Episode 025 – How I Launched A $30M Coaching Business (actual steps)

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

Today I’m going to share with you the really simple framework that allowed my wife and I to generate $30 million in revenue over the last 7.5 years doing what we love.  In typical David Bayer fashion, this isn’t going to be stuff that’s commonly taught in the marketplace, which is full of savvy marketers vying for your attention and trying their best to convince you that there’s a “perfect” strategy that you must follow to be successful.

I’m going to speak into the principles and the mindset more than anything else because at the end of the day, all strategies can work – as long as you take consistent action and follow through with them.  In my experience, the truth is that you only need 2 things that, once dialed in, you can generate as much income, create as much impact, and achieve whatever level of success you set your mind to – without growing to hate your business (or your life) in the process.

The Root Cause Of Entrepreneurial Success

We’ll start with those two things I mentioned.  One is understanding which strategy you should be focused on at the stage of growth you’re at in your business.  Because the strategy you use to get your first client and reach your first six figures is going to be different from the strategy you use to scale past a million dollars in revenue.  The principles might stay the same, but the tactics and strategies will change at scale.  Most entrepreneurs are not successful at moving through these stages because they believe that all strategies are relevant for all stages, which isn’t true.  

The other thing is mindset or, as I prefer to call it, your personal evolution.  I’m not talking about defining your why, doing affirmations, or constantly seeking out motivation and inspiration.  I’m talking about understanding the real science behind how thoughts become things and consistently doing the work to align your thoughts, emotions, and actions with the results you want to create in your business.  

After devoting my life to personal growth for the past ten years and achieving a considerable amount of business success, I believe that success is really about identifying the limiting beliefs you have that are represented by the patterns of thinking and emotions in your nervous system and in your brain – and having the tools to rewire your brain and increase your emotional resiliency, your self-awareness, and your emotional capacity.

There are a ton of limiting beliefs that entrepreneurs especially must overcome to reach their goals and achieve the level of success they’re after.  It could mean overcoming your beliefs that you’re not worthy, you’re not good enough, things never work out for you, nobody will buy what you’re selling, and so on.  Because if these beliefs are shaping your experience of life, they’re going to prevent you from implementing any strategy, taking any action, or putting yourself in situations where generating clients and making money are possibilities for you.

Instead, you’ll procrastinate, self-sabotage, or try to brute force your way into executing something that otherwise could work, but won’t work for you because of your beliefs.  The mistake so many entrepreneurs make is thinking the strategies themselves don’t work because the strategies are bad.  But in reality, the strategy didn’t work because the beliefs, thoughts, and emotions that you brought to the strategy were out of alignment.

I Just Wanted To Help People, But All I Got Was Another Strategy

I’ve shared Carol and I’s story many times before, but we started our business with little more than an idea – we wanted to help entrepreneurs with personal growth.  We invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into training courses, coaches, seminars, workshops, and events in an attempt to turn that idea into a legitimate business.  One of our first mentors told us the key to our success was learning how to run Facebook ads and selling a digital course – so we did.  The result?  We didn’t get a single buyer.

Another mentor told us that the reason the previous strategy didn’t work was because our backend system wasn’t sophisticated enough – we needed better marketing automation.  So we tried that and got a handful of sales, but certainly not the level of success we were after…or promised.  We ended up going round and round on the “entrepreneur’s carousel” trying strategy after strategy, hoping that one of them would finally allow us to grow our business…and see a return on the massive investments we’d already made.

More importantly, we wanted the feeling that we were actually doing what we were meant to do in the world.  We were taking massive action and implementing everything we were advised to do, but we had very little to show for it.  But what we learned through it all is that strategy is just one piece of the puzzle.

“How can it be so hard just to go out and help other people and make a little money for ourselves?”

• Carol Gutierrez Bayer (circa 2015)

The REAL Strategy Is Not To Rely On Strategy (At First)

We tried it all – funnels, podcasts, YouTube, Facebook advertising, email marketing, webinars, video series – you name it.  We followed the advice of the “gurus” and got caught up in all the silver bullets that would supposedly make us rich.  But now that I’ve got hindsight on my side, I realize that we didn’t actually need any strategy at all – nor does any entrepreneur just starting out wanting to generate their first 6-figures in revenue.

We lacked clarity.  We weren’t clear on who we served.  We didn’t know who our ideal client was.  Because we didn’t know who we were trying to serve, we also didn’t know how to speak to them.  We didn’t have unique, differentiated messaging that was authentic to Carol and I and the way we could provide value in the marketplace.  We also didn’t have an offer.  We tried selling different things, but we didn’t have one offer that we could effectively communicate, deliver, or help the people we wanted to serve get incredible results.  Finally, we didn’t have enrollment skills and a way to persuade the people we wanted to work with into our (at that point, non-existent) offer.

The Must-Have Foundations For Early-Stage Entrepreneurs

We call these the “Core 4” – ideal client, messaging, offer, enrollment skills – that every entrepreneur absolutely must have in the start stage of business.  Having clarity around these Core 4 foundational elements of your business activates the one thing you need to start enrolling clients and generating income for your business – confidence.  Because when you’re confident in who you serve, how you communicate with them, the solution (offer) you can provide to their problems, and your ability to enroll them into that solution, you eliminate the fear that holds so many entrepreneurs back from putting themselves in the right situations and pursuing the right opportunities to generate sales.

Now this is very different from what the marketplace proposes – write a book, get some clients…launch a podcast, get some clients…build a funnel, get some clients.  What I’m saying is be confident and you’ll get clients.  How do you activate confidence?  Through clarity around the Core 4 foundations of your business.  This isn’t “woo woo” stuff either, it’s at the core of behavioral psychology.  Because when you have confidence, you enroll your conscious and your unconscious mind to connect you to the people, places, and situations that will help you reach your goals.

My first $250,000 in revenue wasn’t generated using a single strategy – it happened when I gained clarity, which led to the development of my confidence.  Case in point: I met my first real client as part of Tony Robbins’ high-level coaching program.  His name was Ruben, and when he first met he asked me what I did, which I explained to him as helping entrepreneurs with their mindset and business.  He asked me what made me different from Tony and I went on to explain my distinctions about rewiring the neural networks of the brain, identifying and removing the resistance that holds us back from achieving our full potential, and how mindset is the cause and strategy is the effect.

The day after I met Ruben, he asked what it would be like to work together.  Up until that point, the only coaching client I’d ever had was a 19-year-old son of a friend of mine whom I coached for $125/hour.  I charged Ruben $5,000 a month to meet with me once a week with a 6-month commitment, resulting in $30,000 from just one person.  The clarity around my Core 4 and the confidence that came with it resulted in enrolling another six clients from that program.  I generated close to $250,000 in that first year between my 6-month and 12-month contracts and VIP intensives I offered for $25,000 each.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, how much experience you have (or don’t), or where you go looking for client-generating opportunities, the Core 4 and confidence that comes with them is the key to success in the start stage of growth and generating your first $250,000 in revenue – without a strategy.

The #1 Strategy For Reaching 7-Figures In Revenue 

Once you’re generating a couple hundred thousand dollars, some adjustments will inevitably need to be made within your business to keep growing.  Some things will be a byproduct of your growth, too.  When Carol and I had reached our first $250,000, we started to build up an email list, increased the prices of our offers, and began building out the infrastructure of having a consistent marketing and sales machine.

At this stage, if you want to grow from $250,000 to 7 figures in revenue, it becomes necessary to transition from one-to-one to one-to-many marketing, sales, and fulfillment.  Why?  Simply because there’s a cap on your time and you can’t do everything yourself.  You can’t be having one-on-one enrollment conversations with people all the time and delivering your service to them and wearing all of the other hats in your business.  You might need to make a few key hires to help with your sales process, the fulfillment of your offer, and the marketing of your services.

In order to free up some of your time while continuing to bring in new business, I’ve found that the single most effective strategy for growth-stage entrepreneurs is (drumroll, please) presentations.  A presentation could be a webinar, a video sales letter, a livestream in a Facebook group, or speaking on stage.  Ultimately, anything can be a presentation as long as it involves you sharing your Core 4 and presenting an invitation to work with you in front of multiple people at once.

The first presentation I gave was in front of a group of 15 entrepreneurs.  I spoke for 45 minutes and presented an opportunity at the end to work with me.  Out of those 15 people, five wanted to speak with me further and three ended up enrolling in my program which, at the time, was $5,000 for six months.  That’s $90,000 in new revenue from a single 45-minute presentation.  So I went out and did it six more times over the course of the year and ended up generating almost half a million dollars in revenue.

I then took that same presentation, which I’d continually refined with each iteration, and turned it into an online webinar that allowed me to sell different offers to different levels of ideal clients.  Some people would buy the $500 course I’d developed, others would schedule a strategy session with me or a member of my team and enroll in my group or private coaching.  Between delivering presentations on stage (in person) and online, I was able to grow from $250,000 to $1 million in revenue – quickly.

Developing A Million Dollar Mindset 

In addition to leveraging one-to-many marketing and sales in order to grow from $250K to $1 million, a mindset evolution is also required.  As I mentioned, going from the growth stage to the scale stage is going to require hiring a team, which naturally brings up doubts about trusting people.  At this stage, you need to learn how to let go of control, delegate, and embody this thing that so few of us understand – surrender.

You’re also going to need to start investing the money that you are making back into your business, both into people and marketing expenses, which can bring up some fear of financial insecurity. You might start to feel like there are just too many things going on and start to feel overwhelmed, stressed, anxious, or that there’s never enough time.  

But the truth is that none of these things are necessarily business problems – they are personal problems that are reflected by your business that’s always been inside of you.  Because of this, a deeper level of mindset work is required to continue growing – fears, doubts, insecurities, and traumas will have to be transformed.  No strategy is going to solve that for you.

Scaling Beyond $1 Million 

The scale stage is when you really become a business.  You start building an organizational chart, hiring more team members, delegating, and automating more of your marketing and sales efforts.  Getting to, maintaining, and growing beyond 7 figures in revenue requires manufacturing predictability, so advertising becomes necessary.  This is where some of the strategies that Carol and I tried to implement too early became beneficial.

The great Dan Kennedy once said “Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins” – and there’s a lot of truth to that, especially in the coaching, consulting, and service-provider space.  If you can put a dollar into Facebook or YouTube advertising, let it run 24/7, and make back at least two dollars in return, the growth of your business can run on autopilot.

It’s at this stage that you’re essentially replicating and automating yourself and everything you’ve been road-testing up until this point.  That might mean getting new prospects to opt-in to watch a free 20-minute video where you’re delivering a 20-minute version of your presentation and then giving them an opportunity to schedule a strategy session or purchase your product.  

The next steps from there now happen with your team – you have your coaches or delivery team fulfilling on most of your product for you.  You have a sales team fielding most of your sales conversations.  You’re now transitioning into a new level of leadership where you’re no longer operating in your business, but you’re the visionary working on the evolution of your business while your team supports you.

Principles + Mindset > Strategy

If you look back at these threads we’ve discussed so far and consider what it takes to go from zero, to $250,000, to $1 million even up to tens of millions of dollars in revenue, what you’ll realize is that the emphasis is not placed on finding the perfect strategy.  All strategies can and do work.  Some are more suited at certain stages than others, but all of them hinge on understanding the foundational principles of business and having the right mindset to take action, implement, and achieve the results you’re looking for.

At the end of the day, there are three stages of growth – start, grow, and scale – and at each stage there are different elements required to create success and reach the next level.  At the start stage, it’s all about clarity and confidence.  At the growth stage, it’s about one-to-many marketing, sales, and fulfillment.  At the scale stage, it’s about automation, creating predictability, and becoming the visionary who works on the business more than in it.

The umbrella around all of this is that our business is a reflection of ourselves and, as entrepreneurs, we must use it as an opportunity to identify the resistance inside of us and do the deep transformational work that will allow us to keep growing – personally and professionally.  This might be counterintuitive to what 99% of the marketplace is telling us is necessary to be successful, but everything I’ve just outlined is the exact playbook Carol and I used to go from zero to $30 million in, all things considered, not much time at all.