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[Transcript starts at 1:00]
What is up y’all? Welcome to another episode of FitBizU. I’m your host, Jill Coleman, and today I wanna talk about something. Uh, we’re gonna review the Ascension model today, and then we’re gonna talk about the difference between what I call a front- end launch versus a back-end launch.
And it’s the beginning of the year, we’re recording this in January of 2023, and hopefully if you are taking this entrepreneurial thing seriously, you have sketched out at least the next two quarters in your business. Now we’ve done whole episodes on, um, how to sort of schedule your calendar year, things like that. So at JillFit, back in the beginning of quarter four of 2022, I put together our entire launch calendar for 2023.
Now, last year and the year before, I think we probably executed it probably about 80 to 85% of what we had on there, as it was, right? But of course, there’s gonna be things that come up, you know, maybe you end up doing some, maybe do a new offer, maybe do a little flash sale. Maybe you have some other promotions or affiliate launches that you’re doing, and so you give yourself a little bit of space.
But last year we launched 11 times at Jill Fit, and I felt like that was maybe a little too much. Um, not from, I mean, we definitely did well, but I felt like maybe from an energetic perspective, uh, maybe a perspective of, uh, potentially fatiguing our list a little bit. And I wanted to get better at launching this coming year.
And instead of doing 11, do maybe half of that, maybe do a six or seven total. And do them just better and bigger. And I wanna talk today, because not every single launch is gonna be what I call a front- end launch. Front- end launch is you can kind of thinking, uh, think about it like pushing, right? So it’s kind of like you’re pushing, uh, yourself.
For example, we pretty much only do front end launches for our signature offer, which is called FBA or Fitness Business Accelerator. Now, FBA is my signature course. It’s a six month business building course for beginners. Speaking of which, side note. We are gonna be launching FBA within the next couple months.
And for those of you who are interested in getting started and really learning this stuff and really implementing it, not just talking about it, but actually doing it in 2023, this is for you. If you wanna get on the interest list, you can do that by going to jillfitfree.com/fba-waitlist. It’s Jill fit free.com/fba-waitlist.
Now, the reason why FBA is our signature offer is because it is a beginner to business program. And theoretically, if you think about it, there’s way more people who are thinking about having a business. Thinking about starting a business in the beginning stages of business and for beginners, they need a lot of handholding.
And that’s not like a jab, that’s literally just the end. That’s, that’s it. It’s brand new skills, right? So as you progress to more of an intermediate business owner, as more of an advanced business owner, you probably need a little bit less handholding, a little bit less like checking with Jill and things like that.
And so my more advanced container , which is called Legacy . The Intermediate plus program I do with the Movement Maestro, as well as my mastermind, which is called S + S, or Strategy and Scale. Both of those are, uh, the, the information that the clients get in those containers is just different than what you get in the beginner program because when you’re new, everything is brand new, you’re learning so much.
Sometimes it can feel like you are, you know, just drinking from a fire hose. And as your coach in FBA, it is literally my job to make sure that you don’t get overwhelmed, that you don’t disengage, that you don’t get scared, that you don’t, uh, run away from the process, that you stay the course and you actually continue to implement things.
And so in FBA, we theoretically are just gonna have way more people and a beginner programs, just more people to choose from. And so we run that program twice a year, and we do massive launches for this. So when I say massive launches, these are multiple six figure launches every time. Uh, and we have some big goals for 2023 as well.
And we do a lot of prep work for these. We do a long lead magnet. We do like an eight day lead magnet. We do, uh, paid traffic. We bring in people from ads. We do a lot of nurturing between those launches. There’s six months between the launches. We, you know, we nurture our business list. We give them a lot of stuff to, to implement, to read, to listen to, right.
We send them the podcast episodes and you know, so when we go into our FBA launches, our goal each time we do that is to really enroll as many people as possible. So we don’t really put a cap on it. There are two levels. One’s more like up close and personal with me and like a coaching level, like a weekly coaching call, and we do cap that.
That’s more of a significant investment, but we don’t cap the standard version of that, which is the course itself. We don’t actually don’t cap that. And for us, this is really important because this is like our opportunity twice a year to connect with anyone in our audience who wants to build a business.
And so we take these launches very seriously. We probably make over half of our revenue at Jill Fit just through these launches. And so, uh, your front end launch is most likely going to be for your signature offer. It’s going to be the thing that if out of everything you want people in this program, so think about that.
Everything you sell, everything you potentially have made, or you know people can purchase from you. What is the one thing that if they don’t do anything else with you, they do this program? That’s what I consider your signature offer. So when you look at all of the things that you could potentially sell, really just big, put a big circle around the thing that you are, that you want to be your signature offer.
Now, if you are just getting started, maybe your signature offer is a one-on-one coaching offer, right? Maybe it’s a high, high touch, high or ticket, one-on-one coaching container. That’s totally fine. So that will be probably the thing that you push the most. And for us at, at JillFit, FBA of course, is that. FBA is also towards the bottom of our ascension model.
So our ascension model is, if you can picture sort of like a pyramid, uh, the bottom of the pyramid, the very, very bottom of the pyramid, if you’ve actually done whole separate episodes on this, you guys, if you want to just literally Google, I think FitBizU and then ascension model, um, you’ll come up with the episode if you wanna listen to the whole thing.
But this is a way for you to organize your offers. Now, it’s important for you to organize them, but it’s actually also important, just as important for your customers to know where they go next, to go, where they go next. So, for example, the very bottom of the pyramid is probably gonna be your lowest ticket offer.
You wanna think about this from your offers typically are gonna be from lowest at the bottom of the pyramid up to highest, which the highest offer is probably gonna be your one-on-one coaching. Now the lowest offers for us that we have are low ticket. We have some, uh, we have Instagram stories course called Story U.
We have like some paid webinars that are for sale. We have the coaching track, which is how to become a coach. Um, we have some like lower ticket. These are what calls self-paced or DIY offers. The next level up is FBA. Now FBA again is our signature offer. So it’s towards the bottom of the Ascension model because we’re gonna, it’s the lowest, it’s the, you know, I don’t wanna say it’s one of the cheapest, but it’s one of the least expensive options, especially because as beginners, I know beginners are scared of investing.
They are the ones who need to invest the most, and they’re also the least likely to invest only because they’ve just never done it. So they haven’t had a positive experience necessarily with investing. Whereas if as you get more intermediate, advanced, You know, when I talk to my peers, it’s not, are you investing, it’s with who are you investing?
Where are you investing, right? It’s not even a question. But for beginners, they have a lot of activation energy that they have to overcome in order to spend money on their business. They’re maybe not used to that. They’re used to going to a job and getting paid money. So the idea that you would invest and pay into your business in order to eventually make money feels a little bit hard at first.
So it’s sort of a paradigm shift that has to happen. So for all of those reasons, FBA sometimes is our, actually not, sometimes, it is our hardest sell, meaning it’s the one that we have to have the best messaging around. It’s the one that we, uh, have to really work to for people to understand what it is, to understand the value of it.
And by the way, like you, we do this with all of our programs. But the, the signature offer is the one that ideally you wanna have the most butts in the seats. This is gonna be where you have the most people coming into your business. And so when we look at FBA, that’s our, that’s the one we want to have the most people in.
And we usually enroll between a hundred and 150 people in this program twice a year. And when we get them in, , they go through six month of coaching with me. There’s lifetime access and then some people stay in for another six months. Some people sort of like, you know, maybe just stay in the Facebook group.
Maybe some people continue to implement, and for a lot of people it takes ’em about two to three years to like work through the material, implement the material, do enough launches to then be ready to apply for Legacy. Now, Legacy is one step up on the Ascension model, right? It’s right above FBA. And for Legacy, it’s intermediate business and we do have some parameters.
And the Legacy launch is what we call a backend launch. So a backend launch is not like this big blowout launch like FBA. FBA is like tons of numbers. Big old lead magnet, you know, trying to get anyone in my ecosystem aware of this program. When it comes to Legacy, the reason why it’s a backend launch is because we want, I want people who have done FBA primarily.
It doesn’t mean we only take people who who come through FBA, but I would say at least half of the people who enroll in Legacy have done FBA, and that’s by design. They just do better in Legacy if they have the foundation of FBA, and they’ve done that and they’ve worked to, they’ve worked their business to a level where they’re ready for Legacy.
And so our Legacy launches are backend because a lot of them have already worked with myself or they’ve worked with Shante before. And so this launch is a lot more chill. It’s what we consider, like we, we usually do a wait list to an application. We don’t really do a lead magnet. This past year we did a live event, which is, I guess another version of a paid lead magnet.
We did a live event. Uh, but a lot of people who came to our live event either were current clients or previous clients of Legacy , so there actually wasn’t as many qualified people at the live events as we would’ve liked. But we went ahead and did a launch after that, and it was like a four day open cart, four or five day open cart, and literally it was just like, Do you want this thing?
Because it was application based and part of the application was you had to put a deposit down. So there’s a lot more, uh, there’s a lot higher barrier to entry, right? This was a much more significant investment. It’s for someone at a certain level of business, there’s a $500 deposit to even apply. That’s of course refunded if we don’t accept you, but it’s a whole application process, an interview process.
It’s an application process, an acceptance process. So this is what we call again, a backend launch. This should feel a lot more chill. Now when you think about the contrast, the FBA launch with something like a Legacy launch, the difference in energy is so different. A front end launch is probably gonna take it out of you, which is why I don’t want every single one of your launches to be a front end launch, right?
I don’t want it to be this like every single time, what we call like spray and pray, right? Everyone gets everything all the time, right? We don’t wanna do a ton of that because again, yeah, I guess you could fatigue your list, but more importantly, you’re gonna fatigue yourself right?
At the end of those FBA launches, they take a lot out of myself, out of the team. They’re worth it. They’re always worth it. But again, it’s a different level of energy. The energy is what we call like pushing, right? It’s pushing. It’s going to find the right person, sending them to a sales page, sending ’em to a buy button, doing everything we can to make sure that they take this next step.
And so we are really pushing. Now, when it’s Legacy or when it’s the mastermind, chances are it’s gonna feel like more pulling. It’s gonna feel like more pulling. Really we’re looking for the right person, right? We’re almost curating a group of people versus blasting it out and hoping everyone comes. And so remember at the end of the day, Legacy in something like that, that’s more like higher up probably, maybe higher price point by the way.
Smaller container, less people, Legacy. We cap at like 20, 30 people. The might have kept it like 12 people. So in these smaller containers, We’re not looking for everyone. We’re looking for the right person. So when these backend launches, they should feel a little bit easier because the prompt here, the prompt for you, or the prompt for the potential client is exclusivity.
The prompt is not urgency and scarcity, right? Things going away, like, you know, spots are limited, right? I mean there is that, but more so it’s a, it’s about the fit of the person. You know, I wanna make sure that someone who comes into Legacy is the right fit for Legacy. I wanna make someone who, someone who comes into the Mastermind is ready and right for the Mastermind because I’m curating a smaller group of people who are gonna have to work together for months on end.
And also with myself. And we do turn a good amount of people away in both of those containers. Not because we wanna be a dick, but because like literally we’re looking for the right fit. We’re looking for the right person. And so it’s not like a better or worse thing, it’s just like, is this person right for this container?
And if they’re not, we usually tell them. Somewhere else to go, Hey, we’d love for you to go and do FBA. We’d love for you to go and do Shante’s, you know, Instagram intensive. Like, maybe they’re just not ready for this thing yet. And so when you think about a backend launch, it’s not that maybe you don’t talk about it on social media, or maybe you even send out a couple emails to your whole list.
It’s just that it, it’s really predicated on exclusivity. So it should feel like pulling, right. Whenever we have people apply to Legacy, like they really want to be in there. It’s not like they’re feeling, you know, it’s not like we’re tricking them or compelling them or anything like that. It’s like they are excited to be picked to be in that program.
And so your backend launches typically are going to be to most people who have maybe already done a program with you. And at JillFit we want people to ideally go through FBA, then graduate to Legacy, and then potentially graduate to the S+S Mastermind. That’s like really the goal is to get someone to that level and give people, especially in my ecosystem, right, the people in the JilFit audience, I wanna give them aspirational next steps.
So think to yourself when you’re thinking about your own offers, which of my programs is going to be like a big old front end launch. A big old live launch, right? A big old, like tons of people, and a lead magnet. Like what are those programs? And then what am I, which of my programs can be more like curation, personal invites, uh, application.
Wait list, uh, personal, like, you know, just personal invitations, things like that. You know, I’ve done like physical mailers, for my mastermind before because I’m like, I wanna invite this person who I think it’s gonna be a good fit. So it’s almost like you’re handpicking the group. And when it’s a backend launch, again, the majority of people will probably have already worked with you in some capacity.
So think about this. Which of your programs deserve to have a front end launch? Which of your programs need to have a backend launch and what’s gonna be the sales mechanism? Is it going to be a three-part video series? Is it gonna be a challenge? Is it gonna be a webinar? And if it’s gonna be a backend launch, probably it’s gonna be a little more chill.
Is it gonna be applications? Is it gonna be personal reach outs? Is it gonna be maybe a single webinar of some kind? Maybe it’s a live event. It’s something where it’s probably not gonna be as big cuz you just aren’t looking for as many people. It’s just not about volume, it’s more about fit. So think to yourself, this is a way for you to sort of.
Contain your own energy, right? To like manage your own emotional resources and mental resources as you go through the year. Don’t think every single launch needs to be like this balls out front end, launch some of your stuff if you organize it correctly and then you communicate that organization to your audience.
My clients in FBA, they know about Legacy, right? Our Legacy students know about the Mastermind. It’s like they need to know that there’s a next set for them if they are ready and if they’re a fit. And when your people know where to go next, chances are you’re gonna keep them in your ecosystem for a lot longer. Which of course is great for viability of your businesses.
Are these people staying with you? How long have they been with you? How many things have they purchased from you? What’s the lifetime value of that customer? And so that’s really what we wanna continue to, uh, increase. But people also need to know what’s next. So think to yourself, which of these need to be front end launches and which can I get away with being a back end launch?
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that every single launch should feel the same for your audience. You want them to feel different. And I’m telling you, it is so much more chill when there’s more of like a pulling energy. There’s exclusivity. I don’t wanna say there’s like a velvet rope cause that sounds elitist, but really, It should feel like a more of a fit versus we’re just doing this sort of spray and pray.
Hopefully it makes sense to you guys. I wanted to give this a second because, you know, at Jill Fit, we are still trying to like dial in how many launches, what kinds of launches, what are gonna be the best for each product. We’re probably like 90% of the way there, but at the end of every year, We do a debrief and we’re like, cool, what worked this year?
What needs to maybe change for next year? And we’re constantly refining and as we refine, we’re gonna share ’em with you as well. So hopefully that was helpful for you guys. Thank you for being here for your time and attention, and we will see you on the next episode. Bye guys.
Links For This Episode:
For more on the Ascension model:
FBU 111: Building Out Your Online Product Suite
Get on the waitlist for FBA:
