Whether you’re starting out or have been in the coaching industry for quite some time there are some mistakes that hinder you from achieving your desired income. Because of these mistakes, even the most talented coaches struggle to translate their expertise into financial success.
In this episode of Influence by Design, I am joined by my partner in life and business Leon to talk about overcoming the greatest mistake that we see that impedes coaches from growing their income.
Understanding how you can increase your income starts with knowing your numbers. These are the numbers you can easily track on a daily, and weekly basis that help boost your leads, conversation rates, and ultimately, your revenue.
But what numbers do you need to know?
We dive deep into the four levers you can pull to achieve your income goals, and shed light on them so you can discover opportunities that will increase your income.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- The difference between a coach and a business owner (03:55)
- Why knowing your numbers is a game changer (08:00)
- Two types of numbers you need to be aware of (10:08)
- How to leverage your 30-day runway (12:40)
- The significance of increasing the number of leads (16:50)
- How to improve your conversion rates (18:07)
- Strategies to increase average your transaction value (19:05)
- The upsides of moving from a one-off sale to monthly recurring revenue (20:40)
QUOTES
- “You have to be honest with yourself and have a look at your numbers to start with. They are what they are and that’s not an issue. When you know what they are, then you can move forward.” -Leon Flitton
- “Being a business owner can give you more freedom than an employee. But it’s balanced out by a lot of responsibility.” -Samantha Riley
- “If you work with someone for 30 days, they’re going to get some results. If you continue working with them, they’re going to get even better results.” -Samantha Riley
RESOURCES
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- Your current situation and immediate opportunities for growth
- Uncover the #1 thing holding you back from not being booked as an industry leader
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WHERE TO FIND LEON FLITTON
- Website: https://yourpodcastconcierge.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonflitton/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leonflitton
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChatWithLeon/
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
- Facebook: Samantha Riley
- Instagram: @thesamriley
- LinkedIn: Samantha Riley
- Twitter: @thesamriley
TRANSCRIPTION
Samantha Riley (00:00):
When you know that there’s only a few different levers that you need to pull, you can actually sort of start to play an experiment. Well, if I move this lever, what happens and then when you see the numbers changing, it gets really exciting.
Leon Flitton (00:15):
I think it’s square, keeping it simple, but doing it very well. And making it repeatable, easily repeatable, can have a massive payoff effects for you.
Samantha Riley Intro (00:26):
Welcome to the Influence By Design Podcast. I’m Samantha Riley, authority positioning strategist for coaches and experts. If you’re ready to build a business that gives you more than just a caffeine addiction, and you dream of making more money, having more time, and having the freedom to be living your best life, then you’re in the right place, it’s time to level up.
Welcome to today’s episode of Influence By Design, I’m your Thursday co host Samantha Riley and joined by my partner in business and life. Leon Fitton, how are you, Leon?
Leon Flitton (00:58)
I’m fantastic, thank you.
Samantha Riley (00:59):
Well, that’s good, I actually know you’re good, because you’re just in the room next to me, we’ve just had a coffee. So. But now we’re in separate offices behind the mics to talking about a topic that we want to bring into the light, because here’s the thing, when there are topics that get shoved under the rug, so picked up the rope, put it under there, put it in the dark, these kinds of topics hold a lot of fear, shame, judgment, all of the really awful things that hold people back. But when we bring things that I don’t know, that we’re afraid of, I guess, or don’t want to do a into the light, it just sort of takes away all the power that this topic holds.
Leon Flitton (01:42):
It’s just one of those topics that really needs to be talked about more, but it just isn’t.
Samantha Riley (01:48):
Yeah, so this is we’re gonna talk about the biggest mistake that we see, that’s holding coaches back from growing their income. And I can say 100% hand on my heart, I’ve never met a seven figure business owner or a million dollar business owner, who doesn’t do this, every single person that’s in that million dollar and above 789 figures definitely do this 100% of the time. And it’s something that we see that coaches that are generally that under that 10 to 20k a month, don’t do this, because they have a fear around it. And I think this fear is around just maybe not understanding it or understanding how to do it. Would you agree? Yeah, I
Leon Flitton (02:31):
think a little bit is around not understanding it, and may also be potentially from the making that shift from, you know, starting a business. So the the kind of more entry level. So going from maybe an employee mindset into maybe a more of a business owner mindset.
Samantha Riley (02:51):
Yeah, yeah. Once we break, or once we help people break this down, and what then we’re going to do, we’re going to do it today help you to break this down, and you understand it. And what we see is that when we help people understand this, that they lean into doing this, and once they understand this, and this is definitely what happened for me when my first business coach helped me do this. Once I understood it, not only was the fear taken away, but this turned into a game for me, because I understood what I could shift to get different results. And you’ve seen me with spreadsheets, right? Leon you’re exactly the same. We love manipulating them. And what we don’t mean is manipulating them to make not fake numbers up or fake outcomes up. What we do is say, Well, if we change this one number, what happens to the end goal? Or if we change this number over here? What happens to the end goal?
Leon Flitton (03:50):
Yeah, so we’re not talking about anything to vanity metrics here. These are all real numbers.
Samantha Riley (03:54):
Yeah. So before we jump in, and we still haven’t really talked about what you know what we’re talking about today, but let’s cover off something that you and I were talking about before we hit record. And that is the difference between a coach and a business owner. They’re two very different things. And I find that people get these two things are they sort of put them in the same bucket, but they’re two very different buckets. And that’s that the business owner, or a lot of people want to have their own business because they want freedom, right? They want to be able to work where they want when they want with who they want. It’s yin and yang, it’s light and dark for all of the freedom you get at the other end. It’s balanced out by a lot of responsibility. There are a lot of things that you need to be doing. So this is where you need to decide do you want to put on the business owner hat and be the person that’s that’s running the business? Or do you want to purely just wear the coach hat and have the safety of having money deposited in your account every week? And if if that’s what you do, there’s absolutely no shame Am I going actually I just want to have a job or let me take the just out, I want to have a job or be in an employment position and have that money to come into my account. I love coaching, I only want to coach I don’t want all of the other responsibility. And if that’s you, then just you know, let it all go and just go, this is what I want to do. Because there are plenty of coaching business looking for really good coaches. There’s definitely no shame in that at all. And I think that there’s a lot of, like, Bro marketers that have put a lot of shame around over the last few years having a job. And I don’t agree with that.
Leon Flitton (05:37):
Yeah, I feel like there’s Yeah, social media has led it that way, where it kind of almost seems like you have to be like this. And it’s not the case at all, like not, I think entrepreneurship, you need to be cut out for it. Yeah. Otherwise, there’s nothing wrong with having a job. No, you if you love what you do, and you want to keep doing it, then there’s no problem at all. I don’t see why that would be an issue to anyone. And probably stop worrying about what other people think if you want to have a job and say it’s a coach and you want to be the best coach you can be and work with someone, and then that’s great, then, then you have what probably have more fulfillment in that, I suppose.
Samantha Riley (06:12):
Absolutely, absolutely. But if you want to be the business owner, then that’s great, too. And that’s what we’re here for you and I love being in business, right? 100% We love the freedom of being able to create our days, like we like them, we still work a lot of hours, you know, that’s the truth of what happens here. But we do in our way, you know, we do go to the gym, I was gonna say every day, but that’s a lie, we go
Leon Flitton (06:38):
to the gym most days, we would like to go every day. Exactly,
Samantha Riley (06:42):
you know, Mondays when we have our personal training session, first thing in the morning, we always get breakfast on the way home and, and discuss our calendar for the week. And, you know, we’ve got some quirky little things that that we do we we walk and get coffee, and almost every day we do that. So there’s a lot of things that we like about having that freedom. But in that there’s also a lot of responsibility as we’ve got a team of, you know, quite over 10 people now, that requires some overseeing or some project management, there’s clients that we deliver to there’s, you know, lots of projects that we’ve got on the go. So we’ve got plenty of freedom, but there’s also a real lot of responsibility. So we love it. That’s what we’re here for. And we’re here to help you to build your business, if that’s what you want to do. So that it can give you the freedom that you want. And the income because that’s why I one of the reasons I went into business because in a job, I realized, doesn’t matter how hard I work, the person is sitting at the desk next to me, that was you know, feet up on the desk doing not much and I was doing 10 times the work. I’m like, How come I get paid the same amount as this clown.
Leon Flitton (07:53):
That’s super frustrating. It is really frustrating.
Samantha Riley (07:55):
But anyway, let’s get into it. I’m getting very off track here. We’re talking about knowing your numbers. Now, knowing your numbers, depending on who’s talking about this topic, it can be taken a lot of different ways. We’re not talking today about profit and loss statements and, you know, balance sheets, we’re not talking about this, we’re talking about the numbers to actually increase your income, the numbers that you need to be paying attention to every day, or if not every day, at least every week. But this is something that since my very first business, I’ve always paid attention to every single day. This is something that my very first coach helped me with. My first business partner came from a background and I’ve spoken about this at length before we came from a background in McDonald’s, they have got the most amazing systems and processes. And we just learnt that you track your numbers every day. And from your corporate background to Leon, it’s something that you’ve done in your career, being in operations and sales and retail, you’re used to tracking numbers
Leon Flitton (08:58):
Yeah, every day, you watching it and multiple times per day, I think it is suddenly there’s rolls on it becomes part of life and what you do, particularly because of the corporate was, you know, a retail based, so it was always about the numbers. So whether it was and I know that we can talk about now profit and loss, but I love that stuff, you know, like working out what cost what went where and, you know, essentially every cent counts, but being able to track every cent. So it’s pretty cool. But yeah, I’ve had that for like 30 years of, you know, watching sales and watching the profit and watching the wages and all those kind of things.
Samantha Riley (09:32):
Yeah, what I love about it, and I did sort of mentioned this before, is that when you know that there’s only a few different levers that you need to pull, you can actually sort of start to I’m gonna use that word manipulate but what I mean is you can start to play an experiment. Well, if I if I move this lever, what happens and then when you see the numbers changing, it gets really exciting. I love it. Love it, love it. So let’s So, let’s jump in. So the very, very first thing you need to know. So before you start to break this down, or before we start to break this down, there’s two numbers you need to know. And the very first one is, what is the next result you’re looking for. So not necessarily the end result of what you want in five years or two years. But what do you want at the end of this particular cycle that you’re running. So at the end of this 30 days, or 60 days, or quarters, however you run your planning. Now, I personally think that if you’re in the 10 to 20k per month range, that you’re best off running in either 30 Day or six week cycles, because you need a shorter runway, so that you can change course, or course correct a lot quicker. That’s what I’ve seen. So knowing your end result is the first number that you need, and what’s the second number later on.
Leon Flitton (10:56):
And so because you’re in that 10 to 20k, bracket, if it’s important that you’re utilizing what you have well, and I think you’re right in that fact that it’s a 30 day window, to turn things around or change things as you go to really get a good effect. So the other thing you do need to know is what your starting point is. So where are you starting from? And I think there’s something needs to be realistic about.
Samantha Riley (11:20):
Yeah, so how many clients do you have right now? What are the programs that you have right now? What are the conversion events that you’re running right now? What are your conversion rates, you need to know all these numbers, and this is where I find people stick their head in the sand going, Oh, I know, my conversion rates really low. So I’m just gonna, like, shut the door on this, or I’m not bringing in the leads that I want to be bringing in. So I’m just gonna, like, you know, like, hook, you know, it’s like, when you’re a kid, and your parents tell you to clean the room, and you just like, open the cupboard doors, and you shove everything in there. And you’re like, shocked, because it’s like, you know, like coming out the scenes, or maybe that’s just me.
Leon Flitton (12:01):
But he’s, he assigned me to really make your point of it does seem to be that at that stage of business growth, that a lot of people will do actually kind of ignore that or don’t want to look at it. But in reality, it’s still gonna be they’re just not looking at it, which is kind of dangerous.
Samantha Riley (12:18):
Absolutely. And this is where, where, if you’re doing this, you’re not going to get the growth that we know that you can get. So pull out your pen, pull out your pencil, pull out a piece of paper or your iPad, let’s start to break this down. Let’s like bring it out into the light. Because it is actually, once you start to do this, you realize how simple it is. So the first thing you need to know is what is it that you’re trying to add in the next little amount of time. So what we’re going to work on today is a 30 day runway, for someone that wants to add $10,000 to their income. So not, you know, have a 10,000, but add $10,000 to what you’re already earning in the next 30 days. So the next thing you need to know is the amount of your program or the average price, if you’ve got multiple programs, what’s the average sale price. So let’s just work it out on super, super basic numbers here. Let’s say you want to add $10,000 In the next 30 days, and your program average price is $500. So working that out, that means that in the next 30 days, you need 20 clients. Breaking that down again, is five clients per week. Okay, so if it worked out is how much do you want to add? What is the average program price? How many clients is that? And how many clients is that per week? And like straightaway, five per week makes that sound a lot more doable than I need to add $10,000 Because now you know exactly what it is that you’re working towards. You can put a plan in place.
Leon Flitton (13:53):
And even makes it more doable when you think about 20 clients. If you start talking about five per week, if that makes you seem completely doable, right?
Samantha Riley (14:01):
Yeah, all of a sudden, you’re like, Huh, okay, I can do this, we can do this. Alright, so numbers you need to know, before you get going, you talked before Leon about foundations and sort of knowing where you are. So you really need to know things like where you’re most engaged audiences on social media. You mentioned before vanity metrics, Leon. And if you’ve got, you know, a huge number on a social media platform that isn’t engaged, then the numbers don’t really count. So you want to know where your most engaged audience is on social media. And the other thing you need to know is your list size, say how many numbers currently on your email list.
Leon Flitton (14:42):
So the other thing you need to consider as well is how do you normally convert your clients through your funnel to actually become a client so what can take them from a lead to becoming a client? So what’s your conversion event? Are you so by chat person or do you like webinars? Or just hope and pray? They kind of staffing
Samantha Riley (15:01):
do Oh. Let’s face it, a lot of people are I’ve definitely been there in the past. I’m human, we all have human moments hope and pray doesn’t work. Let’s go by an actual conversion event.
Leon Flitton (15:15):
I think it might be a builder and they will come on. Yeah, I don’t think that works either.
Samantha Riley (15:21):
It might work for people building baseball fields out in cornfields, but pretty much for coaching businesses. All right, well, so let’s just say for today’s example, that your conversion or you know, we’re saying conversion event here, but we’ve also added in a sales call, which is actually the conversion event. So we know that we want five people per week. And imagine that your conversion event is webinars, and you do one per month, one webinar per month, you know, you get approximately 50 registrations a month. And from that 50 registrations, you get 10 calls booked. Again, we’re just breaking down the numbers to be super simple. This isn’t what the average numbers are. We’re just, I’m not a numbers person, I need everything divisible by five or 10. So one webinar per month, 50 registrations, and you know, you normally get 10 calls booked out of those 10 calls booked, you normally get a 50% conversion rate, which means that you get five clients. All right, so let’s just take a stop here. We’ve said that we want five clients a week. And we know that from a webinar, we end up by working at all our numbers that we get five clients. If we needed 20 clients in a month to hit our revenue goals. We know that we’re 75% short, because we still need another 15 clients. And this is why you need to know your numbers. So at this point, you know you’ve you’re coming short, so which lever Can you pull, let’s start to break this down. Do you want to go firstly on what’s the first lever that we can pull.
Leon Flitton (16:52):
And just to reiterate as well is you need to keep tracking the numbers all the way through with, you know, the registrations, the calls booked in the conversion rate, right. So that’s a given. But one thing you can do, and the first thing we’re going to talk about is increasing the amount of leads that you’re actually going to be bringing in to your in this case will be your webinar. So if you can increase more of those, obviously, the numbers as they filter through, if you can get twice the amount of registrations, you’ll get twice the amount of clients essentially at the end of it, all things being equal.
Samantha Riley (17:23):
Yeah, you can either go for more registrations, so that one webinar, and you know, get four times the amount of registrations, or you can run more webinars, so maybe you can run one a week instead of one a month. Yeah, so
Leon Flitton (17:37):
similar lever, just in, you know, which one, you’re going to pull in this case, which is more webinars or getting filled with more leads. So if you wanted to get more registrations, for example, that’s when you might want to unlucky much bigger, or extra social media campaigns and that kind of thing.
Samantha Riley (17:56):
Yeah, maybe you want to run more promotions to at least maybe you want to take on joint venture partners. But that very first lever that you can pull is just to increase leads, alright, second lever you can pull is to improve your conversion rate. So once you’ve got leads, the next step is to convert them into paying customers. So some of the things that you can do here is maybe be clear on presenting your offer in your webinar. So you have more people booking calls, maybe you need a better process for your sales calls, maybe your sales calls are a bit hit and miss and you haven’t worked out a specific, I’m going to use the word script, even though I’m a little bit against, like very, very tight scripts, but some sort of format on your calls to make sure that you’re walking people through and and getting higher conversions. But that yeah, the second lever is to improve your conversion rate.
Leon Flitton (18:50):
Because this is a side note here as well. If you were doing more webinars, chances are that you get clearer on your presenting offer anyway on your webinar. So that could actually could help you twofold.
Samantha Riley (19:01):
Absolutely. Very good point, Leon.
Leon Flitton (19:05):
What’s number three,
Samantha Riley (19:06):
three is increasing the average transaction value. Now there’s a couple of different ways you can do this. Yeah, you and I’ve got a retail background. So we love this one. In retail, we call it increasing your basket price. There are different ways that this can work in an online business or in a coaching business. So you can create upsells so have an upsell to sell someone into something else or a higher priced offer. You can have down sells, so convert people that didn’t make a sale to purchase something that’s a smaller amount. You can have cross sells where you’re adding on different parts. But I think if you’re in the 10 to 20k range, I would leave all those alone because they actually add a lot of complexity to funnels, and all I would do is increase your program price. So if you increase your pay GRANT price from $500 to $1,000. Straight away, you it means to hit your next revenue or income goal. Instead of needing 20 clients, now you only need 10 clients. So depending on where you are in your business, there are many different ways to do it. If you’re in that 10 to 20k range, I wouldn’t worry with upsells downsells cross sells complexity, all I would do purely is increase your program price,
Leon Flitton (20:28):
I think is square keeping it simple, but doing it very well. And making it repeatable, easily repeatable can have a massive pay off effects for you.
Samantha Riley (20:38):
Absolutely. Number four, what’s the fourth lever we can pull in?
Leon Flitton (20:43):
Well, hopefully, everyone’s doing this anyway. But I think this is a great one moving from one off course. So just a one point sale to monthly recurring revenue. So I think that’s a big one. So this is going to really pay dividends when you think about the lifetime value of the customer.
Samantha Riley (21:00):
So if we want to add $10,000, let’s break this down. If we wanted to add $10,000 to a business, we could either find 2010 or 20 people every single month to make that sale. Or we could find 10 or 20 people every month to add that amount. So we could either sell $1,000 a month, and then add 10 new clients next month, and then it’d be 20,000 a month, and then add 10 clients the next month and it would be $30,000 a month. Or we could find 10 clients next month and make 10,000 and then find another 10 clients the next month and make 10,000 and then find another 10 clients the next month and hit that 10,000. So hopefully you can see straight away, I guess it’s the compound effect.
Leon Flitton (21:47):
You know, yeah, stackable
Samantha Riley (21:51):
stackable programs, stackable, recurring revenue
Leon Flitton (21:55):
Probably one of the best things about this as well. As I said before, it’s the lifetime value of the client, while they’re still in there, in your programs as well, you’re still building good rapport with them. So when you do have an upsell, as your business grows, and you do have that next product, you’ve got more chance of selling these already existing clients into that upsell as well
Samantha Riley (22:15):
100% It means that you’re giving your clients more support, it means you know that they’re more likely to have success in whatever it is that you’re coaching them in as well. You know, as a good coach, that if you work with someone for 30 days, they’re going to get some results, you know, if you continue to work with them, and they layer, learn and keep layering that you know that success that they’re having on top of each other, that they’re going to get even better results, which, you know, means that you’ve got more loyal customers means that you get better case studies, it means all sorts of things. But most importantly for you as the business owner, it means that you know, the first of the month, next month, you don’t need to wake up and think, oh, I need to get 10 new clients, you know that you’ve got the bills paid, you know that you’re growing. And you can, you know, put that or invest that money back into your business to grow even further.
Leon Flitton (23:10):
Yeah, it definitely brings about a level of stability for you as well, knowing that you have X amount of dollars coming in, you know, for that recurring revenue.
Samantha Riley (23:20):
Absolutely. So let’s just go back over that the four levers that you can pull is number one to increase your leads. So getting more leads means attracting more potential customers. Number two, you can improve your conversion rate. So either getting better on presenting your offer, or having a better process on your sales calls. Number three is to increase the average transaction value. And the easiest way to do that no matter what level of business you’re in, is to increase your program price. And number four, moving from a one off course fee to a monthly recurring revenue model. This is definitely the way that I recommend that you build your business out because it means less sleepless nights. Leon anything that you want to add,
Leon Flitton (24:04):
I think that you’ve just really got to be honest and just have a look at the numbers to start with. Because they are what they are. And that’s not an issue. I think what the thing is to go, Well, what can I do with it and move forward? Because if you don’t log in, you don’t know. And there’s a saying is you can’t grow what you don’t measure. So first step is to go where do I want to go? And the second piece is actually go and have a look and see where you’re at and be realistic about it.
Samantha Riley (24:33):
Absolutely. So today we’ve talked about one of the biggest mistakes that we see that holds people back from growing their coaching business, growing their income, but there’s actually nine key growth areas for your business and these areas will give you more income, more freedom and more impact. And we’ve created a planner for you. It’s absolutely free to download. It’s called the million dollar plan where we will help To Work walk you through the formula for pricing your product. So you reach your income goals, start to look at the tasks that are not giving you a return on investment for your time or your money. So you can stop doing them right away, plus, who wants to be doing all the things, things like defining the gaps in your business, which are currently holding you back a strategy to attract more exposure so more people know who you are. And you can download a copy of the million dollar plan at Summit the Riley dot global forward slash plan. So you download that, and definitely start to play with some of these numbers. Like I said, once you bring them into the light, you take away the fear that you hold around them. And it really does turn into a lot of fun. We love to play with the numbers and you know, play with those levers and discover where we’ve got opportunities in our business. So thanks for joining us today for this episode. We’ll see you next Tuesday for another episode of the Influence By Design show.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more head over to influencebydesignpodcast.com for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other experts who are growing and scaling their business to join us in the coaches, thought leaders, and changemakers community on Facebook, the links are waiting for you over at influencebydesignpodcast.com
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