The Unconventional $300k Blueprint Most Coaches Won't Share

Last year I was fortunate enough to have my biggest ever year since I started business coaching. In total, we brought in $300,000 through several different revenue streams. I'm not going to break those down. I've actually done that in another video, which you'll be able to find a link to somewhere else around here. However, one of the most common questions I get asked is that, Robin, you have such tiny audiences. How were you able to go from $0 a year when you first started out coaching 10 years ago to a point whereby you're doing $300,000 a year relatively easily. So first and foremost, sorry to break it to you, but it certainly wasn't easy. I have managed to find all of the hard ways to be able to grow my business to that point. But 10 years into this business now, my coaching commitments are probably around about 6 to 8 hours a week, absolute maximum, in terms of client fulfillment. The rest of the time I get to play with and do as I please. Unfortunately though, I'm absolutely addicted to business, which means that generally speaking, I'm working on my business during the spare time which I get. However, the freedom and flexibility which I get does mean that I can hang out more with my kids, I can take my dogs for a walk during the week, do lots of other fun things which I want to do as well. Anyway, you don't wanna hear about my story necessarily. What you want to understand is maybe some practical ways that you can grow not just a coaching business, but any business that are basically unconventional. And when I say unconventional, I think the typical way that people believe that they need to grow a business these days is to go straight to social media. Oh, I'm starting a business up. I need to do some marketing, so I'll go and set up the social media accounts and then post on socials 5 times a day. Oh, I've got an established business which we want to grow. Let's go and do some social media posts and things like that. However, I don't wanna burst your bubble here, but some people do luck out and do very well on social. However, it is a bit like a lottery win these days in terms of getting posts which go viral. It's very rare for most brands that you're gonna get some kind of a viral post unless you've got some young upstart who is really creative and you hire them full-time and they can create some viral posts for your video. The ones I see doing that most successfully tend to be what I class as small local businesses, bricks-and-mortar businesses, cafes and things like that. There are some other brands out there doing it exceptionally well, but again, it's quite a heavy lift. I don't want the hassle of having to employ somebody to do my social necessarily and/or do it myself. And just a couple of statistics for you. When I was all in on social media, because I have been there and done that, we were probably spending on average about 30 hours a week between me and my team on posting social media content and all of the other sort of content marketing which we were doing. And it took us 4 and a half years to get to 3,000 leads or inquiries within our database. And then a couple of things happened. I guested on a podcast with Ali Abdaal, and that one podcast interview that took us 2 and a half hours to record produced 3,000 leads for my business. And I just thought, what on earth have we been doing for the last 4 and a half years when there are these really fantastic opportunities out there that we hadn't been maximizing? So where did it all begin then? Because I didn't start out You know, I started out with no audiences 10 years ago. I didn't intend to do business coaching as a career, kind of fell into it. So how do you get from 0 to $300,000 a year in any business if it's not through the conventional ways of doing marketing? So first and foremost, I would always recommend that you are just not afraid of doing the heavy lift. I was doing a couple of workshops on Friday in front of about— there's about 150 people at the first event and 100 people at the second event. One thing which became apparent is that everybody wanted to grow their business via digital marketing. Now, many of the businesses that I was in front of were in some way either apps or they were marketing themselves through social media. So it kind of makes sense you want to stay in this online world. But actually, some of the best ways to grow a business is through just getting out there and selling the idea first and then build it later. And by selling the idea, what I mean by that is actually just getting out and meeting people and speaking to them. And I remember in my early days of coaching, I had somebody come into my office say, Robin, I think I'm a better coach than you, but I don't understand why you're so much more successful than me. And we discussed how many consultations, in-person consultations, she'd done with her clients at that time, and she counted on one hand. And I was like, oh, well, that's not many for, you know, for the last week. That's pretty good. And she said, oh no, no, not the last week. I've done like 4 or 5 consultations in the past year. In that time, I'd actually sat 125 consultations. I'd guested on 45 podcasts. I'd run about a dozen or so events myself in the local area, marketing my business in front of hundreds, if not thousands, local business owners. I'd also spoken at about 35 different events at other people's networking events. I was doing like the heavy lift of just getting out there and just telling people about what it was that I was doing. And lo and behold, I think that first year I did £89,000, so about $125,000, and I've not done under $100K since. And in actual fact, my second biggest year was COVID. My biggest year was last year where we did $300,000 in total. So get out there, meet people, Hand out flyers. Go and stand in the field at an event like entrepreneurship event and talk to people about your business and the amazing work which you're doing. You know, send out— rather than just sending out social media posts, when you drop into somebody's DMs or WhatsApp, make sure you send them a short video saying, oh hey, it's Robin here. Listen, thanks so much for your inquiry or comment on my post. You know, what is it that made you reach out to me? Is there anything else that I can help you with? Oh, by the way, did you realize I've got a book? I would love to send you a copy. So it's all of this manual heavy lift actually which garners far more trust with prospective clients than anything else that you would ever do online. And I always quote the stats, you know, a picture paints a thousand words. Well, a video paints a thousand pictures. Therefore, you should always turn to the heavy lift, like spend an extra 60 seconds to 2 minutes recording a video. We've got these wonderful devices these days, you know, that we spend thousands of pounds on which can do really great quality videos and then just drop it straight into somebody's inbox. So why not leverage some of these The other thing which I want you to think about, and there's this fantastic book I'm reading at the moment which is called Why 10x Is Better Than 2x. It's by a fantastic author, a guy called Dan Sullivan. I think he's got about 35 books out there, but he, he introduces you to this really interesting concept of like, well, let's talk about 2x for a moment. Imagine if you had to do 2x the client fulfillment, if you had to do 2x the sales calls, if you had to do 2x the marketing. So basically double all of the effort and workload you're doing at the moment. Most people would be like, no, I couldn't possibly do that. Because if you could do it, you'd already be doing it for a start. So there'd be nothing to 2x because you're already doing 2x. And the second thing is like, would you actually want to do that when the goal in business is to have more fun? It's to do something which is fulfilling. It's to create freedom for yourself and obviously make some money. Why would you want to put double the effort into absolutely everything you're doing? Surely a better business is one where you've got double the income with half the clients. So that's something which we help people do at Fearless Business. So what he talks about is actually 2x is not a good business model. You shouldn't be 2xing anything. What you should be looking to do is 10x stuff. So what are the moves or plays which you've got to make in your business that are gonna 10x? They're just gonna absolutely transform your business. It could be your first strategic hire, somebody who then takes all the business development and sales calls off your hands. But instead of you squeezing into tiny amounts of you know, time that you've got left. They're able to spend their entire week doing those calls. And could that create 5 to 10 times the number of sales opportunities for your business? It could be rather than focusing on social media and trying to grow your own audience. And I think this is where a lot of people's ego gets in their own way. And like, don't get me wrong, here I am recording a YouTube video for my YouTube channel because I want to get subscribers, but I also want to build relationships with people. I also want to leave a bit of a legacy. It's a bit of a weird way to do it, but I want my girls, when they search for Daddy when I'm older and maybe not around anymore, that they find this archive of videos of me talking about business stuff that, I don't know, maybe inspires them or their friends to go and start a business. I don't know. Hopefully they'll be proud of it. Anyway, that aside, we've got to try and seek out like different ways of, you know, if we can't grow our own audience, if it's happening too slowly, well, there are people out there who've already done the hard work of growing these vast audiences. So wouldn't it make sense to spend far less time and effort building partnerships with those people rather than trying to churn out tons of content to grow our own audiences and hope that they blow up. Well, go and find a podcaster or a YouTuber or a blogger or an email person, newsletter person, who has already got hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of subscribers or followers that you can then tap into their audience. And a lot of people are always like, the imposter comes out, why would they wanna partner with me? Well, you have to remember that These people started somewhere as well. They started somewhere with no people in their audiences. I would hope that most of them would be, you know, they would get it. They would understand that they were there once and therefore they would like to help, you know, lift other people up. Now I'm not suggesting that you can just drop into their DMs and say, hey, promote me on your YouTube channel. What you've probably got to do is build a bit more of a relationship and a rapport with them. So it might be that you've got to get into their world, add some value, show up at their events, various other things like that. But Most of the people now that I come into contact with in my entrepreneurial sort of world, they are only 1 or 2 degrees separated from somebody with a far larger audience than them. And so all they've got to do is figure out how they're going to build that partnership, gain their trust, win their trust. And then, you know, you've got to also come at it from the perspective of like, what's in it for them? Why would they want to promote your stuff? Is there anything that you've got value which you can offer to them? You know, like I said, the guesting on Ali Abdaal's podcast and getting 3,000 leads for my humble little coaching practice was an absolute game changer. So is it any wonder why I'm trying to forge partnerships now with people with large audiences? Because for my little practice, I only need to do maybe one of those every year or every other year, and I've got a really nice sustainable and profitable business that isn't completely overwhelming. And I set this up to be a lifestyle business. I think that's quite important to say as well. I'm not here to like— if it grows big organically, awesome. I don't mind that. What I don't want to have to do, because I want to spend time with my family and my dogs and things like that, and from on myself. I don't want to have to like force growth. That's a 2x move where you have to like put loads of extra effort in, squeezing all of that juice out of the lemon, whereas actually there are, there are far better plays. Writing a book is a 10x move because all of a sudden you've got an asset that you can then send out to hundreds if not thousands of people a year and also win their trust. You can get leads in and things like that. Then when you have partnerships, you can gift books to their audiences Which again is a nice way to sort of build trust and give some value back into their community as well. So is it any wonder now I've got several books? I've just written another one that's coming out in June next year, but then I'll be leveraging that book to create opportunities for myself potentially to speak on the stage or maybe do a podcast tour again and, and things like that. All of those things open me up to those vast audiences. Also, the final thing which I will say on this as well is like, life is too short. You don't want to be spending your days doing stuff that you you just deep down don't enjoy doing. I've gone through creator's block where I've struggled to write content, I've struggled to make videos, I've struggled to record podcast episodes for my own podcast. And in actual fact, it's on a hiatus at the moment anyway. And part of that is just down to the fact that sometimes if it just— if it feels too much, feels too overwhelming, feels too much like hard work and effort, and if the inputs don't justify the rewards, then you should think about— question whether that is the right strategy or not. I'm fortunate enough now that because I've recognized these shifts that I need to create in my business over the past 2 to 3 years, that I have been able to restructure my days so that I'm doing far less coaching. I have a small amount of time I pay into my partnerships, and then guess what? I get to make videos in my spare time and be creative. I've turned back to writing books because I get to spend time thinking about the content rather than having to rush it, which is what I was doing before. And these are the things which have helped me the most in terms of growing a business from $0 to $100,000, and then in the past 3 years, from $100,000 to $300,000 a year in my humble little coaching practice. Now, you don't have to be a coach or a consultant or a freelancer to do this. I think any business owner can benefit from some of the principles which I've outlined in this video. If you wanna know a little bit more about it, then do reach out to me. I've got a couple of books which I'm gonna make available to you free. We'll link them in the description below. If you've already got a business and you want to maximize the opportunities, then you probably want to get hold of a signed copy of my book Take Your Shot. We'll include a link for that. If you're in the process of starting up a business and you want to get to grips with your numbers and understanding partnerships and how to launch your business, you probably want my Fearless Business Blueprint. Again, I'm happy to send you out a copy for free, and we'll include a link to that as well in the description below.