Simply how to SCALE a coaching business

Hey guys, it's Will. And in this video I want to walk you through the stages step by step from 0 to 10k per month to 100k per month to half a million a month to 1 million a month and beyond. Okay, now you can see this written on the board all the way from traffic.

Right through to actually exiting your company. And if you're wondering, well, who are you to tell me how to make all this money and even exit your company? So for those that maybe don't know who I am, my name is William Brown. I used to own an e learning company. I grew it from 0 to $16.4 million over five years. I sold it last year to a private equity firm for multi seven figures. And I've helped hundreds of other people do this and build and grow and even exit their information, their knowledge, their coaching business over the years. Well, and the board that you're looking at here. So I held a one day mastermind here at my villa in Bali just yesterday for six entrepreneurs all in different places, some of them newer, some of them further ahead, already doing six figures per month as you can see here. So these were the problems that all of those people brought to me yesterday. You can see they're all crossed out because obviously we solved them all yesterday. And if you stay to the end of this video, I'm also going to share with you.

What you see over here as well. So offers for the front end, offers for the back end. This stuff makes me an extra 60, 70, 80,000amonth. And you can use it wherever you're at, whether you're making 0 per month, 10k per month, 50 per month, 100 per month or more. That is the stuff that is literally instantly going to make you an extra 50, 100, 250k in cash this year. So stay with me and I'll share that with you as a bonus at the end. Now again, the point of this video is because yesterday somebody asked me.

Where are the pitfalls, where are the bottlenecks, what things are going to go wrong as I start one of these businesses, as I progress through building and scaling one of these businesses, what are the pieces of the puzzle? And I've never seen a video like this before where someone has shared the exact steps, the exact pieces, the things that can go wrong. And I want to give it to you in this video. So first and foremost, let's just start by covering what these are together.

Now to to make anywhere from zero to about, I would say 50,000amonth. There's only really three things that you got to do. And it's these three things. Get traffic, book sales calls, close the sales calls. That's really all that you've got to do to make, I would say 50, 75, honestly, even 100k a month. Get traffic.

Hook that traffic for sales calls, close the sales calls at a high ticket price. That's literally all that you've got to do. Now, following on from there, what comes next? And we'll dive deep into this in a second, but for now, what comes next?

So when you're doing that and you're making, let's say 50k a month, 100k a month, or really anywhere from 0 to 100k a month, what comes after that? Well, when you're there, the next thing that you naturally want to do is you want to scale. You want to go further, you to want, want to grow bigger. And you're going to push on ads and you're going to push on organic in order to achieve that.

Now, as you do that and you scale, the next problem that you're going to run into is this.

Team hiring, training, ramping and managing two things, your cost per acquisition and your lifetime value. Because to scale, that's the only two things that are important. What's it costing you to make a sale? How much are you making from that sale? And there's two ways to pay. You can pay with your time by making organic content. And again, we'll go deeper on this in a second, or you can pay with your money by running paid ads. Those are the only two ways to get traffic. You either pay with your time, you pay with your money, or in an ideal world, you do off. And just to put this into context, so last month I made $337,000 cash collected, 85% organic, 15% paid ads with, I think it was 87.4% profit margin. So I personally made after tax something like, I think it was about $280,000. And that's what's possible when you do all of the stuff that I'm going to tell you in this video. So let's get back into the steps. So step one to three, traffic book calls, take sales calls. Step four, scale, Step five, team hiring, ramping training, building a hiring pipeline, so on and so forth.

After that you're going to be primarily focused on what's the cost per acquisition, what's the lifetime value.

And you're going to start to think about backend, if you haven't already. And again, I'll tell you what back end is in just a second, when we go deeper on these steps.

From there, it's going to be all about your infrastructure, right? Because by this stage you're going to be making 150, 250, 350, 500k a month area things are going to start to break. You've got team meetings happening all the time, you've got a hiring pipeline, you've got messes, fires to put out. So then you've got to start dialing in your infrastructure for the long term. And I know this well because in my last company we scaled to just above 800,000amonth and we had a very good infrastructure and infrastructure that was so solid that I was able to exit that company for millions of dollars to a private equity firm in America. And you can only do that if your infrastructure is dialed. And I'll tell you how to do that in just a second.

From there, there's just two more steps. So culture and values. And this is stuff that if you haven't already tackled this, you've got to tackle it now. And if you don't tackle it, you're God. I mean, your team are going to start leaving, you're gonna start to burn out and wonder what the hell you even doing with your life. I'm speaking from experience here because I've done all of this, I've made bloody tens of millions of dollars doing it. So I've faced every one of these problems head on and solved it thankfully. And then the final step, if you want to, is to exit your business. And I would highly, highly, highly, highly encourage you to do that because not only is it an amazing feeling, but also you can get a hell of a lot of cash in one go, which is great for building wealth, which is great for going and doing your next thing. You can roll that cash into real estate, you can buy your dream home, which is one thing that I did when I sold. And it's just a great way to bookend the business venture and have something representative of all of the time and the hard work that you've put in. Because if you get to the exit stage, you've probably spent 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 years in the trenches doing all of this stuff to get, get there. So you should exit, basically. And if you do all of those things, you're gonna make a hell of a lot of money, you're gonna have a hell of a lot of fun, you're gonna build something great and you're gonna hopefully exit it and have a lot of Money at the end of it as well. Now, next.

Let'S actually break down each component so that wherever you are, you can understand your next step and also the next problem as well.

So to rewind, I imagine that a lot of you are probably new, right? And you're either making 0 or 3 or 7 or 10 or 15k a month, something very, very small. And if you are, then really all you need to do the following.

Do this.

Get traffic, get eyeballs, get people to see you, hear you, follow you, subscribe to you, pay attention to you, watch your YouTube videos, watch your Instagram reels, look at your tweets. Hopefully not come to your house. That's a bit too far. But you just got to get traffic, You've got to get eyeballs, you've got to get attention, right? Because without that, well, you're never going to get anywhere. Right now, again, there's two ways to get traffic. You can either pay with your time, make YouTube videos like this, make Instagram reels, do Instagram stories, do social media in general. That's route number one. And route number two is to pay with your money instead. So run YouTube ads, which for most people is the best way to go. Run Facebook ads, Instagram ads, TikTok ads, LinkedIn ads, whatever is relevant to you. And just to go kind of one layer deeper here, what I would ask you is where is your ideal customer the most likely to be hanging out and spending time? Right, so that's the first question you've got to ask when it comes to, well, what platform should I produce content for? Or what platforms? So where are your ideal customers most likely to be?

And also what platform kind of fits what you're doing? So if you're running like a VSL funnel and you're running ads to a VSL video to a sales call. Well, people on Facebook don't really go on Facebook to watch videos or learn. They go on Facebook to talk, to read, to see what their grandma and granddad are up to on holiday in Spain, see one of their channels. Childhood friends buying their dream car and fucking hate them for it and be jealous, whatever. I'm not speaking from experience there, by the way, but seriously, people go on Facebook, they don't go there to watch videos and learn YouTube. However, people go on there to watch videos, to learn, to be educated, to be entertained. So it makes sense to run ads on there, into a video to entertain them and to educate them.

So this is a bit too deep for this video, but where is your ideal customer? What platform Are they most likely to be on and what's your funnel type? Right, because if you're running a VSL funnel, you're probably going to go to YouTube first. If you're running a book funnel or a written sales page funnel, well, you're probably going to go to Instagram and Facebook first for those varying reasons. Right? But nonetheless, step number one is you need to get traffic and get attention.

Now, when you've got that, and let's say you start a YouTube channel, you start making videos, you start getting some views and subscribers, well, then you've got to send that traffic, send that attention and get them to book in sales calls with you.

When you get sales calls, your only job is to learn to close those sales calls and basically turn the attention into money and then create customers, look after the customers, add value for them, and just provide a value exchange. You take their money, you give them your value, and you should both be happy when you've done that. Right?

So let's just say you've got traffic. How do you book sales calls? Right. Well, I would suggest.

You can either put your calendar link in your Instagram bio, in your description of your YouTube videos in the pinned comments, or you can even comment it to people that comment on your videos to go one step further. Or you can do what I do. So I've got a specific page that I send people to. It's the Work with me page of my website and there's an explainer video. They can book in a call and then they speak to one of my two coaches and they can buy one of my programs, they can attend one of my masterminds, like all of these guys did here in Bali yesterday, and they can basically give me money and I give them value. Right. Another way to book sales calls is to, let's say you've got an Instagram. Well, you can message all of your followers, or as people follow you, you can just message them, talk to them. I don't do this myself because you've got to kind of align it with your brand, and that's a bit of a conversation in itself, but you can do that. You can message your followers and you can also run what's called a retargeting ad. So you can run, let's say, an ad on YouTube that only shows to your viewers and your subscribers. Right? So only people who are engaging with you, they're watching your videos, they're subscribed to your channel, and you can literally say to them, hey, if you're seeing this ad, Then that means that you've been watching my YouTube videos. Maybe you're a subscriber to my channel and you probably therefore are interested in this, or you have this problem or you're looking for this solution or what, Whatever. If that's the case, click this ad and I've put together. Or you can even send them straight to your calendar. Go ahead and book in a free discovery call with me, or go and watch and explain a video that explains how I can even help you. Or vice versa. And basically send them to book a call, right? So you can run the targeting ads. You can put your link to that page in your video description s opinion comment. You can comment it to people. You can chat with people on Instagram or Twitter or whatever. Basically just take that traffic and do whatever you have to do. Whatever you can do to get that traffic. On a sales call with you.

Through talking about the problem that you solve, the value that you can add, the knowledge that you can instill. So what are you going to be doing here? You're going to be creating valuable content that attracts the people that you want to help and can help. And then you're getting that traffic on a sales call. You're conducting a sales call. And I can't go into how to do that in this video because it's just, I mean, I'll be here for an hour talking about discovery, transitioning, pitching, closing. Objection. Handling, flow, pace, tonality, on and on and on. Conducting a sales call.

Successfully conducting a call, following a script. How do you build a script? How do you read a script? On and on. Too much for this video. Comment below. If you'd like me to make a video like that for the future, and I will, but nonetheless, you're going to take the call and you're going to close the call. Now, as a CEO, as a founder, the average close rate that I see is about 32%, right? And that is the face of the brand. You, the person that's in the content that you're making.

And also you're at least decent at sales. And the people that you're speaking to have the pain. They have the problem that you solve. And if all of that is in alignment, you should be closing about 32 out of 100 sales calls. And if you're closing at, let's say, $2,000 for your program, for your course, for your workshop, whatever it is, then that's $64,000. You should really be charging a bit more than 2K. But again, pricing. I've already made a Video on pricing, that's here on the channel. You can go and watch that later on after this one. Boom, you're in business. You've made your first 30, 50, 70, $100,000 when you've taken 100 calls and you're off to the races. Now, if you're closing anywhere below 32%, there is a problem. So it might be closing ability, it might be your price is too high or actually too low. Sometimes too low of a price will put people off, put the right people off. Not a lot of people know that, by the way, if your price is too low, that can actually put people off and stop you closing.

So if you're not closing either, your price is wrong, you were shit at sales, your script is not good enough. You're speaking to people who don't have the pain and the problem. They're not looking for a solution. You're attracting the wrong people through your traffic and on and on and on, right? So that is the first place.

That'S the first place where I see people struggle. But when you overcome that, you're going to be making 20, 50, 100k a month. You only need to do those three things. Get traffic, book calls, close calls to make 100k a month, 150.

Now when you're there, you're going to scale, you're going to start making more content, better content. One thing that you're going to do here is. So one thing that I do is I have a tracking system whereby if someone watches one of my YouTube videos and books a call, I know what video they came from. Now what that allows me to do is I can understand, right, what content do I make that books me sales calls and gets me clients? What content do I make that doesn't get me sales calls and doesn't get any clients? And then I can stop making the bad content and make more of the good content, right? So that's an optimization that you can make when you're at the third stage, going into the fourth stage. So then you can make more, better content. You can book more calls, you can close more calls. You can also start running retargeting ads if you're not. You can start running cold traffic ads if you're not, which is basically running ads to people who have no idea who you are. And that's how you transition into that fourth stage. So scaling ads, organic, doing more, doing it better, raising your price and pushing forward.

To the fifth stage. Now, most people actually stop here, in my experience, when they get to the team You've got to have a hiring pipeline, you've got to be interviewing, you've got to be training, you've got to be ramping, you've got to be doing meetings. And for some people that's a bit too much. They don't want to do that. And a lot of people just stop here at 1,150,200k a month and just have a cash flow business, make good money and enjoy their life. A lot of people stop at this stage. You do still need a team if you're going to get to those heights, but it doesn't have to be a big team. So for example, like I mentioned earlier, I'm making around 320 to 360,000amonth cash collected right now, US dollars. And it's me, two coaches and a virtual assistant. So very, very simple, very lean team, very high profit margin. And I don't really want to scale any further. I'm going to scale my ads a little bit further, but there's just no need. I want to keep it simple, I want to keep it fun, I want to keep it lean, I want to keep the profit margin as high as I can physically keep it. So I guess really you could say that I'm in this camp whereby.

I'm actually pretty much stopping at this stage now. Now, I do have.

A very firm eye on cost per acquisition, lifetime value, my back end. I'm going to actually walk you through my back end at the end of this video as well.

But largely I am somewhat pausing here. I also have a very good culture, very good values, a very good mission that I'm on, so on and so forth. I can tell you about that in a second.

But if you do now want to scale further and you want to go to the next level, you've got to focus on these two things. What is it costing you to get a customer and how much do you make from that customer? Now, the more that you make, the higher the price. Recurring pricing, selling more things on the back end, the further you can scale. Why is that? It's because, well, number one, you can't control organic, you can't control eyeballs, you can only control ad spend, right? So you need to run ads to have a predictable, systematic client acquisition machine. There's no other way because you can't scale organic, you can do more. But doing more doesn't essentially mean more traffic. You can make double the videos, you may not double the views, you may not double the calls. So to scale you have to run paid ads. That's just a fact. Unless you're the master of viral content, you and you can somehow, you know, you're just excellent at content and you get loads of views very consistently. Even then it's going to come to an end at some stage. But even then you've got to run paid ads to scale far and scale with predictability and build a systematic client acquisition machine.

And to do that you've got to manage your cost per sale, cost per acquisition, and you've got to manage your lifetime value as well. Now as you spend more on ads, your cost per sale goes up over time and again, that's just the nature of paid traffic. So the more you spend, the more it costs you to book sales calls, to close sales calls and make sales. So how do you combat that? You can raise your price, you can have recurring pricing like I do myself. So all of my three offers, group coaching, one to one coaching done for you, they're all recurring and people just come in, they stay as long as they like and then they leave, which is fine by me, that's what I would want. So I treat people how I would want to be treated and that works very, very well. Because when you give clients your role, when you get them amazing results and outcomes, when you over deliver, they keep paying you. And I can say this, this sounds a bit arrogant, but just knowing pretty much everybody in this industry, I've got one of, if not the highest LTVs in this entire online coaching space because it's not uncommon for a customer to join my coaching program, pay me 20, 30, 40, $50,000, then buy my mastermind and, or attend a workshop and, or buy more one to one calls with me and, or do a day with me and all these other back end things. So I've got customers that have given me $90,000, $110,000 and pretty much no one else in this coaching space has an LTV that high. Which means that I can scale very far if I want to because I can pay 10 grand for a customer, no problem. I can pay 20 grand for a customer. Not all customers of course, but I can go to those lengths. And when you can do that, you can just buy up all the traffic, buy up all the customers and scale as far as you want. So that's why your LTV is so important. And sometimes it can even. The point is to completely solve the customer acquisition cost, right? Because again, the more you spend on ads, the more it costs you to buy sales calls and close sales calls. So you need to make as much money from them as physically possible. And when you can do that, you can scale really far.

And then as you scale you run into the infrastructure problem. So now you've got, you know, I used to have 16 members of staff to manage, to look after, to talk to, to train, to track and it is hard and it's stressful and it's challenging and anyone with a big team.

Will, will tell you that it's not easy. So do you want to fight that battle? And if you want to scale far, you have to fight that battle. Now for me, I don't want to fight that battle. I fought it in the past and it was really stressful and I don't want to fight that battle again because it's just for me, it's just not worth for me making the money I make now, quarter of a million a month profit after tax, simple lean, very low stress. I get to just mess around and make these videos for fun. I don't want to increase my stress for more money at this stage. I did back then, I don't now. So do you want to fight that battle in return for the payoffs? So that's one thing you've got to think about here. Some people when they get here, they scale backwards and scale down and some people, masochists usually keep going and scale further. So whatever you want to do right.

Now, the next two things to conquer, culture, values, team holidays.

Rewarding your team, having a mission that you're on, that's really the glue behind a great long term company. Right now you don't need that to make 100k a month.

150Amonth, 200amonth, you don't need that at all. But if you want to go far, if you want your customers, your team to love you, to respect you at this stage, you're focusing on brand, you're focusing on long term vision, you're focusing on somewhat preparing for exit as well. And you're just cleaning everything up basically. And you've got a mission statement, you've got very clear values, your team are very bought in, your customers are very bought in and you're just really just checking on your foundation, making sure your foundation is as solid as physically possible and then when it is.

You can then jump to the final step and exit your company if you want to, right? And by this stage you're going to be making got 2, 3, 4, 500k a month, a million a month in revenue. Whatever your profit is, whatever your profit margin is, here's one, one Other thing I want to mention. So the further you scale, the more infrastructure that you need. You pay for that infrastructure with your profit margin, right? So if you value profit margin, you really can't scale as far. Now, there are things that you can do here. For example, Sam Ovens once sacrificed profit margin to scale to like, I think it was like 34 million a year. But I remember Sam telling me when, when I was in his mastermind telling us all that his profit margin was like 8%. So he made 32 million, but he only kept about 8%. So maybe maybe two and a half million. So he made 32 and kept two and a half and pretty much gave away 30 million to scale. And then later he kind of went backwards, capitalized on the traffic and on the brand and on the recognition and everything that he built and went in the complete opposite direction, scaled everything back, actually. I think he turned ads off or almost off, raised his pricing, leaned everything out and took the profit margin right back up. Now that's a bit of a game that you've got to keep playing because eventually the traffic slowly burns out and you've kind of got to go again. Or you can do something like I do now, where it's mostly organic, a little bit of ads, just to push on scale and keep you growing. And for me, that's like the ideal balance.

In my opinion, where you can keep your Profit margin above 80%, 85% even, and still do a couple hundred thousand a month. A few hundred thousand a month cash collected. Right now, what we've just covered there is the end to end, from 0 to really 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 million, especially if you count the money that you exit for. So again, when I exited last year, I'd made 16.4 million from the company, and then I made a few million more from the exit as well. So when you get to there.

You'Ve done pretty well. And you should have millions in real estate, millions in cash, at least a decent investment portfolio and you're set for life, basically. Now, I made a video a few weeks ago about how entrepreneurs waste their money, don't invest their money, buy stupid stuff. And again, you can go and watch that later. I won't get into that in this video. The final thing that I want to share.

Is this.

Offers for the front end and for the back end. I'm just going to move the board so you can see it a bit more clearly.

Coffee is almost cold, so I'll just move this a little bit.

All right, now there's a Few things that I wrote on this list and I'll share them with you in a sec. But this stuff makes me an extra, depending on the month. God, an extra 20 to 150,000 cash collected by implementing this stuff. Now you can't do it every month because it's quite tactical. But honestly, across a year this is an extra million dollars in cash. In cash profit as well. So let me share what's on the list.

So re offer workshop mastermind.

997 calls.

Basically running offers.

And having a software or having an app as well.

The face is really making me laugh. I should have been an artist. I should have been. Honestly, some people say, will you remind me of Picasso? And I'm sure a lot of you are thinking that as well. I really, I should give up business and become an artist. I know I should. I may one day. Now this stuff is stuff that all of you can implement. And if you implement even one of these things, you are going to make money. Like honestly, I should be charging you for this list because this stuff prints God damn money. Pretty much every single client that I've ever worked with, they've done at least one of these and made an extra. Fuck me fucking 10k. 15k minimum, minimum. Some people, like if you spoke to some of my clients and said, oh, will teach you some offers, did you run them? How did they go? They'll say, yeah, that makes me an extra 1, 2, 300k a year. And this is the stuff that I share with my clients, walk my clients through, show them how to implement and this stuff just prints God damn money. And also I've shared some of these in my blog as well. So if you haven't read my book yet, it's called How to 10 Million Sell youl Knowledge and Make Millions, you can get paperback hardback Kindle audiobook from Amazon.

So you might want to read it to get your hands on these. But let me just walk you through a few. Now the first one on the list is, as you can see, it's a RE offer. And what a RE offer is is repackaging your existing offer and re offering it to your, sometimes your customers, sometimes your leads, sometimes just your audience, your.

Traffic sources. And it's really just letting people know. So let me give you context. Now a lot of people follow me on Instagram, but they don't really know what I offer. They don't really know how I can help them. They certainly don't know my prices.

And they're just following. And a lot of people are probably just thinking like, what does this guy actually do though? You know, and we all get that. You also get that build up on your email list as well. So if you gather emails over time and especially if you run ads as well, you get the leads that can't afford your program, aren't ready for your program, and everywhere in between, they just sit on the list. So by sending them a re offer, you can send them a discount, you can change your program and re offer it for a lower price or a higher price. You can do a one day workshop. Like just last week I posted on my Instagram and I said, right, I'm thinking of doing a one day workshop. Would anybody be interested in coming to my villa for a day? We'll hang out together, we'll get a chef to cook his lunch and dinner, we'll talk about business, we'll solve your problems together, which you can see up here on the board, and we'll jam and have fun and you can build your network. I got like 35 messages from people. So I decided to do it. I sold six tickets that day. I made like six people at two and a half thousand dollars in a day. And that money was just sat there. So that Almost whatever it was, 16, $17,000 was just sat there waiting to be added to my bank account.

So that's a re offer. You just speak to your audience and say, hey guys, look, if you didn't know about my program, well, here's what it is and here's what you get. And if any of you will be interested, here's a link to buy it or here's a link to booking a call and I'll tell you more. Or Here is a one day, 24 hour discount. Get in now because this is like a one time thing or anything like that you can do right.

Now. Another thing that can work really well.

Well in fact, I'll give you two more things. So one is a mastermind and I kind of just explained what that is. But you can do one day, you can do three days, you can do two days, you can do a five day retreat, you can really do what, whatever you like. And that is a way for you to build value, get customers together, get more money in the bank account and on and on. Another way is something that I did a few days ago. I just allow people to book some calls with me for like a heavily discounted rate. So I usually charge $3,000 for an hour. I posted on my Instagram and I just said, look, just for 10 people because I'm off for the next couple of days. I'm bored out here in Bali. I've got nothing to do. Ten of you can book in for a thousand pounds. Ten people booked in. It was actually 14 people have booked in because I didn't turn the calendar off and I had some awesome conversations. I was able to add value for some people in my audience and make an extra almost $20,000 with again, one Instagram post and one email.

So you almost certainly got traffic right now. They want to buy something from you. Maybe they don't know what you do, they don't know your prices, they're not aware how you can help them. Just speak to your audience, post on YouTube, community post on Twitter, on Instagram, email your list. If you've got leads, literally dial them and just have some conversations. And this stuff is an easy extra. 10, 20, 30, right up to 100, 150k a month in some cases. The biggest re offer that I've ever ran in my life did it was like $174,000 in a day. Absolutely insane, that was to a very big email list. But nonetheless, that's what's possible when you get this stuff, right? So I really hope that this video helps. I hope it's added value. And I would just ask you this. So.

I would ask you.

I would ask you a very serious question. Does that look like you? I'm joking. Serious question. Where are you on that scale?

Where are you at? What's the problem? And I've just literally told you how to solve a problem. So go and solve the problem. If you need any help with this, I'll put a link in the description. If you need me to help you, then be more than happy to lend a hand. I'll get on zoom with you. I'll bloody help you do it if you want me to. I'll put a link in the description. You can go to the work with me page of my website. There's a little video that explains who I can and can't help. Give it a watch book in a call if you want some help. And if you don't want help, just get on with it. I've just told you what to do, so literally go out there, get on with it, Go and make the money, run some of these RE offers.

Get some money in the bank and thank me later.