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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 we are gonna start off with a quick plug because we are coming down to the wire for those of you who are interested in learning more about Fitness Business Accelerator, FBA, which is my signature beginner to business course we’re gonna be launching in a couple months, but we’re opening up the early bird registration to wait listers very soon.
So if you wanna get on the interest list, there is absolutely no obligation, but you of course, do get the information sooner. You get to enroll sooner, you get some exclusive bonuses, as well as an exclusive discount. So go to Jillfitfree.com/fba-waitlist. That’s jillfitfree.con/fba-waitlist.
Okay, so today I wanna talk about something that I have a little bit of beef with.
Now this is something that we see quite a bit in the internet business space. So if you’re scrolling on Instagram or Facebook, chances are you probably see an ad at some point that is speaking to coaches, speaking to healthcare professionals, speaking to health coaches, trainers, group fitness instructors, and saying, “Are you making 10 K months yet or are you at 10 K a month?”
For some reason it’s this very, like, just in my estimation, a sort of arbitrary number of, uh, of like benchmark of success is if you’re online business owner, if you have a personal brand, you should be at 10 k months. Now I don’t know who decided that that was the benchmark for people getting into the space.
And it’s, it’s fairly arbitrary and it’s also not the best goal. I actually have, um, a client of mine, a couple clients of mine actually, who have gotten fixated on this number. We’ve talked about it a couple times, but for some reason I think it keeps just sort of staying in their head as a measure of success.
And I understand that, you know, you’re making 10 K a months, that’s over, that’s a six figure plus, you know, online business, which is amazing. And it also means that you have some ability and some stability in your business. And I think this is one of the hardest things for newbies to the internet space to really swallow is this pill that it’s not going to feel super predictable all the time, or it’s not gonna feel super certain or safe every step of the way.
It’s not like you go to a job and you immediately start getting, you know, a salary and you immediately start getting a paycheck every two weeks. There is a lot of ramp up time, which we’ve actually shared quite a bit on this podcast, but, Here’s the deal. Once you even get to that point of it being a little bit more viable, things do start to feel more predictable.
So in my courses FBA and also in Legacy and also in my mastermind, we talk about launching and I’m a big fan of launching and there’s a lot of sort of, people talk about do launches still work and things like this. Yes, launches will always. Work. Now, if they’re not working like they used to, like from launch to launch, say maybe your conversion numbers are going down, or maybe your total units are going down.
It’s probably not because anything is wrong with the actual launch. Maybe it’s that either a. You don’t have any people to launch to, right? Maybe you’ve already exhausted everyone in your ecosystem. Maybe all of your early adopters, your warmest leads have already purchased the program. And so at that point, you might have to grow your audience.
You might have to layer on some paid traffic, you might have to do some organic promotion to start growing your online platforms, to grow your email list. So it could be just a numbers thing. Second, it could be a messaging issue. So for example, a lot of times, and you know this is sort of like the golden age of internet business, 10 years ago when I started, You like didn’t even really have to have great messaging.
You didn’t even need to really be a good marketer. You can just say, Hey, I have this thing. And if people liked you, they would chance there, they’d probably buy it. Now, of course, there’s way more people, there’s way more coaches. There’s also way more programs and products and services. For me, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, I was oftentimes people’s first purchase, like online purchase.
They’d never actually worked with a distance coach before. And so now we’re seeing people coming in having done maybe half a dozen, maybe even dozen programs. And so there’s a lot more to choose from, which means that you have to become better at marketing and you can’t just rest on your laurels. If I have the best certification or I’m really smart, or I have a six-pack, or whatever it is.
You have to learn business. And of course, that’s why you’re listening to this podcast. So when I think about all of. The launch model still is always going to work better than Evergreen for a couple of reasons. Number one, we have an urgency and scarcity prompt, right? We have an exclusivity prompt. We have prompts that get people to take action when they’re sort of in a holding pattern.
Now, don’t get this mixed up with, you know, coercing someone or forcing someone or anything like that. At the end of the day, it’s 100% permission-based marketing all the time, which means people can have all the information. You guys know, I’m really big on transparency marketing. When you give them all the information, you’re saying, here is everything that you need to know to make an informed decision.
So to me, marketing or sales or, or some of these things, it’s not sleazy. It’s just you making a, an argument or making a case, a contextual case for why your product or service is going to help them get a result. And so at the end of the day, don’t take me saying, Hey, we’re gonna force people to make a decision.
Meaning that, you know, we’re gonna coerce them. It’s putting them on the hook to decide. Now that’s e extremely different than coercing someone or making someone feel bad or guilting them into, into purchasing something. By putting a deadline on things or by having some sort of capped spots or something that’s going away.
You’re saying, Hey, like it’s going away. Are you in or out? You’re basically asking that question. You’ve been hanging around for a while, you’ve been checking everything out. You’ve been messaging me, you’ve been telling me you wanna do. Shit or get off the pot. You know, I say it in the nicest way. And it might not be someone, someone might not have the right time, but I can tell you most of the people who sign up for something like FBA are a little scared.
I don’t think you’re ever gonna make an investment and not be a little bit scared. And so at the end of the day, you know, a launch always puts that urgency or that scarcity in place. Now I do think that more than ever there is a need to have some kind of evergreen mechanism in place. Now, evergreen means something is available all the time.
I do think that at, at some point in your business, you’re gonna wanna have a, an evergreen machine of some kind. Now, when I say machine, I just mean like what’s the modality or what’s the mechanism that you’re using? Are we using a, uh, paid, uh, are we doing a paid funnel? So essentially this is called an SLO or self-liquidating offer.
Are we doing something where we’re sending paid traffic to a landing page, having someone opt in for something free and then upselling them after they opt? Right, and there’s a lot of tweaking that has to happen with that, and we’ll talk about that more here in a second. Or do you have an Evergreen High Touch program?
High ticket program? Like maybe a one-on-one? Now, if you do, that’s great, but remember, you still need to have a way to create a pipeline, even if you’re doing high ticket sales or you’re doing high ticket one-on-one, and that’s evergreen. You still have to have a pipeline. How are you getting people on sales calls?
Like, what are you, we talk about it in FBA, like going fishing. What’s your bait? What is your bait? Is your bait going to be a free, um, high touch, I don’t know, like an audit or something? A health audit, a consultation of some kind. Are you doing like live workshops where people can come and essentially, you know, get on and, and talk to you doing, um, you know, are you doing, we talked about this quite a bit in the last episode on, um, scaling your one-on-one, but.
what is the thing that’s gonna help you get a pipeline of people in? Because here’s the deal. At the end of the day, showing up on social media every day is great, and you’re definitely gonna build that trust. And as your audience builds and as you stay consistent and as you stay more reliable, you will get more inquiries.
I can tell you that we sell products every, every single day at Jill Fit. Evergreen products. But at the end of the day, You still have to have something in place that’s gonna get people to make a decision, make them feel compelled to reach out to you for coaching. And so, yes, the launch mechanism still is, in my estimation, the best way to do this.
So what that means is for you, if you just look at it like a job and you say, I wanna be making 10 K months, realize that internet business doesn’t exactly work like that. For those of you who maybe are personal trainers or you’ve been personal trainer like me, There was always natural ebbs and flows, right?
We always had clients maybe pause their sessions or quit their sessions around the summer, maybe around the holidays. Like this stuff is normal and it’s scary cuz sometimes you’re like, oh my God, three people quit this week. Very scary. That’s why if you have a pipeline or you have some bait that’s coming in, or that’s running in the background to get more people in, that’s great, but here’s the deal.
If you’re in a a time for money service industry, there’s always going to be some unpredictability, and when you fixate on, I need to be making 10 K a month, to me, number one, that’s arbitrary. Like why 10 K? Right? It could be anything. Could be any number, but also sometimes in internet business, that’s not how revenue works.
If you’re using launch model and maybe evergreen sales, chances are you’re probably not, and this is the punchline of the entire episode. Chances are you are not going to be at consistent 10 K months in your business until you get to 30, 40, $50,000 launch months. I’m gonna say that again, you’re probably not going to be getting to consistent 10 K months until during your launch months, like the months that you actually launch, you’re bringing in upwards of 20, 30 to 50 grand.
So, for example, at JillFit now, you know, at a seven figure level, it’s a little bit different. But same thing, just more just different number of zeros. But we do a launch, like for launching fda, or we do most of our major launches.
I think last year we did six, uh, six, six figure launches. And so in those months we obviously brought in over six figures. We sometimes we brought in over, over $200,000 in a month. and in the months that we didn’t launch, we were consistently bringing in 40 to 50 grand. And so if you think about that on a smaller scale, you’re gonna have launch months and you’re gonna have months where you’re bringing in more than 10 K.
Maybe you do a launch for your one-on-one, maybe you do a launch for a group program, maybe you do a launch for a self-paced course. And then because you have those larger. The months that you’re maybe not launching something are gonna be less, but they’re going to maybe be at that 10 K mark. Does that make sense?
So for example, like if you’re doing what I, what I, you know, tend to help my clients do, which is put in place an ascension model, which essentially says we have some products that get launched and we have other products that get maybe evergreen sales or wait list to an application or something like that.
All different types of launches. But in order to making 10 K consistently, you’re probably gonna have to have some bigger months. And in those months, that’s where you make a majority. Versus if you’re, you have, you do a launch and you have a 10 K month launch. Month, then the other months you’re not launching, gonna be less than 10 K.
Does that make sense? So you wanna think about it from the perspective of, once I get to the point where I’m doing like a multiple five figure launch, maybe 20 K, 30 K, 40 k, at that point, I’m going to have some things in place that can help me reach that 10 K month when I’m not launching things. Maybe you’ve built your brand to the point where you are bringing in evergreen sales.
You know, at JillFit people come to our website all the time and we just make sales like small sales, right? We don’t do like our bigger offers. Those are usually on launch, but some of our low ticket sales, we make those, you know, every day in the business or multiple times a week, you will. Also have things like payment plans.
If you’re doing a launch, if you have a high ticket offer, you’re going to have payment plans. And of course you can have this with your Evergreen offers too. So if you have a one-on-one coaching offer, you can do payment plans. We make a lot of our just like recurring revenue each month off of our financing options, but that also means you have to be launching consistently, right?
Have something in place that you’re launching every three months or every six. So that you have continuous payment plans. So we have people who joined FBA like almost a year ago, like nine months ago, and they’re still paying on their 12 month payment plan. You know, and we like that. We like to get, you know, a good chunk of money upfront because we can do stuff with that.
We can invest back in the business. We can, you know, put that into payroll. We can do bonuses, but we also like to have people on payment plans. And we also like to have sort of recurring revenue. Our goal always is probably to have like a 60- 40 split. We love to have. 60% of people doing the paid in full and maybe 40% of people doing the financing option.
Now, if you have too many people doing the paid in full option and no one is taking you up on the financing, chances are your price is probably a little bit too low. You might wanna increase that to maybe get some more payment plans. Again, now you have recurring revenue coming in. So when we think about 10 K months, chances.
Here’s, I guess here’s what I would recommend, instead of looking at it at a monthly basis, right, how much money’s coming in each month. What we do at Jill Fit is we look at quarters, so for us, we know, okay, let’s just as a, as a exercise for you, let’s say you wanna make six figures this year, and so you wanna make a hundred thousand dollars.
This makes way more sense to me from like a launching perspective and just like the, the ebbs and flows and the natural sort of unpredictability of internet business. You wanna make a hundred k, which means divided by four, four quarters, you need to bring in about $25,000 per quarter. Now I’m hoping that that makes you have a little bit less pressure because 30 days is goes by really fast, right?
Oh shit, I gotta make another 10 K, another 10 K, another, every time you turn around, it’s like the end of the month and where’s my 10 k? Versus being like, okay, I have 90 days to generate $25,000. How am I gonna do that? Maybe in one month I generate, I don’t know, 18 grand because I did a launch that month, and then the other month, maybe I’m only generating like five or six K.
Right? But you still hit your numbers, and so remember, there’s a lot of ways to get to that point, but try not to put it, in my estimation, the pressure that I see people putting on themselves to hit 10 K every single month and then making it mean something if they don’t like, oh, my business is bad, or It’s wrong, or something’s happening with it, to me. Look at it at a quarterly basis.
And that’s exactly what we do at Jill Fit. So I want you guys to think about this from the perspective of like just maybe, maybe considering that the 10 K month to me doesn’t mean anything about your business. Instead, you wanna look at, am I having big enough launches so that on the months I’m not launching, I’m still bringing in revenue?
Like to me, that would be a way better mark of success and viability is, how much money am I making in the months that I’m not launching and I’m not having to put like pedals in the metal. Like at Jill Fit on the months we don’t launch. Like I said, we’re at like 40 to 50 grand. But that’s from a bunch of things, right?
That’s from, uh, organic sales, that’s from, uh, paid traffic. We have some automations going. We have some order bumps. We have some upsells, we have some down, we have some payment plans. All of this kind of stuff. Like that’s really, when I think about passive income, that’s really what I think about.
People think that passive income is you just put together one funnel one time, and then you just go and retire on the beach. That’s not what passive income is. Passive income is when you’re not actively launching something that you do have some revenue coming in, and this is gonna ramp up over time as your business grows. So it may be 10 K, it may not be, it might be 5k.
Six K, seven K. As your launches get bigger, probably your monthly receivables will also get bigger, so something to consider when you see that number again. I know it’s nice because we like to grab ahold of it and be like, that’s when I need to hit. Instead, I would like to see you do 25 K a quarter. To me, that makes so much more sense and it takes the pressure off because it’s not like every time I turn around, it’s been 30 days.
What’s my revenue generating activity, my launch for this quarter? Am I launching something? Am I being an affiliate for someone? Am I uh, doing a push for one-on-one coaching? What am I doing in this quarter, and that gives you a lot more time and space to make your launches more successful so that you have more money coming in those months that you’re not launching.
Hopefully that makes sense. Cause I’ve been seeing this quite a bit, especially at the beginning of the year. I wanted to address this and address the idea of sort of passive income and we’ll maybe make a whole separate episode on that, but hopefully this is helpful for you guys. Hit me up if you have any questions about this, you can always reach me at the uh, @FitBizU account as well as at @JillFit social.
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Especially if you listen to this on like a walk or something. You can do it right now and I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you guys so much for being here for your time and detention, and we’ll see you on the next.
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