How I Built 3 Six-Figure Companies Using This Simple One-Page Framework

During my 20 years in business, I've built 3 6-figure businesses, and one of those businesses I even successfully sold in 2016. But one of the things about those businesses which is possibly slightly unusual, and I'm not ashamed to admit this even as a business coach, is that for those businesses, I didn't have a business plan for any of them, and yet I was still able to grow all of them very successfully. There's this very simple framework which I'm going to share with you, which is essentially a business plan on a page. Well, in actual fact, it's not even enough to write on a page. It's probably enough to fit on a postage stamp. It's one of the simplest business planning frameworks which I've used, and it's called Goal-Focused Pricing. This is what I'm going to walk through with you now, and hopefully I'm going to do that in less than 10 minutes because I don't want to take up too much of your time. So let's get started. There is one thing which is important for me to say though before we dive into this that I find is quite interesting. I've worked with thousands of business owners in the coaching, consulting, and freelancing space, and each of those clients, before we start working together, I get them to fill out my scorecard. I'll share a link to that somewhere below if you want to go and click on that and take it for yourself. The website address for that is fearless.scoreapp.com, and it's a bit like your mother-in-law asking you 20 questions about your business. And from that, you'll get some answers there about what steps you should take next within your business. But the first question in the scorecard is, please rate your business plan on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being absolutely smashed it, refer to it every day, really detailed, absolutely amazing, and 1 being it just doesn't exist. And through having over 1,000 people take that scorecard, there were some really amazing results. So about 75% of the people who took that scorecard rated their business plan 4 or below. So essentially it was substandard. But 26% of the people who've completed that scorecard rated their business plan a 1, basically saying that it was nonexistent. Now, I don't think business plans are a complete waste of time. I think those 40-page business plans with loads of graphics and cash flow forecasts in them and nice charts and things like that, those sorts of business plans, quite frankly, are a waste of time because— None of us really realistically are going to be looking for venture capital investment or massive loans from banks. Some of you might be, in which case you probably want a more detailed plan. But for 99% of small business owners out there just starting out, you don't need that at all. So here's the framework. The first thing which you need to decide on is what is your revenue target for the next 12 months ahead? For most people, that traditionally these days seems to be the 6-figure mark. So let's say, for example, if you wanted to earn $100,000 next year, that's what you would answer for that first question. And you'll notice this isn't so much of a business plan, it's just a series of questions. And once we've answered those questions, we can then start to interrogate that plan and see whether we can actually make it come to fruition or not. So first question, what's your target revenue for the year ahead? And I'm going to make the numbers nice and simple with the examples I use, mostly for myself so I don't have to think too hard whilst I'm recording this video, but also for you so you can follow it and then apply it to your business. The second question which we would then ask ourselves Or that I'm going to ask you is, on average, how much is the average client going to spend with you? And this then leads us on to the first sort of big insight which a lot of people get when I go through this exercise, a lot of the time with a room full of people. Because I'll then invite you to take the big number, your turnover, and divide that by the small number, which is the average selling price for your product or service, and divide the two together. So let's say you were selling your product for $1,000. Let's say it's a 6-month coaching program and you're going to sell it for $1,000. You would take $100K, divide it by $1,000, and that gives you 100, which means that over the next 12 months you've got to attract and enroll 100 clients into your business. Now, we've only asked 3 questions at this point, but typically when I do deliver this as a talk, people's eyes pop out of their head because like, how on earth do I not only, you know, deliver 100 clients or 100 products to, you know, these clients, but how do I actually find them in the first place? So you'll start to see here that the— with just a small number of questions, we're looking at just the basic, like, first principles around business in terms of supply and demand. And at the moment, we're trying to establish what level of supply we've got within our business. Now, if 100 clients in a coaching practice, which I know is unrealistic, I don't think there are— unless you run some kind of group program, doing 100 clients one-to-one, for example, when you're starting out, it's just impossible. In fact, a more realistic number is perhaps 20 clients. Over a 6-month period, which means that you've probably got 10 to 12 clients working concurrently, that's actually more than enough for a coach starting out. And again, that's where the next insight comes in, where people all of a sudden are like, well, 20 clients, if I take $100K and divide it by 20, that means I need to be selling this package for $5,000. And again, their eyes pop out of their head, 'cause they're like, well, I'm not worth that much, and who's gonna pay that much, and how do I find clients that have got $5,000 to spend on a coaching programme? So, but what we're doing here is, or what I would invite you to do, is to take the handbrake off, this is your opportunity just to dream and create the ideal business model. And what we're looking for is a business model here in this basic plan that economically stacks up in terms of being able to deliver enough units of capacity at the right price point to have a sustainable coaching business, consultancy, or freelancing business or agency. And, and also not just sustainable but also profitable as well, because what I've noticed is if people are selling too many products too cheaply their business generally isn't profitable. In fact, in many cases, it's actually losing money. I've done plenty of videos on pricing, so I suggest you— there'll be either one linked around here somewhere, or you might want to jump into the description where I've shared 3 videos which are all about sort of pricing and money mindset and things like that. So I'm not going to dwell on the pricing side of things too much. But just for now, for the sake of this exercise and for this business plan you're creating, dare to dream. This is your opportunity just to create the perfect business model for you and for your business that's going to give you the freedom you want. It's going to give you some spare time to be able to spend with your family or friends. Or do things which you want to achieve. Hopefully it's going to make you enough money in the long run, and also it's going to be fun. That's ultimately what we, what we want to be achieving, because there's nothing worse than running a business that's, you know, running you into the ground and creating burnout and things like that. So we've got to make sure we design this business so it fulfills all of those different aspects of your life, but also on the business model. So 20 clients at $5K, and that's the supply side of things taken care of. Now what we've got to look at is the demand side of things. So Ultimately, what I'm talking about here is marketing and sales. And a typical good conversion rate for a coach, consultant, or freelancer is roughly 1 in 3 to 1 in 5. So 20 to 40%. We'll work on the worst case scenario because then that presents us the picture of like the maximum amount of activity you're gonna have to do in order to achieve that $100K target and those 20 clients. But let's say you're working on a 1 in 5 conversion rate for those 20 clients. That means you've probably got to sit somewhere in the order of about 100 consultations per year in order to attract and enroll 20 clients into your practice. Now, 100 consultations sounds like a lot, but when you actually start to break it down, that's 2, maybe 3 a week. And if those consultations are only maybe half an hour to an hour, that's not really too onerous. And also, it's a manageable amount of volume of work in order to be able to build this sustainable business, 6-figure business in the first instance. The other thing as well is the next question probably to ask then is, well, how do I get those 100 people booked into consultations? Well, again, I've done another video about this, which is all about how to build partnerships to generate effortless leads for your business. So go and find the link for that. But really what we want to do is we want to initiate these— the invitation for these consultations through just some, some basic conversations with people. You could do this through networking, through podcast interviews, through a YouTube channel or social media. You could do it through in-person events or referrals. There's a number of different ways to initiate conversations, but loosely speaking, you're probably talking about for every consultation which you book, you probably want to initiate 5 to 10 conversations with your ideal audience in order to be able to then build up enough trust to be able to invite them into a consultation. So you're talking about over the course of a year maybe starting 500 to 700 conversations with people who may fit the bill in terms of like ideal client fit. And that's essentially it. So you've got, the business plan there is have an idea about what the turnover is, and then what we do is we reverse engineer the business model to achieve that turnover based on the capacity we've got to deliver, however many products or services you can deliver. That gives you a few clues as to what price point on average you should be charging per client. It also helps you to discern how much activity you've got to do in terms of consultations to then get people in as clients and how many conversations or what level volume of marketing you've got to do to initiate those consultations. And that's it. It's really that simple. Hopefully this video has actually taken me less than 10 minutes to get into this. If you follow these steps and we'll itemize them in the description below, you should have a business plan which you can then look to execute on over the next 12 months. I'm sure you'll probably have questions as well. My door is always open. I periodically do group coaching experiences, which is essentially a workshop where we— I'll do some live coaching, hot seat work with a client, and we'll work through some of these basic business plans and models. I also offer a free 30-minute diagnostic call as well, which is an application process. We'll share a link to that below in the description as well, so please do take me up on that. If you've gone through this exercise and you're left feeling a little bit confused, or your eyes are on stalks because the numbers just look a bit wild, that's a really good time for me to intervene and maybe help you out with that business model and give you a bit of coaching around how you can actually make it work for yourself.