Here's what we learnt from our failed business scales..

But what it actually left me with was more headaches, more stress, more personnel to manage, less profit.

Why was I actually opening a second gym? And the answer was ego.

A lot of the time, a lot of people will drag a lot of dead wood through their business because they have some sort of loyalty. Like, you know, we hired them, they've always stuck with us. They're really nice. Like, these are not the reasons to keep employees in your business.

Welcome to the Success School podcast. We are on episode 35. Welcome, Steph.

Hi. It has been quite a momentous effort to get to today's episode.

I would like to paint a picture for you guys of the momentous effort. So yesterday I was so pumped to do some work, had a five hour block. I was literally so excited. I was like, cool, I'm going to take a nootropic, which essentially gets you focused. So I go and take a nootropic. And I was like, man, that tasted really weird. So I went check the bottle. And I didn't take a nootropic, I took a sleeping pill. And this was at 11am in Perth. So I proceeded to slowly migrate to the couch and I proceeded to work from a lie down position for the next five hours and got fuck all done.

We are so sorry, Alicia and the TVC team, because we were definitely due to record yesterday and we had to message her and be like, sorry, Tim, Maxine took a sleeping tablet in the.

Middle of the day.

Day we can't record.

It sounds so ridiculous. It sounds fake. And then today, to make it even worse, we just got set up, our dog came in and snapped our recording.

Cord, like one of our HDMI cables. He just came in and like knocked it and it snapped and I can't.

Believe this for an hour trying to.

Find a cord for the camera.

So, Steph, lesson of the week. I think we both need to have the same lesson of the week because Success School is turning one.

I know. I actually cannot believe that we are almost at the one year mark and I've actually been reflecting on this a little bit lately. I know we both have. We've been talking about it a lot. And this morning I was looking over our numbers. In the Last just over eight months, we have signed 243 clients into success School, which is so crazy.

Yeah, that's pretty crazy. We've been picky. Like, we actually don't just say yes to everyone. So if you've been applied and been rejected, sorry, but it's because we have a certain type of person that we like to work with in success.

Yes. It's 243 clients and we haven't even been picky. Like we haven't even, you know, just said yes to everybody, like. And so I was absolutely blown away with, with those results and but something else that made me really emotional when I literally just put it on my Instagram stories this morning was some of our client wins. And they've been making me so emotional lately just looking at them. You put a post up a couple of like last week asking about, you know, wins from Q1 this year and I was reading through them and just absolutely blown away with some of the results that have happened just in the last two weeks. The last eight weeks. Sorry. But also like over the last 12 months have been absolutely insane. So we've had like, I mean some standouts may have been Jess, she went from 0 to $107,000 months. We had Crystal who's just joined and she's gone from 0 to 20k months in 10 weeks. Harmony, who has been a long term client of mine but has left and come back a few times. She was really nervous about joining and then she made back her entire investment for Success School within the first four weeks of being in the program and came to Bali. And it's just like I just sometimes pinch myself the fact that we get to do this for work and also these are the results that we get. What is what has been your one of your favorite results?

So definitely the anti one where she paid off her parents mortgage which she posted in like minded Bitches hating on men and it absolutely went off. Thanks for deleting me from the group. Whoever listens to this podcast from that group.

Kim is shady at you guys.

I am shady.

Someone blocked him from the group. But I love dance as well. Like that actually gave me full body goosebumps and we celebrated her in Bali for that with everybody. It was so incredible. But I think the reason that our clients have such incredible results this program is because I genuinely think Success School is the only program and from what I've been able to see on the market that actually does a mix of done for you and done with you. So rather than just like a lot of coaching programs are kind of an information hub where you just go on, you watch modules and then you get really overwhelmed because you don't know how you're supposed to implement it or how it's going to work for you. We've actually given every single one of our clients every template that we use in our own business. To plug and play information into yours and actually plug and play the systems and plug and play the processes into your own business. And then we take it one step further because we personally help our clients to adapt these into their own business model so in a way that actually works for them. Which means that our clients just take action a lot faster than they have done in any other program they've ever been in before. So we want to give our podcast listeners a very special exclusive offer because we haven't done that really before. And if you're ready to stop winging it, if you want to grow a six or seven business, if you listen to our podcast and you think that we give huge amounts of value here, then you have no idea how much more we give our clients is successful. But if you want to get results in as little as four weeks like Harmony has, then not only can you join Success School, which is the best ever, Tim is also throwing in a free website order. And if you've been listening to the podcast for a while.

Am I doing that?

You are.

Yeah. Okay, cool.

Tim is gonna.

Okay.

I'm doing website orders, free website audit only for the next eight people though.

Okay, cool.

A free website audit. And I'll be.

Man, you guys are gonna keep me busy.

Yeah. Eight people website audits. Like Tim is obviously self proclaimed CRO conversion rate optimization expert. So therefore this is gonna be phenomenal. We're going to be giving you a free social media order, which I will be personally doing. Tim will not have to do that before our podcast list for the next eight people. So if you are interested in getting a website audit, you know, you've been sitting on the fence about wanting to join Success School. We're having a birthday offer at the moment as well, so it's got a pretty juicy discount. At the same time, if you want a free audit, if you want a free social media audit, if you want access to a birthday discount, the next eight people who click the link in the show notes will get a access to that.

Guys, just on top of that, like, Success School is, I think, the best coaching program in Australia by a mile for people who've actually done it. So we're not business coaches that talk about business and we've never had a business. We're in the trenches every single day doing this stuff. Okay. And we give you all the stuff that we do every single day on a daily basis from sales, marketing and scale, so you don't have to make the same mistakes. I was talking this morning to one of our clients Becca. And she was saying, how do you know so much about Facebook ads? And I said, because I've spent over $250,000 trial and error on Facebook ads. So you don't have to. So that's the kind of stuff that we teach you. We teach you a lot more than that, but we would love to open the opportunity to help you in success school.

Yeah. And I think this leads perfectly into our topic today, which is three things to learn from our scale fails. So, you know, we, we have done it all so that you don't have to. And I think this is the perfect topic for today's. For today's lead in. So we have scaled five businesses in the last five years, and I wish that we could say that we got it right every time, but honestly, we definitely did not. There have been many, many late nights, many tears, many pulling out hair, many losing hair, literally scenarios where it's just been super stressful because we honestly didn't get it right every time. We've had some epic fails, and luckily for you, we are going to share them so that you can learn from them so you don't have to. If you're an entrepreneur listening to this. It is normal to not get things right the first time, okay? So I think a lot of us put pressure on ourselves to be perfect or have some level of perfectionism, but it is normal to not get things right the first time. Okay? So learning is literally just trial and error. So the first time you got up to walk, you didn't nail it. The first time you fell over, you stumbled, you tried again, you tried again, you kept falling on your ass and eventually nailed it. Every single learning process follows that same cadence. So you have to fail, you have to try, you have to fail, you have to try. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs are just too scared to fail. But what we want to share with you today are five things that you can learn from our scale fails that maybe will save you some time and money. So, Tim, kick us off.

So my first one was don't do what everyone else is doing, which I think is very common, especially in the social media world. Now we're going to see. We see this all the time with our clients as well. It's like mine would be, you know, open a bunch of gyms. That's the way to get super successful. A bunch of our clients come to us and they say, oh, my friends are doing this MLM thing. I think I should be doing that. Or my friend is doing this course in reels. Or that is the way, or you should have a massive team, or you should have no team, or you should have any combination of team. I think the appropriate answer here, or the right answer is do what is appropriate for you and what feels good for you in terms of your path. Personally, for me, you know, I always, well, I did want to have multiple gyms at some stage. So COVID 19, the great lockdown came around and I had a lease, a very big lease on an expansion for my second gym. And it really caused me to step back and ask myself, did I actually want to have a second gym and why was I doing it? And I asked myself that question, why was I actually opening a second gym? And the answer was ego. And it was because everyone else was doing it who I perceived to be successful. Not because I wanted to help more people, not because I wanted to make more money, not because I wanted to have the biggest performance athlete performance center in Australia, because of ego. Because I wanted to be the guy that had multiple gyms. And then I'm asking you, our amazing podcast listeners, is that a good reason to open a gym or expand or open multiple businesses or do multiple things? Because I would have been doing what everyone else is doing or every successful guy or girl in the fitness industry, they all want to open a gym and then they want multiple gyms and it's just this never ending status game of who's got the bigger gym, who's got the newer equipment, who's got multiple locations. And personally that didn't sit right for me. So I checked myself, I asked my ego and I told my ego to, you know, literally off because that's not the right decision. It was for us, our family, our business, etc. Steph, what about you?

Yeah, I remember you going through that process when I first met you when Tim was, you know, bright eyed and bushy tailed. He still is by the way. We were very young though and you were like, I'm going to have, you know, multiple gyms Australia wide. And I think that you wanted that simply because that was the only way that, you know, you'd seen it done. And that's what success looks like. And that's what the guys who you were looking up to, that's what they did. And so it's really normal guys to, to first think and I did the exact same thing. So when I first started my first business, house of hobby, you know, I, I had no idea what I was doing in business and I just looked at other people who had done stuff, you know, I thought the only way that I could scale this, this incredible business was to go Australia wide, was to franchise it. I just didn't know another way of business. I didn't know another way of making that work. And it was interesting because as we grew the business to get it to the point that we built out all the systems really thoroughly, put them into courses, you know, we had incredible on because we had a lot of team. Like, by the time I sold House of Hobby, just before we sold it, we had, I think, 14 casuals, we had two managers, we had, you know, a team of VAs. We had, like, it was. It was a really, you know, big business. And one of the things I realized right before I sold it, you know, and I got rid of a lot of those team members and really simplified the business model was that more didn't equal more. And I thought that if I added more team members and we could run more workshops and we could get more people through the door, obviously we can have more impact, which would be great. But what it actually left me with was more headaches, more stress, more personnel to manage, less profit. To be completely honest, it was way less profitable. And I realized in that moment that more didn't equal more. And the only reason I'd even wanted to build House of Hobby up to that point, to take it Australia Wide, was because that is the only way that I'd seen it done. And I think that, you know, that is the biggest mistake that you can make at the very beginning of scale fails is just going, oh, well, that's the way it's done. So that's the way that I want to do it versus really checking in with yourself and going, okay, but what kind of lifestyle would that give me? Because I remember actually a business coach said to me, steph, if you build a nationwide business, you're going to spend a lot of time traveling. Do you want to do that?

And I was like, I think you did. At the time. You were at peace with it.

No, I don't think I was. I didn't want to travel around Australia. I don't want to spend time away from my family and my new. And my dog. And like, I just. I didn't want that. I didn't want that wife and never wanted that life. It was interesting because I still pursued public speaking after that. Like, I, like in the last.

Angela said that to you, huh? She was like, yeah.

And then one of. Yeah, she said to me, she was like, do you want to speak and be flown around and speak on stages around the world. And I was like, not really. So I was like, why am I pursuing these things? Because that's what success looks like versus like do I actually want to do that? No, I just want to be at home with my family and you know, working 20, maybe 30 hour weeks doing I love and coaching people. So I think guys, if you're listening to this, please, please, please take it from us, like to check in on your goal, like what would it actually mean for your lifestyle? What would it look like from a financial perspective, profitability wise especially? And does it actually make sense to you?

Yeah, build the business you want to build guys, and set it up around your lifestyle, not the other way around. Okay. Which a lot of people get in trouble with. So onto our next scale fail, guys, we're going to be talking about keeping profit as the king. So a lot of the times, well, you know, a lot of business coaches go by revenue, which is great. They're like, yeah, I'm a seven figure business coach or six figure or five figure or nine figure or a million figure or whatever it is. And then it's all in, all out. Okay? And if your business is all in, all out, you're going to have a hard time and you're going to have a very bad time. Your tax bill is going to come in, you're going to get gst, you know that wherever you are in the world and then you are going to be literally fucked up. Okay? So you need to be operating a business on a profit margin. So I don't know if you guys know this, but most of the time a lot of business valuations are valued on profit plus assets or some combination of that. So the profitability, let's say it's, it's anywhere from like a one to a, you know, three or four times multiplier on the profit. So if you made 100k profit, your business is worth around 100k or 400k. Okay. So the profitability is key. They're going to take, you know, add backs and drawbacks and stuff out of the equation on that to work that out actually, like your wages and stuff. But we're going to get technical on this. But if you ever want to have a big exit in your business, you need to keep profitability in mind and profit or cash or whatever that is is the lifeblood of your business.

Yeah. And I think a lot of people just don't think about guys, I really implore you to think about what is your exit strategy because most people don't think that at the end of the day that they're going to like. When I started house a hobby, I never ever thought that I would sell it. Like that was the last thing on my mind. So I didn't even think about building it to sell. I built it so that we could scale it so that we could, you know, self franchise versions of it. But I never ever thought that I was going to get rid of that business. And so you don't ever plan to. And I could say the same thing about pmp. I, when I went into it, I really thought that that was going to be the program that was going to grow and last forever and you would just stay around for years. I didn't plan to have an exit in that you will change your mind. Things in life will happen, you will find other passions. It will stop being exciting to you. At some stage you might want to change direction. Do yourself a favor and plan your exit. Okay, so have a think about, okay, would I sell this? Would I just shut it down and walk away? Would I like give it to an employee? Would I, you know, bring management in or a CEO in to take over? Like what would you like that exit to look like? If you were, you know, gun to your head, you had to make a decision about how to get out of your business, what would you do? And most people would want to sell because they put a lot of time, effort and energy into their business. I actually had a conversation with one of our clients this week. She was potentially looking at getting acquired buy another business. And she was saying, you know, I think it's worth this. And I was like, well, how much property making? And there wasn't a lot there. There wasn't a lot of profit there. I think she was pretty shocked when she realized that actually the value of her business was quite a lot less than what she had seen the value as. So profit is amazing because first of all, it's what's going to pay your bills, it's what's going to you're going to bring home at the end of the day, it's what like that's what you pay yourself out of usually is out of your own profit. And then on top of that, you know, it is the reason that you will be able to sell and the reason that your business is valuable at the end of the day as well. Tim, do you have a story on making more profit from Helix?

I do have a story on this. And been an entrepreneur for so long, I've wasted a lot of money. I waste a lot of Money on dumb stuff. And, you know, one of our core values with Stefan and I is simplicity. So we had a look at the business model of the gym and how we get results and we were like, cool. Is there anything complicated? Convoluted, doesn't make sense, you know, is drawing out the path of getting results for our clients. So in Success School or Helix Gym or any of the other business we ever have, our number one thing that we want to do is get results for our clients. And what's the fastest way we can get results for our clients? We just map those two things out. So I had a look at, you know, the apps and the systems and the processes and all this type of stuff that we're using. And I was like, why the hell are we having four mobile apps to deliver training, nutrition, booking in classes and all the stuff around those things. And when you think about that from like an onboarding point of view, if someone comes into an onboarding session with me and my gym, we're going to set up four apps. We have to set up a username, password, email address, reactivation activation, all the other stuff that goes in setting up an app, you'll do that four times in the first hour. Is that a good look? Joining someone's gym?

How complicated?

Yeah, like super complicated.

It was so like, this was. Guys, this is pretty recent.

Yeah.

Just to give you an indication, this pretty recent and like, this is the sort of stuff that you just sometimes do because, you know, this app is better. It's like, well, is it actually better or are we just telling ourselves it's better so that, you know, like, if we can change our belief system on it's actually better and we can just. Yeah, the other one's not perfect, but it's way more simplified for a business. For the client, the onboarding process. For our team members, it's cheaper as well. We've saved money profitability wise. So there's just so many additional benefits to it. And it, it's really funny how easily and quickly things can get out of control like that. You know, add this happen and we'll try this. And you know, you had the seven.

Email marketing platforms and you know, you.

Had the community built out of school and Facebook group is just better and it was easier. And just sometimes we just, we want to try different stuff in our business and that's cool, but it's really important to constantly be looking back and going, okay, like, what is the most simplified way to help our clients get a result? Doing an 80:20 and then most of the time that 80:20 is going to help you to actually become more profitable as well, because you're going to cut back on a lot of stuff that's taking time, you know, team effort, which is literally cost to your business, hourly rates, potentially cost of apps and things like that, which are going to drop down. Profit, like, it's. It's crazy how quickly it can all stack up.

Yeah. So we've basically taken. I think we got rid of about seven apps or programs or softwares in the last month, and it saved us high five figures a year. Okay, well, not high five figures, but five figures a year on app savings. And then in terms of hours and man hours, I think we're saving like five to ten hours a week. So if you extrapolate an hourly rate BY let's say five, that's 250 a week. Multiplied by 52 weeks, it's like 10 grand plus all the other stuff, which is huge savings.

I can't believe you can math that fast. Yeah, I want to quickly touch on, just to wrap that one up. Profit is king. Guys, there's a couple of things I really need you to think about with profitability is one, the way you measure cash flow is really important. So we see a lot of entrepreneurs that are like, oh, I made $1,000, $100,000 in sales today. It's like, okay, but how much cash did you actually collect today? Because, I mean, by that measure, Tim and I probably make like 200 million a day. Thousand dollars a month. Like more, maybe way more than. Yeah, more in projected.

Don't trust Steph's math.

Yeah, but like in projected sales. But it's like, okay, please do not measure your business in projected sales. It's not about the value. It's about how much actually hits your account. You should only be measuring cash flow on what is hitting your account. And every single month. Profit is not calculated by, you know, by amounts that you're getting in the future is calculated by what is actually hitting your account today. So when it comes to profitability, with profit being king, it first comes down to actually managing your cash flow correctly. Secondly, cutting out all the stuff that's overcomplicating and not simplifying your business and then finding an easier and faster way to help your clients get a result so that, you know, you don't spend as many hours working in and on the business and you'll get more profit really fast.

Yeah. Just another way to look at the cash hitting the bank account thing. If you went to the bank and asked for a bank loan and they were like, how much money do you make? And you said, Yeah, I made 270 grand last month. And they would just laugh you out of the building because you've actually only made 30. Yeah, because that's what's hit your account. What hits your account is how much money you've made, not these hypothetical theoretical sales maybe in Rupiah or Bart or however you want to measure that as well.

Yeah. Like it's not the full payment plan. So it's actually hit your account. So the third point that we're going to go through is hire. Like you sell now. We have actually just been going through this process quite a lot recently. We've been hiring a lot of a players for our business lately, which we are loving and so stoked about the new team members that are on our team. But a quality team will be your make or break. So we have seen it in every single business we've ever worked in and every single business that we've coached as well. A lot of the time a lot of people will drag a lot of dead wood through their business because they have some sort of loyalty. Like, you know, we hired them, they've always stuck with us. They're really nice. Like these are not the reasons to keep employees in your business. You need to have a players in your business and so to get the best, you have to be the best. And I'm going to throw to Tim because we have just recently hired three incredible a players in our business in the last couple of weeks and Tim has gone on a huge recruitment hunt and has just tracked down the most killer employees and I'm super pumped. So talk us through that.

Yeah, it's been actually super strange this round of hiring of. Yeah, literally hired three people in two weeks. Last one was today. And it's been easy and it's the first time it's ever been easy for us. And I've just been like I. I was driving before and I was. I was imagining myself in a Lamborghini with Mundog in the passenger seat. But I was also wondering like why the. Has it been easier this time to hire people and high quality people as well like a players. And I just think because you've just been in the industry or the industries that we're in a lot longer, therefore you have a better brand rep, therefore you know what you're doing. Therefore it signifies trust and safety to the potential employee which is key. One of the ways we do that. And I always in any Hire. I always present the vision. Okay, and that sounds really airy fairy, like vision. What is he talking about here? But people want to work for people or they want to be involved in projects that have a vision. Okay, so in success school, we want to help 600 entrepreneurs in a range of niches over the next couple of years. That's just one of like the small part of the vision. What we have for success school and where we're going in the future, there is a detailed vision. I'm gonna bore you guys, I'm not gonna bore you guys on this podcast on what that actually looks like. But firstly, we always start out with the vision and what that looks like and how they are going to be involved in it. Okay. No one wants to go and work in a dead end position or a dead end job. So it's how they can evolve in that position with that mission as well. So a couple of keys here, guys. If you really just taken what I'm saying down is you don't just want to hire someone to be like, cool, I'll give you 30 bucks an hour, let's go. You know, like, there's nothing inspiring about that. People want to be inspired.

Yeah. Like, again, when it comes, like, hire, like you sell, it really needs to come down to the fact that your company has to be company they want to work for. Like we are. We're living in an economy right now where the unemployment rate is the lowest it's ever been. So that means that, you know, there aren't a lot of incredible people on the market yet. People are looking around, but there's not plenty of people sitting around unemployed right now. So to, to attract the best candidates, you really do have to make sure that you, you have a sell in there. Like, everything is a sell, but this especially is a sell. Like, why your company? Why are you the fricking best? Do you have a mission that they can get behind? Like, Tim has a mission in Helix to change, you know, 10,000 lives and help a certain amount of people and get fit and get strong. And really his biggest mission is to change the way that our society views movement, health and fitness. And so in success school, you know, we have a huge mission to help build, you know, 10,000 entrepreneurs at the seven figure mark. And so we, we have these huge, big goals that people want to get behind and they want to be a part of a mission or a movement like that. On top of the fact that, you know, then the rest of the stuff which Tim's going to go through, which Is like, how do you make it sexy? How do you add incentives in all those sorts of things? But the first thing is like, be a company they want to work for.

Secondly is how they are going to fit in and where they fit in in the organizational structure, who they are reporting to. Just make everything very clear at the start of like what their role will be, what the expectations are, what their tasks are going to be like. The previous point, guys, is people want to go into a position and they want to know what is expected of them, what they have to do and how they're going to meet the standard. Okay. It really sucks going into a position where these things aren't clearly articulated. It's okay if you're working it out. We speak to more of a small business under seven figures, but the more concrete you can get on this, the better it's going to be for your chances to land the prospect. So we had our new coach that joined the gym, Peter. He had something like five job offers in a three day period. Okay. So you know these things, these are the types of things I'm telling you that can go a long way to landing an in demand prospect. Like, Peter was. Okay, but you know, we got the deal done in the end.

Can you talk us through? I'd love to expand on the, on the Peter situation, if you don't mind, because I think this is a really cool. I think he did it really beautifully. And Peter, if you're listening, I hope you don't mind that we wooed you, but because he had also an offer from a FIFO job and you know, it's definitely not as sexy, but in terms of finances, it's very sexy. Like, you know, it's more than what we could offer in a Helix gym. And so how did you, how do you take someone away from, like he's had, you know, incredible opportunities. What did you do? How did you make it so awesome for him? How did you display the company? How did you display yourself? How did you put your best foot forward? How did that go down?

Yeah, so always when you're interviewing a prospect, you want to find out what their vision is, their personal vision. Okay, Now I've said vision heaps in this podcast, but what do they want for the next year? Two years, Three years? Five years? Ten years? Okay. And that's debate. Okay. So that's what you use to craft your offer. So Peter said to me that he wanted to have his own online training company. And I said, brilliant. I'm a business coach. That's what I do. That's literally my bread and butter. I will help you do that, which I do. Any of our staff members in any of our companies that. That come in and they want anything, Steph and I will go above and beyond to help them. Okay. So I knew that he wanted to build his own online thing, and I was like, sweet, I'm a business coach. I'll help you do that. So, you know, part of the incentive structure is I wrapped in success school, I wrapped in mentoring, and I wrapped in a few other things, which we'll go into in a minute. So the vision and then both of our paths were clearly aligned. Okay. So he wanted to be online. I'm an online coach, you know, Brilliant.

Tim also took him out for a really, like, beautiful interview. And I think that, you know, if you can interview in person, that's always really important. And obviously Peter, like, is at our gym, so it's an in person interview. This is not always possible if you're interviewing online, but especially if you're interviewing in person. Tim Wyndham died. Him. Took him out to a fancy Japanese date. They had a. A bit of a sake together. They, you know, sat down and had some. Some sushi. And. And it was. It was really nice. It was really beautiful. It wasn't just like, it was. It was fancy. Like, it was. It was really nice. And I think it just goes to show that, like, we're already invested in you and we are already fully committed to giving you an incredible experience, not just in the business, but in our world as well. And we have really high standards and we want to show that. So there's so, like, it's so much of. It's like a first date. So much of it's like a sell. Like, you want to put your best foot forward. You want to show them what you're about. I think so many people are just so lax on that stuff. Like, they just go, oh, like, I need this person. Can you start Monday? Here's the rate, you know, and they think that maybe by offering a competitive rate that they're going to just land the client. And there's so much more to it than that.

The third point here, guys, is you need to pay the best, okay? Especially when, you know, Peter had so many opportunities and offers. Our rate is very competitive, so we pay double the market rate. Okay. And I know that's not possible for a lot of industries, but Steph and I have both seen the back end of a lot of businesses that do not pay their employees well, and they have a very hard time with retention, okay? And they have a high churn rate. The worst possible thing you can do for your business is have a high churn rate of staff, okay? Because that is felt throughout the service.

It actually costs you more, honestly, like, it costs you so much money. You know, I've worked with clients who. Who were paying, you know, basically minimum wage for their. For their staff, which is, you know, that's. We understand that that's how it could seem like that's what you pay. However, when you have a huge turnover of staff, what happens is when those staff members leave, sometimes clients are attached to them. That means clients are unhappy and disgruntled. That means sometimes clients leave. Plus you have to step back in, which means you're losing an opportunity cost. Because now you can't work on growing the business because you have to step back into the business. Then you have to. Look. It's the cost of hiring. It's the cost of, you know, training. Like, that's weeks of your time. That's weeks of someone's time that needs to be paid to train this person. That's all a cost. Guys, we have. We're incredibly proud of our retention rate for our team members. They stay. They just stay. They stay and stay until they get five years, unless we let them go or unless, like, really big, perhaps to them personally, but they stay, like, years and years and years. So, you know, and we pride ourselves on that. That's why we pay higher than pretty much everybody else is, because we want them to stay. We want them to know they're valued. We want them to know that, you know, there is a job here and it's really safe and it's a heck yes for them.

And lastly, guys, we find out what they want, and then we cater the incentives to that. So for Peter's example, he just moved over from Ireland, so he didn't have a car. And he lives in the CBD. My gym's about 20 minutes drive. So Steph and I actually offered to buy him a car. Okay, this. Which we would have in the company, and he would be able to use it as long as he worked for us. But we actually went one step further, and we were selling our Tesla, and then it wasn't selling, so we just let him drive our $100,000 Tesla, which is pretty fucking cool in terms of an incentive for someone that's coming into a, you know, head coach position at a gym. On top of that, access to success, school mentoring, you know, lunches, that type of stuff. As well. So we really, it was more of like a full package thing. So we've got the vision, we've got the payment, we've got the incentives, we've got helping him grow his online business and then you end up attracting a players like that.

Yeah. And I think the final hack that I will share with you guys is just they're going to, they're going to check you out and so, you know, if someone's looking at potentially working with you, they're going to go to your website, they're going to go to your social media, they got to look at who your husband is. If you tag them, they're going to look around, make sure they like what they see. Are you putting your best foot forward? I cannot stress this enough, and we've spoken about this on a lot of podcasts recently, but you absolutely have to be a living, breathing, walking, talking example of your brand. Okay? So if you are, if you sell high ticket and you're. Your brand is all fancy, it's like black and it's gold and it's dripping with luxury, that's how you need to be presenting, Right? If you are, you know, fun and vibrant and your brand is all bright colors and funky writing and cool like, esthetic, then that's how you need to present. You need to be a living, walking, talking example of your brand. Okay? And where people create, where distrust is created in businesses is because people aren't actually in alignment or in authenticity with their brand and with the way that their brand is displayed. Like Tim and I, the biggest compliment that we get is when people meet us in real life. They're like, you're exactly like you are online. Like, yeah, 100%.

Just wear more.

Yeah, we do swear more in real life all day long. We are like, we are, you know, exactly who we present as online. We are living book. We. We, our brand values are time, freedom, financial freedom. Like, we live and breathe this stuff, you know, so it's just so important that if you really want to attract the best people, just make sure that you come across as the kind of person that they want to work for.

Yeah, let's just talk about swearing one and authenticity. So we actually had a mentor of ours and he reviewed our content. Really? Like, you know what I call him? Like famous.

Yeah, he's famous. And he's famous for content, like his thing.

And he reviewed our content and he said, you guys need to stop swearing because it turns people off. And I was kind of in my head, I was like that, like straight Away like swearing in my head and then I like seven I kind of discuss it and I thought it would be inauthentic to myself and to my brand to not display what I'm actually like in person online.

Yeah, I would hate for someone to join one of our programs or any of our courses and to think that you know, where these prim, proper, very PC people when actually we're just, we're ourselves. And when we get into our client, you know, when we get into working with our clients, into our client space, we are, we are so in flow in those moments that we're completely ourselves. And so because of that swear words are going to slip. We're going to say stuff that's not always politically correct, it's not always going to be perfect, it's not always going to be polished. And I don't want to display that online because that's going to break massive rapport when somebody comes into our program. And also I really think that being you, like this has been said a long time, but being you is like so powerful. And I've been watching that with like the guy that does evidence based training, what's his name?

Ebt Adam Sullivan.

If you haven't gone and followed ebt, the dude literally says the C word. The C word that no one says. He says it all day long, like in every, every email, every post, everything. And I'm like, bro, if this dude's got a multi million dollar business selling T shirts with the C word on it, we're not saying it. C word on it. That is like that is just case in point that you can 100% do whatever the heck you want to do online.

All right, let's get into listener questions. First one from Kara Stokes. So she says I'm planning my first launch of my membership for my second business. What's the number one thing to focus on during a launch? I'll let you answer this one, Steph.

I honestly think energy, energy is the number one thing to focus on during a launch because I have seen people with absolutely zero launch plan with, with even like really crappy landing pages. I've seen people that have had absolutely no social media content prepped and there's wing it every single day that have shown up. And because they are so friggin passionate and so in the deep belief system that their content and their stuff is needed, they sell out like 70, 80,000, $90,000 worth of launch like stuff that I'm watching and I'm like man, like I can see why people are buying because they're buying into the passion, they're buying into the emotion. Like anyone who believes in their thing so deeply, other people are going to start being like, oh, maybe she's right, maybe there's something there. Maybe there's something I need to look at. If you go into a launch and you are only trying to make money, if you go into a launch and you're like getting to any kind of scarcity at all, it is going to absolutely kill the vibe and the energy of your launch, which sounds so woo woo. But I'm telling you, it is a top down approach. If you don't show up in the energy of believing 110% that this thing is the best thing that ever hit the market, you are so fucking lucky to have access to it. You are so incredibly crazy. If you don't buy it, if you don't go in with that level of energy, people are going to feel your hesitation and they're going to hesitate. Okay? So the number one thing for me is energy belief system, like going all in, 100% conviction that what you have is it what's yours.

Yeah. So I'm just a little concerned. I'm planning my first launch for my second business. That's where I'm a little bit concerned. Because your energy is going to be not as strong as it would be if it was your main thing. Okay. So it's kind of like a side chick. You give the side chick a little bit less energy which is not good for the main chick. Okay. Or the main ho.

So because we, we preach master one.

Yeah.

And so when you have a second business, like I hope Kara, that everything in your first business is sorted and that someone's rolling it and someone's working it and it's all good and you don't have to worry about it and it's all like kicking go and you know it's all running without you because if it's not. Yeah. That's when it can be a little bit, it can be a little bit tricky for sure.

My only other piece of advice here, Cara, is make sure the offer is hot. Okay. So I've seen really bad marketing plans executed with a really good offer and they've crushed again. I've seen really bad offers executed really well with a marketing plan and they've flopped. So the offer for the thing has to be really good, like so hard that it sells itself.

Yeah. When we launched Success School, our membership, our like founding members offer was like so insane.

It was ridiculous.

So insane. That people will literally message me and were like, you made an offer that was so good that I just, like, I had no choice but to sign up. Like, this is so crazy. So if you. Especially for a launch, especially for a founding offer, like, just go ham. Like, just get people into it, get that momentum for yourself. If you go with the wrong offer, you don't get any sales. It's really hard to get that momentum back. The next question is from I. She said, how do you handle troublesome students? Do you have any? And what did you do?

Yeah. So knowing a little bit of background on you, I. I would say that you're probably not the type of person that likes conflict. Therefore, there may have been niggling things that have been coming up that you've ignored, like warning signs, which has now escalated to a troublesome student situation. So in any of our programs, any of our businesses, any of our client interactions, Steph and I don't let stuff go, okay? So if something comes up, we usually address it pretty quickly and we stamp that shit out, okay? And that stops these type of situations coming up. So I hope that just that little intro that I gave you there answers your question, that we stamp out these things and we say that it's not acceptable with whatever behavior you're doing. Therefore, they will either say, no worries, I understand, or they'll, you know, tell you, get lost. Either of those is fine, because there is a story of one bad apple, okay? So one bad apple can poison an apple cart, okay? And that happens in business coaching programs, education, whatever it is. If you have shitty clients or people that are complainers or whingers or Karen's or whatever it is, it's going to poison the rest of the apples or the rest of the students or whatever it is. So, you know, my theory or my understanding on this is you want to nip that in the bud straight away, I would give her a warning. I would say, this behavior needs to change. Otherwise I'm going to have to remove you from the program for the. The good of the program.

Steph, I have definitely had this. I've had this for the exact reason that Tim has explained. You know, when I wasn't probably as assertive as I am now, I did used to let stuff slide because I was playing nice girl and I was playing the good girl, and I wanted everyone to like me. And so I was. You know, if someone was playing up, I'd be like, oh, you know, I just. I don't want to. I don't want to lose A client, you know, I don't want to. I don't want to upset her. So I'm just going to let that go. But by letting it go, what I actually allowed was for other people's experience to be impacted because of this one. This one bad apple. And so it's not just you. And, like, you know, we've had clients in my last program where my coaches will come to me, and they'd literally be like, steph, you need to find this client. Like, it is so bad, you know, and. And I've been like, oh, gosh, it's not just my coaches who are being impacted. It's the clients that were on the group calls with her. Was the questions that she was asking in the group, the time that she was taking up on the group calls. Like, it is troublesome. It's really troublesome in your business. And so my advice to you, now that you're in the situation that you're in, maybe you haven't nipped in the bud early enough. My advice to you now is to maybe just, like, make a list of all the things that haven't been right and go back to her and say, these are all things that, like, honestly are not in. In alignment or not in, you know, in accordance with the standards that we hold. These things, like Tim said, need to change. Otherwise, I actually just don't think this is the right program for you. And then at that point, you get to make a choice about whether or not you want to offer her a partial refund, a full refund, no refund at all, whatever, but let her out. Like, give her an out. And usually what you'll find is they'll either pull straight into line and be like, you're right, I'm so sorry, I'm going to do better. Or they'll be like, you know what? I do want out. Thank you very much. See you later. And then you get rid of them. So either way, the problem is solved, but you have to take action on it.

All right, guys, if you got some value from this show, I'm only going to ask you for one thing, and that is to subscribe and follow the show, okay? That is the number one metric that we track in success school. So if you're loving it, if you're a raving fan or even you just got a little bit of value from it, please follow the show on Spotify or Apple or whatever platform you're listening to. If you're on YouTube. Hello, we love you, 57 subscribers. Let's go. I remember when we were at 12. That's incredible.

I do want to also say if you want a free website order via Tim and you want a free social media audit via me, there are eight spots on the link below on this podcast for you to apply for Successful and get one of those added in as a bonus for free. We would love to see your application form come through, guys. Have a great rest of your day and we'll see you next week.