Welcome back to the Jereshia Said podcast. In last week's episode of this homecoming series, we dove into all the details around why I took a sabbatical, how I plan my sabbatical in advance and how I prepared my business for my absence and the steps I took to ensure smooth operations all while grieving the death of a close family member and going through a divorce.
Today we'll be going deeper into the 10 lessons I learned from testing every department of my business at scale over an 18 month time period before I kicked off my sabbatical. I didn't know what type of sabbatical I wanted to take. So the engineer and me decided to get data by testing every corner of my business, to determine where I could decrease owners dependency while still experiencing substantial growth.
And I basically wanted to know what would be required for each aspect of my business to run without me. And how far off from that I currently was. So these are the parts of my business that I tested client delivery and coaching content creation and distribution, social media management, and engagement. Lead qualification in sales, customer service and client relations, and finally project and task management. This testing period was also the biggest year I had ever had in my business.
I brought in over $1.4 million in top-line revenue, maintaining over 60% in profit. And seeing some of the biggest clients results to date. Having multiple clients cross the seven figure mark and dozens of clients add hundreds of thousands of dollars to their business. At this time too, I had been working with a handful of my clients for three to four years. So our customer lifetime value was incredible. And the middle of that testing period is when my personal life starts to take a toll.
I lost a very close family member. And was swept into grief. A few months after that, my ex partner and I decided that it was best if we went in our separate ways. And I wanted to include those very real life moments to give you context, because I. Relied very heavily on my business model on my systems and especially my team during that time period to get through. So these are not listed in any particular order, but let's get into the top 10 lessons learned from this testing period.
Lesson number one. 90% of what you do in your coaching business can be automated or delegated. You are special, but you're not that special to the business. And let me explain that. So in the beginning, you will be the primary person doing the heavy lifting of your business because you are still validating your actual business model. You are in a massive testing period. You're figuring out what you should sell, how it should be packaged, what it should be priced at and how to actually sell it.
Those are not decisions that you can delegate, but rather those are skillsets. You must learn. Yes, you can. And probably should hire a coach or enroll in a training course to shorten your learning curve. To help you learn and hone those skill sets. But once you've learned the skillset of selling, then you start enrolling clients on a more consistent basis. Then you start noticing repetition in those tasks that you are completing on a weekly basis.
That's usually the first indication that is time to actually hire internal help. As you continue to grow your business, you'll begin to document the patterns which will become your processes. And those things can be handed off to team members. And the thing is, is that online coaching businesses are fairly simple. Show your face.
So in surf, Showing your face is really all about the messaging and the content that you create to build trust, to articulate your perspective and to invite people in, to work with you. Selling is what exactly it sounds like having those sales conversations to actually enroll clients and typically in an online coaching business, that's going to take place either on a sales call. Could be happening in person. You know, you having a real sales conversation real time with somebody.
Or what's most common for me is closing clients and selling and having those sales conversations in the direct message on Instagram. The third is serving, and this is the actual delivery that you provide through your teaching. You're training your mentoring, your coaching, or your actual delivery, which is based on your perspective, your past experiences and your honed expertise of skillset. The decisions around those three areas.
Are yours to make in document, but there is a lot of room in the doing of those three things that can be automated with software or delegated to another person to fulfill. As you mature in your business. The second lesson that I learned is when you couple an unhealthy ego with poor decision making criteria and a lack of standardization, these are the ingredients holding many people back from creating more leverage and increasing profitability in their business.
One of the most common pitfalls, I think as online business owners is that we can wrap our ego and our sense of self-worth and our identity. Into the work that we do, we get so attached. Our self-worth gets so fixated on the number of followers we get. How many likes we get, how big the client results are that we're helping our clients achieve, that we can really lose sight. Of why we're truly in business and the type of freedom and flexibility we're looking to get out of our business.
When your sense of self is wrapped up into the results that you get with clients, it can be very difficult to notice the best role you play in your business. This took me years to learn. And what solidified during this testing period? If you think you're the only person who can handle and lead sales conversations and enroll clients.
If you think you're the only person who can offer support to your clients, answering emails, being able to point them in the right direction, even leading coaching calls. If you think you're the only person who can edit videos or write copy, I am here to tell you otherwise. If you have a coaching or an education business, yes, you are 100% responsible for unpacking and developing the intellectual property of what you teach.
You are solely responsible for the messaging in language you use to articulate the value that you deliver. You are 1000% responsible for defining the promise and the outcome of your programs and offers and what they actually deliver in who was most qualified and best suited for your offers. Those decisions can not be delegated, but once you have discovered, defined and documented those key functions of your business, the support roles can be handed off to somebody else.
During this testing period, I had a full-time team of three, including myself, and we ran two launches back to back. Since we had refined and relaunched the offers that we were selling over the past few years, we had our messaging, our content strategy, our marketing for our launches and our sales process super dialed in, in addition to the client delivery being super dialed in as well.
So I was able to standardize pretty much everything from lead generation to sales, to client delivery and offboarding. And we had developed our internal trainings so that my team would know how to do all of these things. And I could train them on how to do each of these aspects. Aspects of the business without me being involved. That was a huge part of this test and preparation during this testing period. But interestingly enough days into the launch.
a, close family member of mine had passed away and I was on a plane by the end of that week to attend the funeral. Those few weeks of preparation and recorded loom videos were all my team had to continue with the launch. During this initial launch in going into this, the original goal was to shadow my team and be able to train them live. I wasn't expecting to hand off the entire responsibility to them and have them really lead and run this launch on their own.
But once the launch was all said and done, we had our biggest month ever bringing in over $250,000 cash money. Okay. Cash money, and over half a million dollars in future payments to be collected. And the wild thing was that was without me doing any of the selling and enrolling. So, how was that possible? For starters, we had two core offers. My business model was super, super simple. There was one front facing offer and we had one. Lifetime value client retention offer on the backend.
So standardizing my offers made it so much easier to document the key aspects of how to qualify a lead. How we led sales conversations based off of how qualified or where a prospect was in their business journey. So we knew how to tailor the sales conversations and how we tailor those sales conversations was already documented and processes were created around it. And what messaging we needed to infuse into our content strategy when we launched.
The second thing that made this possible was relaunching and refining the same offer over and over and over again. When you are growing your business right. Guarantee you that you probably will get bored, but your creativity comes in the refinement process, not in the new creation process. This really allowed me to improve my client delivery, which in turn increased client results, which added more credibility to our program.
And more importantly, it added more conviction to my team to actually believe in what they were selling. The last thing is that I, as a CEO, I took responsibility for the decision-making and the documentation around the core operational aspects of my offers. And this is a level of CEO or business maturity that you really grow into you as you stay in business longer.
So it was my responsibility to understand what are the common objections, what is the proper way that we qualify a lead for this offer who was qualified, who was not, and that's very different than. Who could this offer be for, but really who best meets the qualifications to get and ensure that they had the highest likelihood of achieving the promise of the program. What is the offer? Positioning? What is the program promise?
Really developing the curriculum and training that's within the client delivery. Listen, when you are packaging your perspective and selling your experience, you are responsible for all of this. Yes, you can get help. And I have hired help throughout the years. I've always had helped throughout the years from a coach trusted advisor or a mentor to help pull these things out of me and help me iron out my thoughts and better align them to be able to better articulate them.
And this is a lot of what I do with my own coaching clients, but you are the source. When you accept that responsibility, it leads you to making better hiring decisions and it helps you reduce the amount of rework and despair that you would have ultimately have experienced. If you try to hand this off to somebody else. So a few final thoughts on this second lesson learned for you is just what aspects of your business model and offers can be standardized.
How can you simplify the number of offers that you sell publicly? And how can you clarify the promise of what your offers actually deliver so that it creates clarity and from a front facing standpoint, but it also creates internal clarity for both you and for your team. The third lesson learned was delegating, standardizing and automating. The business is not a matter of if, but more, a factor of how and when. As I mentioned earlier, knowing what help you need.
And when is the primary question you gotta be thinking about. And make decisions around. So I started hiring internal teams support once I was making about a hundred, $150,000 a year in revenue. Again, when I crossed $300,000. And again, when I crossed a million dollars in revenue, so each stage of business growth required a different level of internal support because my business was evolving.
Usually the support that got me from a hundred thousand to 300,000 was no longer the same level of support that I needed to get me from 300,000 to a million dollars in revenue. So one of the big lessons that I learned here was that I had to be willing to let team members go or to change the focus of their role when the business demanded it. It's not a personal issue. It's just a business priority.
So standardizing my offers was really dictated by the consistency at which I was seeing client results. And that helped me start to evaluate how I could refine and better clarify my offers, my program promise and my client delivery. So, when you're thinking about your own offers, usually when you get to about 10 paid coaching clients in that particular offer. That's a good time to pause.
Look for what you can standardize, what you can clarify in what more specificity you can offer to your program. Promise. You should have the opportunity to do that again. When you've had 30 paid clients, then again, when you've had about 50 paid clients. And then again, when you've had more than a hundred paid clients into the same one core offer. It's nearly impossible to standardize the delivery and operations of an offer.
If you are constantly changing the offer, the prices and the promise every few months, look. Can creating new offers frequently make you money a hundred percent. But it's very difficult to sustain that and create predictability that way. Fast money is usually not the same thing as long money. And when you're thinking longterm, we need to think about doing things in a standardized way that has some level of repetition, which allows us to create some level of predictability in our efforts.
If you look at apple with the iPhone, this is a really great example. They have been selling the same phone to us since 2007. So instead of making an entirely new cellular device, every single year, they refine and relaunch the same cell phone year after year, they improve the product based on client feedback. Which influences how they message and position the offer the next time they actually launch it to the public.
So start to think about how you can create more longevity with your most profitable offers or the most profitable promise that you know, how to deliver, to give yourself the gift and opportunity to create more standardization and automate more inside of your business. The fourth lesson that I learned was that having a team doesn't have to by default mean hiring full-time employees.
It's really important that you define the scope of work you actually want to hand off and the type of support that's needed to fulfill that role. For most coaching businesses, you might need one at max two full-time employees working 40 hours a week in your business. Someone inclined delivery or executive assistants type of role, and maybe someone to lead your marketing efforts, depending on how complex, how big your launches are or things of that nature.
And I don't think that level of support when you have multiple full-time employees as needed, unless you're making more than $600,000 a year. And probably if you're making 600,000 to a million dollars a year, you probably only need one full-time team member at most. If you're making less than $600,000 per year, and you have multiple full-time employees, I would invite you to evaluate that immediately.
You're probably either overpaying people based on the actual performance, their work is contributing to the business. I learned this lesson from being in a high level mastermind. Many of my peers had been taught to hire before you need the help. And to train up inexperienced full-time employees to work with you. Long-term. This is more of a corporate fortune 500 mentality. In my opinion, that I do not believe is directly applicable to lean online business coaching models.
I was fortunate not to have to make this mistake personally in my own business, but I paid to learn that lesson by being in the right rooms. And I'm super grateful that I did. So I want you to think about the work that you want to delegate based on these three things. One is this actually just a project, meaning that it has a short scope of work and once it's implemented, then it just needs to be maintained. To does it require part-time or seasonal support or three? Is this a permanent position?
Meaning the work, they will be responsible for something that you are currently doing on a daily or weekly basis over a long stretches of time. So project part-time or permanent. Most of the work needed to get done in a coaching business can be done by a specialized contractor or some sort of part-time support. Hiring somebody to implement a new system could be as simple as booking a VIP day with the right person.
Or needing support with your podcast editing and publishing can be working with a specialized agency or contractor on retainer, even getting coaching support for your programs. Cause it like paying a flat fee for calls they lead or coaching support they offered inside of your community on a contract basis. Having full-time employees doesn't make you a legit business hiring the right help for the right scope of work at the right time is what makes you a smart CEO.
The fifth lesson that I learned during this testing period is just as children go through growth spurts. So will your business. Scaling isn't a season that's meant to last forever. It should have a start and an end date planned for it. And if it happens unexpectedly pause after it, give yourself space to regroup and restudy the ship. If your business has grown by 20 or 30% in one year, this is really, really, really healthy growth.
If your business has grown by 50% or more in one year, this is substantial growth. And if it has been growing like that for multiple years in a row, you'll need to prepare the business and your internal expectations for a maintenance year. Very soon. So, this is why it's really important for you to actually track your financials and measure your growth year over years, that you can start to classify. What type of years your business is experiencing.
Are these growth years, maintenance years what's actually happening. But nothing can grow that fast without consequences and episode 1 74. Is it time for a maintenance year in your business? I'd go in depth about what to consider and how to take a look behind the scenes and see what needs taken care of on the backend after experiencing years or multiple years of substantial growth. It's kinda like the Oprah effect.
Everyone dreams of being featured on Oprah's favorites list until you get that bump and your backend can't handle the rapid expansion. Businesses have literally gone bankrupt after being flooded with new clients, from being on Oprah's wishlist. It's super important that you again, think about sustainability. Not just for the health of your business, but also for your own mental wellbeing. Revenue is one marker of success, but it's not the only scorecard metric that matters.
So something to think about is what aspect of your client delivery or back in operations needs to be dialed in and tightened up. As you're bringing in more revenue, how was that actually impacting your profit and your actual take home pay? One thing that I see often when new coaching clients come to work with me is that they may be making very high six figures or even seven figures in revenue, but they're taking home less money than when they were making $400,000 or less per year in revenue.
So it's super easy to get caught up in growing bigger, but remember what you're doing all this for your coaching business, when design strategically should be a cash cow, meaning that you shouldn't need to spend the vast majority of your revenue in order to actually run the day-to-day of the business. Lesson number six is knowing when or if you should, scale should be a conscious decision based on your desire lifestyle, your owner's intent, your exit strategy.
And the season of life that you are currently in. And also the data showcasing healthy cashflow with growing demand. I want to repeat the last part there is that you have data showcasing, healthy cashflow with growing demand. As you scale your business, you have to consider each department individually and ensure the structure is built specifically for growth.
So for example, when I was running leverage my primary group coaching program, I had to redesign the client delivery and overall client experience. When we went from supporting 30 coaching clients per year, to supporting over 75 coaching clients per. A year. The curriculum stayed the same, but the client support went through a major overhaul. We totally redesigned the client portal. We had to add in new client touch points, both front facing, and also on the back end to track client progress.
We redesigned how we did communications that we could ensure clients were clear on expectations and they knew exactly how to receive support and where to go. And when we had to increase the types of support, Because the volume of students increased and we didn't want to diminish the client results along the way, how we operated the program had to fundamentally change. The same is true for our lead generation and sales process.
Since we were enrolling more clients per year, that means we also needed more leads to fill the funnel. Which means that we were increasing the amount of marketing output that we were creating because I don't run paid ads and I haven't ran paid ads since probably 20 16, 20 17. All of our lead generation was based off of organic growth. So increasing our marketing output was necessary and also increasing the number of sales activities that we were doing. And that was on our plate.
So you can start to see how overwhelming this can be. If your offer lacks a clear program, promise if your offer lacks standardization repetition. And if your business is running on manual activities, it's like damn near impossible to keep all the cylinders firing. And the downfall that I see most often is that coaches will start to prioritize their marketing and sales to keep up with their growth goals, but their client delivery will start to severely suffer.
Or worse you as the coach and the business owner, you end up getting burnt out from trying to keep up with the growing efforts, to the point where you lose focus. And you start to slow things down so that you can actually take care of yourself. Like you kind of force yourself into pausing and taking a break, because of kind of poor planning and misaligned expectations of what's truly required. So scaling requires support.
And if you have the opportunity to plan for it, you'll thank yourself for it in the long run and your clients will also feel supported during your growth. So one of the most important questions I learned during this process is one, do I actually need to scale? And if so at what pace. And why for what? I realize that I was chasing growth for the sake of being able to say that I did it. I was ego-driven and Hey, I'm human. We all are.
Sometimes we want things to simply prove to ourselves that we can achieve it. But once I grew and was able to maintain that level of growth multiple years in a row, being able to say I did, it was no longer, a big enough reason to keep doing it. Lesson number seven, one year of incredible growth is not enough justification for doubling your operating expenses and bloating your overhead.
Gather enough data before making dramatic decisions that drive up business expenses, which can be challenging to unwind. This was very common back in 20 21, 20 22. People were having the biggest years in their business that they had ever seen me included. And when you have had one or two huge ears, it is very easy to just assume that things will keep growing at that rate. Which tends to cause us to do one of two things. Either one, we start to become very lazy marketers.
Or to we over-hire overstaff or an overspend in our business. After my first huge year in business, I brought in five part-time employees because the demand was too much for my team support. That I had at the time. And quite honestly, I was just overwhelmed. Like a girl was feeling desperate. I'm like, how are we going to keep up with all this? We need support. And I hired really prematurely. After four months, I ended up letting all five of those people go.
And by tracking the performance data of every team member against business growth, having all those people just did not make sense. I still need a support, but not ongoing permanent position levels of support. So the lesson that I learned here is that hire when it hurts, not when you are desperate. And really being able to understand the difference between that. So when you're spending money out of desperation or this feeling of wanting to be saved, not trusting your own.
Decision-making in thinking that if you just hire the perfect unicorn, they will be able to carry the cognitive load that you've been weighed down by. If that is how you are feeling before you spend a single dollar, I invite you to pause. Talk to a trusted advisor or a mentor who can help you return home to yourself. To help you refocus on what matters most and to help pull you out of the mental sabotage. Your brain is trying to suck you into.
Before you start throwing money, ask yourself, is this even a problem or are you confusing your fears with the facts? When we overspend or over higher, it can cause more problems in the short-term relief at it. Tricks us into creating, and it can be mentally taxing and overwhelming to unwind those decisions after we've initially made them. So just be really mindful if that's a season of business that you are in, that was a major lesson that I learned.
Lesson number eight is that your definition of success is the only definition that matters. Comparing yourself or mimicking what you see other people want for themselves without first checking in to see if it's something that you want. Can lead you down a path that was never meant for you in the first place. Some of our trials and tribulations are self-imposed.
If you are in a cycle of self-abandonment overextending yourself to the point where you question yourself identity or hitting goals, but feel emptiness after the achievement. You might be chasing a version of success that was never yours to begin with. One thing that I realized that I missed so deeply was working closely with coaching clients. I had my high-end mastermind, which had six to 10 clients in it per year.
That gave me a lot of close proximity, but I had really removed myself out a lot of the really close coaching proximity in my core coaching offers. And I missed being in person. I missed having a high touch point and a high level of access to my clients and them having access to me. Like I missed teaching and supporting clients in a really live real time fashion. But during the scaling process, I had removed myself from many aspects. Aspects of my business that actually lit me up.
And the reason being is because as we're taught in the online coaching industry, you can't scale that it's, it's really easy to scale yourself out of what brings you joy and a sense of fulfillment when you are just chasing growth. And even though the business model worked, client results were still able to happen at the, at the levels and the percentages that we were targeting. You know, we were still in still have amazing client reviews.
The thing is, is that as I was growing after two or three years of being truly in a CEO role and not really having majority of the work that I was doing, being the work that actually filled my spirit and lit me up. It that also contributed to having this disconnection with my why and how I was operating my business. So, I didn't really realize this real time because the things I loved are difficult to scale when it's just me.
But looking back on hindsight is something to be mindful of as you grow your business. And it's something that I'm being really mindful of as I'm redesigning my business, moving forward. This leads me into lesson number nine, the importance of knowing how much is enough. Be mindful of when your life seasons change and adjust your owner's intent, your business goals and your pace or accordingly. You are allowed to outgrow your desires.
You are allowed to dream up new dreams as solopreneurs and personal brands, leading coaching businesses who started their business for options, freedom and flexibility. Your business should be designed to support the lifestyle you are living and actually want to live. Bigger is not always necessary. One of the things that I did that I encourage you to do as well is make an expense sheet, budgeting out the cost of your dream lifestyle.
Get very, very clear on how much it actually costs to live the lifestyle that you want. The mortgage you'd be paying the property taxes that you'd be covering the school. You'd be sending your kids to the cost that you'd be spinning on your lashes and a house cleaner and whatever it is that you think you want in your dream lifestyle. Also make sure to include a line item cost for your medical insurance and for your retirement or long-term savings as well. That number will become your new goal.
Take home, pay. See how far off from that you currently are? And then I want you to take it a step further and calculate how much your top-line business revenue needs to be in order to pay yourself that much money. Cause how much you pay yourself as not going to be the same dollar amount is how much your business revenue is. So you're going to figure out your business revenue, minus business expenses, federal state, and payroll taxes. And that will land you at how much money is free and clear.
Knowing these numbers is vital. And once you know these numbers, you can make sure your business model, your pricing and your offers are aligned to actually hit that target. And knowing this number has been really the true anchor for me as I'm coming back from sabbatical and redesigning my business model. Like I know how much is enough versus setting arbitrary goals or just chasing more without any end goal or in target in mind.
And now that I know how much is enough now I am redesigning my business model to recognize how many clients do I actually need. And it's far less than what I thought I would have to have in order to achieve my dream lifestyle for where I'm at right now for the family planning that I want to be doing in the next one to two years as well. So it actually is a huge relief. And I hope that when you know your number. Uh, it will give you some relief too.
The final lesson that I learned during this testing period, is that you may not want to make millions in a year, but you absolutely need to make millions in your lifetime. And I cannot emphasize this enough. The profit from your business is the vehicle that will fund the gap in your wealth creation. So prioritize profits over revenue care about what you keep, just as much as how much you make. The growth of my personal net worth is my exit strategy.
And for a lot of us running coaching businesses, that's probably your exit strategy too, whether you've defined it or recognize it or not. You know, I'm not growing for the opportunity to sell my company. One day. I'm not growing my business with the hopes of my kids taking over this company. It's a personal brand. You know, it's very unlikely. It could happen, but it's very unlikely that I will either sell my business or.
Have my kids come in and want to take over, you know, 20, 30, 40 years from now shoot, who even knows if I want to still be in business doing this exact type of work 30, 40 years from now. So I treat my coaching business as a cash cow. To pay for my personal lifestyle today and to also build my personal net worth for tomorrow. So get clear on what your end game is.
Start to think about how you will manage the profit of your business beyond just spending that money on your current lifestyle and structure your business model to plan for profit and have a place to put the extra money for longterm financial stability. This entire testing period really allowed me to push my boundaries, challenge my assumptions and discover my definition of success.
Ultimately helping me align my business with what I deeply desired and to act in accordance to what I want for this new season of my life. You know, I have no regrets about the hustle and grind. I dedicated my journey over the last seven years to. After departing from corporate. And leaving my engineering career. Did it come with periods of identity, crisis moments of imposter syndrome. You know, induced paralysis of overthinking self-sabotage and bouts of depression.
Yeah. But it also enabled me to restore my nervous system from survival mode. It enabled me to achieve financial security for early retirement. It allowed me to acquire multiple properties, including one just blocks away from the ocean. And one of the most expensive zip codes in this country. And also allow me to elevate the quality of my day-to-day life.
Like I am so proud of what these past seven years of focus effort afforded me to be in a position to do right now, where I don't have to work for the next four to five years without changing the quality of my existing bougie, rich auntie lifestyle. Like it's mind blowing that I'm even saying that out loud and that that's true. You know, these lessons learned have also helped influence how I'll continue to choose to run my business. Moving forward.
Knowing how much is enough is giving me so much permission to focusing on working with a limited number of clients and being okay with maintaining that. Versus putting immense pressure on myself to constantly grow. It's given me permission to set my coaching rates at a price that feels really good without having to stress out or worry about overhead or large internal expenses, because I'm constantly in scale mode.
You know, it's giving me permission to stop making my business a top priority in my life. To separate my identity from my work and to view my work as a contribution to society rather than a measure of my self worth. So thank you so much for listening. And next week episode, we'll be talking all about how to define your owner's intent and how to align your business goals with that intention in mind.
If you're interested in working together for private one-on-one business mentorship, I will be sharing opportunities with my email list as client spots become available. So each coaching relationship is custom tailored and personalized to help you earn enough money in a simple, stable and streamlined way. So check the episode description for info on how to join the wait list. And lastly, subscribe on apple iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to get notifications on when new episodes drop.
As you are listening, please leave a review and tell me what you think. I look forward to hearing from you and continuing the conversation. So until next time, keep trusting yourself and keep listening.