Forget Courses, Launch This In 2026 To Double Your Revenue

Adding services into the mix, I was able to triple our monthly income.

Layla built ProcessDriven into a 150,000 subscriber YouTube channel teaching systems to small business owners.

Here is the solution for how to systemize your business of 5 to 50 people making 5 to 50 million.

This episode is about what she's seeing that many creators are missing right now.

We just added that human touch into it, and that is the piece that has changed everything.

What Layla found after doing hundreds of sales calls—

one of the biggest unlocks in terms of conversion rates on sales calls was quoting the number as a monthly rate.

Absolutely insane.

Close more than 50%, you're doing something wrong. Not good.

What do you want your close rate to be?

I want to be like 20% at this point. If someone's—

you just said something that is very important.

That's what I'll say usually at the end. Don't work with us. Here's why.

The offer model you've been told to build might be the very thing holding your business back.

So afraid of services for the reason so many are. Felt like a step backwards.

We're like more than doubling revenue.

Yeah.

With this one change.

Yeah.

You know, this one weird trick that maybe all course creators should consider. If you have a course or you're about to build one, watch this entire episode before you make another move.

The reason I realized that it would work is because I—

oh, I mean, that's such an important point. So Layla, you hit a revenue ceiling with courses around $600,000 or $700,000 a year. Is that right?

Yep. The infamous number.

A lot of people hit that.

Mm-hmm.

But then you broke through it when you moved from products over to services.

Yeah, which is not so infamous.

Not so infamous. Not very many people make that switch.

Yeah. Oh, well they do, but they go the opposite direction. Like that's the big thing, like passive income, get outta services. Yeah.

So what did it look like to break through that ceiling and what revenue number, uh, you know, did you hit?

Yeah, so it's a rolling target right now, but essentially, um, what switched in terms of how it worked was I just went to adding services into the mix. And I was able to essentially triple our monthly income, which I'm hoping now will annualize out. Like, I'm right now, I'm like, okay, let's 2x this year. But as I was talking to you before we started filming, I want to push further. And I honestly think adding services, even with the cost of fulfillment factored in, like, I want to 4x. Like, I just, I think it's possible.

So what are you on track for revenue-wise right now? If we just play forward what happened in Q1?

Don't let me jinx it. Okay. Like, it's looking like it'll be about $1.5 million this year. I'm, I'm, I'm hoping to be able to say a higher number than that though. I really am.

But I mean, even at that point, we're like more than doubling revenue.

Yeah.

With this one change.

Yeah.

You know, this one weird trick that maybe all course creators should consider.

Yeah. No, it's, it's right for everybody. Don't give it any critical thinking at all. Just do exactly what I did.

So let's walk through what was the model before and the price point and, and all that. Um, and then we'll dive into what you switched to. That, you know, has had this huge impact where already you've doubled or tripled monthly revenue and are on track to take it even further.

Just so weird to say out loud. Yeah. So after, after all the silos, it's so great to break free. So original model, like you want me to go way back, back, or just like right before the change?

Let's go right before the change. And then we'll do the, the history a little later.

Okay. So right before the change, the model was essentially a, um, I wanna say it was $1,500 one-time course. It might've been $2,000 at that point. $2,000 one-time course. Yep. We had a membership on the backend, how classic, and we had some splinter courses, like some mini courses that kind of were intended to ascend you into the next level. Okay. That was the before. So it was very much done for you, or do it yourself rather. It was a do-it-yourself course where you get the content, you have a little bit of community if you choose to pay for it. But honestly, when I was, you know, attending an event where we were at last year, I was kind of telling folks like, hey, I've got a passive business. Like, I spend my time doing things, but it's very hands-off. It's the passive income dream. And I'm deeply unsatisfied with it for the reasons around revenue and then some other stuff we can get into.

I wanna talk all about satisfaction levels in that, cuz most, you know, many people, uh, would be like, wait, you're making $600,000 or $700,000 a year? That, you know, yeah, that's absolutely incredible. And it is, but also like, we all know what we're capable of. We know the power of leverage and, and like we're all very driven, ambitious people. And so it's like, okay, I want to I wanna level up from here.

Right.

So you're at that $600,000 to $700,000 again and again and again.

Yeah.

Just keep hitting that ceiling. I, I mean, we have a lot of friends that have gotten to a very similar number.

Yeah.

They've gotten stuck there.

It's cursed. It's cursed.

Then what was, what's the model that you switched into when you say you added services?

Yeah.

What does that look like?

So the immediate shift was essentially realizing two things. Number one, I wasn't gonna get to the revenue numbers I wanted by just sheer force of will. I did the math. God bless math. I did the math and I was like, you know what? I really need to 3x my audience in order for my business to get to where it was going to go. My funnels were converting well thanks to Kit and other things, but in order for that funnel to get enough traffic through it, I needed to either get really good at profitable ads, which I wasn't going to be able to do, or triple my audience. And I just, I could do it, but that would take me years and years. And so what I realized was, well, let me get down to the actual problem that I'm trying to solve. Which is I'm trying to get this content out into the world. You know, we help small businesses systemize their operations. That's the thing. And I've been doing it in this one particular way. Along the way, I listen and I get a lot of requests from our customers for additional support. It's not a foreign concept. Most of us have like had ignored requests from customers. And more than anything else, it was the request of like, can I just get you to like hold my hand through this? Like the steps might work, I'm scared. My team doesn't want to follow it. I got stuck on module 2. I think I was saying before we started filming, I had a membership model for a while for the course. And I remember a moment where someone was like, I've taken your membership for 3 years now. It's amazing. I love it so much. I referred it to my uncle. I'm still at module 2, but I hope by year 4, I'm going to be able to get to where I need to get and finish this course. Which mind you only took 12 hours total. It was a pretty concise course. The services approach was to say, all right, I hear you. Let me just try to fulfill that need. And so we launched a service which was like a 90-day operations sprint where it built on top of the course we already had. It was the same A to Z, the same curriculum, but we added in a human audit at the beginning, a human checkpoint at 3 points along the course after the audit, and then we personalized it. So rather than saying take module 1, 2, 3, 4, it was take lesson 1.2, do this special thing that's really relevant to you, then do lesson 2.4. And so we just added that human touch into it, and that is the piece that has changed everything.

And so what's the price point on this version? And I, I know you're always changing and tweaking prices, so, you know, at the moment of recording, what's the price point?

Yes, yes, yes, yes. So the course version by itself is around $2,000, $1,997 or something, or something like that. The services version is now at $2,500 per month for 3 months. I say that in that format for a certain reason, but $7,500 total. So that's to go with someone on my team through that journey. And then if you wanna work with me, it's $21,000. Okay. Or $7,000 a month.

Why do you say it in that specific way of the $2,500 per month? Or you said, you said $2,500.

Yes. So I really like tracking numbers. And so in the, the lead up to this service, I knew I wanted to do it right. Like, I'm a systems and ops person. So in the fall of 2025, when I was kind of piloting this out, I mean, between now and then, I've done probably about 150 sales calls, maybe 200 sales calls. I did almost 100 last month. And I would just keep changing how I would present the offer and the price I would present the offer. And one of the biggest unlocks in terms of conversion rates on sales calls was quoting the number as a monthly rate. Which is better for me because I had fewer spikes. I actually didn't care about getting the cash earlier for me. Yeah. And so rather than saying $7,500, or at the time I think it was $4,000 or $3,500 was the first quote. I asked $3,500 up front. I was like, ah, okay. Then I changed it to $2,000 a month for 3 months. And I don't know, that math just really changed. Then I went to $2,500. To me, that feels a lot clearer. And I say $2,500, not $2,500 because ESL. So I have a lot of folks who aren't, you know, uh, using English as their first language perhaps. And so I just kind of try to build it more clear. Mhm.

$2,500.

Yep.

Each month for 3 months.

Yep. For now.

For now. And then I'll go up later. It'll be $3,000. You know, it's interesting. It sounds like a much lower price. Maybe $7,500 would be a large amount to lay out all at once.

Feels like a lot.

Yeah. Um, and all that, then it does ease people into it. And you avoid this large sticker shock.

Yeah, and small businesses, cash flow is consideration. And also, they're used to hiring operations people. So they have that fractional ops person that they're paying $4,000 a month for. So they're getting all of their other things in a monthly rate. It makes sense for me to be a monthly rate. And when I compare that with, oh, but it's 90 days. It's just 3 months. And so that—

So it has that off-ramp. Oh, that's fascinating.

Yeah.

So, okay, so we need to tell the listener what the service actually is that you're providing. What problem are you solving?

Yeah.

And who are you solving it for?

Well, I'll start, start with the person, because I think that's really kind of the key to this whole journey. So the person we're working with is someone who is in charge of a 5 to 50 person team making $5 to $50 million.

Okay.

Who is struggling around tasks, knowledge, and communication. So what that looks like symptomatically is like, we're not getting things done, We have to have a lot of meetings. Promises are being broken. I have to double-check things. One of my clients had this line, whatever happened to dot, dot, dot. Those kinds of sentences are when people start to feel this like process breakdown.

Things are being dropped.

Things are being dropped. Exactly. And so usually they will go try to change software. No offense to software. God, I don't know anyone who does that stuff.

It's like we were on Notion, now we moved to ClickUp, and now we're trying this, and have you heard about monday.com? Or, you know, and you're just jumping between everything and like that. That's the solution.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. And admittedly, I mean, backstory real quick, lore dump. I was a YouTuber who did tutorials on software.

Okay.

So like, I kind of knew that world and there's a lot of money to be made in telling people, hey, if you just switch the software, your whole world—

Exactly. Exactly.

And yet it doesn't. It just moves the problems. So usually that happens first. Then they go to the point of like, I need an executive coach. The coach says, I don't know, just change your team. They fire their whole team. They restart. And then usually at that point, They're like, hmm, maybe it's how we operate.

Right.

Maybe it's like what is normal in our culture. Maybe it's the fact that we never write down an agenda. Maybe it's that we, we don't know what we do on a Monday morning. And that's when usually they'll come to me. They'll watch a YouTube video and that's where all of our leads come from. Uh, in a lot of my sales calls, which I still do most of them right now, I'll just ask like, what, what does a Monday morning look like for you? Where do you go on Monday morning to know what you're supposed to work on? And that is usually like, that's the whole story in one scene.

Now we gotta dive into sales because that's such an important thing. But most people do sales the opposite way of what you just described, where they say, I don't know, I'm figuring this out, Nathan.

Tell me how other people do sales.

Well, what most people do is they say, they ask maybe a few questions about like, oh yeah, tell me about your team size, revenue, that sort of thing. You know, if we were to solve this problem for you, what would that look like?

Right? What would a magic wand be? Yep.

And then you dive, you know, or they're diving into all of these specifics around, okay, and then here's what our offering would do for you and, and all of that. I, I talk at you for 20 or 30 minutes.

Yeah.

5 minutes of questions, talk at you. What you're doing immediately is getting them to talk.

Yeah.

And they will identify all the problems. They will talk through here's what's working, here's what's not. And that will give you so much information and that you don't have to tell them, ooh, sounds like you really have a problem. Like they will do all of that for you and then you can just point to the solution.

Exactly. And, you know, I love data points. So for anyone who's like tracking this, like, how do I take this actionably? I noticed that for me when I do sales calls, because I track all these in, you know, an AI note-taker, I talk 20 to 30% of the call.

Okay.

Including the closing where I'm usually talking a lot more of like, here's what we do, here's how we help, here, hey, let me answer your questions about this. So it's largely just, it's extremely diagnostic. And I think it's just because I literally don't know how to do it the proper way.

No, what you're doing is the, is the, not the default way. That human, someone's in sales, they're like, I gotta talk until I convince you of it.

Yeah.

But I think you are doing it the proper high conversion, all that way.

It feels good, right? Like it doesn't feel like you're doing something like, you know, the sales has all those associations with it. It feels like, oh, I'm just like listening.

Mm-hmm.

And if we were grabbing coffee here, that's what I'll say usually at the end. Like if we were grabbing coffee, I would suggest that you don't work with us. Here's why you should probably go check out these guys instead. That's a pretty common like ending to a call and that's okay.

Yeah. We do that with Kit where, you know, or I was on a call recently with someone who they were running like a media company in more of a traditional way and all that. And we said like, actually this competitor of ours would be a much better fit for you.

Yep.

And they were like, really?

Yeah.

And they're like, yeah. And here's why. And you know, this is someone who was gonna work with a bunch of different brands. And so I was like, now if you have, if you work with a brand that matches these criteria, mm-hmm, that'd be a perfect fit for us. But in this case, I think You should go with this other platform and it builds so much trust instantly. And they're just like, oh, awesome.

Thank you.

And sometimes they'll flip and be like, no, but here's why we should work with you. But most often they're like, okay, that sounds absolutely right. And then you build all this goodwill that lasts for a long time. Yeah.

It's almost like the difference between a sales call and a screening call. I honestly think the way we do it, it's really a screening call. And I've only psychoanalyzed this because we're now hiring someone for sales. And so I've had to write down in text. If it's not a fit, tell them to go to these other competitors. And I'm like, that's a weird thing to be writing down. Right. But also it's honest.

But it's in your SOP.

It's in the SOP.

Yeah. Okay. So you're tracking a lot of numbers.

Yeah.

And I love that. You know, you were talking earlier as we were in the car driving over, you were like about how much you love math, right?

As long as it's not mental.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We won't do any math on the spot.

Safe, safe space.

What are some of the metrics that you track in your business that are most important?

The number one metric for me is runway.

Okay.

So the number of months we can go if all revenue stops tomorrow.

Is that how much cash you have in the bank divided by your monthly expenses?

Okay. Yeah, specifically my non-operate. So like I'll have checking and savings, nothing fancy. I will just take the savings number and divide that by our average expenses and to get the number of months of runway. And I broadcast that to the team as well as some other numbers every single month.

Okay.

So they know and they have that peace of mind because I think the hard part about working for a small business is oftentimes you're like, ugh.

Will we be here tomorrow?

Yeah, exactly. And a lot of the folks that we've had join our team over the years have been people who were laid off. They were in tech, they got laid off during all of that stuff. They're like, hey, let's try this thing. And so I think it's really important to model that. That's my number one.

Do you have a rule of thumb of how much, like how many months of runway or?

I used to have 6 and then I realized that's excessive. So I actually have a goal now. I'm in the process of whittling it down. I want to be at 3 because it's just our savings account. We have checkings as well. I think 3 months would be great. I think everyone comes into business with their own money story.

Yeah.

You know, I was a scholarship kid. Like, I didn't know any of this world. And so I had a tendency to just hoard and I wouldn't take a salary and I wouldn't, you know, I'd pay myself very little. And I had to kind of shift that and realize, you know what, like, it's good to put the profit into the business. It's also good to actually take care of myself. So I'm not like, you know, squeezing every juice out of the lemon.

And then if you look maybe at your sales process or leads, or, you know, you were mentioning even tracking down to how much you were talking on a sales call or being aware of that.

Yeah.

What are some of the metrics in that process that are important to you?

Oh my gosh. I mean, I, what I love about the services world is that it is so trackable as compared to an organic business that I had previously where it's like, oh well, how many emails did we have? And then we only can track from there on. Here we've got so many more touchpoints, but The key numbers now are number of calls booked, number of days from a yes that someone can start a project. That is one that has been really eye-opening. And then, I mean, sales. So like sales count, how many have we sold in the current period? I want to start tracking referrals. I haven't really done too much with that yet other than being like, oh yeah, we're getting referrals just a few months in. That's amazing. But those are the, the service-specific ones. And then funnels, I mean, between like the kit automations, but also just the sales cycle in general, tracking like what percent go from call or from the call page to book a call, from booking a call to being qualified for an offer, from getting an offer to buying the offer. We just have each number in a spreadsheet and it's not high tech. It's just tracking a number once a week or once a month and counting. And you know, that's worth it to me because I understand what is actually not working, which is Sometimes hard otherwise.

Yeah. What's an example of in that spreadsheet and as you're tracking things, finding something that's not working, like finding a new bottleneck and then digging in and fixing that?

Yeah, we had one where, um, it was our webinar. We, we did a webinar launch to get people to book a call. We changed all of our main funnels from saying buy our course to actually buy our service. Now, if you don't want the service, get a course.

Right.

And so there was a big redo and we didn't get the conversion we thought overall, like we had this many people. I think it was like 2,000 people registered for this webinar. I forget how many booked a call, but it wasn't what we expected. It was like really low. What's happening? Ah, we went to our contractors. They're like, ah, the copywriter said it's the ad's fault. The ad said it's the copywriter's fault. And they all thought it was the webinar's fault, which might have been true. But then we looked at the numbers and we actually saw the problem was the show-up rate. And when we looked at it and we said, well, if the show-up rate, people who registered actually showed up, was even within the realm of normal, we would have hit every single goal of that campaign. Every other conversion rate was exactly where it needed to be except for that one. And we wouldn't have known that. And we had gotten misleading advice all over until we actually looked at the, just the math of how many people got to each step.

Did you run more webinars? And if so, how did you fix the show up rate?

So we actually kept that same webinar because the webinar didn't seem to be the problem. It was the show up rate. And we switched it to evergreen. And then once they opt in through our kit form, they then get automatically redirected to the webinar, the Blueprint, which is our approach to systemizing. Therefore, no show-up problem because they literally see it upon redirect. And then we have an email sequence that makes sure if they clicked off very quickly, it takes them back there repeatedly. And so—

They have more opportunities to come back and watch it.

Exactly. And I'm like, ah, why didn't we figure this sooner?

And you're not teaching it live.

Yeah. No, I don't.

Do you feel like you're giving up anything in the webinar being prerecorded?

Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. I mean, isn't that like the whole thing of just choosing what you're willing to give up?

Right.

I'm happy to give that up. And instead though, I work with clients. Like I would rather have 4 one-on-ones with these high-end clients over a quarter than host 4 webinars. And I know for other people that math is different. I love teaching, but I film a YouTube video every week. Like if you wanna hear me teach, there you go. Like, it's fine. This webinar is like B, B, B+ maybe. Yeah. And I'm okay with that cuz the math still supports that that's not the bottleneck, so I'm not gonna solve it.

Okay. So let's talk about bottlenecks because you have this laid out basically like a factory.

Yeah.

You know, and, and I'm obsessed with the theory of constraints and yeah.

Okay.

And finding, finding the bottleneck, optimizing for that. What's the biggest bottleneck in your business right now?

As of last week, it was sales. People to take sales calls. So like the volume of calls that we had coming in, I was taking most of them. It was insane. Tried to hire a salesperson.

You said you did 100 calls last month?

It was about 100 last month. Yeah, it was a lot.

And then clearly, uh, number of interested leads was not the bottleneck at all. No, it was can we get on a call and actually close them?

And you know what, just quick side note for anyone out there who's a product creator, a course creator, whatever, I would bet that's other people's experiences as well. I think we had waited so long to have some kind of one-on-one human touchpoint offer that by the time we did You know, the 20,000 people on our email list were like, oh my God, finally, finally. Like when we just started sending out emails where it was just like, hey, if you wanna systemize your business and you're tired of waiting around, click this link to book a call. And that alone got a bunch of people to come through the journey. So I think a lot of folks are gonna be in that same situation where demand is not the problem. And I don't think we've yet hit the limit of what is just in our own list, candidly.

Okay. So sorry, I got, I think that's absolutely true, but you just said something that is very important. Oh, and I want people to. Not skip over it. Okay, you just said your email list is 20,000 people.

Oh yeah, it's tiny.

If we had— first of all, 20,000 people is like a basketball arena, so it's a good number from that sense. But fair, you know, for the numbers that you're putting up, it's very small. Yeah, right. And so if a lot of people, you know, think about, okay, revenue per subscriber, all this per month, you know, services, services, you know, I might be like, okay, I'm making Uh, if I have 20,000 subscribers, maybe I'm making $100,000 a year. Like that would be, a lot of people would say that's good. What? Uh, maybe like $200,000 a year. Now we're making like professional, like you went to school for a long time to make that amount of money and all that. And you're like, yeah, no, we'll like, if we can't accelerate things throughout the rest of the year, we'll cap out about $1.5 million this year off 20,000. And you're like, but I think we can accelerate things a lot more.

Really, truly. And you know, to be real with you, I talk a lot of time about like, for folks who are interested in starting a YouTube channel, I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing, but I started I started a YouTube channel, like it kind of helped. It was around 5,000 YouTube subscribers, which are far less valuable than email subscribers, that my entire book of business, I was booked out 6 months. Like, that's why I went into the courses and memberships and all these other things to begin with, because I was trying to solve that problem. It does not take a large audience by any means to make a really sizable and meaningful business, but most people don't think about it. They're so consumed with the audience. Whereas I guess I kind of approached it from the opposite perspective. I only went on YouTube to build my book of business. And then when that was like going pretty well, I'm like, I don't need any more YouTube followers. This is fine. Get on my email list and we'll take it from there.

I'm curious about this. So if we have $1.5 million in annual revenue divided by 20,000 subscribers, so we're at $75 in revenue per subscriber.

Yeah.

And that's a helpful number to— it's a fantastic number, but it's a help. Revenue per subscriber total is helpful to think about, you know, if you're comparing between different business models, all that, you know, as a total. You could end up— there's a couple traps in that number. Um, the first one is that it's always, it's total annual revenue divided by total subscriber count at the beginning of the year. Yeah. At the beginning of the year. But also a lot of those people might've been on your list for a long time.

Yeah.

That sort of thing.

Yeah.

So it could both mask that you're bringing in better subscribers who are paying more, or, or it could mask that a lot of people have been on this list for a long time. They're never gonna buy.

Sure.

And, or, you know, or they've already purchased. Or you might say, okay, wow, $75 per subscriber. I could be running Meta ads at $6 per subscriber, you know, which would be a crazy amount of money to spend. And you, if you weren't tracking cohorts, you might find that the new subscribers you're bringing in are very poor quality, but it's blended in the total averages and you might not find—

I've not done that at all.

Um, yeah, I've definitely done that. But yeah, that's where, you know, if you could track revenue per subscriber, um, over a 90-day period after they come in, that could be something like, then you would, you would notice early on. Ooh, these new YouTube videos that are driving leads are, you know, driving really high quality subscribers. Or they're, ooh, actually this, this video did great, but like 90 days later, the leads that came from that weren't actually worth much. And so, um, I just think it's a really important metric, uh, to look at and track, and more people should do that.

Yeah. The, I mean, the ability to track UTMs and just see which video generated subscribers. I mean, it was kind of a, a sit down conversation with our YouTube person who's like setting everything up for YouTube. I was like, hey, I don't care about subscriber count. I don't care about watch time. Time in so much as, you know, I need to, but what I do care about is how many subscribers do we get to our email list per video? I want to know what that is and produce more videos like that. And you only know that if you're tracking that information. I guess the other thing I will say that has been helpful in that regard is in wasting a ton of money on Meta ads, hypothetically speaking, um, I don't know, we probably wasted like $40,000 in Meta ads if I'm being, yeah, not the only one hopefully. In that journey, one of the things I realized is we should be tracking our organic stuff. At the same level that we're tracking paid ads.

Yes.

And so our, the amount of times my team is going into Kit, pulling numbers, being like, how many people are in this segment of they started the sequence? How many bought during the sequence? Wait 90 days later, who bought something since that opt-in? Like, that's why I feel like even though I'm saying all these numbers, I don't think my business has ever been simpler in some ways, even with courses and memberships and services now, because it now feels very doot, doot, doot. It's a flywheel.

Mm-hmm. Okay. So, Let's dive into that. Cause a lot of people make this assumption that like at $100,000 a year, I can run a very simple business. And then at $500,000 a year, it has to be more complex. And if I want to do something, I ever want to break a million, like I've got to have like a very sophisticated, it's gotta be brilliant. And there's, you know, I'm going to get up on the board with, I got the string and I'm going to outline and it'd be a little complicated, but I'll explain to you how we broke through a million dollars.

Yeah.

And the story that I hear over and over again. Is actually I found a slightly different model. I simplified, I eliminated things, and revenue doubled.

Yep. If I can make it even worse, even more of like, ugh, I actually basically went back to what I was doing in 2019.

Okay.

So I remember telling my team in the beginning of 2025, the theme of 2025 is 2019. We went back to the same service. Like I'm essentially offering the same services I offered then. But in a slightly different flow now with more established IP, which was worth the detour. But everything we're doing is just simplifying back to what I did essentially as a 1.5-person business, except now doing it at a different level, 'cause I needed that detour.

Okay, so this gets to one of my business rants. Yes. And that is one of my least favorite quotes in business.

Uh-huh.

It sounds so smart.

Okay.

What got you here won't get you there. And I think that is true 50% of the time, and the other 50% of the time it's absolutely not true.

And if it's only right 50% of the time, we're basically just getting the weather, and then it's like, why are we even saying this? Yeah, what, what got you here may probably, yes or no, get you there.

So on one hand, it brings up aspects of it where you're like, you should absolutely question whether the activities that got you to a certain revenue level are the right things to get you to the next stage. Maybe before we did it solo, now we need to do it as a team. The behaviors that you show up with of like, okay, I gotta be super scrappy. I gotta do it all myself. That's the only way we're gonna hustle through this. And now at this later stage, you might be like, oh, I need to hire team members that I can give an outcome to, not just a task. And right. And so that, that's a what got you here won't get you there. The inverse, I'll share, you know, you shared one from your life, right? Of like, oh, services got me here, it won't get me there. Oh wait, just kidding, it actually will.

Yeah, 5-year detour.

So for Kit, we, direct sales is the thing that made all of the difference. We used direct sales to go from $2,000 a month in revenue to $100,000 a month in 12 months.

Wow.

And then we continued direct sales and we applied that to affiliates and partnerships. To go from $100,000 to $500,000 a month in the next 12 months. So in a 24-month period, mm-hmm, we went from $2 grand to $500,000 a month and it was absolutely insane.

Yeah.

And then we said, now we need to do the thing that all grown-up software companies do. And that's where we should have all of our marketing channels. They should be dialed in, you know, paid ads, all of that.

And take out the thing that was working.

And we, and the idea is like, that's working, so we'll just keep it going. And we spent, Oh, the next 4 years, probably still growing really well, but at the same linear amounts, we would add about $4 million to $5 million in annual revenue every year, but never accelerated it.

Yeah.

And we kept going back to like affiliates is fine as a channel, but it's limiting and direct sales, like no one, you can't scale with direct sales. It's like services, especially at our price point. Like that'll never work. And I kind of went back and realized like, wait a second, what were we doing when things were really working? What were we doing? And we turned around and we really embraced direct sales and then both to acquire customers and to acquire affiliates and partners. And it worked so well. And, you know, it's always like, oh, what got us here might actually be really good at getting us there. And I think as entrepreneurs, You know, we do this thing where we listen to smart people on podcasts who run different businesses than we do. And we go, oh, you know what? Or we go to masterminds, that sort of thing. You know, I'm all in on growing on Instagram. And someone's like, hey, LinkedIn is pretty great for me. And you're like, never mind. I'm all in on growing on LinkedIn. You know, we're like jumping from thing to thing or doing it all at once. Then you end up doing all of these things pretty mediocre instead of saying, You know what, this is what we're really good at and we're going to go, we're going to keep scaling that thing. We might make some little tweaks, we'll question it and, and all that. But yeah, what got us here will probably get us there.

You know what's funny about that is one of the practices I started, which I, I understand you might have something pretty similar, is I started making a log of key events in my business back in 2020, which was a great time to start tracking. So like major decision, major release, major product, I would log it in this one just like kind of spreadsheety thing. It is in inside our ClickUp and just here's all the dates. And I would share that with new people when they would join the team. Here's our story, just so you know, like we started this in 2020. Here's like it was a VA business at first and here's how it evolved. And it's funny looking at that now because you can very much see the circularity of like now we're going full circle and it's great to have that.

Everything old is new again.

Everything old is new. But I think what's fair to acknowledge in the won't, you know, what got you here won't get you there piece. Is the reason why I thought I had to change was because I didn't wanna do it in this way. Like there were certain things that I associated with being a one-on-one service provider. And I mean, they're trite at this point. And I was like, ah, I just don't wanna do this. I'm an introvert. That's not gonna be my superpower. I have a competitive disadvantage to having conversations with people all the time, especially this one, you know, really painful.

That's right.

Yeah. And so I just made this story up that like, because I don't have a lot of energy, I'm not great with people, you know, like this isn't gonna work for me. So therefore I need to go over here. It became a Spark, uh, South Park episode because of that. Therefore we went into this, but then this, but then this. And I think now when I have friends who are kind of going through an offer transition, having now gone through, it seems like every model under the sun in 8 years, um, I feel like it's important to ask, why do you not want to continue with the thing you're doing? What do you think continuing with one-on-one services looks like? And what if it was not case? Not the case. You know, what if there was a world with which, you know, you could have one-on-one services, but you didn't have to talk to a lot of people all the time? Would that be interesting? Oh, it would. Okay. Well, good news.

Because one-on-one services tells me, like when you hear it, you think, okay, so you're doing client work and you are spending maybe 5 hours a week on content or lead gen or that sort of thing. And then 40 hours a week on actually doing the work. And then the next 15 to 20 hours a week on the business admin and all of that, making sure everyone pays and everything else. And that does not sound enjoyable.

No.

And that does not sound like a good way to scale.

Mm-hmm.

And so when people hear, oh, you went from products to services.

Mm-hmm.

You know, in the ladder as well, if you went from ladder 4 back to ladder 2 or 3.

Yeah.

Then everyone's like, that's terrible. I don't want that.

Mm-hmm.

And so what it sounds like you did is you you notice the particular parts of it. And I mean, you took the best parts of products and you took the best parts of services and really were intentional about your time and the systems behind it. And you said, "Oh, I wanna have it all." Yeah, you make it sound really smart there.

Like, that's not, like, just to be clear, that's the Instagram version. Not how it went. No, no, no, no, no, no. But yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, let's play it off that way. It was, you know, a lot more painful than that. Each time, each year, especially hitting that plateau, like, I was used to growing, especially during COVID as so many of us did really well during COVID Especially in digital worker, like helping digital workers work together. Like I was in a pretty good position to grow.

There was a wave that you were riding.

Yeah. And that felt great to grow year over year and double and this, that, and the other. And then just like boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. What the heck's happening here? Month over month, it's the same. So like there was a lot of pain involved in realizing I needed to reflect on it. And one of the reasons we talked about this earlier, I released a YouTube video showing what my calendar looks like. In each of these business models, because that's a real piece of it. And I didn't know until I did it, because no one talks about what does it actually mean to be a course creator? How is your time being spent versus what does your time look like if you're a membership owner? I've done that now. Here's how my, like across the team or when it was just me, here's how time was actually spent. You know, people think community, ah, perfect. People are going to talk to each other. No, you've got 15-minute breaks where you're in that forum a few times a day, especially if it's just you. And there's a calendar implication for every business model, especially when you're small. And so knowing that you're ready to sign up for that in the short, you know, 1-year period as you're scaling it up, and then you figure out which pieces you want to get off of your calendar. I thought that was really freeing, but it was not a smooth, perfect, like, duh, duh, duh, intentional process as it now feels like it was.

So let's dive into that because what your calendar looks like is such an important thing. In 2019, when you're doing the services. Yeah. What did your calendar look like then?

Okay. 2019. Um, I probably had about 4 clients at one time, 4 or 5, who was, I think I called it System Up at the time where I was doing full on, honestly, same kind of service I'm doing now where I'll help you set up a work management software, train your entire team, migrate all your data. Probably was working for about $40 to $50 an hour at that point, I would think. And I was just constantly doing fulfillment. I had very few sales calls because if I had a call, it closed because I was undercharging. There's a good sign, right? Close more than 50%. You're doing something wrong. Not good.

Oh, I mean, that's such an important point. Okay. Everyone was like, you know, what's it like if you were to ask someone, what's your ideal close rate? I mean, 100%. Yeah. And you're like, no, I respect—

respect to this person. Someone at the event that we were just at was like, my close rate is 70%. I said, uh-oh. And they looked at me very confused. I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Congratulations, you get a raise.

Right, exactly. What do you want your close rate to be now?

Right now, I want it to be, especially now that I have other people doing the calls, I want it to be like 20%.

Okay.

Yeah, because at this point, if someone's not a fit and they have that positive experience with our, you know, person or me, if they have that positive experience, it's actually better for me. So I'm okay with 20%. That still covers all the costs and then some, like We're still groovy there. Um, so 20 to 30%, but 20% is good for me.

Yeah. Because, and so if it were to creep up to 35%, you would say we're undercharging. Yeah.

Raise the prices, I think. Um, but in this point, it's great to have that other 80% becoming advocates. Right. In some way, because it really does, it's, yeah.

Make sure they have a great experience. You can leave them with other resources that you could say like, hey, it's not the right fit.

Yeah.

For to work together right now, but like, implement all of this. Maybe someone comes in, they're like, hey, we're at half a million a year in revenue and we really need these systems and processes and you're just too expensive for us. And you're like, yeah, we are, right? Why don't you go take this, take our course? Yep. Go ahead and implement all of that. And if at any point in the future you need help, we'd, we'd love to help you.

Yeah. One of the best things about doing this now for a while, the same offer over, like I've had the same offer for like 6 years, 6, 7, 8 years.

Another thing, all these creators are like, in order to scale, in order to break a million, I need I need new offers. I need multiple offers. Like maybe if I add the fourth product, then that will get me through the glass ceiling.

I mean, for me it wasn't true. I had, you know, my goal, you know, one of the pieces of advice I heard very early on from a free SCORE mentor, shout out to SCORE, who's a free, you know, Small Business Administration in the US. You get free mentorship through them. I had a SCORE mentor who was saying, you know, Layla, brand is what you are known for when you leave the room. And business, I don't think this was his quote, but business is about finding a problem so interesting you want to spend 10 years solving it. Those two truths were kind of like my rock for the first beginning piece. So it took me 2 years to figure out my problem. But once I found it, I was like, why would I create more products? It's almost a problem in some ways. But I created one product. Here is the solution for how to systemize your business of 5 to 50 people making 5 to 50 million.

Yeah.

What is the perfect way to do that? Uh, that was not something I could just create. I created it and then I refilmed that course just about every year, every 6 months, updating, rebuilding, reformatting, re-whatever. Right.

Okay. Yeah, that's amazing. All right. So you were saying you're charging $40 to $50 an hour. Yeah. Spending almost all of your time on fulfillment.

Yeah. 2018 was even worse. It was $20 an hour.

So I mean, we're just doubling revenue.

Yeah, I have a theme here.

Yeah, exactly. Started from the bottom.

Started from the bottom. Now we're here.

What was revenue in 2019? Do you remember?

Oh gosh, I don't know. Um, I want to say it was like 100, 120, I think. So I, I'm pretty sure the first year I started in April officially. I got the paperwork on April Fool's Day 2018.

What a joke.

Yeah, no, it was so perfect too, cuz I didn't even realize it. And then after I got the paperwork, cuz it was like an online form and it printed out, and I was like, yep, yep, okay, perfect.

That's my entire new business is April Fool's Day. My brother's birthday is April 1st. It's always Tuesday. Him about it.

Oh, perfect. So, um, yeah, so I had my joke of a business. My plan in the beginning was to do this for 2 years and then go back to corporate. I just wanted to get 2 years of experience, and I was like, oh, this would be a free or paid way to do it. But it was $45K, I think, that first year, $44K. And then, um, I think it was like $120K in 2019. Yeah, in the next year. But I was working my ass off. Working my ass off.

Yeah. And so then what did it— what did it look like to kind of the next iteration of the business?

Backing up, in 2018, I was really just doing virtual assistant stuff, which is part of where the $20 an hour came in. I remember I had a client being like, you are, you know, you graduated from this great school. Like, why are you charging $20 an hour? Bless this heart. Like, thank you so much, Lisa. That was a great experience. And so then I moved on and I read the book The Goal, which is about, you know, throughput, theory of constraints stuff. And I was like, okay, hmm, I need to get my stuff together.

It's one of those books that all the business nerds have entirely read and everyone else who's just like wants the, the, the business fluff is like, oh, I've never touched that book.

Yeah.

You know, they look at it and they're like, this looks like it was written in the '70s or '80s. You're like, it was, it was.

Yeah.

This looks like this is just for business. It is.

It is.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But then you get, you know, people like you and I are like obsessed with this book.

Yeah. Well, I was an econ major, so I was like, ah, I speak in my language. Um, but reading that book and then, uh, Built to Sell, right? I was reading those. I was like, all right, I really need to productize this. So I did productized service in 2019, which is how I got over $100K, and that felt like a hurdle. The next year, I think it was in $250K. I think it was doubling pretty consistently at that point. The next year is when I was using productized service pretty heavily. Like everything was a productized service. It was 6 weeks or 8 weeks or whatever productized. And around that time, I guess we would have been in 2020.

Yeah.

Some things started happening. And I remember it was, I had 4 or 5 clients. And one or two of them dropped due to COVID. And I was like, what am I gonna do? Like, I've got free time. Enjoy it? No. So I started filming.

We don't do that. We're entrepreneurs.

Yeah. Like, this is massively uncomfortable. And also, like, I just lost a significant chunk of revenue, right? When you're in, you know, that kind of services, that's 40% of your revenue potentially gone. So you lose a lot of revenue. And I decided to film YouTube videos during that. And I just filmed the responses to client questions. Clients. So for my remaining clients, when they asked a question, I'd film the answer, put it on YouTube, and then send it to them. And that's the, the other inflection point that changed the business. I think that one and, and honestly services are the two major pivot points that have really made a significant difference.

So that's a, a content format that I love because I first learned this from Tim Ferriss. I don't know who he learned it from, was to write to one person. Yeah, because we do this thing where we're like, okay, what could everyone possibly want to know about systems and processes?

This like, why would anyone want to learn about this?

Or whatever the thing is that we're teaching. And so then we write this generic, like it answers all these questions and all that. It's not written to anyone in particular and it's just not very good. And it's hard. Like you end up with this writer's block all the time. And if instead you just have one person and you say, okay, let me answer this question for them. So I actually wrote, um, my book on designing web applications. I wrote it to my brother-in-law because he was early in his design career and had just gotten his first job, you know, um, job in design. And so every time I was like, okay, what does he need to know?

Yeah.

And so I would write Philip, comma, enter, enter, and then I'd write a whole chapter and then I'd go back and I'd delete his name cuz that's weird in a book. Yeah, that would be weird. That would be very odd. So sometimes I'll And it helped me write so much better because I could, I, you know, wrote naturally, wrote directly to him. The same thing is, you know, as content creators, we always think about like, oh, what should I create? All that. And you're just going, well, what, what problems are top of mind for my ideal client?

Yeah. Okay.

Let me go to my actual client. Yeah. And then what I love about your example is someone asks you this question and you're like, hey, I wanna overdeliver. So maybe, I would record a Loom video, like walking through, talking about it and send it to them. Yeah. And then, and what most people do is they would do that and then they're like, okay, and then I'll use that as a basis to go make the other video.

Yes, exactly.

And you're like, why don't I just make the good video?

Yeah. Well, no, it wasn't good.

Sorry, I set the bar a little too high.

Yeah.

Um, but why don't I just make the public video, send that to them and say, hey, I made this just for you and I thought it'd be helpful for a few other people. So I put it on YouTube.

Yep, exactly.

I love it. I mean, there's quite the content flywheel in that.

Oh, it was beautiful. And honestly, I don't think I knew it until, like, one of the best things about my business is I work with people who are smarter than me exclusively. Like, I'm sorry, like, there's no one I work with that's, you know, I can't learn a ton from. And just like I had that client tell me, you're an idiot for charging $20, she said it in a much nicer way. I had a client who was an author. It wasn't what he was doing. He was working in a construction firm. Hey, Mark. And Mark said, Layla, I love the fact that you didn't answer my question. You sent me a YouTube video that just published a minute ago. How coincidental about exactly my question. And he called it out and he actually had the CEO of the business he was working on as the operator start doing that for his team. And they started a YouTube channel or some kind of Instagram Reels, the same thing. But I didn't know it. I didn't see it. I was just being lazy and I didn't want to pay for file storage. And so YouTube was free.

And so I didn't, so it wasn't even intentional.

No, no, no, no. Not at first. Not at first.

You're like, I could pay for a Loom account. I could, or Vimeo or is anything— yeah, yeah, yeah, Vimeo, Dropbox or whatever, or YouTube is free.

And so exactly. And then when other people who weren't my clients started seeing it, then I was like, oh, okay. Because I thought at first, oh, I have a link I can send to more clients. That was the thinking. And then when I started getting clients from YouTube, which happened very, very early on, I was like, okay, this is totally different than I thought.

It's such an interesting thing because everyone is hung up on what content should I make? Which is strange to me. And so even like internal company content, right? Or any of that, you can just say, what questions do people have? And just answer the questions.

But I think people get hung up on hypothetically, what are the themes we're struggling with? Right. Hypothetically, who would I talk to? Like we think about like Pam, the imagination, you know, like we imagine this person.

Right, our avatar that we—

Avatar. Yep. When I first, I think my first video was for Suzette. I remember Suzette, like specifically, and I didn't say her name in the video out of protection, but I'll shout her out here. But, you know, when I was filming the video, I was like, I had a client today ask me, how do you connect Cognito Forms to Gmail? Here's an answer and how you can use this for your follow-up process.

Right.

And that's it. And she felt very seen by it. But I just think it needs to be a real person. Like, like, you know what I mean? Like, we need to have people who are real and not just this imaginary thing and real questions in the same way.

We were at a table at the mastermind having a conversation yesterday about functionality and kit.

I was so afraid which conversation you were going to pull from for a second. You're just like, yeah, like how to make more content.

And so So the thing that I've been thinking about separately is how to make more content that directly shows how people use Kit and all of that.

Mm-hmm.

And to do it in an easy way. Right. And so something that came up, we were talking about, um, tags and how you organize and manage tags and how to find them. And we added this whole new interface and I was asking like, is this better? How is it? And all that. And I was like, well, it's better in some ways and worse than others because now we're lazy loading the tags. And so you can't do Command+F. Yep. And just search for all the tags.

Mm-hmm.

And so I was like, oh man, I hate it when we, it's like two steps forward, one step back in something we do with the product. And I hadn't heard that feedback before.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh my God. Come on, Kit users. Let's get together here.

And so I just heard people were so excited that there were folders for tags.

Yes. That is also true.

And so I told that to my team this morning and I was like, hey, I heard this feedback. I'm not sure the best way to handle it, but let's start to think about it.. And one of our engineers piped in and said, um, well, totally hear that. We can fix that. But did they know that if you press Command K, you can search for a tag just right there? Or if you press FT for find tag, it pulls up a list of all of your tags and lets you just, because you've got the command bar built in. Yeah.

I didn't even realize that. Yeah.

And so what this makes me think of, not that we're trying to promote Kit content right now.

Yeah, no, forget Kit.

I could make a video.

Yeah.

That says, so I was talking to a KIT customer the other day. Yeah. And they asked me about this, which made me realize a lot of people don't know about these power features inside of KIT. If you press Command K, if you do this, if you press N and then B, it's not for Nathan Barry, it's for new broadcast. And it jumps you right to the new broadcast. Right. And so that's just this, you know, talk to customers, hear what they want. And then I could make videos just about that. And I would have quite the, like, I would have an endless stream of things to make and it would be highly relevant, you know, to you and Chanel, right?

And then probably also to a few, few thousand other people and everyone that we talked to about it. Yeah.

Right.

Yeah. That was where I first bonded with Chanel actually was about kit, uh, analytics. But I think that's huge. And I think one of the things, can we go back to flywheels? Um, one of the things that people, you know, they shit on services cuz they're like, ah, God, so much work, execution, time for money, all the stuff. All the stuff. It is the best research into— you are paid to make your product better. And that's why when I started this service, I was like, I'm going to deliver the first ones. Like, you're going to get a great rate. I'm going to do the sales call. I'm delivering it. And it helped me make that product better, but also the course better. And one of the conversations I was having last year when we were like passive income business, I was like, I want more impact. I want to make sure we're getting better. And I don't feel like we're getting better at the grade I want you to be done with this journey and have the answer. And when you have, like, to go back to the benefits of services, conversations with your customers, right? Especially if you're paid to have them, that's not too bad either. Like, you will learn so much more than any frickin' survey or market research study or analytics or numbers will ever tell you because you're able to learn from actually being with them and telling you what they wouldn't otherwise tell you. And better still, seeing, like, we do screen sharing. We see more in that story than what they would ever tell us on an intake form. Yeah.

Cause if you're just like, oh, how ClickUp or something is used in the ideal world.

Yep.

We look at it in the tutorials and the marketing videos and all of that. Mm-hmm. But if you actually get into some of the, you're like that, okay. All right. That's how you use it. All right. Let's, let me meet you in reality.

Yeah.

And help you with that.

Yeah. We were telling, uh, so I've been hiring coaches, right, who are fulfilling this. And one of the mantras I have for the coaches is make sure that you're showing and not telling. Don't talk about the work. Take them, you know, go into your mind's eye. To your client, show me what it looks like Monday morning because now we're on a real fulfillment call. They'll share their screen. Where do you go first? Huh? And what do you do with that button right there? Oh, you don't use it. Okay. So that task thing, you don't touch. Okay. And then you go to Planner, then you go to Apple Notes, then you go to— and they actually show the first, you know, 10 minutes of their day on the call. And you get a world of context about that. That yes, helps you deliver that particular project, but you're jotting notes like, hmm, looks like we might want to screen for XYZ in the sales call. And just making sure there's always that feedback loop, um, I think is often skipped in part because we try to make things too passive too early. And I, I, especially if you have a human component, which I think I do, like every business has a human component, you can't go too hands-off or you have to start paying a whole lot for market research, which feels like a waste of money. Yeah.

When you could be doing it hands-on in customer development. Okay. So then as we're scaling, going back to your calendar and how you spent your time.

Oh yeah.

What, what did it look like? I mean, this is getting to some really great stuff. What did it look like when you really went into the courses side of it?

Yeah. So the courses side of it essentially is long uninterrupted work blocks, which sounds amazing for like my brain. Like, yes, 6 hours of just staring at a screen, forgetting to eat. Amazing. Amazing. But here was the hard part of it is I didn't have that loop. I didn't see what was working. I didn't need to feel the hero complex. But course completion rates at 10%. The referrals we would get, we would get referrals and people recommending friends. It wasn't at the rate I was used to in services, which told me a lot about what would happen after someone bought a course. And my goal always was not to get the most revenue out of the business or to have the highest salary. I wanted to solve this fricking problem. Like 10 years, my 10-year time clock is ticking. Like I wanna get this going. I'm 8 years in now. I got 2 years to finish this up. And I knew that if I kept with courses, our courses, I guess I didn't say this, our course revenue continued to grow. Our conversion rates continued to increase. Our audience was growing. So I knew we would continue to grow with courses. It was just a matter of time, but I could make all the money I wanted to with courses and I still would not solve the problem. Because there was no flywheel, as you would say, back to product.

Okay.

And so that was kind of the problem with it. And the calendar reflected that. It was deep focused work, reviewing intake forms every 6 months or 3 months or 12 months, do a giant refilm, sometimes live for a little bit of interaction. But it was like pulling teeth to find out what was working and what was not working for actual users of the product. We tried to do case study interviews. We like, we had to spend so much work to do what is inherent in a service. And that's when I kind of realized something should shift for what I wanted.

So that sounds like the ideal calendar to a lot of people where you're like, okay, time for money are pretty disconnected and all of that. But then you and the customer are disconnected. The customer success rate is much lower because a lot of people say like, oh, I sold $500,000 or $1 million worth of courses.

Yeah, cool.

What did they do from there? And they're like, Well, we have like these really great customers and you're like, all right, so you, you talked about 5 out of 1,000, right? What happened with the other 995 customers?

And you're like, bingo.

Well, some of them finished the course.

Yeah.

It's like, right. 'Cause the, the, you don't know, you often don't have as much of an impact as you wish you did. Right. And you're like, well, I did my part. I produced a great course. I sold it well. I got the right people in there and I can't hold their hand through it and create the outcome. It's like, okay. Well, they didn't get the outcome, right?

Or they did and they're not telling you, right? Also valid.

Yep. Which does happen. And so there, you know, there's things that you can do to collect information, get on calls, um, testimonials.

There's so many great steps for that. You can have all the checkpoints in the world, still not the same.

And so like, what was the spark where you're like, okay, I think I need to add the services component back into it?

I didn't want to. I didn't want to. I was so afraid of services for the reason so many are. I didn't want to go back to 2019. It felt like a step backwards. I think the reason I realized that it would work is because I had tried everything else and it didn't.

So I tried, you know, as measured by being stuck at $600,000 to $700,000 a year.

Exactly. But yeah, those stable years were not stable. It was like a duck, fish underwater, trying a bunch of different things. Tried group programs. I crossed off things that weren't aligned with what we were doing. I wasn't going to do a mastermind like that. Stuff didn't make sense. And it just never got traction. Like I felt it in my bones that if I offered, hey, oh, actually, no, you know what? There was a specific moment actually, now that I think about it. The last offer I tried before this one, I believe it was, oh yeah, this was it. It was, I think, 8 people at $8,000, I believe was the offer. And we're gonna go through this together over about 90 days. And so kind of, you can see the inklings here. But no way was I gonna do one-on-one. I mean, like, come on, time for money. And I got on those sales calls because I put a quick email out in Kit and I was like, hey, anyone want to do this? Blah, blah, blah. Very basic details. Book a call. I think I did 20. No, it wasn't even that many. It might have been 10 calls. And all but one asked, can I just pay 10x and just work with you directly one-on-one? Or 10x, 5x, some ridiculous multiplier. How much would I have to pay? Would $40K make you just work with me just exclusively? $50K? Can you just come out to my office and just work on site with us for a week? I think one of the lines I heard twice in those remaining calls was, can we just kidnap you and have you join our team? And I'm like, hey, nice to meet you, by the way. We're strangers on the internet. Um, and that's when I kind of realized one-on-one is what my audience wants.

And so it's also a very intimate thing of like, oh, it's so intimate.

Yeah.

How my business operates, like what my goals are, who I've hired, you know, all of these things. And it's like, there's a lot of things where where being around other people is a perk because you're like, oh, I get to learn from these other entrepreneurs. Yeah, but if they're in different industries and everybody's got to share all their— yeah, you're just like, uh-uh, can you just help me?

Yeah, like it kind of feels like sometimes I'm on— I'm filming episodes of Hoarders. Except here's the thing, like I was on Hoarders, but now I've switched over to Marie Kondo stuff. And so everyone on Marie Kondo is like, oh my God, I'm so embarrassed. I'm like, trust me, I was on Hoarders before. This is nothing., and I think there's some peace that comes with that in a one-on-one way that is hard to deny. And once I like got over my fears around it, which were my own stories I was bringing to it, I was like, oh, there is a way that I can give people what they actually want, God forbid, while also giving them what they need.

That's fascinating. Okay. And so then when you added in services, it's not this done for you. We have a whole staff that is going to come in and all of that. Like, it's not an agency model.

No. Mm-hmm.

And so it's this very tailored productized service that is layered on top of the course. And yeah, talk about how exactly that's structured. Have you iterated a little bit? And then we'll get into the calendar.

Yeah, there's been quite a bit of iteration. Um, but yeah, the model right now is I basically took the same journey that the course goes on A to Z, and I said, hey, you're gonna work with a human on this. We're gonna start off with an audit so we really get to know you, and then we're gonna question between A to Z, which letters do you actually need? And what letters that aren't in there, let's add some numbers in there too. So we essentially built on our end, we have the fixed course and then we have these kind of like modular add-ons that are appropriate for certain people struggling with certain things. Like we have a key metrics add-on because if someone's like, we don't track any numbers, but God, no one ever does the important thing. Like, hey, let's just, here's a little system for how we can do that. Um, and then we have a human being, being kind of build your own personal curriculum. So it's kind of like a college class in some ways where you're working with a mentor one-on-one, develop your curriculum, and we'll check in with you as you're doing most of the execution. Um, it was important to me in designing this that we didn't have to build a full team. Although if I, if I thought that was best for the customer, I probably would have. I would have just stomached that and figured out the way to do it right. But our fundamental belief is that when it comes to systemizing a business, it's best done from the bottom up and from the inside out. So the external consultant that comes in is like, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, here, I fixed you. Enjoy.

Lasts for 3 weeks. Yeah.

The problem was I was that person. Like, I'm like self-aware enough to be like, I totally did that. I did that.

Yep.

I am sorry, but you did get $20 an hour. So, um, and so we knew we didn't want to do that. And so we were trying to think, how do we train 1 to 2 people from within a company to be the powerhouses of building and maintaining a system? And then we just worked backwards from there.

And so what does your calendar look like now?

So, I mean, it's going to look a lot different next week. Now sales is off my plate, but my calendar as of now, doing founder-led sales, having a few clients, and also overseeing these coaches because we are only 6 months into this model from beta to now scaling it up. And then I'm kind of on a 3-month journey to get out completely. My calendar now is on Mondays. I have team calls, uh, team calls with anybody that I have. I'll have a client call usually every other Monday with one of my clients that I have. Tuesdays I will have nothing other than content creation. So a whole day for YouTube or writing. I'm writing my first book. Like that's a lot of work. Um, and then Wednesday I have sales calls in the morning. So I'll usually have 8 calls a week at this point that I'll squeeze in there somehow. Um, so that'll usually be my Wednesday mornings. Wednesday afternoon is usually a second client call because I have a few active clients right now at that tier. Thursday is more sales calls and then actually getting work done. Turns out you still have to do that. Um, supporting the coaches who are supporting all of the rest of the clients since they're all a few months in has been, um, like an hour a week, I would say. And then on Fridays, I have, uh, usually creative work again. So I try not to book any calls. I might sneak a sales call in there if I need to in the morning, but otherwise it's working on the book. Um, that's taking, you know, 6 to 8 hours a week.

Yeah. So even running that services model, you have a lot of control of your time. Now I do wanna call it that. Oh, where were you gonna go?

I was gonna say, I, I force myself to keep control of my time.

Right.

I don't think I have control. I keep control of it. Yeah. Because I think by default I would not.

Yeah. What are some of the things that, that, you know, the boundaries of the rules that you have in place to keep control of your time?

Sales calls can only get booked on 2 days a week. And they're all back to back to back to back to back.

Are they 20 minutes, 30 minutes? What's the—

They're 30 minutes right now. And I just back to back to back to back.

Just roll one, one to the next.

Pretty much. Yeah. It's a good excuse to get off the call on time.

Right. Well, and then your AI note taker can handle those things and then you can batch your follow-up at the end.

Exactly. Exactly. So, and that's a compromise, right? Salespeople are like, well, you shouldn't do that. Should be right away. You should follow up right away. I'm like, I'm okay with leaving that on the table. If it means I get all of Tuesday and most of Friday to work, to do the real work.

Because you're talking about some, you know, doing almost 100 calls.

That was a crazy month. Yeah.

So that was, you know, that's over 20 a week.

Yes.

And so you're fitting in really a lot of calls.

That I will say during that period, that did not get as spacious of a calendar. It was very much just I had 3 hours for YouTube. I somehow had time for book in there. It was like 3 hours for book, but those were long days. I would not, that was not intentional to get through that journey, but I learned a lot from it.

And a sprint for a short season.

Yeah, it was a seasonal thing. We, funny story, we had, we were intending to hire a sales position before that. The day before they were supposed to start after a 2-week delay, they're like, actually, I decided sales isn't for me. And so we had our webinar go live a day or 2 later from that. And I was like, all right, well, 100 calls coming my way.

We had someone years ago. Uh, his name is Neil. Just call him out on the episode. And, uh, who joined the company on a Monday, oh no, quit on Friday and was just like, actually, I just want to be in an entirely different industry.

Yep.

And you're like, what? And so now we call it pulling a Neil.

Okay, pulling a Neil. Yeah. So I had someone pull a Neil, and you know what, good for you. Like, I'd rather you tell me now.

Clarity now is better than later.

Way better.

Like, I don't want to spend 3 months training, like, onboarding and everything and be like, actually, I'm out. But it's just like, where I was like, what? Where did that happen? Okay. So if someone were to make this jump, right, they're selling courses probably in a B2B type setting or a business environment or that sort of thing. And they're like, huh, maybe I should layer on a services element to it. What are some of the mistakes that you think they might be likely to make?

Overcomplicating.

Okay.

I think that's the number one thing. We kind of overcorrect like I did, you know, when I went from services to product, I went so far into like super product memberships. It's the hardest product to really do well. And so services the same way, you know, we get into services, we're like, oh my God, done for you agency, hire 14 people, we'll do everything for you. You don't have to do a thing. I think that's the first one. I think the second mistake is making it about yourself first. Yes, that's part of it. But ultimately, I think the reason I finally got the model that worked after hard fricking times trying to figure it out, it was not easy. And it was not linear was because I like actually confessed to really listening. I got on calls with my audience, which I know Tim, you know, our mutual friend, great video. I'm sure we can link up top.

Yeah, his episode, he's, I think had 3 episodes on my show. So.

Okay.

Lots of great appearances.

Yeah, talking with your customer and building what they actually need and what will serve the actual result rather than, hmm, I'm afraid of hiring a team, so I guess I'm just going to have VIP days. Like, that's lazy, self-serving. It's problematic for you. It's problematic for your business. You're not building yourself a job. You're trying to build a machine and your spot in it is temporary. And so don't be selfish. Get some more money.

Yeah.

It's a win-win.

Those are some good mistakes. Any others?

Undercharging.

Oh yeah, because if it involves some of your time, you have to be charging enough. Otherwise you're going to, you know, like, have your revenue—

oh my gosh. Yeah, well, a lot of people don't track their time at all, and they're like, oh, tracking time, what am I, a lawyer? Oh, I'm not saying 6-minute increments, although like, why not? Um, I think tracking your time is phenomenally helpful if you do services. I would almost say it's like it's a requirement in some ways because a lot of people don't realize what their costs actually are. They're like, well, I host a call for 1 hour, I charge $500 for it, I'm doing great. And then you're like, oh wait, but I actually prep for an hour beforehand. I send a recap after, and 3 months later I send them a gift bag and that costs me $15. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm actually getting $70 an hour. And I also still have to acquire this customer, which costs me 20% in some way, which is another $60 off. You know what I mean? And we're not considering that in there because we're used to courses where our costs are nothing other than marketing.

So I wanna dive in on lead generation because that's something that you seem to have down pretty well. If you're doing 100 sales calls in a month or have the ability to do that.

Yeah.

Then clearly something between YouTube and the email list and the calls is going well. What's making the biggest impact on lead generation?

Well, I will say, you know, full disclaimer, 100 sales calls was a spike around having a webinar and hosting it live. Theoretically, we could replicate that if I was willing to do more live webinars, but again, I'm willing to leave money on the table. In so many ways. Um, what's making the biggest impact on lead generation? Ignoring having one-on-one services. That's the number one indicator is going from buy our course or bust to you can work with us one-on-one means we have a giant backlog of people who had no access and now the door is cracked open. That's huge. I mean, that's, that's, that's a lot of value. And because of that, we're able, most of our calls come from are kit automations and, you know, kit, whatever tool you're using, whatever it's just automated sequences that we have one that's a boomerang that we add everyone into every 90 days. They get an invitation to book a call endlessly. They never leave. They can unsubscribe if they want to, but they will forever be invited to book a call. Warning, uh, until you either book a call or buy something that makes you disqualified for the call. The other thing I would say is YouTube, right? Like, I've picked one platform. I would like to say I'm getting good at it. I'm not there yet.

For reference, how many subscribers do you have on YouTube?

I think it's like 150,000 on B2B business process. So, you know, the numbers aren't quite comparable to the, the sexier topics, perhaps.

Well, it's one of those things that people often realize, you know, if you're in food and recipes and it's like, oh, I got a million followers on Instagram, like, that is a a hard thing to do.

Yeah.

But it's way harder to do it in like a niche business processes or marketing or that sort of thing.

Let's talk about SOPs.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

It's a different, a different thing. And so what's made the biggest difference in growing on YouTube and getting to that 150,000 subscribers?

So, haha, what got me here got me there or will get me there. It's been the same thing the whole time of customer or lead questions generating the next video. So I, you know, my YouTube strategy is very simple. I don't really know what I'm doing. I just take a question or a prompt. I have now a YouTube agency that I've like invested in, like, hey, help me with the packaging because I know I suck at that. I'm going to be like very literal. You need to make it sexy. So they make it sexy. And then I film the sandwich. They got the bread. I fill it in. And the way I film, how I go about that is I usually take a few bullet points of like, here are the things I want to make sure you know by the end. And then I just talk and that's how I make a YouTube video.

And then are you going to a lead magnet, a call to action in some way?

That part, that does seem important. So yeah, I have some rules around this that I've kind of built over the years because I like numbers. So in the first 20 seconds, I need to make sure that I mentioned kind of the promise of the video and I have two hooks, the opening hook and then the hook to the first intro. In the first intro section around 30% into the video, I want to have a first call to action of some kind. So this is like, you know, tip number one is make sure you eat sushi every day. By the way, if you want my sushi recipe pack, it's in the description below, but let's move on. So I'll do something like that. I don't do anything with sushi. It's on the mind now. But that would be an example in the very beginning of the video. And then I will also do that again at the end. What I find myself doing more often these days is actually having multiple call to actions. So the way I do this is usually naturally. We've done 700 videos, 450 or so long-form YouTube. And I remember pretty much everyone. I don't remember their names because now they're all packaged to be sexy. But I'll just say like, yep, and we have a video on the best business model for your personality type up here. And I will just link up two hands because I never remember which side the cameras flip to. And That's how I'll do it. So I'll link to other videos and I'll link to at least 2 call to action, but oftentimes 3 or 4 in a 15-minute video. Uh, it's the first link in the description. So it shows up before the preview, the read more, first pinned comment. None of this I do, by the way, it's just our process. Um, we send it out to our newsletter pretty immediately upon publishing with again, that same feature. And all of our subscribers pretty much are from YouTube.

What I love about it is you've implemented a very sophisticated business that's also very simple.

It's— yeah.

So, you know, other people would be like, why aren't you on TikTok? Why aren't you on, you know, wherever else doing all these other things? And you're like, because YouTube and email work really well. And then I book calls and you work— can work with me in these two ways.

And, and cause I did YouTube and Facebook and TikTok and I realized I was like, oh, this is stupid. It doesn't work. I didn't actually know. I just did it wrong and then realized I was wrong.

Thank you so much for sharing this entire story. I think it's gonna be so inspirational for people who, you know, are stuck at the ceiling in some way and said, oh man, I've made this really complicated business that's not getting me the life or the revenue that I want. And you've laid out a path where you're like, look, you can actually go from products, the pinnacle of all your time, and then say, let's actually move back one ladder.

Yeah.

And let's go to productized services and have the ideal life in business and more customer outcomes and all that.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to share this. I felt so lonely when I was at that block. It felt like, am I an idiot? Am I the only one stuck here? Finding Tim and others who was like, oh no, this is a real thing. It was really, really helpful. So I hope it helps somebody else.

I love that. Where should people go to check out your YouTube channel if they want to work with you? Any of those things?

Yeah, go find me on Instagram. Just kidding. I'm not on anything. I'm not on anything. Find me on YouTube under my name, Leila Pomperry, or go to processdriven.co. That's where we have all of our freebies. And yeah, people can find out about how to work with us and book a call before I change my prices again.

Yes, exactly. Hey, that's some good urgency.

Yeah, there we go. There we go.

Perfect. Thanks so much for coming on.

Absolutely.

If this episode made you rethink your offer model, episode 87 with Jay Klaus will take that further. Jay has interviewed over 250 creators and built a data-backed case for why courses are no longer the default answer for creators who want to scale. It's one of the most watched episodes on this channel for a reason. Like the video if you enjoyed it, hit subscribe on YouTube or wherever you're listening, and I'll see you next week.