The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 128: Behind The Scenes of Our $100K Month
In today’s episode I am going to be diving deep into my business and sharing with you all the behind the scenes details of how we prepped our business to have a $100K Month and how you can do it too!
Behind The Scenes of Our $100K Month
By: Melissa Lin
If you follow me on Instagram, or if you follow me on Facebook, or if you're on my email list, you probably saw that we recently hit our first 100 K a month in our business. And there are so many more, many, many more coming this year.
We are so ready for it. I remember a few years ago, seeing other coaches in the online space, other business owners reaching $100K months, multiple six figure months, and thought to myself, like, no way, that's impossible. Like there's no way, and just a few years later here I am. Literally creating that for myself and my business.
I want to dive into all of the behind the scenes with you today to really share how it happened and how it can happen for you too. Not that your business has to look anything like mine, but I want to share some of the strategies and some of the steps we took to get there and really ensure that our business was actually prepared for it as well. I love sharing all the behind the scenes of my business with my clients. So that they can see what's possible and what a seven-figure business can look like for them. This is also why I dive so deep in these episodes with you and with all these behind the scenes and step-by-steps and action items.
So today is going to be all about some of my mindset shifts that I needed to make to reach $100K months, because mindset was definitely a big part of it, our sales plan, our goal setting, some of the behind the scenes again, where some of the sales came from and so much more. So get ready if you don't have your notebooks yet, grab them your favorite pens, favorite beverage, and let's get going.
First, I want to say that the goal of this post isn't necessarily to teach you or walk you through how to go from $500 a month in your business to $100K overnight, right? Or even $10K, right now, per month in your business to $100K months overnight. It's to show you the insights on our $100K month; how we planned, where sales came from and how you can start to map out your next $X amount months. Whether that's your next thousand dollar month, your next $5,000 a month, your next $10,000 a month, with some of these same steps it can help you brainstorm what your next strategies could be. It's not an overnight thing. It's not like we went from $10K to $100K overnight. So I just want to make that clear. That's not the goal, but I do want to dive into a lot of the behind the scenes with you today to help you reach your goals faster.
Mindset Before Strategy
Now the first thing I'm going to start with is mindset. Mindset before strategy. I don't want to even touch the strategy until we touch the mindset. Because it truly is very important. I needed a lot of mindset shifts before I could hit my first $100K month. And, you know, I've been wanting and claiming and calling in those $100K months for quite some time. My coach knows this and the mindset has been such a big shift for me. I want to share with you some of my $100K month mantras, and maybe you'll love them. Maybe you'll use some of them, but one that you've probably heard me say before, because it truly is something that I believe in my business and something that I truly, truly believe everyone gets to embrace, is "The more fun I have, the more money I make". So something I'm going to talk about today is how I added more of that fun to my business. How I added more fun into my life. Like, yes, we're in quarantine. Yes COVID, but there were still ways that I could create some of that play and that fun and some of that me time so that I could feel good.
My second mantra is "I'm always doing the right thing at the right time". Like I truly cannot screw anything up, which rolls right into my third mantra where I truly believe “I can not screw up where I'm meant to go”. Like, I know the universe already has its path for me. So I get to trust and I get to go with that. Another one is "I'm a magnet for wealth in all forms".
So these were my top four $100K month mantras. Again, 'The more fun I have, the more money I make', 'I'm always doing the right thing at the right time'. 'I can not screw up where I'm meant to go'. And, 'I am a magnet for wealth in all forms'. Like those were things I said to myself every single morning and journal about them every single day. These were my mantras.
If you're wondering about other things that you can do with some of your mantras that you have, you can have them as your alarm notification in the morning. So it's the first thing that you see on your phone when you wake up. Post-it notes, you can change your passwords to some of these. You can have them emailed to you every day. You could have them texted to you every day. There's a lot that you can do to ensure that you're seeing these mantras every day.
Creating Backend Systems
Now some of the big shifts that I decided to make and truly needed to make, to reach this first $100K month was truly believing that I was capable of receiving all of this, you know, believing that I can continue to push my upper limit. Knowing that I'm also fully supported in my business by my team. So to scale, to any new level, this means that we can serve more people, which is amazing. I wanted to ensure that my clients also felt supported as we continued to grow. So we shifted and we created some new systems so that our business could be ready for this. A big project in 2020 in my business was creating some of these systems in the backend so that we were ready for those $100K months, that we were completely prepared for them. We knew we were well on the way there. Then we claimed January to be the first of many, many, many more $100K months in 2021. You know, we were fully supported on the backend. I felt fully supported by my team. All of our systems were in place. We were ready and we were preparing. So much that our business is now ready on the backend for multiple seven figures. So we're so excited. We're always prepping for that next level. Always, always.
Journal Prompts for Mindset
Now I want to dive into a little bit more mindset before we go into the strategy today. Now some of the journal prompts that I use throughout the month were, and I had this at the top of my page in the mornings, "I'm proud of myself for ..." and listed a page of all the things I was proud of myself for. Mindset is something we get to work on. Mindset is something we do every single day. It's not like a once per week kind of thing. This is a daily routine we get to add in.
My next journal prompt that I use throughout the month was "Things that would make me feel good today...." This was one of the big focus points for me personally in my business, because I knew that if I felt good, good things would come and I really got to focus on myself. It was awesome because that was a big shift. Yes. I kind of did this in the past, but I fully went all in and made sure that I felt good every single day.
My next journal prompt was "Things that my business needs for me today…." and journal that a little bit. Those are those last two; things that would make me feel good today versus things that my business needs from me today are very different. Those are very different things. We get to make sure that we aren't asking ourselves, what do I feel like doing in my business today? Because there are some days that we may not want to do certain things. We are human. We don't always want to show up. We don't always want to do X, Y, Z, and your business might need you to, so I want you to separate those two items, things that would make me feel good today and things that my business needs from me today. They're very different.
So I was highly, highly focused. I heavily focused on my self care and things that would make me feel good. So some of those things were my slow mornings. I truly enjoy having slow mornings, journaling, asking myself what would make me feel good that day, my espresso, my second espresso, cuddles with Pearl, reading, and then some type of movement every single day.
Something that I've learned over the years and I talked to my clients about this, is we cannot attach sales or my business success with my feelings. It's very dangerous, I see a lot of entrepreneurs do this. It's very dangerous. What I see happen is entrepreneurs, coaches, business owners, they let sales or money or success of business, be the driver of how they feel that day or week. When we feel good, we know everything is going to be okay. We know that everything is going to work out exactly how it's intended to. So if we let our emotions shift because of these things. So for example, if sales is the driver of your happiness right now, or if your monthly income is the driver of your happiness, then we're letting that drive us and that's not sustainable for you or your business. We let our business drive how we feel and we get to detach from that outcome because we want our feeling good to drive how we feel. So completely detach yourself from those outcomes and focus on what makes you feel good.
One big role that I do have is we get to create a business that we love and a business that runs the way we want it to. So yes, we did have a strategy and we knew what we wanted to feel and what got to happen to reach $100K for the month. We didn't even launch anything new. We did not have a big full blown-out launch. And I wanted to share that because there's not one way that it needs to happen. It's not, "I have to do all of these exact same things that Melissa did. My business model needs to look exactly like hers does'', no, not even close. We get to call in like your next big goal and how your business runs based off of how you truly want it to run. If you want to create a business where you don't have any evergreen products, amazing, you get to do that. You could scale that and you definitely can. And it's all about what you want to create. There's no cookie cutter around business strategy, business growth, you truly can scale your business in a way that truly feels so aligned to you and feels so great to you. Can you do it with only launching? Yes. Most definitely. Can you do it with only evergreen products and courses and things like that? Yes, most definitely. Can you do it with a mix of both? Yes, you can do in any way you want, any way you choose. So we get to determine what that is and what that looks like. For us, for January, we didn't do a full, big blown launch. There are other months this year that we are going to have a full, big blown out launch to help us get to that $100K and beyond. So there's tons of things that you can do and we're going to talk about strategy now that we've talked about some of the mindset and some of the shifts and some of the mantras that I had for my $100K a month.
Sales Planning and Goal Setting
Now I want to dig into some sales planning and goal setting, because you may be asking,” Well, how did you create your sales plan? Like, how did you know, Melissa? How did you know that it was going to be a $100K month?” We actually created our sales plan for the majority of 2021 last year in 2020. Now, if you've listened to me before, if you've been in my community for a while, you know, I'm always prepping ahead, like always prepping ahead. So last year, my team and I, we sat down and we reviewed all of our offers and decided what we wanted our focus of the year to be, which was to scale our coaching programs and serve even more women, helping them scale their online businesses. We knew that was what was going to excite us the most. I really wanted to scale my coaching programs to serve even more people.
So our actual sales plan before going into the month wasn't exactly what happened and I want to dive in and share some of why that was. Something that we do is we map out our entire sales plan. We usually do this inside of Asana. So we keep track of everything that's happening inside of Asana. So we knew that for our $100K month, we were going to fill a certain number of clients into our various programs. So our goal for January, this is kind of what our sales plan looked like, was that we wanted to spread across our two signature offers that were available for enrollment in the month of January, which was the Fierce Business Academy, which is our group coaching program to help you start your online coaching or service-based business, and then scale to the $5K month level. And then our second tier program, our next level is the Six-Figure Fierce Business Mastermind, which is to help you scale to consistent $10K months in your business where, inside of this program, we heavily focus on a few additional items. We focus on increasing your prices, expanding your product suite, launching with ease, hiring your first few team members. So we anticipated filling both with new clients through various sources of lead generation.
Maybe you're asking, "Well, Melissa, what do you mean by you anticipated? Like, what do you mean? Like, I thought you knew exactly what was going to happen?" So we don't always know what's going to happen. And I'm happy that I can laugh about this now because it definitely felt a little chaotic in the moment. Again, everything is fixable. Everything in business is doable and nothing that's ever going to burn the business down, but there definitely were things that weren't anticipated that happened. So one of the big things that we just didn't think was going to happen or see coming was our Facebook ads account was actually shut down halfway through the month of January. What this meant was one of our lead generation sources was shut down one, not the only one. That's definitely something to keep in mind, not our only lead generation source. It was however removed from our sales process for the time being, which meant that we needed to lean more into our other sources of lead generation for the rest of the month and shift some items around and push a little more heavily organically versus the ad source that we were utilizing. Was it ideal? No, because we had to spend, you know, a few days rearranging pivoting and making some shifts and adapting. Was it doable? Most definitely. Again, nothing, nothing that ever happens is going to burn your business down. Everything is fixable. Everything is doable. You can handle any challenge that comes your way. I have been through all of the ups and downs and I'm sure many more are going to come and I know that I can truly handle anything that comes my way. So that was one of the biggest things that happened that we just didn't anticipate at all.
So how did our plan shift through with this? What does that mean? I want to just share that we leaned heavier into organic range. We utilized our email list even more. We added a third item at the end of the month for additional revenue. So I had mentioned originally we were only going to be pushing our two signature programs or two of our signature programs because we have more than just the two and instead we added an extra option for a little bit more revenue to come into the business because it was something that we knew some of our audience was also looking for.
Before I continue on, I do just want to mention a few business tips here and there. Number one is having multiple lead sources. Having multiple sources of lead generation is so important. You cannot rely on just one. Also, really adding to your email list and utilizing your email list. Right? If Instagram shuts down tomorrow, I'm knocking on that, that hasn't happened. I do not want that to happen for anybody, but if it did, because it is possible, it could happen. We want other items to rely on, other sources of lead generation. So start to think about that, right? Your email list is the only thing that you actually own. If Instagram were to go down, if Facebook were to go down, like, as we felt and experienced when our Facebook ads account went down, we needed to rely on other sources of lead generation. We have many, we've got dozens of lead generation sources. I just want you to think about, and start to brainstorm what other sources of lead generation you can add into your business, because it's so important as a huge money-making activity for you and your business. But there's my little side note there and my little business tip there.
Systems to our $100K month
So we're going to go into some behind the scenes now of our $100K month. Now, I want to talk about some of our systems. I know the word systems overwhelms a lot of people. It overwhelmed me when I first started my business, I felt like I had nothing streamlined and no systems in place, but I want to keep this as simple as possible. Your business can be simple. It doesn't need to be over complicated.
Now, our content marketing systems. One of my rules in my business is that I get to add value to my audience every single day. My clients asked me the other day, like "Melissa, what are there things that you absolutely need to get done in your business?" If I ask myself that question that I talked about earlier “What does my business need for me today?” Like what are the things my business needs for me? On that list is always adding value. It's one of my big, big things. I always push adding value to my audience every single day. This is a mix of captions and mix of video training or freebies or workshops or emails with value, even podcast episodes. This is a value that we add to our audience. So what did our content marketing system look like? We knew on the backend that if we wanted to fill both of our main offers, then we needed to integrate in content for both. So we did just that. We talked about content that related to starting your online business and scaling to the $5K month level. We talked about scaling your business because that's what the mastermind is about, scaling to the $10K month level in your business. Now, again, halfway through, our ads account going down, we did need to add in a bigger organic push to help with some of the sales, which we definitely did. Again, things don't always go according to plan, which is why as business owners, we get to be open to pivoting.
For example, Our content marketing, our topics are always planned out at least two months in advance. Again, here I am with always, always being prepped ahead of time. So our topics are planned out two months in advanced, however, the actual day-to-day content, we like to stay one to two weeks ahead to give us that flexibility to pivot when needed, which we needed to do in January, because things do happen. Is that what you need to do? No, absolutely not. If you want to have one or two months of content ready to go, go for it, but that's not how I roll. I want to be able to have that flexibility to pivot if needed. So we like to stay one to two weeks ahead with the actual day-to-day content to give us that flexibility. Throughout January, we created content that related to both the programs that we were pushing organically since, you know, those programs are both very different programs with different ideal clients. We wanted to add value to both which yes, you can definitely do. As long as it's very clear what the differences are. You can definitely sell two different programs at one time. We definitely don't want to confuse our audience, which is why we never have more than two to three offers open at one time and they are always extremely different. Our Academy is to help women start their businesses. Our mastermind is to help scale the $10K months, we recently launched our next mastermind "Fiercely Scale" to help women scale to the $20K, $30K a month level in their businesses, which is definitely a higher touch mastermind with me and those clients get the most one-on-one access with me outside of my private clients. So, we added value to all of those items.
Tracking and Programs
So behind the scenes, what were some of the things that we were tracking? What are some of the important factors in your business? This will look different for everyone. It's all about what's important to you at this moment. What's important to your business at this moment, and for us, it was sales, right? We're definitely looking at the sales. We're also looking at new customers. We're looking at repeat customers and conversion rates. Those were some of the important numbers for us in the business.
Now, a little bit more behind the scenes, because I did mention we were utilizing some Facebook ads before our ads account got shut down. I'm really happy I can laugh about this now, but we had only spent roughly $2,000 on ads before we got our account shut down and we ground our numbers in the backend. And over 75% of our sales for the month were all organic, not from ads. So I do want to mention ads. Yes, they can definitely amplify what you're doing, but we can't rely on just that source of lead generation in case something like this were to happen. So our programs behind the scenes are extremely scalable. We always ensure that our programs are scalable. Not that we are going to scale them right away, we may run it a few times before we make that pivot, but we have spent so much time tweaking our programs so that they are scalable.
If you're wondering, how do I know if my program is scalable, this is one of the big keys for us to then move into the $100K a month level. If you're wondering, "How do I know Melissa? Is my program scalable. I look at my program and I think it is, but how do we really know?" So this is the question I want you to think about. If I were to hand you 100 clients today for your current program, could your current program handle it? Could your current systems and support handle it? If the answer is no, then we get to look at your program. We get to look at your systems and determine, what changes could be made to scale it, right? How can we shift? How can we automate your entire onboarding system so that it is hands-off so that if a hundred clients did come your way today, you weren't there onboarding 100 new clients. So ask yourself that question and let me know. I'd love to hear and would love to help you tweak some of these things. This is something that we definitely focus on inside of our masterminds and higher level programs, because you definitely want to be able to scale your programs. If you can scale your programs, you can help more people. You can serve more people and create an even bigger impact.
What Support Looks Like in our Programs
So what does the support look like in some of our programs? If you've never been in any of my programs before, I don't run my business by myself. I have incredible team members that help me. So inside of our programs, I have 13 incredible team members right now, and our team includes my OBM ,VA's, content managers. I have some amazing support coaches that also help inside my programs. My ads manager, Pinterest manager and more. So I'm not doing this alone. I definitely have help and have support inside of my programs. I do have support coaches that help me run some of the day to day. Am I in the programs? Most definitely. I always have a pulse of what's going on in every aspect of my business. And I go into all of my programs every single day to support as well. That's really important to me as a business owner is that connection with my clients.
The Sales Breakdown
So let's go into the sales breakdown. Like how much came from each program? What did that look like? What were some of the resigned rates for first-time customers? So roughly 30%. Again, roughly, it was like 27ish, but roughly to spring, easy math, 30% were client resigns or upgrades. So what that means is someone who was in one of our current programs upgraded into the next level or resigned for more time, with more coaching calls, that type of thing, or maybe resigned as a private client. So we wanted to know these numbers so that we could continue to predict and look at how our business could continue to scale the rest of 2021 into 2022 and 2023.
So roughly 30% were client resigns or upgrades. And again, it's important to us because when we know these numbers, if we want to focus on increasing our client resigns or upgrades and okay, we get to look at our client experience. What else can we do there to increase that number if that's a focus we want.
Then, roughly 60% were new clients that came into two of our signature coaching programs, brand new clients that we had not coached before, had not gone through any of our coaching programs., etc. Then a few intensive spots that we opened the very last week of the month, which covered roughly 10%. And again, we didn't do sales calls, I didn't do sales calls. My team didn't do sales calls. All of this was through email marketing, social media, selling them in the DM’s. You can reach $100K months without sales calls. Again, as I mentioned at the very, very beginning of this, you get to create a business that you love. You get to create a business that runs the way that you want it to run. If you love sales calls. More power to you. Amazing. You can definitely do this with sales calls. You can hire a sales team to help you as well if you're wanting to scale and need some more support in that area. So I personally have done hundreds of sales calls in the past few years, and I knew that for my business, I saw the vision of it scaling without sales calls, so we made it happen and it's so, so possible for you as well. Just a few years ago, I was sitting in my chemical engineering job. I had my hard hats. I decided to find a different path that could help me create a different life. My business, and you can too.
So let me know, what are you working towards this month? Send me a message over on Instagram @TheMelissaLin. I would love to hear what you're working on and could definitely send you some resources or at least point you in the right direction to help you move the needle forward and what some of those steps could look like.
Thank you for hanging out with me today. Please leave me a review on iTunes and let me know your honest opinion, any questions you might have, thoughts, takeaways, all of the goodies that you want to send my way and I am always going to be your biggest cheerleader. So you taking time out of your day to hang out with me truly means the world to me. I'll see you next time!
Topics we cover include:
Mindset Before Strategy
Creating Backend Systems
Journal Prompts for Mindset
Sales Planning and Goal Setting
Systems to our 100k month
What Support Looks Like in Our Programs
And so much more!
Times to check out:
(7:27) Mindset Before Strategy
(9:57) Creating Backend Systems
(11:16) Journal Prompts for Mindset
(16:44) Sales Planning and Goal Setting
(24:20) Systems to our 100k month
(31:30) What Support Looks Like in Our Programs
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