Is your coaching business stuck? It's time to raise the roof!

Hello and welcome to The Real Coach Convo. I'm Mary Schiller, your host and the founder of the 5K Coach Club, an affordable group program for coaches who want to reach those $5,000 months without all the complexity and with a lot more fun. Here on The Real Coach Convo, we get real about what it means to be an entrepreneur coach, as I like to call us. So let's get into today's real talk. Real Coach Convo now. Let's talk about raising the roof or even blowing the roof off your coaching business and your life. For a little bit of context here, I woke up this morning as I'm recording this and my husband said, you know, they're doing some renovation on the place next door and they have taken off the roof. And I said, what, they took off the roof? Yes, indeed they had. I could see it from our upstairs window right into the home that they had taken the roof off. I don't know what they're planning to do. Perhaps they're going to add another story. Since I don't know anything about construction, I don't know why one would take the complete roof off your house. I did find it interesting that the rooms that were exposed because they took the roof off, still had really nice windows and I could see electrical heaters on the wall. So they haven't removed any of that. There was a very powerful looking steel beam also that was still there. So who knows, but it got me thinking about something as I'm recording this. A few days ago, I listened to several free trainings as part of one of those online summits where they bring together a bunch of experts on a particular topic. I generally don't listen to many of those types of things because I don't like to get confused. I find that if I'm listening to too many voices, I can get really muddled. And especially with business, that's the last thing we need is to get more information and more confusion and more ideas for what we could do. However, this time I decided to be judicious and listen to the ones that the titles really appealed to me. There were 28 speakers in total, and I listened to 5. One I dismissed right away, not because what she was saying wasn't valuable, but I realized within the first 5 minutes that it didn't apply to me. A couple of others were somewhat interesting, but again, as I got into their presentation, I realized that their business model was quite different from mine and what they were talking about really wouldn't work. But there were two speakers who I really connected with. I loved their innovation. They were both course creators/coaches, and they were doing some things that I had never heard people doing before, some truly unique offers that they were making. Using marketplaces to gain more audience traction in some really interesting ways. And I just was like, wow, there is so much more that I could be doing that I haven't even thought of. Really outside the box, pardon the really overused cliché ideas. So you know what I did? I started implementing some of the things that they were talking about. I haven't shared them all yet with my audience, but I thought, you know, I am just going to start putting some of these things into action that really connected with me as a person and me as a professional. Now I will say I am nervous. I don't know how my audience is going to respond when I reveal some of these things and maybe they will fall flat. Maybe they will take a long time to build into something. I don't know. But I'll just share with you what 3 of these ideas are that I started implementing right away. And again, as I'm recording this, I have not shared this with my audience, so things may change. But as of right now, one thing I'm gonna start implementing is called Merry Money. And Merry Money is simply credit that can be used like cash. For example, when someone purchases one of my courses, they will receive X amount in Merry Money. I don't know if I'm gonna do this for every course that I sell, but I may, I don't know. We'll have to see how it goes. So if someone buys a $9 course, they'll get $5 of Merry Money, let's say. And that Merry Money can be used as cash. So if they wanted to use that $5 towards a $37 live training, let's say, All they have to do is let me know and I'll apply that money to the fee. The woman who is using her own version of this credit allowed it to be used on anything and everything. So I've decided to do the same thing. It can even be applied to private coaching with me. So that was a really exciting idea because I want to give people an incentive to keep learning with me, preferably if possible. And to have fun realizing that they have actual cash money sitting there that they can use. It just sounded like a really fun idea. Another idea that I am implementing right now— I have not shared this yet— I decided to open a group on Facebook for people who have bought anything from me. Now, I tried this back in 2020, I believe it was, And it really didn't work well because frankly, I didn't know what I was doing. But since then, I have had a free group that anyone could join, and that really didn't work for me at all. But I thought, you know, I'd like to have a space for people who have bought anything from me, not just my 5K Coach Club membership. And in this group, I will essentially offer encouragement. I will let people know what's coming up if they want to participate. I will foster a sense of community among people. That's my aim anyway. So I'm gonna give this a try and see how it works. The final thing that I'm implementing, I had actually thought of before and just never did anything with it, but I was inspired by the fact that I made a few dollars recently by having some free audios on an app called Insight Timer. So I definitely have plans to add more to Insight Timer. And even some paid courses on Insight Timer. But I also just now today have a free course available on Udemy called The Waitlisted Coach. So if you search for The Waitlisted Coach or my name, Mary Shiller, you'll find it and it's free. One of the people who I listened to who was part of this summit has close to, I think it was 200,000 students on Udemy. And she said that it's been an incredible part of her business, not necessarily for income because most Udemy courses don't go for much money, but it has built her audience to the point where she's done very, very well, and it's been almost the sole source of her audience building. The other thing that she said about Udemy that I thought was really cool was that when you are creating your own website, for example, or your own social media personas or brands, you can tend to feel a bit hemmed in as to what you can share, what you can create, because you want to stay on brand. She said that Udemy has been great because, as she explained it, there is no brand for her. She can put anything she wants on there because people aren't searching for her necessarily, they're searching for the topic. She has courses of all different types on there, not just business-related ones, which is what she's mainly known for, but when I perused her catalog, I saw all kinds of self-help topics. And I thought, wow, this is a really great platform, as she pointed out, for quote unquote multi-passionate people like myself. So my plan going forward is to put classes on Udemy, offer those same classes on my website, and when possible, offer the same classes on Insight Timer. Now Insight Timer, if you're not familiar with it, is an app that was originally designed to help people meditate. And now it's gone a bit beyond that, but it's all audio-based. So as I put together some new courses or revamp my previous ones, I need to consider whether it will work well just for audio or if there's a version of it that I could do that's just for audio. I am all about repurposing. Literally, that's my middle name. Not really, but it feels like it sometimes. I don't like doing things over and over and over again. I like to see how I can create something once and leverage it in multiple different media, which I have done a lot over the years, including some of my books on Amazon, which came from free talks that I gave or even some paid trainings that I gave. I have probably hundreds of digital assets that I've created by this point. And that's something that I would encourage you to start doing if you haven't already. Digital assets can be anything from Facebook Lives that you've done, YouTube videos, anything that you can create and put somewhere safe like Dropbox or wherever and reuse it, repurpose it, transcribe it, turn it into something else. That's what I'm talking about when I say a digital asset. So why did I start by saying that we want to talk about raising the roof or blowing the roof off our business? Because for me, these ideas are exciting. They're new, at least to me. They feel really fun and energized and creative. And I just want to shake things up. You know, I've had about 18 months in my business where things have felt— I don't want to say super challenging, but pretty challenging. I kind of lost my stride in 2022. I have a whole YouTube video on that if you want to check it out. It's called Lessons from a Rough 2022 on my YouTube channel. Mary Schiller is my handle over there on YouTube. At the beginning of 2023, I started to turn things around by realizing that I wanted to help coaches reach that $5,000 a month mark without all the complexity. So I opened the 5K Coach Club. I have been running that since then. And as I'm recording this, I'm about to relaunch the club in what I think will be a much better way to support people going forward. I do feel like I have raised the roof, blown the roof off my business this year by approaching it from a very different angle. And also by being open to new ideas for how to do things. I certainly don't know everything about running a business. Yes, I have been successful. And as I said, I've also had kind of a slump for the last a year and a half where I realized that things weren't working anymore and that the things that got me to the level that I was at that time were not going to be the things that were going to take me to the next level. And that's what I've been sorting out particularly this year. My whole MO is always follow the fun. And when I heard these ideas, I was like, yes, that sounds fun. It sounds exciting. It sounds like it would be really beneficial to people. Let's go. So my question to you is, what could you do that would raise the roof on your business and consequently your life? Because, you know, we are talking about how we're spending our precious time, our precious life, and I don't wanna do things that are boring or feel uninteresting or feel the same old, same old. I'm always looking for a new challenge and for something that will reignite me as a human being. So keep that in mind and let yourself go. I mean, really let yourself go towards the ideas that seem kind of out there, kind of nutty, and don't just listen to those ideas, but act on them. Thanks so much for listening today. I will talk to you again very soon.