I sold $21M of online courses only to learn this

Hey, guys, it's Will. And in this video, I want to share with you the one thing that I Learned from selling $21 million worth of online courses over the last roughly seven years.

Now, I've spoken a lot on this channel about selling online education.

And I've touched on niches a little bit and pricing a little bit and offers and all of the components. But I honestly think this is going to be one of the most valuable videos that I've ever made. Just because in this video, I'm going to focus on the one main big thing that you need to know and that I've learned. It took me many, many years to really understand this.

And that is the following.

Business is just solving problems. And in return for solving a problem, you exchange value for money. And the bigger problem that you solve, the faster and easier it is to make money and the more money you can make as well.

Now, let's dive deep into this. The reason that I want to dive into this is because I can see a lot of people getting inspired by my content and then going into the wrong niche or making the wrong offer, or making an offer that's good, but making it to the wrong people. Okay.

Now let me share an example, and I'm going to keep this broad because I don't want to.

Share the person's details that I'm about to talk about. But I had a client that joined me about a year and a half ago, and he was with me for three or four months, and he came to me with no offer, no website, no funnel, no program, no pricing, nothing. Just a good idea for an online education program.

And the thing that he had done himself and the thing that he was. Well, the thing that he wanted to teach other people to do was to essentially.

Get jobs.

Stay at home.

And hire someone else to do those jobs, and then keep about 30, 40% of the fee, but not do the work. And he called it drop servicing. Now, let me give you an example. So he would, let's say, get a job cleaning the windows of a supermarket or a mall or an office building.

And then he would from home, call around, get that job, get the job priced. And then he would, when that was done, he'd hire someone to go and do the work. And let's say that it was a $5,000 job. He would keep, say, two, he would pay them three, and do none of the work and just stay at home. And that is what, what he would call drop servicing. So similar to drop shipping, where you find a product you sell it to someone, you don't do the fulfillment and you can do it from anywhere in the world and you keep a margin. He would do that with services. Now that is a good offer in my opinion, and a lot of people would want to do that, but it's not broad.

So what I mean by broad is an offer that you could truly sell to anyone and that focuses more on the key things that most humans want. Now we don't like to admit that this is what we want, but humans, if it was possible, would want to make the most amount of money with the least amount of effort and work and time. If it was possible to just press a button and make money without doing any work, without traveling, without speaking to other humans, without leaving home, that would be the best offer on planet Earth ever. And that would make hundreds of millions of dollars. But obviously that is not possible. There is no magic button out there that you can learn to press and just make money without doing anything right. And really, when you're building an offer, you've got to think how many people, well, you've got to think of a few things, but you've got to think of what niche does this fit within. How many people are going to be drawn in by the marketing and sales efforts?

How many people are actually going to want to commit to this offer when they find out what is required? What can I therefore price it at? How deep is the market? So what's the tam? The total addressable market tam? And on and on. Now coming back to this offer. This Guy joined me at 00 per month and I helped him build this whole offer and within about 1012 weeks he was at just above 50k per month. So I think the furthest that he scaled when he was a client of mine I think was 56,000amonth or thereabouts. 56, 57K per month and we got there in about 1012 weeks. So not bad. Not massive, but certainly not bad for a brand new offer from ground zero starting from nothing. Not bad. But I want to make a point, okay? I don't believe that that offer could be scaled past.

Maybe 150, 200 per month or thereabouts. Okay. I believe that guy is currently doing roughly the same. I, I think 50, 60k, maybe 70k area after about a year and a half. So pretty good from a standing start. Not bad. But I just got off a call with someone about two hours ago, one of my, my other clients. And his plan is to scale to a million a month.

Cash collected by the way. Now if you want to scale to a million a month, your offer has to be broad.

So this is the first thing that I want to share with you guys in this video. Just understand how much money do you want to make before you go and choose a niche. You choose a problem to solve, on and on. So just know how much money you want to make. Because if you want to make 10, 20, 30, 40k per month, you can pretty much do that in any niche. I mean, I've seen that done in so many. Every niche, every person that I've ever known or worked with, whatever the offer, you can do 30, 40, 50k a month, no problem with pretty much any offer. But if you want to scale to.

100, 200, 300k a month, half a million a month, 1 million a month, it's got to be a broad, ideally globally accessible offer that almost anybody can do. Now let me give you an example on the opposite end of the spectrum. So I know somebody who sells, and again, I won't name names, I won't name their program for privacy reasons because I've been told off for this already by another friend. But I know somebody that sells a program on how to outsource the production of audiobooks.

So completely, hands off, they're made for you.

Put those audiobooks on audible and make 2, 3, 4k per month. For everyday people, anyone can do this. Male, female.

16 years old, 25 years old, 40 years old, 60 years old, 90 years old. Pretty much anybody can do this. So that offer is truly global and it is truly broad and they have. Sorry, I say they, that person has scaled that offer to multiple millions per month on a global scale.

The reason that they've been able to do that is because the offer is so broad and it's so accessible. Not only that, whenever you're selling a program that is that broad, you can actually charge a little bit less because you can make a hundred times the sales, right? So I believe right now they either charge1995 or 1249 or something like that for that offer.

Whereas my other client, who I was just talking about, he wouldn't be making money, he wouldn't be profitable if he was charging 2k because of the cost of ads, because his offer is more niche. Now here's another thing that I want to share with you guys. The more niche your offer, the smaller the market, the smaller the pool of people that you can sell to, the higher your price has to be for unit economic sake. So if you're going to run paid Ads, paid ads cost a certain amount, right? And if you're running traffic into a broad market with a broad offer, you're going to make sales at a cheaper cost because more people are going to buy. Right? If you're running traffic into a smaller pool of people, less people are going to buy. Therefore, it's going to cost you more to make a sale. So your price has to be higher so that you can make a profit on that sale. So hopefully that makes sense. The bigger the pool of potential buyers, the lower it will cost you to make a sale. Right? And vice versa.

So coming back to my point, business is just problem solving.

What problem can you solve and for who?

And is it a broad problem or is it a more niche problem? Okay, now I've literally just got off a call a second ago with somebody who was inquiring about becoming a client and their offer is quite niche. It's not broad, it's not mass market. It's actually US only as well, because it's a US sports offer.

So they are going to have to charge more.

And it's going to be just a more unique, more direct offer where it's only going to be right for like one in a thousand people. But those one in a thousand people will love it, will need it, will pay. I mean, I think we're going to start at $8,000 for the offer. If we do work together, that is. And then we'll raise that to 10, and then we'll raise that to 12 because it's a very valuable offer, a very much needed offer.

So.

You get where I'm coming from. So my point is this. If you're gonna start or grow an online education company.

Pick your niche very carefully and pick the problem that you're going to solve very carefully. And just understand how small or how big is this niche and just get an understanding before you go into it of the impact that that is going to have on your deliverables, on your timeline, on your pricing, and on and on and how far you can scale. Because if you desire to make half a million a month, 1 million a month or beyond, your niche has to be suitable, the TAM has to be suitable, and vice versa. Now, one of these businesses is really as simple as four things. The niche, the problem, the solution, and the value.

That's it. You choose a niche, you choose a problem to solve, you build the solution, you create the value and you sell it in. And if you do those four things properly.

And get it right, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50k a month, is it's just going to come automatically. This is the thing. If you build one of these businesses properly.

The money will just come.

Like I had a client come to me a few days ago and he sent me a WhatsApp message.

And he said, will, you won't believe this. We've done like 42k in the last six weeks. And this was, they came to me honestly making about 3k a month with just a telegram and some little like 3,9 7amonth offer. And I turned it into a high ticket program, helped them build their ads and their sales process and sales script and price it properly. And then six, eight weeks later, they've gone from three a month to 43amonth and they just couldn't believe it. And I said to the guy.

It'S, it's not something to be surprised about. It's just, it's like when you take an action, you get a reaction. If you drink alcohol, you're going to be hungover. If you treat your partner with love and respect, you're going to build a great relationship. If you build a great business and build it properly, you're going to make money. It's just the outcome of taking the correct action.

Now I want to share two more things with you.

The more value that you add and the better that you solve the problem.

It creates a flywheel, right? And to give you an example of this, the first 15 or 20 or so business coaching clients that I ever got were all word of mouth. So my first client told a few people about me and the work that we did and the result that he got. And then I got another client off the back of that, that, that second client told a few people about me and the work that we did and how much I helped him. And I got another client off the back of that. And that's how it happened for me. For the first 15 or 20 clients that I have got, just word of mouth and it's really taught me something and it might sound simple, but when you really help people and you deliver a great outcome, they will sing your praises. Like they, I mean, I even had a client, someone messaged me yesterday, an older client and they were like, oh, Will, you're in Thailand, would you mind if I buy you dinner, please? I want to say thank you for all the money that you've made us and the help that you've given us. And that guy's already sent me another paying client that I'm actually working with right now and now he wants to like meet up and Buy me dinner and all this stuff. And it just reminded me that when you really help people, and especially when you make people a lot of money.

They will sing your praises, they will tell everybody how good you are, they'll recommend people, they'll sell people for you, they'll pre sell people for you, and they'll send people your calendar and book them in for a call.

And it's just awesome. And conversely, here's the thing, guys, what I teach you through this YouTube channel.

You can. I want you to use what I teach you carefully and with integrity. Because this stuff is so powerful. What, what I share with you on this channel, you can use it for good or you can use it for bad. Bad. You could go out there and make a shit offer a shit product. And as long as your sales and marketing is good and you're in a broad niche, you'll make money.

Now, karma will catch up with you and you'll get refunds, you'll get chargebacks, you'll get bad reviews, you'll get a bad reputation, and everything will grind to a halt. But you will make a lot of money because this stuff just works. Works. It just works.

And obviously you'd be stupid to do that. You can do it if you want, but you'd be stupid to do it on the other side of that. If you make a great offer, a great product, a great value proposition, you really help your clients, you give them great support, you genuinely love them and care for them and respect them and want them to do the best that is possible, and you get people great results.

It's going to make everything easier, faster, smoother. It's going to be just amazing. Positive word of mouth is the number one greatest fuel for any business, especially here in the online education world, because people talk.

And if you do, bad people are going to know pretty fast. And if you do, good people are going to know pretty fast. And that flywheel, whether it's a positive flywheel or a negative flywheel, it's going to start turning.

And one way to know which side you're on is, I think Alex Homozy once said, positive word of mouth is like a tailwind and it propels you forwards. Negative word of mouth is like a headwind and it pulls you backwards.

So if you are struggling to scale and you're struggling to get clients, you're struggling to make money, you're struggling to get this thing to work, something is wrong. And it is usually one of two things. Well, it's usually one of three things. Either you are Just rubbish at making.

Sales copy, marketing ads, sales process, sales script. You're just not good at one of the elements that's necessary, number one. Number two, your offer is just shit or you're in the wrong niche, or you're making the wrong offer to the niche, number two or number three, what you do is just not good. You don't come across as trustworthy.

You have bad reviews, people don't say good things about you, people don't recommend you. All of that stuff is a headwind. And on the other side of that, if you genuinely care.

You respect your clients, you really want them to do well. I think people can tell when that's the case. I think humans just have a inbuilt sense for when that's the case.

And if you really get your clients great results, you're going to get great word of mouth, you're going to get testimonials, you're going to get recommendations, and everything is going to be easier. And it's almost like you're just not going to believe how much money you make. I remember. Let me leave you with this. So one of my mentors once said to me, when you no longer need money, that is when you'll make the most money you've ever made in your life.

And I took two things from that. Number one, I took the more kind of factual meaning of it. I thought, right, if I can put myself in a position where I've got enough real estate, I've got enough passive income, I've got enough cash liquidity.

I don't need money anymore, I can just relax, I can just chill, I can just do things for fun and I don't care. And then anything that happens, I just consider it a bonus. And that's where I'm at right now. And it's a great thing. So that's number one. But number two, there was a deeper meaning that took a few months to settle in for me.

And that deeper meaning is when you just do what you do for fun and fulfillment and passion and love. I know it sounds a bit corny, a bit cheesy, a bit hippy ish, but when you just do what you're good at, what you love.

And you just fall in love with your craft, you come across in a different way. Your ads just sound more real and true and genuine. Your VSL or your webinar, you just can write it so easily. It just flows, it just clicks. Sales calls don't feel like sales calls. They just feel like you're just having A fun chat conversation. The other people on the other end resonate with that and they can feel that you're doing this for the right reasons. Now, I'm not saying that you need that to do an offer and make money. You don't. Like I said earlier, you can make a decent offer in a decent niche, and if your sales and marketing is good enough, you will make money. If you build things correctly, you can't help but make money. But if you want to go far and stay that, stay in the game and really get to some serious numbers, and my serious numbers, I mean a quarter of a million cash collected per month, half a million cash collected per month above, which is where I'm at right now.

You'Ve got to be in alignment. You've got to have a great program, a great offer, great client results, genuinely care, on and on, and things just.

Just, just work out. I really feel like in my last company, the one that I recently sold to a private equity firm in America, last year, last September, when that deal closed, that business, I loved it. You know, I loved what I did in that building. I loved the customers. I loved the team. I put so much time and effort and love into the product. It was a great business. But I tried very, very, very, very hard in that business. I worked super, super hard, and I wanted to build a massive, great business.

And I really cared about the business and the money and the growth that was the focus.

Now I just care about having fun and helping people. My mission statement for my new company is to make money, have fun and help people. That's the mission statement.

And I thought of that. One day I was walking around my apartment just thinking, like, why bother? Why don't I just stop and just turn everything off and stop working and chill? And I just thought, like, what do I want and why? And I literally just thought to myself, well, I want to make money to build more wealth. I want to have fun, so I enjoy my life and I want to help people. So I feel fulfilled. I was like, well, that's it. Make money, have fun and help people.

And I just felt like, wow, that's it. That's where I'm at right now.

And ever since I stumbled on that, making money has just been so simple and so fun and so easy and so fulfilling. And it's just easy because now I'm not focused on how far can we scale, how much money, how big is the team. Let's go, let's push, let's build, let's grow, let's be the biggest that we can possibly be now. It's like, do I love my clients? Do I enjoy the course? Are they getting great results? Are they loving it? Do they feel happy? Are they getting the outcome that they wanted to achieve?

You know, and it's just such a better energy. It really is just, just such a better, more fun, more fulfilling way to operate.

And I want that for you guys as well. So I just wanted to share that because that is, I would say that's like the number one thing that I've learned from the last seven years and the over 21 million US dollars that I've made now from what I've done in the last company and also in the consulting company that I own and operate now, which for those who don't know, is called Build, Grow and Exit.com. i help people these days just to do what, what I've done and what I do. So it's, that's it.

I hope that this inspires you to, I guess, just be a little bit more conscious about the niche that you choose, the problem that you choose to solve. Just be aware of the second and third order consequences.

Of that choice because.

It'S really a challenge to go backwards.

When you've made that decision.

And like I said a second ago, if you.

Are doing something that you really love and believe in and are passionate about, things are going to be a lot easier. It doesn't have to. You don't have to go that way.

You can.

What am I trying to say? There's so many skills and talents and passions and so much value that each single person can add.

But just be conscious of where it's going to lead you and what you want from the online education business or the coaching business that you build. Because if you're in a small niche, if you're in a broke niche, if you're in a.

Challenging niche, it's going to be much, much slower, much, much harder. And you're going to struggle more and there's going to be a cap on how far you can scale or if you're in a easier niche, a rich niche, a broader niche, it's going to be faster, it's going to be easier. And if you really love what you do, that is just going to pour fuel on the fire. You're going to work harder, you're going to work longer, you're going to have more passion for it, higher integrity.

More love for what you do and the clients that you work with. And making the ads is going to be more fun. Making the Vsl the sales process is going to be more fun, the sales calls are going to be more fun and on and on. So I just wanted to share that awareness with you guys because knowing this will give you an edge. You'll go further, you'll go faster, it'll be easier, it'll be smoother, and on and on. So I really hope that this helps. If you have any questions, just comment below the video and I'll get back to you and I'll lend a hand. If any of you do need more hands on help with this, I'd be happy to get in the trenches with you and help you with building or help you with growing. I'll put a link in the description. You can click that, watch the short video about who I can and can't help booking a call if you feel like it's a good fit and we can discuss me helping you and lending your hand so you can get there a bit faster and avoid all of the mistakes that I've made because it's just you just don't know what you don't know. I just didn't know this stuff until now and it took me seven years to get here. Granted, I made a lot of money along the way. I've made tens of millions of dollars along the way. So I've been paid to learn this stuff for sure. But.

Yeah, if you just take action on what I've shared with you in this video, you're gonna go further, you're gonna go farther, you're gonna get to your goals sooner in a just a better, faster, easier way. So hope it helps guys. Best of luck and I'll speak to you again soon.