This is the build your life coaching business podcast where you can learn how to make more money as a life coach. My name is BJ Butler, an ex corporate guy who helps life coaches do more of the coaching they are meant to do. Every episode helps you get more clients, make more money, and eliminate overwhelm. But if you don’t want to do. It yourself, come contact me and I’ll lead a team to do it for you. And here we go. Hello and welcome back. Did this year not go your way? Did you start the year with lofty goals? Which is great. You want to start with big goals that make you work hard in order to go achieve them. But now you’re here, maybe you didn’t get enough clients. Get as many clients as you want. Maybe profit is not where you want it. What do we do? Let me ask you this. What do you think about your results? Maybe you’re thinking that, well, everyone’s having a hard time, so it’s okay that I’m not meeting my goals. Now. That might make you feel better in the short term, but it might soften the blow of what you’re experiencing. But it doesn’t help you to make more money and get more of the four A’s. So these four A’s are from a book that I just read by Greg Harden. And these four A words are something that we all want. So yes, we’re all in business to make money, but if we were just making money, that probably wouldn’t be enough. Wouldn’t be enough for me and it probably wouldn’t be enough for you. But these four a words are attention, affection, approval and acceptance. I think about it in terms of peers, family, loved ones, employees, bosses. So each one of these, for each one of these groups, we’re looking for attention, affection, might fall more into the family and loved ones, but still, it feels great getting an email from a client that you’ve helped and it really changed their life. That’s also affection. And of course, we’re looking for approval, acceptance. These are all ways of getting satisfaction from what we do. And it’s not just about making money. So maybe you’re thinking about your results this year. Well, I can’t quit my day job. Maybe I’m not a good coach. I’ll never make it as a life coach. And what results are those thoughts going to get you, and what results do you want now? I am a business coach. I am not a life coach. I speak life coach. But I am an expert in everything online business. I bring this up to encourage you to use your coaching skills to observe your thoughts and come to me when you’re looking for, if you’re familiar with the model, when you’re looking for the right action, when you have your thoughts in order, I will help you get the right action in order to get the results that you want. The way I think about it is that I think that when business is down, that’s the perfect motivation to make your business stronger than you’ve ever imagined. Make the messaging clearer. Fill the gaps where potential clients are leaving your world. Business being down is an opportunity. Don’t let it pass. So I’m going to lead you on an exercise today that’s as simple as what’s working now, what’s not working and what are we going to do differently? We’re going to go through that and essentially it’s going to be starting over. Now, this is December, so the conversation makes sense to talk about 2023 versus 2024. But you can do this process whenever. In fact, the more you do it, the better. The more you’re going to improve. Improving is all about getting that feedback about you need to figure out what’s working in order to move forward. Here’s a Ted Lasso quote. You know what the happiest animal in the world is? It’s a goldfish. It’s got a ten second memory. And that’s perfect about what we’re doing today because we’re going to go through what’s working and what’s not working and then we’re going to be a goldfish. We’re going to learn from that, but we’re going to throw it out the window and we’re going to figure out what we need to do next. And we’re not going to think about how it was going. We’re only going to focus about implementing our new plan. This process is for you. Whether you’ve done a plan like this before or you haven’t, it’s really, I’m going to teach it to you. You could both incorporate what I’m teaching you into your current annual improvement process or monthly improvement process, or you could replace your current process. Or if you don’t have a process, do this. This is what it’s for. So the first, like I said, it’s three steps. We’re going to talk about what’s working. Step two, what’s not working. Step three is what are we going to do differently. So what’s working? I think about this in terms of the business overall, and when I think of a business overall, I think of a funnel. Now, funnel is a very buzzy word in the sense that it could mean for like each particular offer has a lead magnet, potentially an ad, email, nurture sequence and then checkout or whatever it is. But I think of the business overall where it could have multiple of those offers. You have content creation going on, and in the middle you have executing your coaching. Like I said, you might have different programs, you might have employees, contractors, and the bottom, you have sales. As people go along their journey moving down your business funnel, some people leave. That’s what gives it the larger at the top and narrower at the bottom. Why it’s called a funnel. I think about it from the top. Down. From the top is where people are entering your world for the first time. A lot of times they’ll be experiencing your content. They’ll be engaging with your lead magnet. They might see an ad, they might see social. So let’s talk about content creation. This is what’s working now. First, let me say that it is really easy to go to what’s not working first. That is where our brains want to go. It’s like watching a juggler. They’re juggling some balls. They drop a ball. Everyone’s watching the ball that’s on the ground, not the rest of the balls that are in the air. That’s really hard to make. Stay in the air. But they’re looking at what’s going wrong first. But we want to talk about what’s working. We want to avoid all those rabbit holes. So what is working? We’re going to start at the top. Let’s talk about your content. This is an exercise for you. You can basically start with a blank piece of paper. What’s working? Start with your content. Is some content getting more engagement than others? Lead magnet is a form of content. Do you have one lead magnet better than others? Do you have a lead magnet? Do you enjoy doing some content more than others? Is there a format that you like? Do you like written, audio, video? Something better than another? Do you like some platform better than another? In terms of ads, do you have ads? Are some more successful than others? Are there certain times of the year that some are more successful than others? Speaking of Facebook ads or Instagram ads, what audiences are seeing some success? What lead magnets in your ads? Are there some descriptions? Some headlines? Where do you have pockets of things doing better than another? Did you run one ad all year? And that would imply, and my question is, did you iterate enough? If you’re going to be running ads, it makes sense for you to use your time in order to constantly be updating them and trying new things. In terms of social are you getting engagement? Did some posts, some topics? Did some posts get more engagement than others? Can you identify it down to a topic or a program or an offer? There has to be some sort of trend that you can identify as working. Can you see that some posts are getting engagement and maybe they’re getting clicks. They’re going to your landing page, but that landing page isn’t getting sales. So you could say that you’re getting some success with your social posts or which type of posts are you getting success with? Some platforms might be working better than others for you in terms of your webinars, your master classes, small offers. Is there one type that’s working better than another? Which ones are you having more fun at? Because at the end of the day, you want to be building this business around what you enjoy doing. HOw are your consults and of course, consultations? There’s so much here to dig into, but what you’re looking for is what’s working. What did you learn? Did you have fun? How are your sales? You need to celebrate any improvements? Are some offers or some programs performing better than another? Do you have employees or contractors celebrate the ones that are working out for you, just having that person around for another year, that relationship has progressed. So dig in. Look at your business top to bottom. What is working? We are compiling a list of action items. I put these into categories of Stop, start, continue. Everything on the what’s working list. Those are all continue. We know that those are working. Let’s keep doing that. We’re going to be moving into what’s not working. Each of these we’re either going to start something or stop something when we’re talking about what isn’t working. I like to put this in the context of which part of the process isn’t working. Now there is a process to online business. I teach it in a free training that’s on my [email protected] It’s a four part free training and it is a tried and true process where the name of the game is really figuring out how to implement it for you into your business. As we’re talking about the process, it makes it less personal. So if you are hearing feedback from potential clients or clients that is negative, it’s really easy to go to the place where you’re saying, oh, I’m not a good coach or I’m not coaching, right? Or I’m not good at this but if you think about it in terms of I didn’t implement the process correctly, that’s a very different conversation. It makes it less personal. You need to know that if you nail the process, you will get clients. This is a game of taking the process that exists and is known to be successful and figuring out how to implement it in your business. That’s how I want you to be thinking about this. What’s not working correctly? It’s not you. It’s that you’re not implementing the process correctly. If you do nail the process, you will get clients. So let me ask you this. What part of the process sticks out as not working? What part of your business sticks out to you as being incongruent, as sticking out? How can you make clients flow through the funnel better? How do you get them the information they need at the right time? That is the trick to online business. Probably as soon as I said, what’s not working in your business? You probably had an answer for that. You could probably put your finger on which part of your business isn’t working, whether it’s from the lead magnet, the ad, the content creation. At some point you have an idea of where people are leaving or where you’re losing people. We want to come up with actions that you can do that better. Guide people through your funnel that are giving them the information that they need, when they need it. And that brings me into my next question is where do people drop out of your funnel? The funnel is a tornado shape. It’s wider at the top and it’s narrower at the bottom. It’s because people are naturally are falling out of it, and that’s normal. But if you can pinpoint where more people are falling out than others, we want to go fill that gap. And it’s likely because there’s some messaging that is not clear at some part of the process. Are people showing up to a consultation with you interested in learning about coaching, or are they just there to get a free coaching session? That’s great that they’re interested in your coaching, but it’s a very different conversation and makes it much harder for you to be able to sell them on coaching. Are you addressing objections throughout the funnel? Definitely. Through consultations you will have an idea about all the objections that people can come up with because they come up with a lot of them. There are some that come up more than others. It’s too expensive. My spouse is currently saying, no, I’ll have to go ask my spouse. I’ll have to think about it. Knowing those objections figuring out how to address them and then putting that information throughout your funnel. It’ll show up in emails that go out. It’ll show up in your landing pages, on your website, through your social posts. It is possible to address those objections before people even have a chance to say them. Here’s another question. Are potential clients seeing the real you? Do they really understand what coaching is and how you are different? Now, it’s nearly impossible to do a download of a typical audience member’s brain into yours for you to see how they see you, but you can get a pretty good idea about it from consultations or emails that you receive or messages on social. Are people seeing you the way that you want to be seen and the way that they’re seeing you is a reflection of all of the marketing that you’re putting out there, of all of the content that you’re creating. Is it getting across the way that you want it to get across? Probably. As I’m saying this, there is something that’s coming to your mind that you want to write down and you want to capture as an action item. Here’s another question. Think back. If you’re doing this for the last year, think back to 2023. Where have you gotten stuck? So basically, somebody asked you a question and you didn’t really know how to answer. Could be a question from email, social media, direct message, consultation. It could also be the same question over and over from your audience, which is great. That tells you exactly what to go work on. For me, for multiple launches in a row, I had a client who was getting the same question, is there going to be a recording with that master class? It got to the point where my client was just answering the same question over and over again with, yeah, there’s a recording just like I wrote on the landing page. But it turns out that clearly we weren’t making it obvious enough. So now on every landing page that I create for her, I put at the very top. Recording is available, and if it expires, I’ll say when it expires, I’ll mention it in multiple promotional emails. I have reminder emails for people who already sign up for the master class. I will say it in those just to remind them. Here’s what to expect in terms of how long the recording is available for. And then also in so usually after the master class or after the short coaching number of sessions that I will remind them that this is how long the recordings are good for and we don’t get that question anymore. That is the beauty of getting feedback and learning from it when we first got it, it’s like, oh, gosh, this is so annoying that we keep getting the same question over again. Okay, so we’ve covered what’s working, what’s not working. Now we’re moving on to what are you going to do? What are you going to do differently? What are you going to do about it now that you know all this? And here’s a little reminder, every result that you have achieved or ended up with is because of you. That’s actually great news. It doesn’t sound like it, but therefore you are also in full control to change those results. Now, once again, I am a business coach. You are the life coach. I am just reminding you to use your powers and your skills as a coach to coach yourself. Okay, now we have our list of action items that we have gathered from what’s working are all things that we’re going to keep doing. What’s not working means we’re either going to start doing something or we’re going to stop doing something. And somewhere along the way, each of those means that we didn’t get the right message across to our potential clients. You’ve identified the places in your business which I also think of as a funnel. People are coming into your world eventually they’re going to buy at the bottom where your audience didn’t hear what they needed to hear or they heard something that wasn’t what they needed to hear. You are guiding them along their journey. They’re starting with wherever they are now, wherever they are in life, how they’re viewing their problems. You’re guiding them along to believing that you are the person who can solve those problems. In your action items. You need to be detailed and specific. Which changes are you going to make to which web page? To which landing page? Which messaging needs to go into which email? Which type of email are you going to change your nurture sequence? Is it your online content that needs different messaging? Or the messaging tweaked? Which web pages need to be created? Are these web pages part of your core website or is it a landing page associated with an offer? Is this offer something that you’re going to be offering more than once on a certain frequency? When you have your list of items, you’re going to prioritize them. The ones that we’re going to put at the top are the most important. We say that they are the most important because we are losing the most revenue or the most opportunity from people leaving our world because of something that we’re doing now. You might end up with a full page or multiple pages of actions, and that can very easily feel very overwhelming. The first action items I would look at are the repeating tasks. I would put those directly into your calendar. If you know that you need to start creating a weekly newsletter, then for however long that takes, maybe 1 hour, one and a half hours per week, figure out what day, what time you’re going to do that. Put that in your calendar, put it on repeat, honor that event when it comes up. You know that that’s what you’re going to be doing then. And do that for all of the repeating tasks that you have. If you’re going to be creating more social media content, put that as a repeating task on your calendar. And as soon as it’s on your calendar, then you can mark it off your to do list. There are some tasks that are going to be farther out in the future. Those would also go onto the calendar. Things that are too far in the future to stay on. My to do list is usually about, the threshold is usually about a week. If it’s more than a week in the future, it’ll go onto my calendar. I can mark it off of my to do list when it comes up on my calendar. I honor that event and I make sure to do it because if I don’t do it, then it’s completely lost. There are times that things will come up on my calendar and I can’t do it. Then it is very important to either change the date, change the time, or write it back down on your to do list. That way you keep track of it. Even after you move those two types of tasks onto your calendar, you still might have this overwhelmingly long list. Now we need to come up with time in order to do to work on your to do list. To work on these action items that you have created in order to get your business where you want it to be, you can just create time on your calendar, mark a set amount of time every week, every other day, certain days of the week. In order to go work on this, put it on repeat. Eventually, your to do list will be working its way down. There might be other action items that are saying, well, when we’re in this type of launch, make sure to do this. I also have a launch calendar, so I have it a couple of different ways. One is over the course of the year, these launches are happening which month, and then for each launch, then I have a detailed Excel spreadsheet. I use Google sheets that has every task needed to get that launch done. And I start at the end I start with when the program starts, whether it’s a group coaching class, individual coaching class, master class, whatever it is, and work backwards. Work backwards through the email sequences that need to happen. There’s a landing page that needs to be created. It needs to have copy written for it. It needs to be designed, needs to be built. Work that backwards all the way from to the very beginning task, which is most likely creating the messaging for it. So there’s launch calendars. Here’s another example of something that might not have worked for you, and this is an example of mine many times, that I will create a landing page which will take people to a checkout page. After someone checks out, then they’re redirected to. What’s a thank you page? It’s a thank you page. And in the software that I use that redirect to the thank you page, it is out of the way and I forget about it. So in order to help with that, I create a checklist. I have a checklist. Whenever I create an offer, I go through the whole list and that helps me not forget anything. So each of your action items, they might go into a different bucket. So you have a to do list. You try to put as much from your to do list into your calendar. If it still doesn’t quite fit into your calendar, you might have a launch calendar. You might have a calendar for your whole year in terms of launches or which programs you’re going to be pushing. You might have checklists. Each of those things help you stay organized. So that brings me back. If you didn’t have the year that you wanted, that doesn’t matter. Do this assessment. Figure out what’s working, what’s not working, and what are you going to do differently? Create your vision. Create your plan based on what you want your coaching business to look like. Be a goldfish and then go execute. Now, how can I help you implement your plan? If you’re wanting to put in sweat equity into your business, build skills so that you can build and run a profitable coaching business, I can coach you how to put into action everything that’s on your plan. If that to do list is just too long, talking about launch calendars and putting to do lists into calendars, if that’s all overwhelming, I can help you. Here’s an example. If you’re putting your first offer out there, that’s not just a Facebook post saying, hey, I’m a coach, I can help. I can coach you through the process of creating the messaging, coming up with the copy, what needs to change to your website, say you’re doing a landing page, I can help you design it, how to build it. Then how are you going to tell people about it? What goes into your social post, what goes out as emails? And what else do you need for your content marketing? What technologies do you need to deliver your offer? Yeah, often Zoom is enough for video conferencing, but then what are you going to do for your recordings? Are you going to have your recording on a landing page? Do you have a follow up email sequence? Are there autoresponders involved? When you’re doing these tasks for the first time, it’s really easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of free information. So this is the first trap. This is the first thing that can stop you on your tracks. You can end up with a case where you have two experts that can both be right, but they’re offering competing paths. Basically, if you do one, you’re not doing what the other one says. So that’s how a coach can help. I can help you come up with the plan that’s best for you, not just what some expert is offering you for free. Also, jargon can stop you in your tracks. So I don’t want you get stuck wondering about, well, what does subdomains mean? What are browsers, UTM parameters? I don’t want you going in circles trying to figure out every detail. So what does this error mean in Zoom? Those are all real examples of discussions I’ve had with coaching clients so they didn’t have to stop and spend time figuring all those things out. So, you know, another common trap when you don’t have a coach is doing nothing. It’s very, very easy to do nothing. Your brain will feel like that’s the safest way because you’re not putting yourself out there. But when you compare the results of doing nothing versus doing what you need to do in order to get your business where you want it to be, you know the answer. I mean, you are a coach. I’m sure this is part of the process of you coaching your clients that there’s less net pain and less discomfort in pushing yourself. There’s less pain in going the route that you know you need to take, even though in the short term it’s easier to do nothing. And I can push you, I can provide accountability. I also provide done for you services. When you’re ready to dedicate more time to directly providing value to your clients or your audience, I can help. I have extremely talented experts ready to implement your vision. You’ll always have me personally leading the team. And it starts with one on one communication so that I can fully understand your vision. Like we’ll meet on Zoom. And all along the while, I’ll keep you in the loop. I’ll either be the one doing the work, or I’ll be working closely with the experts to create something beautiful that will help you better serve your clients. And the most important part is that this is your project. It’s just powered by me and my team. My goal is to be invisible. This is you out serving your clients in amplifying, powering your business. But at the end of the end of the day, this is how you can spend more time directly serving your clients, whether that’s more time coaching, creating content, or just working on other parts of your business. So back to where we started. If this year wasn’t exactly what you wanted, take the time to learn from what worked and what didn’t work this year, then be a goldfish. Let it go. Provide that total disconnect between what was working, what wasn’t working, and what you’re going to do next. Focus on what you need to think in order to make next year happen the way you want it to. Once you have your brain right, you’ll know what needs to be done, and I’ll help you get it done, whether that’s fast tracking you, learning the skills to get it done, or getting it done for you so that you have more time to work in your business. And in fact, both options give you the time to work in your business. And that’s what we all want. Okay, that was more than enough for today. I hope that you go do this assessment on your business. It’s the end of the year. It’s the perfect time to do it. I am not the only person that you’ll hear talking about an end of year assessment, but really, go do it. See you next week. When you’re ready to become that influential thought leader that. You know you can become. Watch my free training. It is an extremely straightforward approach to building a coaching business that provides you the time and money to create the lifestyle that you’ve been dreaming of. You can find [email protected]. Freetraining what are the ways to work with me? Well, there’s two ways. One, I do it for you. If you’re interested in getting a quote. Or a new landing page, a whole. Website, Facebook ad campaign, project management for your next launch, and really anything else related to online business, email me. [email protected] the the other way is coaching. We’ll talk about your long term goals. We’ll break that down into what you need to be working on right now. In the end, with coaching, you’ll be. Doing the work, but you’ll get it. Done so much faster. You’ll have accountability along the way. And having a coach just feels like. You are in control.