means. It's like, oh God. Anyway, if you want to grab that session, then go for it. The link is in the description of this. Hi, Al. Welcome. Fastest path to cash Suggest tips. Al. Oh, wait, is that Al or is that AI? TikTok is kind of weird. Oh, thank you. Yes. Okay, cool. So anyway, yeah, your fastest path to cash. I wish it were sexier. I honestly, I wish I could tell you something sexier, but honestly, it's one on one clients. One on one clients will always be your best path to cash. So anyway, if you want help developing this, if you want help coming up with the idea, designing the offer and launching it, then book a fastest path to cash. Session with me. And if you just kind of, like, want some feedback on if this is a good idea, then come to Brave Biz Labs. It's my free group coaching call that I do every. Every Single Friday at 11am Eastern. Let me see. Okay. Justin, you always have great questions. How, as a consultant, do you overcome a client who is kind of apathetic to action? Meaning client who pays you, listens to you, then doesn't do what you told them to do? Ooh, this is a tough one, Justin. So there are a few things that I might do with a client like this one. Let me just go through them. Okay, so one, I might honestly raise their rates, because when a client signs up with me and they're paying me and I'm doing all the work on my end and they are not doing the work on their end, and it's going nowhere fast, that tells me they don't have enough skin in the game. Tells me that they are not spending enough money with me to actually see it through. And that's not what I want for my clients. I do not want my clients to finish their engagement with me and feel at all resentful or frustrated they didn't get anything out of it. But of course, like, what I do is similar to what you do. Like, they are required to do stuff to get results. So first and foremost, I would raise my rates. Instant rage. Yes. I'm gonna. I'm gonna keep your other comment up so people know what you're talking about. So I would raise my rates. Honestly, that would probably be the first place I would start. Two, I would get really curious, like, what is going on on your end? We're doing all this work. I'm doing whatever it is that I am contracted to do here to help you be successful. And you're not taking action. What's going on. Right. And kind of dance with them at that point. You know, sometimes people. Oh, gosh. I mean, I've had clients in the past who didn't do the work, and it was everything from. They were in the middle of the process of discovering that they didn't want to start a business. I had one client who wrote me the most beautiful testimonial I've ever gotten from a client about how incredible my coaching is and how she worked with me for. I think she worked with me for six months, and over those six months, I mean, she spent tens of thousands of dollars working with me. And she was so happy at the end because in those six months, she discovered she didn't Want to start a business. And I have to tell you, like, every single time I got on a call with her, she hadn't done the homework. She didn't do the homework. And she had lots of reasons why she didn't do the homework. And it was so frustrating. And I felt like I was failing every single week. I was. My. All my guests were flabbered when I got that testimonial, you know, so, like, your client might be going through whatever process they need to go through to come to a realization. You don't know that until you ask them. And then honestly, like, if you're feeling really energetically uneven about this and like, raising your rates doesn't feel correct or whatever, I might just fire them. Right? I may just say, hey, listen, I. I really appreciate you as a person. I really like you. I like the work I'm doing for you, but it isn't doing anything for you. And I don't want to continue to take money from you if you're not going to make use of the work that I'm doing. Right. I don't know. I don't know your financial situation. I don't know if you're able to take that cut in income right now. A lot of people aren'. So I get it. But, yeah, that's a tricky one. There are. This is honestly the thing that I would tell my client on. This is the fact that you have a client who's paying you every single month and not making use of what you're doing. It means you're undercharging. Okay. A client who is paying enough, they feel like they have skin in the game is going to do the fucking work. Right? This is also, like, when someone comes to me and they have a question around, like, do you have any guarantees this is going to work? And they're like, really, really hesitant to invest in working with a coach or whatever because they want to guarantee. My response is straight up, like, cool. If you need to guarantee, I'm happy to charge you more. I'm happy to charge you more for my services. Because what I'm hearing when someone says I need a guarantee before I invest in this is, I'm not sure I'm going to show up and do the work right? Because I'm not doing the work for my clients. I'm. I'm teaching them what they need to know. I am helping them create the strategy. We're customizing it along the way. But they have to show up and do the work, not me. Right. I know what I advise on works if they do the work. Right. But if they just sit there and listen and talk through things with me and never take action, it's never going to work. That's not how this goes. Right. And so I always offer to charge them more money because if. If you're saying that you're still not comfortable that you're going to get results based on what I'm saying I charge, then that tells me you need to be paying more for this. Right. To get you to do the work so that you feel like you have skin in the game. Oddly enough, no one's taking me up on that. That's a baller plan for dealing with it. Because having them talk bad about me not getting results could be worse than not addressing it a hundred percent. Yeah. You know, we will always want to make sure that we have really clear expectations with our clients. So if you have a client who has signed up with you and they're paying you consistently and they're not doing the work and so they're not seeing any results. Yeah, that's absolutely a danger that they could get really upset they didn't get any results and blame you. In their mind, they may be thinking, well, you're not doing enough of them the work, even if that's not actually what you're contracted for. And we don't want that. I had a situation, oh, God, like, three years ago, almost exactly three years ago, where a client who'd been working with me for almost a year at that point hadn't gotten any results because she also hadn't done any of the work. And she came up with a reason why she wanted a refund for, like, two months of working together. And it was because she was upset that I didn't provide legal documents, like legal contracts and things for her to use in her business. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. I can't practice law. Practicing law without, like, a law license or. I don't know. I don't even know, like, what's required. I know that there's stuff required. Like, that's how much not a lawyer I am. But she was threatening to sue me because I didn't provide her, like, illegal legal work because she was frustrated that she hadn't gotten any results. And, like, you know, I get it. Like, I don't like admitting when I'm the problem either, you know, But I also don't try to get litigious about it, but we never want to deal with that. I was cough. This is why? Buying a self help book or someone for someone never works out. Lol. They got to be committed in order to find success. You can't wish them success if they aren't willing to put in the work. Transition comes from consultant to therapist. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. You know, it's, I think it's something that's inherent with those of us who are coaches and consultants where we help people. Like, we have this drive to help people and like, we want to use the expertise that we have to like make their lives better. And it's very alluring when you're working with individuals to think that you can kind of fix them to be better for themselves. It never works. It never works. I'm a coach, I'm a trained and certified coach and I can tell you you cannot fix people because people aren't broken people. People operate in the way they do because it works for them. And they may not acknowledge that it works for them, but it works for them. You know, there are, I mean, let's, let's play with an example of this. So like, I may end up with a client at some point who gets really frustrated that they're not getting any clients, right? That they're doing sales calls and they're marketing and they're doing all the things but like they're not getting any clients. And when I start digging, this has happened before, you know, and I maybe listen to some recordings of their sales calls or I do like a, a role play situation with them and I dig in for what they're doing on the sales calls. I realize they are sabotaging the fuck out of themselves. They are basically like putting the whole kibosh on this ever working out in the middle of that call. And when we start digging into it, like that's not what they want to have happen. But when we start digging into it, we realize that is actually exactly what they want to have happen. Right? They're terrified of delivering their service. Right. And this happens. This happens to so many people. If you've done this in the past, like, don't feel bad. This happens when we're afraid of going outside of our comfort zone. We're very smart. Our subconscious is just as smart as us because it operates out of the same brain. We will sabotage the thing that's going to put us outside of our comfort zone. Right? We will not let it happen. Right? And so we'll go through, we'll, we'll look at their sales call and we'll dig in, we'll fix it. And but until we start really looking at why are they doing this? Like, what is the payoff for them that they're it up? What is the payoff for them that they're not following through on what they should be doing? And we realize, oh, you're actually keeping yourself safe. You're actually keeping yourself in your comfort zone. You're keeping yourself from getting to the point where you're gonna like, potentially have an unhappy client. That's the only point in which they'll actually change. Right. Um, so, Justin, I love that you're acknowledging this. I love that you're seeing this and you're seeking out guidance on how to deal with it. It is tricky. But, yeah, if you have a client who's not doing the work, you know, they may not be the client for you or you might need to charge more. Are there any other questions? Hello, Bethal. Hello, cool guy. And Amy and Jose and Rebecca and, well, hell, and Peter and Jay and Amber. Welcome, everyone. The funniest thing, and this is a complete aside that has nothing to do with, um, what I'm talking about tonight, but today I so one of my programs I have build your own business. BYOB for short. I love a fun acronym. Anyway, it's for absolute beginners who are starting their businesses who need to get their first five high paying clients. And it's a really beautiful, small, intimate group, right? And I do a ton of group coaching calls throughout the month for them and for my other clients. And one of the calls that I do each month is a money mindset coaching call. And it's always on the first Wednesday of the month and it was today and I'm on this call and only two people showed up. I think everyone's having like an election hangover from yesterday, but two people were on the call and one of them, we were going over something on their LinkedIn after we'd kind of finished the money mindset thing. And you know, she had shared the link to her LinkedIn in the chat and the other member had opened up her LinkedIn and was going through it, looking at her experience. And it turns out that the person who's LinkedIn we were reviewing went to school with the son of the person who was also on the call. Like, like one of my clients gave birth to a human that my other client went to school with. Just so random. And I love it when those weird coincidences happen to me when I'm out and about in the world. But I love it even more when it's like in my room when it's in the space that I'm hosting that those weird connections happen. It was wild. Oh, I have new messages. Hello? Okay, Tik Tok is acting real weird. Why can't I see anything? Hmm, bizarre. Let's see. All right, well, Justin, if that helps, I hope. I hope that's useful. Yeah. If you're starting a business, your fastest path to cash is always going to be one on one clients. Okay? If you're not working towards getting one on one clients in the beginning, then you, my friend, are going to be sabotaging yourself from getting clients at all. Hi, Matthew, Welcome. Awesome. Well, I am, um, it's getting towards. It's kind of late. It's like 7pm so I'm gonna wrap it up tonight. Justin, thank you so much for the questions. And to everyone over on TikTok, thank you for being here. I hope this is useful and you know, I hope it. If you've been trying to launch a group program or a digital product and it hasn't gotten off the ground or it's flopped, I hope this is at least told you that it's not you. Okay? Those things are really hard to get off the ground even when you have gotten one on one clients. Right? So let yourself off the hook. If you want to make money in your business, then I cannot stress enough that your fastest path to cash is always going to be one on one clients. So stop beating yourself up. Go do what works by the experts point of view and just don't lose faith in yourself. The fact that you want to start a business, the fact that you have an expertise that you want to offer to other people is half the battle, okay? That is half the way there. For you to start a business, the desire to do it is a huge part. You just have to figure out the how. Right? And there are lots of people out there, myself included, who can show you the how. All right? You just have to decide when you're ready and decide who's going to help you and just go and do it. And honestly, it just takes not being a weenie about it. Okay? So I don't know if you can see my sign. Stop being a weenie. I'll show you guys too. Stop being weenie right now. All right, everyone, thank you so much for being here. Endings are so awkward for me. I don't like it. Anyway, everyone have an amazing Wednesday night. I'll be going live again tomorrow, so I will see you then. And if there are any topics or issues that you're struggling with, in your business that you want me to go live on, then feel free to pop them in my DMs, because I'd love some ideas, because I'm planning on doing this fairly regularly. Anyway. I'm Katie McManus, your practical business coach. Thank you again for being here. And again. Go stop being a weenie and start your business already. All right. I love you all so much. Have a good night. Bye.