Transcript: FitBizU Episode 249: JillFit’s 2022 Debrief

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[Transcript starts at 1:01]

What is up y’all? Welcome back to another episode of FitBizU I am your host, Jill Coleman. Gosh, it has been a minute. Okay, so I think we actually, the last episode was about three months ago, and I do apologize for leaving you hanging, but we were busy in the business and, before we get into today’s episode, which is all about just a year in review, I wanna share with you guys some behind the scenes at Jill Fit, some of our goals, and which ones we hit, which ones we did not hit, and give you just a little of insight into how at a seven figure level, you sort of plan out your year.

And we’ll talk a little bit about some of our goals for next year as well. And I hope that you do this as well with your own business. But I have a little anecdote to tell you. So we are now, if you’re watching this as a video, we are now doing all of our podcast production in-house. We worked with the company the last few years for FitBizU and it was great for as long as it lasted.

We were with that company for about two years. Uh, they got us off the ground. We did, you know, close to 250 episodes with them. And part of what we did with them was just sort of, for you guys to know kind of an exercise in delegation and an exercise in sort of automation. And this company is sort of a done for you service.

So essentially they have a recording studios in Los Angeles where I would go once a month and I would sit down, I would record Fit Biz U episodes for about two hours and usually record about six to eight episodes in a row. And then they would take those clips. I would basically sit down, speak, talk, and then leave.

Right? And then they would take the recordings and they would do, uh, they would create, they’d, you know, publish the episodes, they did the show notes, they did the promotional materials, all that kind of stuff. Uh, since then we actually brought in someone in-house to be doing all that stuff. Shout out to Courtney who’s gonna be handling all of that moving forward.

But what was interesting, and this is just sort of a business lesson I wanna start with you guys, is you know, there are good feelings with this company. I know the owner we’re actually friendly and we’ve been on each other’s podcasts and things like that, so it’s nothing to, say about the company itself, however, a couple of things that happened, I think it was over the summer, I think it was maybe like September or so, I got a call from Courtney, who’s on our team and said, “Hey, uh, the episodes you recorded last week in studio were corrupt and we can’t use them.”

And so that was like, you know, six, seven episodes where. You know, I travel like an hour to go sit down at this recording studio in downtown LA and then come back and prepare and all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, I was bummed for sure because you know, that’s six episodes that you have to rerecord and I was definitely bummed, but I was like, you know what, it’s business.

It’s a fluke. It’s technology. I know that there are bugs, things happen. I get it. And so, you know, they apologized, obviously re refunded our money for the recording studio time. And I went back in, I recorded ’em. So fast forward about a month, and I get a call from the owner and he said, Jill, I’m so sorry, but those episodes you recorded last week, the files were corrupt and we weren’t able to use those episodes.

It was like six or seven episodes again, and at this point, You know, I sort of like didn’t know whether to like, just laugh at this, you know? And, and by the way, I’m on good terms with this company. We had a long conversation. Everything’s been super transparent. But the reason why I’m telling you this is because one of the core values at Jill Fit, we’ve talked, we’ve done whole separate episodes on core values.

One of our core values is competency. Okay. So as much as I really liked the owner of this company, and they had done a great job for us for two years, and this actually, this recording stuff was sort of out of their hands. It wasn’t actually under their company. It was a, like a contractor that they worked with.

And so they wanted to make everything right and went above and beyond refunded us, you know, did all the things, completely took responsibility, and from that perspective, did a really great job. But at the end of the day, when I look at the Jill Fit core values, right, of competency, that one is specifically, it literally would’ve been out of our integrity as a company to continue working with this company.

And it also sort of happened at the same time that we were bringing on Courtney more full-time and so, You know, when I think about from that perspective, from a like business perspective, whether I like this company or not, and whether my feelings are, you know, whoever’s feelings are hurt, at the end of the day, if I say that our core values are competency, any of our contractors and any of our team members, myself, even.

If we’re not producing and we’re not performing at a certain level, then I have to do something different, you know? So the first time, again, it’s fine. It is what it is. Things happen in business. I get it second time now. It’s like a pattern, right? And so while I’m sure that if we had stayed with that company, I’m sure that they would’ve literally done everything they possibly could to make sure it didn’t happen a third time.

I have no doubt of that. We couldn’t stay there. And also, again, at the same time, it made our, our decision a little bit easier to leave because we were, you know, we had Courtney coming on board full-time. So anyway, you are seeing this video and I’m actually in my house. I am in the middle of redoing my office, so I’m super excited.

Hopefully we’re gonna have some really fun stuff in here. Uh, but today I do want to talk about Jill Fit in Review 2022. So this first episode should be airing the first week of 2023, and one of the things that was really interesting for me this year was our second year scaling. So in early 2021, we made it our goal to hit seven figures within a calendar year, and we did that.

We brought on a team. Uh, grew the executive team to five people, brought on three additional coaches, some additional contractors, and we grew it to seven figures last year. And as you know, and I’ve said this before on these episodes, that I feel like 2020 and 2021 were a little bit of what I call a unicorn year, where, you know, because of the pandemic. I hate to say it, so many people definitely suffered during the pandemic, but for online business, things really went gangbusters.

And so we had a lot of trainers jump online. We had a lot of potential clients jump online. Gyms were closed. People are trying out digital solutions more than they ever have, and so a lot of trainers who came online had fast success which was great. And it was awesome. And obviously the Jill Fit business grew as well because of that.

And one of the things that I said to my team at the beginning of 2022 was, Hey, let’s see if we can do this again. Is this just a fluke or can we do this again? And so our goal was, we pushed our goal a little bit more revenue wise, and we had some things that we really wanted to look at. Number one, we wanted to continue getting our backend systems tighter, right?

So that was a big goal of bringing on team, was having someone besides me in the backend really organizing everything from the platforms that we use to the technology we use, the software they use, having everything talk to, everything, uh, everything else. And that was a really big thing. We continue to get tighter in our systems this year.

We also wanted to scale our signature offer. So our signature offer is FBA. It stands for Fitness Business Accelerator. It is sort of our beginner offer for those who are new to internet business and personal trainers, health coaches, nutrition coaches, people like that who want to learn internet business.

It’s beginner, beginner, beginner. Up until this past year, we’d actually only launched it once a year, and FBA, we just launched it once a year. And last year we decided to launch it twice, and then this year we decided to launch it twice again. And so we ended up bringing in over half million dollars just in that program alone.

So we continued to scale that program. That’s actually a continued goal for next year. We have even bigger goals for it for next year. But here’s the deal, and you guys have heard me talk about the Ascension model. We’ve had whole episodes on this. An Ascension model is essentially thinking about what’s the customer journey?

And for us, Fitness Business Accelerator, FBA really is the best starting point for everybody, right? We have more advanced programs like Legacy and the Mastermind and other places that people can go, but FBA really is the best starting point, where you start people from absolute scratch. And so our goal as a company is to get as many people in the bottom of that sort of ascension pyramid as possible because if they come into FBA and they have a great result, typically people stay in FBA for a couple of years to get to the point where they’re ready to then apply for Legacy. And then from there, if they are ready to apply for the six figure mastermind. And so we really wanna think about how can we get more people up in the bottom of our pyramid so that they can essentially move up to other places.

And so FBAs really our, it’s our money maker. It’s our biggest, you know, product and service. It’s what we spend the most time perfecting, to be honest. We spend a lot of time in there making sure the curriculum is tight, making sure people are successful, they have what they need, they have the support that they need, and we’re gonna be doing even more of that next year.

So that was a good big goal of our US this year, and we did that as well. Um, this year was the very first year that we created a six figure container, and up until that point, I’ve run my mastermind now, I think since 2017. I’ve, I run a mastermind where it is more of like an advanced, uh, you know, business program.

I’ve run it since 2017. However, it was the first year in 2022 that we made the barrier entry that you had to be making six figures online, and this was a big jump for me because typically I have mostly in the past worked with a lot of beginners, a lot of intermediates. And so I was even wondering if we even had people in our audience that were at a six figure level online, right?

And I was sort of, and that this is part of the Jill Fit rebrand last year was, um, branding to start attracting more people who are at a higher level of business, especially with Jill Fit being at a seven figure level. Now, I wanted to find people who were ready for those more up-level systems, and I remember saying to my team, I really want to establish this.

Our goal was 12 people in this program. It was about $16,000, wanted 12 people in the program. And I said, you know what? I will do this with even five people cuz I just wanna establish the container. I’ve never put a revenue, you know, kind of, uh, barrier on it before. And I said, I really just want to do, um, I’ll do it five people just to start setting the precedent, right?

Maybe five this year, maybe eight next year. You know, eventually, maybe 1215. We ended up having 13 last year, which is awesome. So 2022, we had 13 people. We have another 13 this coming year, which is amazing. And so to me it kind of shows me that we do really truly have this ascension model. We’re building that up.

So that was really exciting for us. Uh, we definitely wanted to repeat, like I mentioned before, repeat our 2022 year, maybe even build on that revenue wise, which we did. I’ll talk about in a second. Wanted to bring some of our team members on full-time. So Sarah, who most of you guys have talked to, if you’ve ever , emailed it to Jill Fit, you’ve talked to Sarah.

She’s the head of customer success and she went full-time this year at Jill Fit. And that has been a blessing because she’s also the head of coaching, uh, which has been amazing. And we’re also trying to get one or two other members of my team to full-time this coming year, which, you know, The end of the day as the digital CEO, as the person who’s running the company, who’s sort of leading the charge and sort of the visionary for the company can be a little bit scary, especially if you have been a solopreneur as long as I have been, where I knew that I was always making enough money for me and to pay like a VA part-time, right?

That was like kind of easy. I never had to worry about that. And now that we’re having , you know, potentially more people come on full-time. We’re, we’re talking about, you know, now we have benefits and, uh, W2 stuff, and now I’m really responsible for these people’s livelihood. It’s not like, oh, this is a thing they’re doing on the side and they have another job.

It’s like, no, this is their full-time gig. And so the fact that we were able to continue implementing more of these scaling strategies and we’re able to repeat the years 2022, 2021 and repeat into 2023. To me that, you know, is a good sign and I feel like there’s a lot of stability in the business now and I’m excited for what’s to come.

We also also had our first Jill Fit team retreat with our five executive team members and that was really fun for us as well. In terms of metrics this past. Uh, really, really great year. And you guys know I’m very big on gratitude. I just don’t think that if you aren’t grateful for what you have, I don’t think that the universe is gonna give you anymore, because why would they?

If you’re walking around in scarcity or you’re walking around in lack, you’re walking around not grateful for all the things you have accomplished. Whether or not 2022 was a great year for you or not so great year, was a struggling year or not so, and honestly, either way. I really need you to look at the wins that you did have.

Even if you feel like, ah, so many things didn’t go well in 2022. Ask yourself, what did go well? What are some of the things that are wins for me, maybe they’re not revenue wins, but maybe I had a client. I, I do have a client. In FBA, she’s in FBA Live she’s gonna be in Legacy next year. Shout out to Rachel.

Last week on our coaching call, she said, you know, I made about the same amount of money as I did the year before, but I worked a lot less. And she’s a mom, right? She’s a mom. She’s like, I’m full-time online. I’m quitting all my in-person. And I made the same amount, but I’m working less. And so to me that’s a huge success.

You know, the idea that it always has to be about revenue. I mean, I know we talk about numbers and things like that on this podcast, but at the end of the day, I want a lifestyle business. You know, I mean, anyone can make seven figures if they’re willing to work around the clock or willing to pay a ton of money into ad spend.

And so you have to ask yourself like, what’s the kind of business that I want? And if you’re a busy mom and you wanna spend more time with your kids and have more vacation time and have more open space in your schedule, awesome. That’s a huge goal. If you could just maintain for at least a year like Rachel, and then next year she’ll grow even more working the same amount.

And that’s kind of what I said. I was like, okay, so 2023, it’s even more revenue. Maybe even less time, right? More net revenue and less time. So excited about some of our metrics. We hosted seven live events, which was, uh, very fun. Glad we were able to do that now, especially after, uh, lockdown. We worked with over 250 digital business owners, so health coaches, personal trainers, group fitness instructors, Coaches, we had some physicians, we had PTs, we had all sorts of amazing wellness professionals that we worked with this year in all of our different business containers.

So, and that’s, and that’s like up close and personal. That doesn’t even include some of our DIY or self-paced stuff. This is FBA, Legacy and the Mastermind, which is really exciting for us. We also enrolled over 2100 people into fitness and nutrition programs. So just straight fitness and nutrition programs.

All of our fitness and nutrition programs, for the most part are a hundred dollars or less. So we do a lot more volume with those. So having people enroll still, I would say that’s probably at least a quarter of our revenue. Still at JillFit, we probably brought in a quarter million dollars last year just in fitness and nutrition revenue.

Uh, we also have the Moderation 365 certification, which we certified over 50 professionals this year in that cert and that’s one of my favorite things. And that’s a huge part, a huge arm of different arm of the business where we see a lot of people do FBA and then also do the certification because they work really well together.

You know, and being a fitness business coach, I do understand the landscape and of course I definitely understand the Moderation 365 curriculum. So it’s easy for me to help someone with their business when I know exactly what they’re teaching and the modality and the methodology they’re teaching with their clients.

Uh, one of the biggest things for. You know, revenue’s great, but one of the things that was really a big goal for me personally was to make sales every single day in the business. You know? And that was a huge piece of it. Having sales come in every day in the business had never been like that before up until 2022 or 2021, rather, pretty much.

We would only make sales if we were, if we were actively sending people to a sales page, we were either in launch or we were doing a flash sale or something like that. But now we have a lot of people just coming to where we did a complete rebrand, new website. A lot of people just coming to the website, buying things off the website.

We have automations going through paid traffic, and we also have a lot more payment plans because we’re simply doing more volume of sales. And so that was really exciting for me, whether you know, whether it was a $25 sale or a $25,000 day, it was really fun for us to see that we could consistently make sales.

Even in months where we didn’t launch, we were bringing in about 40-50 thousand dollars a month, just even in those months we weren’t launching. And that was really exciting. So our goal this past year, I had to look it up before I jumped on. Uh, our goal was $1.218 million. So $1.218 million. Um, and I just checked this morning y’all, and we are at $1.220.

We are $2,000. Just $2,000 above our goal, and it is December 30th. I’m recording this on, on Friday, December 30th. We have a couple more days, uh, today and tomorrow in this year, and we are $2,000 over our goal for this year, and I can’t believe how magic this world is. That is wild to me. To be, be within $2,000 of your goal for the year is incredible.

And so, so we’re grateful for that. We’re just talking with the team and really excited for next year. And I hope that you do this as well, whether you have a team or whether it’s just you make sure you sit down and have some kind of CEO day, right? Even if you’re just like, “it’s just me.

I’m just a coach. I’m just getting started,” whatever. It’s really important. We talked about this a lot like this, as-if principal, even if it’s just you and you’re just a coach, you’re just doing this part-time and you just have a couple clients. Think about, okay, how can I sit down and really think through what this year is going to be and even put together like a loose calendar.

We’ve done actually a whole separate episodes on like how to do a launch schedule for the year, all that kind of stuff. So please go back and listen to those. But if you put together kind of a loose launch calendar, you kind of think to yourself, okay, what’s my goal unit here? What’s the price point? You can kind of come up with some numbers.

So think to yourself, even if it’s just a range, right? So maybe you’re like, this year I would really love to hit six figures, or this year I would really love to hit $75,000. Or this year I’d really like to hit a quarter million dollars. How is that gonna happen? At JillFit, we have goals and our goals are backed up by the numbers that we are, the, the goal numbers for each one of our launches.

And so look at the actual numbers. Don’t just pick a random number, actually itemize things and say, okay, if we launched this twice, we launched this program twice or three times, and this is our goal units awesome. And then we multiply that by the price point and this is what we can sort of expect. And so think to yourself like, what would be a, what would be like more of a reach?

And what would be more of like a, like a goal that you’re fairly confident, 70, 80% confident that you can hit, and that would be a great place to start. What’s our sort of like moderate goal and then what’s our reach goal? And I think, again, when I say we, it could literally just be you. But it’s important because, and by the way, you guys, I’m a big like set it and forget it person.

Like I had to even look up what our revenue goal was this morning because I don’t like keep it in front of me all the time. Right. It’s not something I’m like constantly checking and constantly refreshing our. Stripe account and trying to see how much, it’s like literally, I had to look up this morning, find it, and then go, wow, we’re within $2,000.

I hadn’t even thought about it, so I’m a big like set it and forget it person, but here’s the deal. Then when each of your launches comes up, you think to yourself, okay, here’s my calendar, right? Here’s our goal. Here’s how many leads we need. Here’s the price point, here’s the down sales, here’s the upsells, here’s the, the bump offers, right?

Whatever the additional launch stack is. And how are you gonna come up with that money? And you probably will hit within range of your goal if you have it broken down like that. And that’s exactly what we did at JillFit. We, we followed our launch calendar, I would say about 85%. We had a couple things turn in, and that’s actually one of our big goals for next year, is actually do less launches.

I think this year we launched 11 times , so we’re trying to get it to maybe six or seven max for next. That’s our big thing is do bigger launches, but do fewer launches and actually have more automations going. So I would say probably about 90 plus percent of our revenue was actually launch revenue that last maybe five to 10% were evergreen sales.

Everything else was launch revenue. So we have a lot of space that we can still grow within the business, but it’s gonna take automations, it’s gonna take full-time, people giving it full-time attention. So anyway, you guys, that is, we’re going a little bit long today, but is our first episode back.

Wanted to give you just some of the behind the scenes at JillFit, some of the things that we’re proud of and some of the intentions we have for next year. And I hope that you do the same. And this can be a very, very simple exercise, a very, very simple template for you to think, what were our goals last year?

Did we hit them? If we did, awesome. If we didn’t, why might we not have? Right. Don’t take it personally, get clinical with it. By the way, you guys, like, we didn’t hit all of our goals. In fact, for our like individual launches, I think we only hit probably, shit, maybe only 40% of our actual goals for launches.

We just ended up making a whole bunch of other . Revenue that wasn’t on the launch calendar. Right. Maybe automations, maybe flash sales, maybe additional bonus stuff that we hadn’t planned on. So we ended up making probably close to $200,000 in other stuff that just wasn’t even on our launch calendar.

So our actual launches, you know, I would say maybe 40% of our launches, we actually hit our numbers. And so I don’t take that as a, a loss, right? I don’t look at that and say, “oh, this is bad, or it’s going in the wrong direction.” I just go, cool. This is different than I thought it was gonna. How can we continue to get better next year if we didn’t hit our goals?

Why is that? What do we need? Do we need more? What are our conversion numbers? How many leads did we have? How well are we messaging this thing? Can we tweak our messaging a little bit? Do we need to put more money into paid traffic? What does that look like? And so this is not an excuse for you to get down on yourself or to start comparing yourself.

It’s an opportunity for you to look at how can I improve? Because you guys. You know this, business development is personal development, and so your business, will never be able to grow past your own level of personal development. You as the CEO, the person in charge, the coach, the content creator, your business can never grow above what you’re capable of.

And really so much of it is how do you deal with some of the losses, some of the problems, some of the obstacles, some of the things that come up that maybe aren’t ideal. The problems, right? Like I always tell you guys, there’s always be problems in your business, but how you handle them is gonna define your future success.

And if you can’t handle small problems and beginner problems, how are you possibly going to handle intermediate or advanced problems? And that’s always what I’m thinking to myself, you know? And now the problems that we have are the different types of problems we have is, my tone sets the tone for the entire team.

So if I get emotionally hijacked and I get upset and I get, you know, uh, emotional and I have that sort of up and down rollercoaster. And my team sees that, what do you think they’re gonna think, right? They’re gonna start now getting anxious. They’re gonna start now worrying. They’re gonna start now thinking this is all bad.

And so it’s really important that I set the tone, even in those moments where I do have into uncertainty, I do feel insecure. I do feel a certain way, right? I need to show up for my team. So that’s the next level, is how am I holding it down for my team members? Cuz they’re taking the cue from me. And so all of these things are important things to think about.

So maybe just take a little bit of time, set your timer on your phone for like 30 minutes and just write, write, just write what your intentions are, what you’re excited about, what you wanna do next year. And don’t just stop with excitement and, and passion. Right now, it’s almost January 1st. Everywhere you look on social media, everyone’s like, next year’s gonna be the best year.

And I’m like, I hope it is. I really do. But it’s not going to be on excitement alone. Just not. I did that in 2018. I was so excited. I joined this huge mastermind with like the Who’s Who internet business. I’m like, this is gonna be my year, y’all. I had no fucking strategy. So you wanna think to yourself, yes, I want it to be my best year yet, but what are you gonna do differently?

How are you gonna show up differently, consciously? How are you going to make different decisions in your business because you need a change to change. And so it can’t just be more of the same and then you just cross your fingers and hope that something will change in the business. You have to be very conscious about how am I making decisions and how am I doing things different?

Whether it’s hiring someone, whether it’s using paid traffic, whether it’s, you know, really committing to getting better at business skills. Maybe it’s getting a new platform, starting a podcast. Maybe it’s getting better at your messaging. Maybe it’s getting better at copywriting. What are you willing to do differently to have a different outcome, because change doesn’t happen spontaneously because you’re excited about a year. It happens with consistent and committed, uh, change to doing things differently. Good.

All right y’all, that is all I have for you. So welcome back, super pumped to be back, and we are gonna be getting on a regular schedule twice a week.

And y’all, we do have Fitness business Accelerator, FBA starting very soon. Uh, if you are not on the wait list, please go to jillfitfree.com/fba-waitlist. That’s jillfitfree.com/fba-waitlist. That is the wait list for the next round. We’re gonna be enrolling that in april. However, we have a really exciting, uh, new thing that we’re gonna be announcing very soon for those on the wait list, and it’s gonna give you an opportunity to work with me for an additional three months, completely free as part of FBA.

So anyway, get on that wait list if you’re not there. And again, FBA is for my more beginner level students, health, fitness professionals who want to learn and grow their online business. That is it from you guys. Hope you have a great rest of your week and I’ll talk to you soon.

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