How to Make 1 Million Dollars As An Expert Creator

I'm gonna show you how to build a million-dollar expert-driven creator business. This is going to be based on something that you know very well, something that you could teach other people, and probably something that you've been doing for a really long time. Think about it as something that you can kind of do without having to think about it. This is a really special situation to be in, and I'm gonna show you 3 ways to monetize it and build it up to a million dollars in revenue. My name is Matt Ragland. I was employee number 5 at Kit. I was director of creator success at Podia, and I've also worked with Ryan Holiday Sahil Bloom, Justin Welch, Dan Go, and many more to build their expert businesses. By the end of this video, you're going to know how to organize and stack your offers to build that million-dollar expert business. Let's go ahead and get into it. One of the things that most creators or most experts don't think about when it comes to building your business is that at the beginning, and maybe for a really long time, you're going to need to sell your time for money. The idea of passive income really gets romanticized, when in reality it still takes a lot of work. And the reason that we want to actually go this route is because early on you can charge more for your time and for your expertise than you would just selling a low-priced product. Now here's the other thing, we're still going to start with a low-priced product because coaching and direct services really are the best way to monetize, but early on it's hard to get someone to pay you $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, or $10,000 for a thing that you maybe haven't shown much social proof to be able to do. So the first thing that you're going to do is you're going to start with a workshop. And when I talk about a workshop, I have another video that you can watch using its ChatGPT or Claude prompts to walk you through how to organize and set up your expert workshop. But this is the first thing that you're going to do, and you're probably at the beginning going to charge less than $100 for this. You may even want to think about selling it for closer to $50. And I would also do it live. Now, I'm going to talk about that in a different video, but the reason that we want to do this is that we want to have an accessible, public, interactive way to reach more people and teach them the thing that you're really good at. Okay, this could be anything. Think about it also, like, conversationally, like how if you were with a friend and you were a fitness trainer, And they said, man, I really got to lose 10 pounds in the next 3 months. You're an expert at this. You'd say, well, if you'd like my help, this is what I would do. Or I actually thought about this whole program while I was talking with my wife. My wife is a fertility coach and she helps women over 30 optimize their diet and their fitness and their health and their hormones to increase their chances of getting pregnant, to become more fertile. One of the things that I have done is productivity coaching. And so people would come to me and say, hey, I'm trying to manage my time better as a busy parent so I can still get my work done but be present with my kids while I'm at home. Help me create better habits, routines, and systems around the house and in my work so that I can do the work that I need to while still being present and have fun with my family. Okay, so those are just things where I could like sit down and talk about any of those things and share with somebody a plan for how to do it. So that's how you want to think about it. I think of it like a conversational coffee. So what's something that you could have a conversational coffee meeting about and teach somebody how to get an ideal desired outcome for the thing that you're best at? Now, the reason that we start here, if you're sharing about this online, it's probably if you have a newsletter, whatever it is, YouTube channel, you can tell people during your content, hey, if you want to get the best information from this, check out my workshop, come to my next workshop. It's in 2 weeks, it's $50, you're going to get this outcome. It's the best thing to do. So we're going to start there as an offer. And another reason that I like starting a little bit lower on price is because early on I want to get more customers than I want revenue. Because you may think to yourself, well, I can teach this for $500, $1,000. But early on, I would rather have 20 people pay me $100 so that I could learn from what made it really interesting from those customers. I'd rather have more testimonials. I'd rather have more social proof. I'd rather have more feedback than say sell it to 4 people for $500, same amount of revenue, but the amount of learning that you will do about what worked, what didn't, what's interesting, testimonials, that will be infinitely more valuable to you as the expert than just getting a few people. Now here's the thing though, once we do this, let's say 100 and we managed to get 20 people. Okay, so right now we're at $2,000. We've got a long way to go to get to a million, but this is a good start because the next thing that you're going to do is sell coaching. So now at the end of this, we won't go into like how to position all of these upsells and offers, But now we're going to say, hey, if you want to do one-on-one coaching with me on this, it's going to be $500 for 3 sessions. Okay. Now that's intentional to keep it a little, a little tight at this point. So let's say out of those 20, $500 for 3 sessions, we get, let's just say we get 5. Let's say we get 4 people. Okay, so now you're starting to see the scale of higher prices, lower numbers. So what you'll see is that now we've made the same $2,000, and this workshop has actually become a $4,000 offer out of these same 20 customers. Okay, so right now we're at $4,000, still a ways from a million, but you can see where this is starting to build. So one of the important things that I want to emphasize at this time is that getting to $1 million is often just a result of volume. So can you get more people into your funnel that will lead to more sales? It's as simple as that. I mean, it's not simple to do, but that's kind of the math of it. Justin Welch is a great example of this. He does not have a single offer right now that's more than $1,000, but he makes, I think, $2 million a year on volume. Because look, if say the next time you do this, we double everything. So now we have 40 people at $100, right? Now we've made $4,000, same thing. And we have 8 people convert to your short coaching. Again, $4,000. So now our new number is $12,000 of revenue. And all you've really built at this point is just the one workshop, an hour-long workshop with Q&A. This is all we're talking about. The other thing that you can think about is, can I develop additional workshops around other topics? In my niche. So let's go back to the example of my wife. My wife is building 3 workshops. She is a fertility coach. And so the 3 workshops are like pre-getting pregnant and then being pregnant and then post, postpartum, if you will. So pre, pregnant, and post. Those can be the 3 workshops and she can monetize each of those in the same way, all driving to a one-on-one coaching. Now things start to change because you have 3 different offers. The reason that I like this— not every business will need 3 distinct, like, workshop offers like this, but I challenge you to think about how many stages are there in your process that make sense that you could stack on top of each other. Now, if we're talking about fertility and pregnancy, there's very clearly like before you're pregnant, when you're pregnant, after you have the baby. All of these, you know, a woman comes into my wife's audience, she's probably in one of these 3 stages. So she would want to hear like, oh, well, I'm pregnant, I'm gonna get the pregnancy workshop. Okay, now we're gonna do something that's a little bit of both combined. We're going to do group coaching. The other thing that's going to happen here, if more people are getting in the funnel And this is important. This is where your increased audience aligns with increased prices. Now the $500 one-on-one coaching program. And again, remember, I want slightly lower prices early on so that I can get more customers and learn more from them. So group coaching now though is going to be a say a 6-week, 6-week program, let's say, for fitness. So we're going 6 weeks. It could also be 12 weeks. You pick what is going to be best for you. Let's say 6 weeks. So let's make this easier. Let's, let's just go ahead and call it a 3-month coaching program. So 3 months. And when you hit this point, you're probably actually going to phase out this price point of your coaching because Your group coaching now, 3 months, let's just again keep it easy and say it's $1,000 for 3 months. Okay, but it's group coaching, remember, because you might think, well, that doesn't make sense. It was $500 here, now it's $1,000 for 3 months. But we're talking about a group. Okay, talking about a group now. It's not the same as getting one-on-one coaching, which we'll get to next. So now if we get 10 people in here, that's $10,000. So now, just in one group coaching offer, we've made almost as much money as everything up to this point. Okay, now, Granny may have been doing this for a little while longer, so this number is higher, but right now we've made almost as much in one group coaching launch as we did with these two workshop and one-on-one coaching launches. And again, your prices may vary. I wanted to give you realistic numbers and not be like, oh, just charge $200 for this and $1,500 for your coaching. In many instances, you kind of have to build up to that, especially if you're not already an established expert. Like maybe you're not already a famous trainer or maybe you're not an actual fertility, like medically trained doctor. Okay. So this is, this is very realistic. This is something that you can do. So now we've got this, right? We've got $10,000 for 10 people. You might have 15 people, you might have 20 people, but now let's just keep it at 10. You run this, let's just even stay conservative. You run this 3-month program 3 times in a year. So now times 3, now we're at $30,000 for group coaching. We've started to phase out the one-on-one coaching. I'll come back to that in a second, but right now we're at about if you're still running this, you're probably around $50,000, which is, I think, pretty great. Pretty, pretty good. Because this is still running while you're doing group coaching. Because now what you've done with your— I call it the value ladder. Some people call it the offer chain or the offer stack. What you're doing at the same time— say you only have 10 people in. Well, you're probably going to have more people who are still interested in working with you. You can still sell them the workshop for $100. Okay? So this is always available for people who say like, oh, $1,000 is too much. Great. I've got this. You're basically selling this workshop offer either, you know, live or recorded. Once you start doing group coaching, I would only sell this recorded because all of your live work is in the group coaching. And so this goes out of live and now it's just recorded. Go check out my workshops. I have these 3 different workshops. They're $100 each instead of $1,000. You want to give people options. Now you may think to yourself, oh, you're cannibalizing the group coaching by having a $100 offer. And yes, that may be true. But if you're looking at this from a volume perspective and you want to grow to several hundred thousand dollars or even a million dollars, you're going to need to have a low-priced offer for people to buy as soon as possible. Because one, you're not always going to be running group coaching and you still want to have a sale available. And the other reason is because if you're only going to rely on high-ticket coaching, that is still something you can get to a million dollars on, but this price has to go up. It just has to go up, and you're going to price out a lot of people. And if that's something that you want to do, that's totally fine. I know a lot of coaches and consultants that do that., but that's not really what I'm talking about in this video. Okay. So number 4, this is when one-on-one coaching comes back, but we're gonna think about this more now as like the premium 1v1. All right. So now people can not only get the group coaching, but they can also get like premium personalized is probably a better personal premium one-on-one coaching. And this could be for 3 months. I do at least 3 months. You could also do it for 6 months. I've seen both, but let's just say 3 months. This is gonna be $750 a month for 3 months. All right. Or $2,000 upfront. Now, if you get, say, 5 people in this and they all pay upfront, so you're looking at a minimum of $10,000 and you can take 5 at a time and you're in a 3-month program, then you could get say $15,000 to $20,000 per year. Let's max this out a little bit and say $20,000 per year. That would be $40,000 just in personal coaching. And then if you're running this, that's $30,000, $40,000, $70,000. Just with this, you're probably looking at very close to $100,000 business with— what are we talking about here? We're talking about $40,000, 30. You could probably do this with— definitely if you did this 40 to 50 group, let's just run all these numbers. 100 workshops, even if you left out line 2 here, the initial like discovery coaching, that could still net you— just call it a short 1v1. So let's look at this. Let's say we did 20. So let's do the numbers here. So if we did 40 one-on-ones that's $40,000, plus, uh, 50 group, that's $50,000. You can see we're basically already there. 100 workshops at $100, that's $10,000. And just right here, that's $100,000, not counting any other one-on-one work that you do. That's $100,000 of revenue. And total, you're talking about selling to 200 people in a year. 200 people in a year $100,000 of revenue, and it's all literally right here on this whiteboard. Okay, let's wrap this up short and sweet. I told you $1 million, I only just showed you how to do $100,000. Remember that the difference in $100,000 and $1 million is either raising your prices or raising the number of people who get their eyes on your offers. And so what you could do is say eventually you're going to raise your personal coaching to $2,000 a month. I've paid $2,000 a month for coaching. Not every type of business will facilitate that. That's why I'm saying again, you need to think about what kind of business are you in, what are the prices like. You need to think about like, is this a volume audience business or is this a high-ticket like coaching consulting business? Cause if we said $2,000 per month, mind you, with a 6-month minimum, $2,000 times 6, now we're talking about $12,000 in coaching. And let's say you have for 6 months and you have say like 30 clients in a year. Well, that's 30 clients in a year times 30. That's $360,000. Right? $360,000 just in one-on-one. But that's a grind, I'm telling you, that's a grind. And then you could also say like your group coaching— my friend John Meese is great at this. So if you said I have a $5,000 group coaching offer and it runs for 6 months, but I have 30 people in there at a time, okay, that is $150,000, but I do this twice a year. That's $300,000. All right, put those two together and we have $660,000 in revenue. So where does this other $340,000 come from? It comes from your workshop still selling. And then you could also at some point— this does not have to come here at the end. But you could also do a course because right now you have two very high-ticket offers and you have a relatively low-ticket offer to a very— it is specific to a need, not the whole thing. So basically what you could do is take your group coaching and turn that into a course, because if you're selling group coaching for $5,000, you could probably— let's just be conservative and say your course is $500,000. And then that's where this remainder comes from. So let's just take it easy. And let's just make the math easy and say you need to sell another $350,000. So you need to sell 700 of these to get— gosh, I hope my math is right— to get to $350,000. And now we're at basically a million. Either 1.1 or 1 point something something, but you're over a million at this point. This is where regardless, volume has to come in. You'll usually be able to convert your course sales at no more than 5% of your audience. So if you need to sell 700 courses in a year— this I'm not going to be able to do math on, let me, let me look at it real quick. Okay, I just asked ChatGPT to do it for me, but if you want to sell 700 at 5%, which is actually a little high, then you need to have 14,000— probably email subscribers, not just like Twitter followers— 14,000 subs to sell. So that's why, even like, coming back to this, 14,000 subs, email subscribers, it ain't nothing. Get more people in the funnel. If you get more people in the funnel then you can have a very clear value ladder here of you're going to have people who pay you for one-on-one coaching who also want to do group coaching. They don't want to pay this high price. They also may not even be able to do this. Again, that's okay. That's why we have this course. And if they're just coming in, they just joined, they're really interested in what you have to say, they can buy the workshop. So this is the whole thing. That you can do. This is a million-dollar business following like everything that's on this whiteboard. The thing that you have to remember is that you get to a million dollars— you get to $100,000 with just— I already erased it. You get to $100,000 with just a few hundred people buying from you in this funnel, in this offer stack. And to get to a million dollars though, it's either like raising these prices significantly or just getting more people in. You get more people in, you'll have more conversions, you have more sales. You have more leads, you have more sales. Now, other videos I'm gonna talk more about, like, how do you set all this stuff up? What's your newsletter like? How are you getting all these people in? But I wanted to show you, I was going through this with my wife and I was like, I need to make a video about this. But this is how it all fits together. If you want, also putting together a lead magnet checklist for this, it's easier to follow than looking at the whiteboard. So you can download that in the description below. Going to see how everything fits together. And make sure you watch the other video on the workshop setup, because if you're new, this is where I recommend starting. You can get it done fast, usually within just a couple of weeks if you're brave and disciplined, and then everything else follows from there. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to the channel and watch that other workshop video. Thanks.