Entre-Talk: Keep It Simple

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, Entre-Talk: Keep It Simple.

This is Better Than Happy, the podcast where we study what the healthiest, most successful people in today’s world think, feel and do. And we leverage this knowledge to create our best lives. Are you ready, little bird? Let’s fly.

Alright, everybody, I want to share this advice with you about your business that I received years ago when I first started to really scale my business. And it is still a guiding principle that serves me so well, and I notice that almost everybody else that I come in contact with that is building a business isn’t thinking this way. And I see it really slow people down. And so I want to offer it to all of you today and that is to keep your business as simple as possible.

Now, I think what’s challenging is when we hear simple, a lot of people think small. They think as I grow my business, it’s going to become more complicated. I’m going to add offers or I’m going to add partnerships or I’m going to add things that I do and that’s how I’m going to grow the business. In most cases, of course, there can be exceptions, sometimes there is a valid good reason to complicate things, and sometimes you might choose it. But in most situations you want to figure out how do I scale what I do without complicating it.

In fact, sometimes scaling your business, growing your business means simplifying it even more. So for those of you that are coaches like myself, the process that I highly recommend you consider if you’re just starting out or wherever you are in your business, I recommend that first of all, you do private one-on-one coaching. Take one-on-one clients.

When you find a client who wants the help that you provide with whatever it is that you do, have a program that you offer them. Don’t just offer coaching sessions. Offer them your program. Create a program. If you need help with this, there’s going to be some help coming up on this in the very near future but create a program and then sell them your program. In most cases, what I see with clients is that program is anywhere from six sessions to maybe three months, sometimes depending on, again, what the problem is we’re solving, it might even be a yearlong program.

But offer them your program. Sell them your program and take clients through that one-on-one. Keep doing that until you have a waitlist of clients. Keep offering that one program. Now, here’s what’s challenging about it. You will get other people that come along that will say, “I really like what I’ve learned from you and I really want to work with you, but that program isn’t quite what I want. Could you do this other thing for me?” And it will be tempting to say yes in the beginning because you won’t have a full practice maybe and you’re trying to fill it up and so you’ll want to take clients.

Now, I’m not saying that you have to turn away anyone that isn’t your perfect ideal avatar. I’m just saying, don’t complicate your business in order to say yes. So for example, my program, when I first started, was six sessions. It was designed for women who were stay at home moms who wanted to be more confident and happier and like their lives better, specifically, especially LDS women or with similar values.

Now, sometimes I would get a client that would come through that would say, “Yeah, what you do sounds great. That succession program sounds awesome, but really my goal is weight loss. Can we really put a focus on weight loss?” And I could say, yeah, totally because I could take my six session program and I could modify it just enough to make the emphasis be weight loss. That’s no problem.

But if they said to me, “I don’t really want a six session program, I just want one coaching session from you or I just want to talk to you two or three times a year. Can I just pay for a package and then every so often when I need it, I’ll reach out to you?” When they wanted me to modify it to that extent, the answer’s no, because that complicates my business. I have to keep track then of this one client whose situation is slightly different than everybody else’s and did they get their sessions or not?

And what happens if two years go by and then they come back and say, just a lot of reasons why I’m not willing to make modifications like that because of how it complicates my business. Now, this is what your brain will tell you, “Oh, that doesn’t really complicate things. That’s easy enough, that’s easy to track. All you have to do is get a spreadsheet and track it in that. All you have to do is get the right software program and you just check a box and it’s really easy.”

This is what people tell me all the time. when I’m like, “Why do you want to complicate your business?” They’ll go, “No, it’s not complicated.” I’m like, “It is.” Any time you have change or variety of things, that you have to keep track of in some way, even if it’s another database. you’re complicating your business. So have a one-on-one offer is what I recommend if you’re a coach or a teacher or something take students or clients one-on-one. Once that is full and you’ll know what full is by how many hours you want to work.

If you’re working full-time hours, maybe you have 20 clients. If you’re working part-time, maybe you have fewer. And again it all depends on how long you work with people and all of that. But you’ll know, you’ll do the math to figure out what is full. And don’t forget you’ve got to leave time to do your marketing and all of that as well.

Okay, so then we want to think about how am I going to scale this offer. And what I recommend is you take that same program, whatever it is, six sessions, nine sessions, three months of whatever result you provide and you start offering it in small groups. And then you say, “Hey, yeah, if you want to come and work with me, you want to get more help here’s how it works.” The way I did this was I took five to seven people all together and we went through my program, at that point had changed to nine sessions. We would go through all nine sessions together in the group.

So I was doing the same thing, but I made a few modifications obviously to accommodate for five to seven people on one call, made sure everybody got enough attention and everybody got the help they need. And that was my offer. And then guess what people would say? “Oh, that sounds great, but I don’t really want that, I want one-on-one. Can I get one-on-one?” And you know what the answer is? No, sorry.

And do you know the reason why? Because I want to keep my business as simple as possible. If I have to be juggling one-on-ones versus small groups and things like that, that’s just more for me to keep track of. It’s more complicated. It’s different payment plans. It’s different amounts of attention from me. It will at some point start to feel overwhelming or not get the benefit you want of making as much impact as possible and generating as much revenue as possible and really helping as many people as you can.

So the answer was, “No, I don’t do that. This is the way you work with me as a coach. You come in and you work with myself and the five to six other people and we do that for nine sessions and it’s amazing. Tell me your concerns, tell me your objections.” Because oftentimes they just don’t realize that will provide actually what they want. But because I don’t want to complicate my business the answer is often no. From there, you might scale to bigger groups or to more workshop style classes where people get to learn from you and maybe they get some interaction.

You can nowadays with Zoom you can take questions in the Q&A. You can bring people on camera with you if you want. But everyone needs to be clear, they’re not going to get as much attention if you’re going to now start teaching groups of 50 to 200 or 2,000 or whatever at a time online. And that’s how you scale your business. And for me, that turned into a membership, might be that for you, might be, I don’t know. Well, lots of ways to do it.

But my point is, then you’ve got to drive everyone to that and they’ll say, “Is there any way we could just get a small group? Is there any way I could get private coaching?” And again, sometimes there are valid reasons to be still offering those other things. I don’t want you to think this is a hard and fast rule. I just want you to ask, “Wait a second, is this going to complicate my business? And if so, is it worthwhile? And do I have the support and infrastructure necessary to complicate my business? Because the more things I offer, the more marketing support I need for those things.”

There’s a reason why we call your marketing a funnel, because it starts wide at the top, meaning you want to be doing as many different versions of marketing as you can at the top of the funnel as the lead generation. As many different ways of generating leads as possible you want to consider. And that might be ways to generate leads. It might be the amount of time you’re going to spend, the amount of money you’re going to spend, the amount of resources you put into it. The amount of ideas and creativity you have to put into it. It’s really big and broad and wide at the top of the funnel.

And as we move down the funnel, in other words, once we generate leads, how do we nurture those leads? What kind of content do we give them? It starts to narrow a little until eventually there’s a place where we make an offer, it’s getting even more narrow. And then there’s the offer itself at the bottom, which is the most narrow part of the funnel. So for every single thing that I offer I have to have a funnel like that. It will complicate your business even if the offer in the end is free. So we’re really inexpensive.

Do not complicate your business unless you really want to and you know intentionally that you’re complicating it and you’re okay with that because you want to do it badly enough then okay. Or like I said, you have the infrastructure or support to allow for it, meaning you have maybe some staff now that’s helping out. You have processes and procedures in place to make sure that everything gets executed the way it needs to, then you can start adding offers. But even still, keep it as simple as you possibly can.

I want to say that, again, this analogy that Brooke Castillo offered, it wasn’t even to me directly, it was to one of my colleagues back years ago when I used to be in a mastermind led by her. And one of my colleagues really wanted to offer a second program from what she was already doing.

And she kept saying, “But people are asking for this. The program I have right now doesn’t meet the need that these people are asking for. I can’t just add people to that. And there are a lot of people that want this and I get so many requests for it. I don’t see why I wouldn’t just do it. It seems like it would be really easy. My current marketing is basically already finding these people because they’re constantly coming to me saying, “It would be cool if you offered this thing for us.””

What Brooke said, I have never forgotten, she said, “You can if you want because you’re right, there’s money there and we’re leaving money on the table.” That’s what this person said, “Why would I want to leave money on the table?” She said, “Because we’re leaving nickels on the table. You could offer that program and you would make some money off it but it’s the equivalent of picking nickels up when we could be just reaching for the $100 bills up in the sky.” That really landed for me.

She said, “Don’t pick nickels up off the ground because it’s distracting you from grabbing the $100 bills in the sky.” And that’s not just about money. That’s about the impact that you can make. The amount of impact that you could have and the people that you can serve, reach for the sky. Don’t bend over and pick up the nickels on the ground. It’s okay to leave money on the table. Don’t complicate your business because as your business grows the complication grows. That already is a natural result of it.

As you have more people that you’re serving, you will have more pieces of this machine that you’ve got to pay attention to. And if your business is too complicated, you will stifle that growth because you won’t be able to at some point keep up with it and/or you might even be slowing down your growth, do you see what I’m saying, by complicating it? So that was the thing I wanted to say.

And then the very last thing I wanted to say is that I see people complicate their business, one of the main ways they do it is not, well, I should say in addition to creating too many offers, is by saying yes to partnerships and collaborations that they should be saying no to. Now, there may be some partnerships and collaborations that you should be saying yes to. And so I’m not saying that they’re bad altogether.

But ask yourself, “Is this going to complicate my business in a way that doesn’t ultimately make sense with where I’m trying to go? Am I doing this out of scarcity? Am I doing this because I just don’t know what else to try? Or do I have a reason I really like for saying yes to this partnership or collaboration?” I’ll tell you that I say no to most of the partnerships and collaborations that I get offered because I’m not going to do something halfway.

A lot of times people offer me collaborations that they’ve done a great job of making it really simple for me. They’re like, “Listen, all you have to do is show up at a time that you pick. And we’re going to record an interview with you and then that’s it. And then we’re going to send it out to all of our email lists and everyone will get to hear what you have to say. It’s really simple.” But guess what? It’s not that simple. This is the strategy behind an online sort of all the guests pull their audiences together and you all expose each other to each other’s audiences, helping in theory, everybody grow.

But I know if I’m going to say yes to that and I’m going to record a course for your online conference then guess what? I am probably going to be asked to promote that conference. You’re going to ask me to email my list. That’s how these work. You’re going to ask me to let them know. That means I’m going to have to get the emails put together. I’m going to have to communicate with whoever on my team sends those out. I’m going to have to make sure they go out on time. It’s going to be an ask of my audience.

I know it sounds simple, again, if your brain is anything like most of the people I talk to, they’ll go, “No, it’s simple, it won’t take that long. It’s fine. we already send emails out. The person on my team can handle, they’re really good, it’s fine.” It is complicating your business, just tell yourself the truth. When I say yes to things like that, and I do sometimes say yes, but mostly I say no.

I reserve my yes for the time when it’s an unquestionable yes and that is because it’s a cause I believe so strongly in and/or it’s an opportunity to up-level myself in a major way. The amount of exposure I could get, the learning I could get from the people I’m collaborating with, they’re 10 times beyond me, for example, something like that. So those are the two reasons. Either it’s really a next level step for me to participate in or I feel so strongly about the particular organization or cause that I want to give my time. It’s part of how I’m giving back.

But I tell myself the truth, which is this is complicating my business and I’m choosing to do it anyway, let’s go. Otherwise, all the other collaborations, partnerships, even though a lot of them, there’s money available in them. I could make money off of a lot of different things. I’m leaving the nickels on the ground because I don’t want to complicate my business. I don’t want to be overwhelmed in my life. I want a business that is clean and simple that I can just keep scaling and growing. Just something to think about, keep it simple.

Alright, friends, thanks for joining me today. I’ll see you next time on another Entre-Talk episode. Have a great week.

If you are a coach, healer or expert who is not yet making six figures, or not sure you’re set up properly to grow to seven figures and beyond, go take my free training. It’s at jodysfree-training.com. I’ll see you there.